In the first millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, someone with a fever did not just call a doctor. They also called the āšipu, a ritual specialist who recited formulae, prepared amulets and asked the gods to drive the evil away. For that person, praying, treating the body and casting an incantation were all parts of the same care.
That detail explains why this series exists. Egyptian goddesses, Greek oracles and Celtic festivals arouse a great deal of curiosity, and they almost always reach us mixed up with recent legends. This text is the starting point: it explains some key words, shows how historians separate ancient sources from modern interpretation and presents the map of the series.
Magic, religion and oracle: words that changed their meaning
The word “magic” comes from the Greek mageia, linked to the Persian priests (the magi). The Greeks often used the term with suspicion, to speak of foreign or dubious practices. The historian Fritz Graf, in Magic in the Ancient World, shows that calling something “magic” in Antiquity was usually a judgement: other people’s rite was magic, mine was religion. Plato, in the Republic, was already complaining about itinerant priests who knocked on the doors of the rich offering purifications and spells against enemies, and in the Laws he proposed punishing anyone who harmed another person with incantations.
Within the ancient cultures themselves, the boundary was far more blurred. In Egypt, heka was at once a divine force and the art of using it, and priests practised it inside the temples. In Greece and Rome, official religion coexisted with the curse tablets that people buried in secret. Graf devotes a chapter to these objects, called katadesmoi in Greek and defixiones in Latin: thin lead sheets bearing a rival’s name, rolled up, pierced with a nail and placed in tombs, wells or springs, places seen as passages to the world of the dead. They were used to “bind” opponents in lawsuits, races and love affairs. When you read “magic” in this series, think of a broad spectrum: requests to the gods, protection, healing, divination and rites to keep the world moving at the right rhythm.
“Oracle” also needs explaining. It can be a place (the sanctuary of Delphi), a person (the Pythia, who spoke on behalf of Apollo) or the answer received. Reading the liver of a sacrificed animal, watching the flight of birds or casting sticks were ways of asking the sacred something. These methods appear in almost every civilisation in the series; see the oracles section and the text on the different types of magic.
Historical source and modern myth
We know things about the ancient world through three routes. The first is the texts of the period: clay tablets, papyri, inscriptions, hymns. The second is archaeology: temples, tombs, figurines, remains of offerings. The third is accounts written by other peoples, sometimes centuries later and almost always with prejudices.
The Celts are the classic example. They left very little writing about their own religion, and much of what is said about the druids comes from Roman authors, such as Julius Caesar, who were at war with them. A great deal of the “druidic tradition” circulating today was created in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The same care applies to more recent stories about the past. In 1921, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing that the people accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were heirs to a pre-Christian pagan religion. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, shows how this thesis influenced many people and how historians abandoned it after re-examining the trial sources she cited. Hutton also shows that Gerald Gardner made Wicca public in 1954, with the book Witchcraft Today, three years after the repeal, in 1951, of the Witchcraft Act 1735. According to him, the religion combined ancient sources, folklore, ceremonial magic and ideas of its own time.
Throughout the series, each post will separate these layers. When information is uncertain, we will say that it is uncertain.
The sacred everywhere
The Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, describes an idea that helps to read almost all of these cultures: for ancient human beings, the sacred manifests itself in the world. A mountain, a tree, a spring or a temple can be points where heaven and earth touch, which he calls a hierophany. Many cultures imagined a centre of the world, an axis linking the three levels of the cosmos; Eliade uses the Latin expression axis mundi for this idea. Time was sacred too, marked by festivals that repeated the gestures of the gods at the beginning of the world. In Babylon, for example, the creation epic, the Enuma Elish, was recited during the Akitu, the New Year festival, and Eliade reads this rite as a symbolic renewal of the cosmos.
Each people had its own calendar, tied to its seasons and its sky. The Maya, for example, built one of the most complex time-keeping systems known, a subject we have already covered in the Maya calendar. The observation of the stars, which gave rise to astrology, was born in Mesopotamia and passed through Egypt, Greece and Rome, as we recount in the origin of astrology.
The map of the series
The series follows an order that is part geography, part time: each region has a general post, with texts on gods, rituals and oracles.
We begin at the earliest possible beginning: Göbekli Tepe, in present-day Turkey, a complex of stone pillars more than 11,000 years old, called by some the “first temple” [coming soon]. From there we move on to Mesopotamia, where magic was first written down [coming soon], and to Ancient Egypt, with its religion focused on eternity [coming soon].
The Mediterranean block takes in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Greece of gods, oracles and mysteries, the Hellenistic world, Rome and Byzantium, and arrives at magic in the medieval West and the talismans of the Islamic world [coming soon]. It is along this path that the grimoires emerge, books of magic that still influence works such as the Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon, and its first part, the Ars Goetia.
In Asia, we visit the Indus Valley, whose script no one has yet deciphered, Vedic India and ancient China, with its ancestor worship and pursuit of balance [coming soon]. In the Americas, we go from the Olmecs and Teotihuacan to the Maya and Aztecs, and from the first Andean temples of Caral and Chavín to the Incas [coming soon].
In Brazil, Marajoara pottery and the knowledge of the Amazonian peoples reveal an ancient spirituality native to this land [coming soon]. Finally, we bring together civilisations that are usually left out: the Etruscans, the Celts, the Kingdom of Aksum, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor [coming soon].
Questions answered
Is Wicca an ancient religion?
Wicca, as we know it, emerged in England in the mid-20th century. It draws inspiration from ancient gods, symbols and festivals, but it is not a direct continuation of any religion from Antiquity.
Was there a single Goddess religion throughout Prehistory?
This idea was popular in the 20th century, but most historians and archaeologists today view it with great caution. There were indeed many goddesses and sacred female figures, in cultures very different from one another.
Did the witches persecuted in Europe practise an ancient pagan religion?
That was Margaret Murray’s thesis, in 1921. Ronald Hutton shows that historians rejected it: the trial records do not prove the existence of an organised pagan cult behind the accusations.
Why do you say “around” for so many dates?
Because ancient dates are usually estimates, based on archaeological layers, carbon dating and king lists that do not always agree.
Did the ancients call their own practice “magic”?
Rarely. According to Fritz Graf, the word served above all to label other people’s or suspect practices. Only in later texts, such as the Greek Magical Papyri from Egypt, do some practitioners adopt the term for themselves.
Mini-glossary
- Āšipu: Mesopotamian specialist in healing and protection rituals, sometimes translated as “exorcist”.
- Heka: in Egypt, the divine force that created the world and also the magical practice that uses it.
- Oracle: a place, person or answer through which the guidance of the gods was sought.
- Grimoire: a book of magical instructions, with prayers, seals and procedures.
- Hierophany: Mircea Eliade’s term for the manifestation of the sacred in something of the world.
Bibliography
ELIADE, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978–1985.
ELIADE, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959.
GRAF, Fritz. Magic in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
HUTTON, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
MURRAY, Margaret. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921.