MAGIC. —
I. IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
It is the art of mastering the forces of nature and life. The name derives from the Magi (μαγιοι), who were one of the six tribes of the Median people, whose members, perhaps belonging to the priestly class, must have opposed Zoroaster in his reform of the ancient religion of the land. When the Persians under Cyrus took possession of Media (550) and then of Babylonia (539), the Magi came into contact with Persia and Mesopotamia, and then with the immense territory opened to Greek culture by Alexander the Great’s conquest (333) of the East, in which Babylon became the crucible of fusion between Greek and Oriental civilizations. In the classical world, the priests of the Babylonian religion (the Chaldeans), skilled in astrological and divinatory practices, were called magi; thus their name became in Roman antiquity a synonym for astrologer (mathematician), thaumaturge, and sorcerer.
As an art, magic consists of a set of experiences recognized as effective and therefore invariably repeated with the same means, whether of word or action, avoiding any innovation lest the desired effect not be achieved. Hence, even if born of an observational spirit (Frazer), it cannot be considered the mother of science, whose progress is due to a spirit of inquiry and enrichment through varied experimentation.
Magic does not necessarily presuppose the intervention of a magician, for in many cases it is the obvious conclusion of elementary reasoning based on the sophism “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” or on an innate sense of an affinity believed to link situations of objects or beings in relation or as parts of a whole. The magician intervenes when an action of domination over the forces of nature and life is required, which he can command by virtue of the occult means at his disposal, inherited or conferred through initiation. In this respect, magic is entirely different from religion, for in the latter the priest, conscious of his inability, supplicates superior Powers to grant what alone they can give.
Another difference between magic and religion is that the latter, through the priest who represents the community, always pursues a social end directed toward the good of the group: deliverance from dangers, healing from sickness, increase of crops and livestock, victory over enemies—even if, to achieve this end, it employs a repertoire of gestures and formulas of a magical type. The magician, however, feared and abhorred, acts for a private end, which is almost always directed to the harm of others.
A particular function of magic is that posited by E. De Martino, according to whom the magician’s action is directed to saving the soul from dissolution, a soul which the primitive does not experience as a “unitary presence” of his being and which risks being lost through the spirits that threaten its life; these, however, are mastered by the magician, who enters a trance precisely to dominate them and make use of their power (exorcism of spirits). Thanks to this action, the primitive would acquire a sense of his own personality. This thesis, however, as a general proposition, does not seem tenable, for the experience of the self, despite the obscurations, absences of consciousness, and more or less frequent lapses of self-control, is the most solid in the consciousness of individuals and the group, and it is this that sustains and justifies the ritual of worship and the traditions of myth.
There are two fundamental types of magic, which proceed from two different principles: 1) like acts upon like; 2) the part acts upon the whole. In the first case, we have imitative or symbolic magic, inasmuch as the magical act is a symbol reproducing what is desired; and homeopathic, inasmuch as it provokes the same effect on the person or thing to which it is directed. In the second case, we have sympathetic magic, inasmuch as the magical act, performed on a part or element belonging to a given person or thing, produces on that person or thing the effect wrought on the 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: to capture prey, hunters reproduce in magical dance its various stages, while one of them wears the skin of the animal to be captured. The anticulture of the Arunta tribe of Australia, whose totem or clan ancestor is the kangaroo, consists in capturing the soul and eating it in a sacrificial meal. 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 soul.
Rain: to obtain rain, its phenomenon is imitated, either by pouring water from a vessel or by mimicking the thunder that accompanies a storm. To avert it, the magician directs against the clouds the noise made by striking his shield.
Eclipses: solar and lunar eclipses, believed to be caused by a weakening of the heavenly body, are averted by kindling fires. The same purpose is served in Christian folklore by the fires of St. John, lit at the summer solstice, when the sun begins to shorten its daily course.
Moon: its waxing and waning during a lunar month is considered propitious (or harmful) to the growth of vegetation and even of animal and human life, in accordance with the principle of homeopathy; thus, according to the prescriptions of Roman farmers, sowing should be done during the waxing moon, “crescente enim luna frumenta grandescunt” (Pliny, Nat. Hist., XVIII, 30); pruning or cutting back during the waning moon, except for things one wishes to multiply and grow, such as the wool of sheep, the hair of the head, or the grapes of the vintage (Varro, De re rustica, I, 37).
Cases of sympathetic magic (part for the whole):
Damage inflicted by burning, burying, submerging, etc., on an object that has been part of or belongs to a person (nails, hair, clothing, weapons, footprints, figurines representing the person, spittle, blood) is reproduced on that person. A well-known example is the love spell described by Theocritus (Idyll., 11) and imitated by Virgil (Ecl., VIII), in which a figure of wax and clay representing Daphnis, when placed in the fire, is to soften the young man’s heart toward other women and make it pliable to the magic of the rite.
Cannibalism: eating human flesh, especially certain organs—eyes, heart, genitals—confers on the eater the qualities of the person from whom they were taken; it is more effective when the flesh is eaten while the victim is still alive.
Name: the name is an integral part of the individual, whose social existence is recognized and legitimized by the family and the group at birth; therefore, to know and evoke a name is to have in one’s power the person who bears II. Hence, in many fairy tales, knowledge of a person’s name (sometimes kept secret) places that person at the mercy of whoever has learned II. Thus, the true name of Rome was kept secret by the college of pontiffs; thus, during the siege of Veii, Camillus was able to summon the tutelary goddess Juno Regina to transfer her allegiance to Rome. Even things that inspire terror are not to be named, lest they be made present, and are alluded to by euphemisms.
The word, whether alone or as part of a formula, is not a “flatus vocis” but the immediate expression of reality rendered in some way present. To this category belong incantations, whether spoken or written on amulets, addressed to powerful deities or spirits, and magical lamellae (v. DEFISSIONE).
Sympathy at a distance: the action of the part on the whole also operates at a distance. When the head of the family or a member goes hunting, those who remain at home must not perform any actions nor touch objects whose contact would harm the hunter, for example, oil or other liquid substances, water, etc., which would cause the prey to slip from his grasp.
M. and religion. — Although different, they can, as has been said, be associated in the same action. For example, in the Australian anticiuma ceremony, 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 the group, gathered in the place where the clan’s founding ancestors 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 kind whose operations, aimed at private ends generally antisocial in nature, the sorcerer performs by virtue of his special powers. His knowledge comes to him, marked by abnormal sensitivity and more nervously receptive, not from his own experience, but from the directives of a spirit that he believes dwells within him. His magical faculties derive either from paternal inheritance, or from a revelation received during an ecstatic sleep prepared by exhausting vigils, as in Australia; or from initiation by other sorcerers, after a novitiate of fasting, painful practices, and solitude that reduce him to a state of morbid unconsciousness.
In primitive groups, sorcerers are gathered into secret societies, venerating a special patron spirit of the sodality, to which they are initiated through special rites that signify the death of the old man and his resurrection with a new soul that assimilates him to the others in powers and prerogatives.
II. MAGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Christianity from ancient times transferred to the account of the devil and his cohorts all the phenomena that popular superstition attributed to spirits (σύμμονες) and in general to the action of occult and supernatural forces, and regarded as demons the deities of paganism whose sanctuaries and statues were the object of proscription even by civil authority after the victory of Christianity. Nevertheless, it always warned in the writings of its prelates and theologians against the opinion, which was spreading ever more widely, of the harmful power that men—and especially women—could exercise after having entered into a pact (compactum) with the devil, ceding their souls after death in exchange for supernatural powers to be exercised in life.
That this was 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 broomstick or staff, after anointing themselves with oil to facilitate flight, took place under the guidance of Diana (or Minerva, or in Germany, Holda), who with her retinue of devils and witches held her assembly (sabbat) in the woods or beneath 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, banquets, and obscene couplings between devils and witches. The first sabbat was described by Stephen of Bourbon (1230); the first witch trial dates to 1258, and the first condemnation to the stake is from 1275 by Hugh of Banyuls.
The Council of Braga (563) in its canon 8 anathematizes those who believe in the power of the devil over atmospheric phenomena; St. Agobard, archbishop of Lyon (c. 840), refutes the same prejudice in his *Contra iuslams opinionem de grandine et de tonitruis*; the same is done by St. Gregory VII in a letter to King Harold of Denmark (19 April 1080). The *Canon episcopi*, a Frankish capitulary from the end of the 9th century, falsely attributed to a Council of Ancyra and included in the *Decretum* of Gratian (*Corpus Iuris Canonici*, ed. E. A. Friedberg, I, Leipzig 1879, col. 1030), denies the reality of witches’ sabbats, attributing them to the fantasy of wicked women.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, with the spread of Gnostic-Manichaean sects (Albigensians, Cathars, Albanians), which placed particular emphasis on the principle of evil, the fear of demonic powers increased. Given the ignorance of medical science, phenomena due to the pathology of the nervous system were attributed to them, while the epidemics raging among a poor and malnourished population in turn disposed minds to seek the cause of so much suffering in the maleficent spells of the devil’s perfidy. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that the spread of the belief in witchcraft from the 13th century onward is chiefly to be attributed to the wretchedness of the social condition.
Especially in Germanic Europe, which has always, par excellence, been the land of elves, sorceresses, and goblins, the phenomenon of witchcraft assumed alarming aspects, so much so that Innocent VIII, following reports from northern Germany regarding the misdeeds of witchcraft, established with the bull *Summis desiderantes* (1484) the Inquisition in those regions, entrusting it to the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer—often Latinized as *Institoris*—and Jakob Sprenger. To the latter in particular is owed the compilation of the *Malleus maleficarum* (1486), whose most deplorable section concerns the procedure against witches. This work had been preceded by that of the German Dominican Johannes Nider: *Myrmeca bonorum seu Formicarius ad exemplum sapientiae de formicis* (1436–38) against the visions and revelations of witches. Following the *Malleus* came the work of the Spanish Jesuit Martín del Río: *Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex* (1599), and in Italy the work of the Franciscan Francesco Maria Guaccio, *Compendium maleficarum* (Milan 1608), which suggests remedies for the misfortunes caused by demons and malefices.
Lutheranism, with its belief in the power of the devil and his arts, also wreaked havoc, intensifying its persecution of witches. The confession of witchcraft was extorted through unspeakable tortures that induced innocent victims to confess their nonexistent crime; then came the test of the mark (sigillum diaboli), namely the insertion of a long needle into some part of the body, most often the left shoulder. The victim’s lack of a painful reaction (in reality the effect of the insensitivity caused by the hysteria from which these unfortunate women generally suffered) provided the sure verdict of witchcraft, followed by condemnation to the stake.
Solitary voices did rise against this inhuman and un-Christian procedure: Johann Weyer, *De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis* (1563), following the thought of his teacher, the astrologer Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim; Reginald Scot, *The Discovery of Witchcraft* (1584); and Christian Thomasius, *Theses de crimine magiae*, but with little effect, although in some countries the persecution of witches was 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 lower Slavic countries, the accusation of vampirism was more prevalent). But even in Catholic countries—Spain, France, Flanders—the witch-hunt raged; only Italy saw a smaller number of trials.
In the present folklore of various countries, in the customs of certain religious festivals—April 30 in Germany (Walpurgis Night); June 24 (St. John the Baptist); October 31 (All Saints' Eve)—the memories of the spirit world of the Middle Ages are still alive.
III. MAGIC IN HOLY SCRIPTURE
In the Bible, magic is sternly condemned. The magic of the Egyptians (Ex. 7:11 ff.; Wis. 17:7) and the Babylonians (Is. 47:12 ff.; Dan. 1:20; 2:10–12) is highlighted, among whom it held great importance. Regarding the Hebrews, both legislative and prophetic texts are most resolute in reproving this degradation of religious sentiment. In Ex. 22:18, witches are condemned to death (Heb. *mēkhāṣēphāḥ*; Lev. 20:27; cf. ibid. 19:26, 31; 20:6).
The means employed by the magician are naturally capable of producing the desired effects.
By cooperating with the magician, one sins against superstition even if one requests his work; but only if and to the extent that one knows of the magician’s sin. Moreover, by exposing oneself to danger, especially spiritual harm, one may also offend charity, which everyone owes to oneself. — *V. tav. CXXII.*