The two concepts were often one in the same—a "magician" was simply any art that "we" considered to be not in keeping with "our" religious practices. The label was slung about freely for some thousand years.

There are some philosophers who attempted to divide miracles from magic. They tended to classify the latter as esoteric science confined entirely to the natural world with no supernatural elements, and the former as invoking the aid of some confirmed divine being. When one considers souls and demiurges to be part of the natural world, however, even this most imaginative delineation is an inherently blurry one.