The Magi

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In the fortification tablets unearthed at Persepolis — the administrative scrap-paper of the Achaemenid empire, baked clay logging the disbursement of grain and wine and small cattle — a priest named Mitukka draws his ration of barley for the performance of an oblation. He is recorded as a magus. The notice is unglamorous and exact: a named man, a measured quantity, a rite to be performed. Long before the word meant a sorcerer in a star-spangled robe, this is what it meant — an official of the cult, paid in barley, who stood at the offering. The history of the Magi is in large part the history of the distance between that tablet and the figure the Greeks would later make of him.

Genealogy: a tribe, a caste, an office

The earliest extended portrait comes from a foreigner. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, lists the Magi (Magoi) as one of the six tribes into which the Median nation was divided — alongside the Busae, the Paraetaceni, the Struchates, the Arizanti, and the Budii (Histories i.101). In that catalog they are an ethnos, a people, not yet visibly a priesthood. But across the rest of his account Herodotus uses the same word for a sacerdotal function: the Magi are the men who must be present at sacrifice, who interpret the dreams and portents of kings, who possess the lore of the omen. The two senses sit side by side in his text without being reconciled, and the field has argued ever since about how they relate. The likeliest reconstruction, set out in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, holds that Old Iranian magu- meant something like “member of the tribe,” and that among the Medes it narrowed to “member of the tribe” — the priestly one — and so to “priest.” Hereditary descent and sacred office were, on this reading, the same thing: one was born a magus as one was born into a clan.

Whatever their origin, by the height of the Achaemenid empire (550–330 BCE) the Magi were the indispensable officiants of Persian religion. They tended the sacred fires; they chanted at the slaughter of victims; they read the sky and the dream. The empire’s own monuments confirm the office obliquely. Darius the Great, in the great trilingual inscription he had carved into the cliff at Bisotun around 520 BCE, records that the man he overthrew to take the throne was Gaumāta the Magian — a usurper who, Darius claims, had impersonated a dead prince and seized the kingship. Herodotus tells a parallel story (Histories iii.61–79): a Magian named Smerdis ruled by imposture until seven Persian noblemen cut him down, after which the Persians fell upon every magus they could find. The day of the slaughter, Herodotus says, was kept ever after as a solemn festival, the Magophonia, the “killing of the Magi,” on which no magus dared show his face out of doors. Whether Darius restored a legitimate line or staged a coup against the rightful king is one of the oldest disputes in Iranian history, and the inscription is as much manifesto as chronicle. What the episode preserves, beneath the propaganda, is the political weight of the priesthood: a magus could come within reach of the throne itself, and the court could fear him enough to remember his fall with a holiday.

The rock-cut tomb of Darius I at Naqsh-e Rustam; in the upper register the king worships at a fire altar beneath the winged disc of Ahura Mazda — the cosmic frame within which the Magi officiated. — Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alongside the cult, the Magi held the offices of the court diviner. Herodotus shows them attending the kings as interpreters of dreams and readers of portents: it is the Magi whom Astyages summons to expound the unsettling dreams that foretell the rise of Cyrus, and the Magi whom Xerxes consults on the eve of his Greek campaign when an eclipse darkens the sun and when troubling signs appear (Histories i.107–128; vii.19, 37). The verdict of the Magi could turn an army or seal a prince’s fate. Xenophon, writing of the ideal Persian education in the Cyropaedia, makes the Magi the recognized authorities on everything pertaining to the gods. Theirs was a knowledge of the sky as much as of the altar — the calendar, the festivals, the meaning of the celestial sign — and it is this astral and oneiromantic competence, fully as much as the fire, that the Greeks would seize upon and magnify.

The priesthood outlived the dynasty that employed it. Under the Parthians and especially under the Sasanians (third to seventh centuries CE), the Magi hardened into a formal ecclesiastical hierarchy whose titles still name the ranks of the surviving Zoroastrian clergy: the hērbed (teacher-priest), the mowbed (from magu-pat, “chief of the magi”), and the dastur (the high priest of a fire-temple). At the head of the Sasanian church stood the mowbedān mowbed, the “chief of chief-priests,” a figure of immense state authority who consecrated kings and adjudicated orthodoxy. The caste that Herodotus glimpsed as a tribe of Media became, over a millennium, the organized church of an empire — and then, after the Arab conquest, the contracting remnant priesthood of a minority faith. The continuity of the word is itself the genealogy: magu-, magus, mowbed, mobed. The keeper of the fire has been called by the same name, in one mouth or another, for twenty-five centuries.

The office: fire, the chant, the haoma, the dead

What did a magus actually do? Herodotus, again, is the earliest witness, and his report — for all that it filters Persian practice through Greek eyes — squares remarkably with the liturgy preserved in the Avesta. When a Persian wished to sacrifice, Herodotus writes, he could not perform the rite alone: a magus had to stand by, chanting over the victim a sacred recitation that the Greek author calls a “theogony,” an account of the birth of the gods (Histories i.132). The detail is precise. In the Zoroastrian rite the priest does indeed chant — the manthra, the inherited liturgical verse — over the offering, and the act of recitation is not ornament but the operative core of the ceremony. Without the spoken word, correctly intoned, the rite does not happen. The Greek traveler had seen something real and reported it accurately, even as he reached for a Greek category (“theogony”) to name it.

At the center of the high liturgy stood, and stands, the fire. To the Magi the consecrated flame was not a symbol of the divine but the very son of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord — the visible presence of aša, the truth and right order of things, against the lie and disorder of druj. The fire was fed with clean, dry wood, tended so that it never went out, kept apart from the pollution of breath and corpse and the dead matter of the world. The priest approached it with the lower face veiled, lest his exhalation defile it. Around the fire ran the apparatus of the cult: the barsom, the bundle of sacred twigs (later metal rods) held in the officiant’s hand, depicted on Achaemenid seals and reliefs; and the haoma, the sacred plant pressed and offered in the central ceremony of the Yasna. The haoma rite — the pounding of the stalks, the mixing of the juice, the offering and partaking — is the Iranian cousin of the Vedic soma sacrifice, and stands at the liturgical heart of the worship the Magi conducted. It is described here as a rite, not rehearsed as a recipe; the tradition guards the performance closely, and the performance is the priest’s, not the page’s.

The tomb of Xerxes at Naqsh-e Rustam, upper register: the king on a three-stepped pedestal worships before the fire altar, the bird-emblem of Ahura Mazda above — the iconography of the rite the Magi served. — dynamosquito (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Two practices struck outside observers as strange, and the Magi did not hide them. The first was the killing of noxious creatures. Herodotus reports that the Magi slay with their own hands every kind of living thing except dogs and men — ants, snakes, reptiles, the creeping and flying things — and seem to take pleasure in it (Histories i.140). Within the Zoroastrian frame this is not cruelty but cosmic hygiene: the world is divided into the good creation of Ahura Mazda and the xrafstra, the vermin of Angra Mainyu, the hostile spirit, and to destroy the latter is to take the side of order against the lie. The second was the treatment of the dead. The corpse, in this theology, is the seat of the corpse-demon, the Nasu, the most acute concentration of pollution; it must on no account be allowed to defile the pure elements of fire, water, or earth. Burial and cremation are therefore forbidden. The body is instead exposed — given to the birds and the dogs and the sun, the flesh stripped from the bone in the open air. Herodotus already knew of the custom: a male Persian, he says, is not buried until his body has been torn by bird or dog, and this the Magi practice openly, without concealment (Histories i.140). The towers of exposure of the later Zoroastrian communities, and the controversy that surrounds them into the present, descend in an unbroken line from the practice the Greek historian recorded twenty-five centuries ago.

Reception: the word, the wizard, the wise men

The most consequential thing the Magi ever did, they did without intending it: they gave the West a word. By the fifth century BCE the Greeks had taken magos into their own language, and from it coined mageia — the art or activity of the magus. But the noun for the actor and the noun for the act parted company almost at once. Mageia came to mean not what the Persian priests in fact did at their fires, but something the Greeks half-admired and half-feared: a foreign, secret, potent expertise over hidden forces. From mageia came Latin magia and magus, and from those the English magic and magician. Every modern use of the word is, etymologically, a memorial to the priesthood of the Medes — a fossil of the moment a Greek looked east and saw, in the keeper of the fire, a master of powers he could not name.

The image that traveled with the word was double from the start. On one side the magus was a sage: heir to an immemorial Eastern wisdom, master of astronomy and the calendar, knower of the divine. The dialogue First Alcibiades, transmitted under Plato’s name, refers to “the mageia of Zoroaster, son of Oromazes” as the worship of the gods — an honorable science, taught to Persian princes among the noblest parts of a royal education. The Greeks set the magus beside their own oldest sages and beside the Chaldeans of Babylon, those other Eastern masters of the star, and ranked all of them as fountains of a wisdom older than Greece. On the other side the magus was a fraud and a sorcerer, a peddler of spells and purifications, a charlatan working the credulous for fee — the magos of the tragic stage, kin to the witch Medea and her foreign drugs. The two faces never merged and never resolved; the Greek word carried both, and the ambivalence has clung to “magic” ever since. To call a man a magus was to praise or to accuse, and only context told which.

Out of this fascination grew a whole literature of forgery. Greek writers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods composed treatises on astrology, alchemy, divination, and the occult properties of stones and plants, and published them under the great Iranian names — Zoroaster, Hystaspes, and above all Ostanes. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, reports the legend in its full shape: Ostanes was the magus who accompanied Xerxes on his invasion of Greece and there first sowed the “monstrous craft” of magic among the Greeks, infecting them with a positive madness for it, so that philosophers — Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato — sailed abroad to learn the art and came home to teach it. Of the historical Ostanes there is, in fact, nothing: unlike “Zoroaster” and “Hystaspes,” the name answers to no attested Iranian figure, and the works under it are pseudepigrapha, attributions rather than authorships. The tradition that Ostanes taught Democritus the secrets of nature belongs to the legend, not to the record. The Belgian scholars Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont gathered and analyzed this corpus in Les Mages hellénisés (1938), arguing that much of it issued from the “Hellenized magi” — communities of Iranian descent in Anatolia who blended their ancestral lore with Greek learning. Whatever its origin, the literature put Greek occult science under Persian names and so completed the transformation: the priest of Ahura Mazda became, on the title page of books he never wrote, the founding wizard of the West. Albert de Jong’s Traditions of the Magi (1997) remains the standard sifting of what the Greek and Latin sources can and cannot tell us about the actual priesthood behind the topos.

Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (1423), Uffizi: the magoi of Matthew’s Gospel reimagined as three crowned kings with an Eastern train — the legend that grew over the Gospel’s spare notice. — Gentile da Fabriano, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The most famous Magi of all walk through a single short passage of scripture. In the Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12), magoi from the East come to Jerusalem in the days of Herod, having seen a star at its rising, and ask where the newborn king of the Jews is to be found; they follow the star to Bethlehem, fall down before the child, and open their treasures — gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The Greek word is the same one Herodotus used: these are magoi, Eastern men of the omen and the star, and Matthew’s first hearers would have heard in the term exactly the astrological priesthood of Persia. The Gospel says nothing more — not their number, not their names, not that they were kings. Everything else is the work of later tradition. The count of three was inferred from the three gifts; the rank of king was read in from the Psalms and Isaiah; the names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar appear only centuries afterward, as does their elevation to relics and the cathedral shrine at Cologne. The three crowned kings of the Christmas pageant are a legend grown luxuriantly over a single Gospel verse — and that legend, too, is part of the reception of the Magi, the priesthood of the fire reborn as the wise men of the manger.

Modern scholarship is left with a hard task of separation. There is the historical priesthood — the tribe of Media, the chanters at the Achaemenid sacrifice, the tenders of the Sasanian fires, traceable in clay tablets and rock inscriptions and the living liturgy of the Zoroastrians. And there is the Greek image laid over it — the Eastern wizard, the master of mageia, the author of forged books, the king who knelt at Bethlehem. The two are not the same, and the second has often eclipsed the first; the word magic in every European language is the long shadow the image cast. To recover the man drawing his barley ration at Persepolis, one has to read back through twenty-five centuries of fascination, and set aside, gently, almost everything the word has come to mean.

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