Magic

← Encyclopedia

Magic is the art of producing effects in the world by hidden means — spoken names, written signs, rites, the sympathies binding one thing to another, or the cooperation of unseen powers — where the means and the end share no ordinary causal link. The word arrived in Greek already wearing a foreign accent. Mageia came from the magoi, the hereditary priestly specialists of the Medes and Persians: Herodotus counts them among the tribes of the Medes and shows them serving the Achaemenid court as interpreters of dreams and masters of rite. In Greek mouths the borrowed word slid quickly toward the foreign, the fraudulent, and the dangerous. Heraclitus, in a sentence preserved by Clement of Alexandria, prophesies against “the night-walkers, the magi, the bacchanals … the initiated” and promises them fire; and the Derveni papyrus — a carbonized roll of about 340 BCE recovered near Thessaloniki in 1962, given its complete critical edition only in 2006 by Theokritos Kouremenos, George Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou — discusses the rites of the magoi in the earliest surviving Greek prose to treat them as ritual specialists, and quotes Heraclitus while doing so. The double charge laid down in those first attestations — power and illegitimacy at once — has clung to the word ever since.

The practice is older and more concrete than the polemic. From one end of the Greco-Roman world to the other survive the curse tablets — katadesmoi to the Greeks, defixiones to the Romans — thin sheets of lead inscribed, folded, sometimes pierced with nails, and deposited in graves, wells, and sanctuaries to bind a rival at law, a competitor in the circus, a thief until the stolen goods came home. The sacred spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath yielded about 130 of them in the excavation of 1979–80, nearly all of them appeals to the goddess for redress of theft; the temple of Mercury at Uley has given more than eighty more; and behind the whole genre stand the execration texts of Middle Kingdom Egypt, enemies’ names written on figurines and bowls made to be smashed. Ancient Egypt under Greek and Roman rule also preserved the working library of the art: the Greek magical papyri, handbooks of invocation, recipe, and rite spanning roughly the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, whose Greek, Demotic, and Coptic apparatus records the procedures of practicing ritualists rather than the caricatures drawn by their accusers.

Almost no one who did this work under its hostile name accepted the name. Inside the traditions the act was knowledge applied, not a cheat against nature: the cosmos is woven of correspondences, and the right word or sign reaches a real seam in it. Late antiquity gave that conviction its most rigorous defense. The Chaldean Oracles, hexameter revelations ascribed to Julian “the Theurgist” in the second century CE, and the Neoplatonists who built upon them named the upward-working rite theurgy — divine work. Iamblichus, in his Reply to Porphyry, distinguished theurgy from philosophy and from theology and defended ritual as the means by which the soul is aligned with the gods and raised — not coercion of the divine but worship the divine itself ordained — and Proclus carried the defense to the end of the pagan schools. The books that speak in the voice of Hermes Trismegistus run parallel: the Asclepius describes the Egyptian rite that called celestial presences into the temple statues — an art later readers set beside theurgy, though the Hermetica never use the word. Texts of power from the house of Thoth, the divine names of the papyri, the angelic seals of the later grimoires: each presumes the same woven cosmos, in which speech and sign have real traction on the order of things.

The distinction that organized centuries of debate was between natural and demonic magic. Natural magic worked by the real but concealed virtues planted in herbs, stones, and stars — a physics of hidden powers, defended as continuous with medicine and astronomy and kin to the laboratory of alchemy and the calculations of astrology. Demonic magic worked through spirits, and was condemned — by churchmen and by many magicians alike — as commerce with the damned. The demonic reading rests on a precise foundation: Augustine of Hippo, in the second book of On Christian Teaching, classed divination and the superstitious arts as resting on fellowship and pacts with demons, and that juridical metaphor governed Latin Christendom for a thousand years. Yet the Middle Ages were never a simple age of prohibition. Richard Kieckhefer’s reconstruction of the period finds a “common tradition” of charms, blessings, and healing shared across the whole society, and a clerical underworld of necromancy pursued by the very men trained to condemn it; medieval magic, on his showing, possessed its own specific rationality rather than representing a lapse from reason. Condemnation kept pace with practice: in 1398 the theology faculty of Paris condemned ritual magic in twenty-eight articles, and the Malleus Maleficarum, first printed in 1486–87, fused learned demonology with village suspicion — the bridge from the magician’s library to the witch trials.

Renaissance writers leaned hard on the line between the two magics. Magia naturalis could be presented as pious inquiry into a God-made cosmos — Marsilio Ficino framed his medicine of the spirit that way, and Giambattista della Porta gave natural magic its most famous compendium in the Magia naturalis, Englished in London in 1658 as Natural Magick — while the same texts that taught it kept slipping toward the rites the line was meant to exclude. The boundary was always more argued than observed, an instability D. P. Walker traced through the era’s apologists from Ficino to Campanella. From the Renaissance synthesis of Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and natural-magical learning, the art ramified into branches with their own long histories: the astral and talismanic magic built on cosmic sympathy, which had reached Latin Europe through the Arabic tradition of astrology, alchemy, and astral operation; Ficino’s astro-magical medicine; the talismanic agronomy of the Nabataean corpus; the planetary magic squares of the number-mystics.

Modernity told a clean story about all this. Max Weber named it the disenchantment of the world — Entzauberung der Welt — in the lecture published in 1919 as “Science as a Vocation”: mysterious incalculable forces retiring before calculation, the old garden of spirits paved over. The record is less tidy. Keith Thomas demonstrated that in early modern England the recourse to cunning folk, charms, and protective ritual fell away before medicine or technology could replace what those services had done — a change of confidence, not a triumph of substitutes. And the magic did not stay declined. The nineteenth century rebuilt ceremonial magic as a living discipline — Éliphas Lévi’s synthesis at mid-century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888 — recovered the Enochian system of the Elizabethan angel-conversations, and fed the occultism of the modern Hermetic revival. Jason Josephson-Storm has pressed the correction to its limit: the founders of the human sciences were entangled with magic and occultism throughout, and disenchantment is less a description of modernity than the myth modernity tells about itself.

Scholarship has spent more than a century trying to fix where magic stands relative to religion and to science, and has mostly multiplied the answers. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough — two volumes in 1890 under the subtitle A Study in Comparative Religion, grown by its second edition of 1900 into A Study in Magic and Religion — ranked magic, religion, and science as three stages of a single ascent, magic the failed proto-science that mistook the association of ideas for causation: like produces like, and things once joined act on one another at a distance forever. Marcel Mauss, writing with Henri Hubert in the “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie” (L’Année sociologique, 1902–1903), answered from sociology: magic is no private error but a total social phenomenon, moving on the circulating force Pacific languages call mana. Stanley Tambiah dismantled what remained of the ladder: the same society commonly holds magic, science, and religion at once; ritual works performatively, doing things with words rather than failing to do things with causes; and the three categories themselves are historical artifacts of a particular Western trajectory. Across the current scholarship of the category, “magic” emerges again and again as the name a culture gives to the practices it has decided to disown — a verdict passed on other people’s rites. Magic and religion sit close, and the boundary between them has recorded, more often than not, who was doing the judging rather than anything in the rites themselves. The category may be less a thing in the world than a verdict, yet it still does real work: there is a recognizable family of practice here, with its own manuscripts, instruments, and lineages of transmission, even if part of what unites the family is the accusation.

The making of a scholarly object

Magic became an object of systematic scholarship across the twentieth century, and the resulting shelf now frames every serious approach to the subject. The documentary floor was laid by Karl Preisendanz’s Papyri Graecae Magicae (B. G. Teubner, 1928–1931; revised by Albert Henrichs, 1973–74) and its English enlargement, Hans Dieter Betz’s The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells (University of Chicago Press, 1986; second edition 1992), which put the Greco-Egyptian handbooks within reach of any reader. Archaeology furnished a matching archive when R. S. O. Tomlin published “Tabellae Sulis” in Barry Cunliffe’s The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, volume II (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988) — the roughly 130 lead tablets from the 1979–80 excavation of the Bath spring, the find that remade the study of Latin defixiones. The medieval synthesis is Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989; third edition 2021), flanked by his article “The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic” in the American Historical Review (1994), which argues that medieval magic was a coherent way of reasoning about hidden causes rather than a failure to reason. For the Renaissance, Frances Yates’s study of Giordano Bruno, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), advanced the boldest historiographical claim in the field — that Renaissance Hermetic magic helped incubate the Scientific Revolution — and the decades of qualification and rebuttal that followed are themselves a defining chapter of the subject. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971) anchored the early modern story in social history; Stanley Tambiah’s Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1990) gave anthropology its post-Frazerian charter; Bernd-Christian Otto and Michael Stausberg’s Defining Magic: A Reader (2013) assembled the term’s career from ancient polemic to modern theory and pressed the case for treating it as a discursive category; and Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2017) documented the occult entanglements of the very disciplines that announced magic’s death.

The word that entered Greek as an accusation now heads a scholarly journal — Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, founded in 2006, whose first volume opened with Michael Bailey’s programmatic essay “The Meanings of Magic” — while outside the academy the working traditions never stopped working: ceremonial lodges still draw the circle, the Enochian calls are still recited, and the revived Hermetic orders still teach that the cosmos is woven of correspondences and that the right word, rightly spoken, finds the seam. What has not changed since lead was first folded around an enemy’s name: the world answers to more than visible cause, and some words and acts reach what ordinary ones cannot.

→ In the library: Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899) · Iamblichus on the Mysteries (Taylor) — theurgy · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908) · Waite — The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan

→ Related: Divination · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Pietro Pomponazzi · Jean Bodin · The Renaissance · Theurgy · Ceremonial Magic · Renaissance Magic · Witchcraft · Alchemy · Astrology