Magic

MAGIC. - I. IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS. - It is the art of dominating the forces of nature and of life. The name derives from the Magi (μᾶγα), who were one of the six tribes of the people of the Medes, whose members, perhaps belonging to the priestly class, must have opposed Zoroaster in his work of reforming the ancient religion of the country. When the Persians under Cyrus took possession of Media (550) and then of Babylonia (539), the Magi too came into contact with Persia and Mesopotamia and then with the immense territory that the conquest (333) of Alexander the Great opened to the culture of the Greeks, the which found in Babylon the melting pot of the two civilizations, Greek and Oriental. In the classical world, the priests of the Babylonian religion (Chaldeans), skilled in astrological and divinatory practices, were called magi; hence their name became in the Roman West a synonym for astrologer (mathematician), thaumaturge and sorcerer.

Magic as an art results from a body of experiences recognized as effective and therefore repeated invariably with the same means, of word and action, avoiding any innovation in this regard under penalty of not achieving the desired effect. It therefore, even if born of a spirit of observation (Frazer), cannot be considered the mother of science, whose progress is due to a spirit of research and to enrichment following various attempted experiments.

Magic does not necessarily presuppose the work of a magician, because in many cases it is the obvious conclusion of an elementary reasoning based on the sophism "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" or on the innate sense of an affinity believed to link situations of objects either similar or related to one another as parts of a whole. The magician intervenes when an action of dominion over the forces of nature and of life is required, which he can command by virtue of the occult means at his disposal through inheritance or initiatory investiture. From this aspect, magic is entirely different from religion, because in the latter the priest, conscious of his incapacity, implores the higher Powers to grant what they alone can give.

Another difference between magic and religion is that the latter, through the priest as representative of his group, is always concerned with a social end directed to the good of the community: escape from dangers, from diseases, increase of the harvest and of livestock, victory over the enemy, even if, to obtain this end, it makes use of an arsenal of gestures and formulas of a magical type, whereas the magician, feared but abhorred, acts for a private end, which is almost always directed to the harm of others.

A particular function of magic is the one envisaged by E. De Martino, according to whom the magician's action would be directed at saving from dissolution the soul that primitive man does not feel as a "unitary presence" of his being, and which risks being lost through the action of the spirits that threaten its life; these, however, are mastered by the magician, who enters into a trance precisely in order to dominate them and benefit from their work (exorcism of the spirits). Thanks to this action of his, primitive man would have acquired the sense of his own personality. A thesis that, as a general explanation, does not seem tenable, because the experience of the self, even through the obscurings, the absences of consciousness, the more or less long and frequent parentheses of self-control, is the most solid in the consciousness of individuals and of the group and is the one that sustains and justifies the ritual of worship and the traditions of myth.

There are two fundamental types of magic; they proceed from two different principles: 1) like acts upon like; 2) the part acts upon the whole. In the first case there is imitative magic, also called symbolic, insofar as the magical act is a symbol that reproduces what is desired; and homeopathic insofar as it produces the same effect upon the person or thing to which it is directed; in the second case there is sympathetic magic, insofar as the magical act, performed upon a part or element belonging to a given person or thing, produces upon that person or thing the effect worked upon the said part or element; this second kind of magic is also called contagious because it is brought about by contact with something belonging to the person or object to be affected.

Cases of imitative magic: Hunting: in order to capture their prey, hunters reproduce its various moments in a magical dance, while one of them puts on the skin of the animal to be captured. The inticium of the Australian Arunta tribe, whose clan totem or ancestral animal is the kangaroo, consists in capturing the animal and eating it as a communion sacrifice. The figure of the kangaroo is therefore drawn on the ground and the hunters strike it with a magical rite that will ensure the capture of the animal.

Rain: in order to obtain it, the phenomenon is imitated, either by pouring water from a vessel or by imitating the thunder that accompanies the storm. In order to avert it, the magician directs against the clouds the noise he makes by beating on his shield.

Eclipse: eclipses, whether of the sun or of the moon, which are believed to be caused by a weakening, are averted by lighting fires. In Christian folklore the fires of St. John's Eve, lit at the summer solstice, when the sun begins to diminish its daily stay, have the same purpose.

Moon: its waxing and waning during a lunation is held to be favorable (or harmful) to the development of vegetation and also of animal and human life, by virtue of the principle of homeopathy; thus, according to the prescriptions of the Latin countryfolk, sowing must be done at the waxing moon, «crescente enim luna frumenta grandescunt» (Pliny, Nat. Hist., XVIII, 30); cutting or pruning at the waning moon; but not of those things which one wishes to reproduce and grow, such as the wool of sheep, the hair of the head, the grapes of the vintage (Varro, De agr., I, 37).

Cases of sympathetic magic: part for the whole. The harm inflicted by burning, burying, submerging, etc., upon an object that has formed part of or forms part of a person (nails, hair, garments, weapons, a footprint on the ground, figurines representing the person, spittle, blood) is reproduced upon that same person. Well known is the love spell described by Theocritus (Idyll., 11) and imitated by Virgil (Ecl., VIII), in which a little figure kneaded from wax and clay, representing Daphnis, placed in the fire, must make the young man's heart harden like clay toward other women, and soften like wax in favor of the sorceress who performs the rite.

Cannibalism: eating human flesh and especially certain organs: eyes, heart, genitals, procures for the one who feeds on them the qualities of the person from whom they were taken; it is more effective to feed on this flesh while the one being devoured is still alive.

Name: the name is an integral part of the individual, whose existence it socially acknowledges and legitimizes on the part of the family and the group at the moment of birth; therefore to know it and evoke it means to have in one's own possession the person who bears it. Hence in many fairy tales knowledge of a person's name (sometimes kept secret) places that person at the mercy of whoever has come into possession of it. Hence the true name of Rome was kept concealed by the college of pontiffs; hence, at the siege of Veii, Camillus was able to evoke, inviting her to transfer to Rome, Juno Regina, patroness of the city. Even things that inspire terror must not be named, lest they be made present, and they are alluded to with euphemistic terms.

The word, whether alone or as part of a formula, is not a «flatus vocis», but is the immediate expression of the reality rendered in some way present. To this category belong the incantations, whether spoken or written on amulets, of divinities or «powerful» spirits, and the magical tablets (v. DEFISSIONE).

Sympathy at a distance: the action of the part upon the whole is also exercised at a distance. When the head of the family or a member of it goes hunting, those who remain at home must not perform actions or touch objects whose contact would harm the hunter, for example, oil or other liquid substances, water, etc., which would make the prey slip from his hands.

Magic and religion. - Although they are different, they can, as has been said, be found associated in the same action. For example, in the Australian ceremony of the inticium the symbolic killing of the kangaroo is a magical act, but the second part of the ceremony, in which the social meal of the captured animal takes place and in which the group, gathered in the place where the founding ancestors of the clan first lived, listens to the narration of the deeds performed by the totemic animal, has a religious character.

It follows that true magic is only private magic, that is, the magic whose operations, directed to private ends of a generally antisocial character, the magician performs by virtue of his special powers. His knowledge comes to him, an individual of anomalous sensitivity and more nervously receptive, not from his own experiences, but from the directives of a spirit that he believes resides in him. His magical faculties derive either from paternal inheritance, or as a result of a revelation received during an ecstatic sleep prepared by exhausting vigils, as in Australia; or from initiation by other magicians, after a novitiate of fasts, painful practices, and solitude that reduce him to a state of morbid unconsciousness.

The magicians among primitive groups are gathered into secret societies; they venerate a spirit specially patron of the brotherhood, into which they are initiated with special rites signifying the death of the old man and his resurrection with a new soul that assimilates him to the others in powers and prerogatives.

II. THE MAGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Christianity, from ancient times, transferred to the charge of the devil and his cohorts all the phenomena that popular superstition attributed to spirits (βλώνος) and generally to the action of occult and supernatural forces, and considered as demons the deities of paganism whose sanctuaries and statues were the object of proscriptions even on the part of civil authority after the victory of Christianity. The latter, however, always warned in the writings of its prelates and theologians against the opinion, which was spreading ever more widely, of the maleficent power that men and especially women could exercise after having bargained (compactum) with the devil the surrender of their soul after death, in exchange for supernatural powers to be exercised in life.

That this was a matter of an unhealthy ferment deriving from animistic conceptions associated with traditions of official paganism is demonstrated by the fact that the nocturnal gatherings of witches, transported in flight on a broom or a staff, after an anointing with oil to facilitate flight, took place under the guidance of Diana (or of Minerva or, in Germany, of Holda) who with her retinue of devils and witches held assembly (sabba) in the woods or under some tree (in Italy the walnut tree of Benevento, in Germany on the Brocken in the Harz); and then under the presidency of the devil himself who, in the form of a goat, directed the licentious dances, the banquets and the obscene couplings between devils and witches. The first sabbath was described by Stephen of Bourbon (1230); the first witchcraft trial dates back to 1258 and the first condemnation to the stake is from 1275 by Hugh de Banyol.

The Council of Braga (563) in its can. 8 anathematizes whoever believes in the power of the devil over atmospheric phenomena; St. Agobard, archbishop of Lyon (ca. 840), refutes the same prejudice in the Contra insulam opinionem de grandine et de tonitruis; St. Gregory VII does the same in a letter to Erold, king of Denmark (19 Apr. 1080). The Canon episcopi, a Frankish capitulary at the end of the 9th century, falsely attributed to a Council of Ancyra and reported in the Decretum of Gratian (Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. E. A. Friedberg, I, Leipzig 1879, col. 1030) denies the reality of the witches' sabbaths, which it attributes to the fantasy of wicked women.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, with the spread of the Gnostic-Manichaean sects (Albigensians, Cathars, Albanenses), which gave particular prominence to the principle of evil, the terror of demonic powers increased, to which, given the ignorance of medical science, phenomena due to the pathology of the nervous system were attributed, while epidemics, spreading among a very poor and malnourished population, in turn disposed minds to seek the cause of so many evils in the malefices provoked by the perfidy of demons. So that it seems reasonable to conclude that the spread of magic and witchcraft from the 13th century onward is above all to be attributed to the misery of the social condition.

Especially in Germanic Europe, which was always, par excellence, the country of elves, sorceresses, and goblins, the phenomenon of witchcraft took on alarming aspects, so much so that Innocent VIII, following information coming from northern Germany about the misdeeds of witchcraft, established with the bull Summis desiderantes (1484) the Inquisition in those countries, entrusting it to the Dominicans Heinrich Kramers, "merchant" Latinized as Institut, more often cited as Institutis, and Jakob Sprenger. To the latter especially is due the compilation of the Malleus maleficarum (1481), whose most deplorable section is the one concerning the procedure against witches. This work had been preceded by that of the German Dominican G. Nider: Myrmeca bonorum seu formicarius ad exemplum sapientiae de formicis (1442) against the visions and revelations of witches. The Malleus was followed by the volume of the Spanish Jesuit Martín Del Río: Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (1599) and in Italy by the work of the Minorite F. M. Menghi, Compendio dell'arte esorcistica

(Bologna 1582) which suggests the remedies appropriate "to the malefic ills caused by demons and sorceries."

Lutheranism, with its faith in the power of the devil and his arts, pressed the attack, raging in its turn against witches. The confession of witchcraft was extorted with unspeakable tortures that induced the innocent victims to confess their nonexistent crime: there was then the test of the mark (sigillum diaboli), that is, the insertion of a long pin into some part of the body, most often the left shoulder. The absence of a painful reaction in the victim (in reality an effect of the insensitivity caused by the hysteria with which these unfortunate women were generally afflicted) gave the certain verdict of witchcraft, which was followed by condemnation to the stake.

There was no lack of solitary voices raised against this unlawful and inhuman procedure: J. Wier, De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis (1564), following the thought of his master, the astrologer Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim; R. Scott, Discovery of Witchcraft (1584); Eh. Thomasius, Theses de crimine magiae, but with scant result, although in some countries the persecution of witches had been abolished: in Holland in 1610, in Geneva in 1632, in Sweden in 1649 and in England in 1682 (Rudwin).

The 16th and 17th centuries were the most terrible for the persecution of witches, especially in Germany (in the Slavic countries the accusation of vampirism raged rather). But also in the Catholic countries: Spain, France, Flanders the witch hunt raged; only Italy had a smaller number of trials.

In the present-day folklore of various countries, in the customs of certain religious festivals: 30 April in Germany (Walpurgis Night); 24 June (St. John the Baptist); 31 October (All Hallows' Eve), the memories of the spirit world of the Middle Ages are still alive.

Nicola Turchi

III. THE MAGIC IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

In the Bible magic is severely condemned. The magic of the Egyptians is highlighted (Ex. 7:11 ff.; Wis. 17:7) and that of the Babylonians (Is. 47:12 f.; Dan. 1:20; 2:10-12), among whom it was of great importance. As regards the Hebrews, both the legislative and the prophetic texts are utterly uncompromising in reproving this degradation of religious feeling.

In Ex. 22:18 witches are condemned to death (Heb. mĕkhāšĕphāh, Lev. 20:27; cf. ibid. 19:26, 31; 20:6).

The legislation becomes even more detailed in Deut. 18:9-14, where it is commanded to exterminate whoever practices divination (Heb. qōsēm qēsāmīm), the soothsayer (mēōnēn), the augur (mōnahēl), the magician (mĕkhāšĕph), the fortune-teller and the necromancer. Such insistence documents not only the deep aversion of the Hebrew religion toward magic, but also the necessity of such severity because of the natural inclination of the people, who were attracted by Egyptian, Canaanite and Babylonian magical rites. This contrast is wonderfully documented by the well-known episode of Saul, who, after having promulgated a severe law against such diviners, has recourse to a necromancer to evoke the spirit of Samuel (1 Sam. 27:3 ff.).

The prophetic writings abound in reproaches against recourse to magic (cf. Hos. 4:12; Is. 2:6; 3:2 f.; 57:3; Jer. 27:9; Mal. 3:5), and this aversion persists in the writings of the New Testament (Acts 8:9; 13:6, 10; 19:19). This shows how deeply rooted in the people was the tendency toward magic; in the Hellenistic era it is evident also from the numerous Greek magical papyri, in which formulas with more or less corrupted Hebrew terms frequently occur, and from the legend that grew up around King Solomon (v.), regarded as one of the most powerful magicians in history.

According to the evolutionists, in the history of religions the Hebrew people too would originally have practiced only magical rites and only later would have passed through the other imperfect forms of religion to reach the purest monotheism under the influence of the prophets. Among recent authors most explicit in affirming the magical substratum of the Hebrew religion one may cite A. Lods, W. O. E. Oesterley and Th. H. Robinson, who still more or less follow the system advocated by W. Frazer. Some, like A. Lods, consider even the symbolic actions of the prophets as magical acts.

But it is impossible to find a biblical text that in any way approves the use of magic, which is systematically condemned. Rachel, who seeks a remedy against sterility in mandrakes (Gen. 30:14 ff.), does not intend to perform a magical rite (cf. J. Chaine, Le livre de la Genèse, Paris 1949, p. 327 f.).

The simplicity and sobriety of the prophets' symbolic actions forbid one to see in them magical rites, which are usually governed by a most meticulous ceremonial and formulary. Moreover, such an interpretation conflicts with the idea of strict monotheism, which emerges from every prophetic page, and with the frequent reproaches against superstition and magic. The various symbolic actions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel imply no extraordinary effect, such as one would expect after a magical rite, but intend only to impress upon the minds of the hearers the idea or the prophecy, which was usually illuminated with a brief sermon or oracle.

Angelo Penna

IV. THE MAGIC ACCORDING TO MORAL THEOLOGY

In moral theology, magic is understood as the art of obtaining effects that are or appear to be superior to their natural causes, and therefore are or appear to be mysterious.

It is distinguished from divination (v.) only by the fact that in the latter the mysterious effect lies within the sphere of the knowledge of hidden things, whereas in magic it lies within the sphere of the production of unusual things. When magic harms one's neighbor, it is more properly called maleficium.

There are various forms of magic. White magic consists in sleight-of-hand tricks. Natural magic is similar to it, though in it no jokes are performed, but rather serious and useful things. But in both the one and the other, the surprising effects are proportionate to their natural causes, which are generally also known to those who employ them; yet, remaining unknown by way of illusion or ignorance, they arouse the wonder of the uninitiated. Morality has nothing specific to reproach in these ingenuous forms of magic. To natural magic there are morally connected all those very varied practices in which — through ignorance of the natural sciences — means objectively insufficient are employed, in full good faith, even on the part of those who use them, believing that they have the power to produce determined effects; for example, the therapy, followed in countries even not uncivilized, of ritual bindings against certain illnesses.

Black or diabolical magic, or simply witchcraft, consists in an occult power that allows the magician to obtain effects superior to the efficiency of the means actually employed. Such power he has or believes he has at his disposal permanently, or only at the time and for the cases in which he practices magic. It derives, then — or he believes with certainty that it derives — not from God, nor from known or unknown natural forces, but from the devil or in any case from a false god. It is precisely in this communication with the devil, real or, as more often happens, presumed, that the sinful element of magic lies. It is evident injury to God. Indeed, it supposes and cultivates distrust in Divine Providence, as though it were insufficient for human needs; it establishes relations of friendship with the irreconcilable enemy of God; it exposes one to the danger of grave illusions and harms for the supernatural and natural life; and, if it goes so far as to attribute to the devil the omnipotence proper to God, it constitutes the gravest form of superstition. Therefore, because of this communication with the devil, magic is always a sin.

This sin is also grave when the certainty — at least subjective — of such diabolical communication is founded on the explicit invocation of the devil or even on a permanent pact with him. But the sin is also present when, even without the explicit invocation of the devil, the magician, by the very exercise of magic, grants him his trust. For he, using means disproportionate to superior ends, cannot expect them from natural forces, which he knows to be insufficient for this; he cannot trust in God, whom he does not invoke and knows he must not tempt; therefore — whether he says so or not — by his manner of acting, he places his trust in the devil as in a god. And this, it is clear, offends the true God. Such an offense will be grave or less, according to the degree of trust accorded to the diabolical power. Indeed, there will not even be the guilt of superstition when the magician acts in doubt as to whether the means he uses are naturally capable of producing the desired effects.

By cooperation with the magician, whoever requests his work also sins by superstition; but only if and to the extent that he knows of the other's sin. Moreover, by exposing himself to the danger of harms, especially spiritual ones, he can also offend against charity, which everyone owes to himself. - See plate CXXII.

Leonardo Azzolini