Magic

treated the statues of their saints in the same way. Whenever they made a
good catch, they o√ered the saints the usual incense, flowers, and candles;
but when the catch was not good, they cursed the statues and kicked
them. The law of ‘‘sympathy’’ is in e√ect: if you kick the statue of your
saint or god, he will feel the pain somehow and react.∂
Hence some scholars believe that there is no fundamental di√erence
between religion and magic. There may be one: praying for something,
giving thanks for something, is conceivable in magic, but not the con-
sciousness of sin and the prayer for forgiveness.∑ The magus does not
recognize sin; he is, in a way, above morality and the law, a law unto
himself. In a society in which practically everyone believed in magic and
practiced it in one form or another, this contempt for conventional mo-
rality and the laws of the state could have encouraged criminal behavior,
but the reasons why magicians and astrologers—along with philosophers
—were periodically discriminated against in the time of the empire were
mainly political.
The roots of magic are no doubt prehistoric. There is reason to believe
that some fundamental magical beliefs and rituals go back to the cult of
the great earth goddess.∏ In historical times, she was worshiped in Greece
and other Mediterranean countries under a variety of names: Ge or Gaia,
Demeter, Ceres, Terra Mater, Bona Dea, Cybele, Ishtar, Atargatis. There
must have been an important cult of an earth mother in prehistoric
Greece long before the Indo-European invaders known as the Hellenes
arrived. No doubt the ancient Greeks’ own Demeter owes something to
that pre-Greek deity, and it is conceivable that the parts of the ritual
(human sacrifices, for instance) that were rejected later on survived in
secret. The fact that iron knives are generally taboo in magical sacrifices
suggests that they may have originated in the Bronze or Stone Age. In
other cases the Greeks gave a new interpretation to existing sanctuaries of
Mother Earth, for instance in Delphi, where they attached to the old
earth oracle, with its prophetess, their god Apollo. The inevitable conflict
between an old and a new religion may help to explain why magic, as a
profession, remained suspect and feared among the Greeks and why the
great witches of Greek mythology, Medea and Circe, are portrayed as evil
or dangerous. In fact, they may have been goddesses of a former religion
or priestesses of the Mother Earth cult. Their knowledge of roots, herbs,
and mushrooms—gifts of the earth—may have been part of their priestly
training. Here again, we have the interpretation of a new civilization that
conquered an old one.
The early Greeks may well have misunderstood the nature of some
foreign religions and cults—they seem to have made very little e√ort to
understand them. Hence, a good deal of magical lore may simply reflect

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the beliefs and rituals of ancient religions in countries of which the

Greeks had only some vague knowledge. One such ‘‘creative’’ misunder-
standing has apparently given us the very word magic, which is derived
from magoi, a Median tribe or caste recognized in ancient Iran as spe-
cialists in ritual and religious knowledge. Sometimes they are associated
with the cult of fire. As we know from Apuleius’ Apology, the Greeks
and Romans saw in the magoi the priests of Zoroaster (Zarathustra) and
Ormazd (Ahura Mazda), but these two divine or semidivine beings were
also considered the inventors of magic [no. 30]. This may simply reflect a
Greek prejudice dating from the fifth century B.C. The doctrines and
rites of a foreign religion were probably reported in a misleading way and
understood not as religion but as a sort of perversion of religion. At the
same time, because this religion (or whatever it might be) was so exotic,
so di√erent, so ancient, the Greeks must have speculated that the magoi
had access to secret knowledge.π
Incidentally, the borrowing of names, concepts, and rituals from for-
eign religions is one of the characteristics of ancient witchcraft, as the
magical papyri attest. Even though cities like Alexandria and Rome were
already full of sanctuaries of exotic deities, apparently there was still room
for more speculation and more experiment. No doubt the religions of
ancient Egypt were similarly misinterpreted or at least simplified by the
Greeks of the Hellenistic period who lived in Egypt, and these religious
practices survived, through a series of transformations, in the mainstream
of magical doctrine.∫
Ancient history shows us a succession of great empires—Egyptian,
Persian, Athenian, Macedonian, Roman—and each of these had its Pan-
theon of divine powers. As one culture conquered another, it took over
some of its gods, usually the ones that could be identified with a native
deity, or the ones suitable to become at least the attendants, the courtiers
as it were, of native deities. The truly outlandish elements in a foreign
religion seem to have been rejected and despised by the conquerors and
classified as witchcraft, but the witchcraft continued to have a life of its
own. The Greek witches came from Thessaly or the Black Sea, that is,
from countries at the end of the world. The Marsi, a tribe or nation of
central Italy, maintained their identity until the late second century B.C.,
it seems. Their civilization apparently was just di√erent enough from the
Roman one to make it look somewhat bizarre. Hence, Marsian magi-
cians (perhaps priests of some of their local deities) enjoyed a great repu-
tation in Rome and were especially famous for curing snakebites.
Finally, when the victorious Christian Church began to hunt witches
and wizards, its actions were often directed against surviving pagan cults.
In continental Europe, as well as in Britain, some worshipers of the

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ancient Celtic and Greco-Roman gods had refused to convert to Chris-

tianity, and the rites they performed (by necessity in secret) were inter-
preted as magical rites. The Celts worshiped a horned male god that may
have reminded the Romans of the god Pan, a minor god to be sure, but
one who could drive you into a ‘‘panic’’ terror when you encountered
him at noontime. This combination of horned gods, one Celtic, one
classical, produced a very powerful deity around which the pagani rallied.
Indeed, so powerful was this god that the Christian priests cast him as the
prototype of the Devil, with horns, hoofs, claws, a tail, and a generally
shaggy appearance. These groups also preserved knowledge of the pow-
ers of herbs, roots, and mushrooms, and although this knowledge was not
included in the fashionable medical science of the day, patients given up
by their doctors probably consulted the local witch, and if she cured
them, her practice most likely grew.
If this Celto-Roman deity was cast as the Devil, his female worshipers
or priestesses naturally were labeled witches, and this may have been the
origin of the witch craze in medieval Europe and in early Colonial
America. To us, the medieval Church looks monolithic, universal, un-
shakable, but there must have been just enough evidence of dissension,
schism, and this kind of underground paganism for the Church to take
the measures it did. There could be no tolerance of anything outside the
Church—extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—and if these unfortunates resisted
conversion, they o√ered proof of the power the Devil had over them, a
power that had to be broken, if not in this world, at least in the next.

Magic as a Social Phenomenon and a Science

There is, in fact, a form of cooperation, or symbiosis, between established
religion and magic. The ability to predict the future is certainly an oc-
cult power, a form of magic. We hear of many ancient soothsayers and
prophets, some of them highly respected, some of them considered mere
fortune-tellers; but without question the most important places of divi-
nation were the great sanctuaries.
In Delphi, the method of divination practiced by the Pythia, the
priestess-prophetess who sat on top of a deep crack in the ground, receiv-
ing her trance and her visions from inside the earth, had nothing to do
with the cult of the god Apollo. She was a medium who received im-
pulses and messages from the Great Mother, who of course knew the
future of the earth and of all mankind. The trance, the ecstasy of the
priestess, and her unintelligible language (probably not unlike the glos-
solalia of the early Christians) were alien to the whole Apollonian myth
and form of worship as we understand it. But the oracle was so old that

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the priests of Apollo kept it going, under their control, and over the
centuries turned it into one of the most powerful religious, political, and
economic centers of the ancient world. Perhaps the priests of Apollo
were suspicious of the ancient method, but for many reasons they recog-
nized its value and sanctioned it. Generally speaking, such occult phe-
nomena as trance, visions, and ecstasy were tolerated only within the
context of a sanctuary and had to be supervised by the priests of a recog-
nized religion.
It has recently been argued that a drug was used to induce programmed
hallucinations during the initiation rites at the temple of Demeter in
Eleusis.Ω But use of that same drug at private parties by privileged Athe-
nian playboys like Alcibiades and his set was considered a profanation and
desecration.∞≠ In a religious context the magical drug was tolerated—in
fact, was indispensable—but outside of that context it was condemned.
There has been enormous interest in the exorcism of daemons in
recent years. Exorcism is the ancient magical technique of driving out
daemons from patients who are thought to be possessed. It was practiced
in antiquity by ‘‘medicine men’’ and miracle-workers long after Hippo-
crates had established the foundations of scientific medicine. Christ ex-
orcised, and in the early Church the ability to drive out daemons was
considered a spiritual gift, like speaking in tongues. Today, exorcism is
still a prerogative of the Roman Catholic Church, and only ordained
priests may practice it. This reveals the same tendency to concentrate and
institutionalize magical powers within a larger religious context that we
observed above.
Thus magic may be called a religion that has been distorted and misin-
terpreted beyond recognition by a hostile environment almost from the
beginnings of history. The environment changed, but the tradition of
magic continued through many metamorphoses. By the time of Christ it
had become a science, without completely losing its religious character.
This process probably took place in Egypt, a country that acted as a
melting pot of di√erent civilizations and traditions, combined influences
from East and West, and gave birth to an abundance of mystical systems.
We discuss the role of Egypt later. At this point, it may be useful to
consider the scientific elements that magic had from the earliest times.
Magic, as a science, has always tried to locate the secret forces in nature
( physis), their sympathies and antipathies. In a sense, the magi were scien-
tists ( physikoi ), whose work was not recognized by the ‘‘modern’’ scien-
tists of the day, though they probably borrowed from them. The magi
were less interested in pure science than in manipulating the powers
(dynameis) of nature. At the same time, they explored the human soul, its
conscious and unconscious states and expressions. They clearly knew

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about the psychedelic e√ects of certain plants, but they probably also
practiced hypnosis; they used the techniques of fasting, deprivation of
sleep, and prolonged prayers. Certain religions used the same techniques.
What is today considered to be science or philosophy was at times part of
religion or magic in antiquity and was often presented as a vision or a
revelation sent by a god: ‘‘Religion [in late antiquity] made science its
underling. The so-called science of late Antiquity is speculative and mys-
tical and appeals to revelations and dealings with the supernatural world.
But, like magic, it always has a practical aim and does not research for the
sake of researching. The fundamental idea was the concept of sympa-
thy. . . . The analogies with which Greek rationalism worked shot up like
weeds in the hothouse of mysticism.’’∞∞
Ancient magic could arrive at the same results as science, but it did not
attribute them to human reasoning or experimentation; rather, it cred-
ited them to direct or indirect contact with a supernatural power. Ancient
magic usually dealt with the material world, but that world was thought
to be governed and controlled by invisible presences. These presences had
to be controlled by the magus, who wanted to gain knowledge and power
through them to change the present and to predict or influence the
future. Hence magic in ancient times was an esoteric technique as well as
a science, something that was not accessible to everyone but had to be
revealed by a god or learned through a process of initiation. There could
not be many true magi within one environment, and these physikoi ac-
cepted few disciples.
Ancient magic may have been based on ‘‘primitive’’ ideas, but the
form in which it was handed down to us was by no means primitive. On
the contrary: magic in this sense existed only within highly developed
cultures and formed an important part of them. Not only the lower
classes, the ignorant and uneducated, believed in it, but the ‘‘intellectuals’’
down to the end of antiquity were convinced that dangerous supernatural
powers operated around them and that these powers could be controlled
by certain means.

Magic as a Literary Theme

The best way to look at ancient magic is, perhaps, to survey various
literary texts. The Greek and Roman poets were interested in magic and
they provide some good descriptions of magical operations. The first
magical operation that was recorded in Greek is found in Book 10 of the
Odyssey [no.1]. It is one of many adventures that the hero of the epic had
to endure on his way back from Troy. The epic itself was probably com-
posed in the eighth century B.C., but it reflects the heroic age of Greece,

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