Martin von Wagner Museum
der Universität Würzburg
“They worked witchcraft in heaven, they worked witchcraft on earth” From the Gira Hymn
Magic is real!
… or at least it was for the people of antiquity.
To understand the impact of magic on the everyday life and lived reality of earlier cultures, we must approach their view of the world. While today we encounter magic at best as superstition or as a fantastical element in books and films, in the past it offered a way of exerting influence, in an unpredictable world, on one’s own environment and on the supernatural forces that governed it.
Underlying it are deeply human feelings: fear of an uncertain future, powerlessness in the face of illness, natural phenomena and death, or even unrequited love.
Magic is commonplace!
“Magic” goes back to the Old Persian word maguš. It referred to a member of a priestly caste of the Medes, an Iranian people, and among the Greeks it became mágos, the term for a “ritual expert”. In today’s usage, magic lies outside a rational view of the world shaped by scientific explanations.
In the past, however, magic was commonplace and not always separate from religion or medicine. There was nothing irrational about magic; rather, it followed a structured system and could be worked through the invocation of deities and complex rituals. In Egypt, for example, heka “magic” was a creative power that dwelt within the gods and was itself personified as a god. People could draw on it to ward off misfortune.
If someone in Mesopotamia suffered from an illness, it might have originated in harmful magic worked by a witch or by demons. An incantation priest (Akkadian āšipu) could remove it from the patient by means of magical rituals.
Magic is for everyone!
In Egypt and Mesopotamia, priests were professional service providers who were engaged for all kinds of concerns. They made amulets for protection against evil demons, performed rituals for recovery accompanied by chants, or cleansed those affected of ritual impurity. Their clientele ranged from the king, who had to protect himself against enemies and bad omens, to the expectant mother making provisions for pregnancy and childbirth, to the rejected suitor who wanted to win the affection of his beloved through magic.
In the Graeco-Roman world, magical practice is attested as early as Homer’s Odyssey: a bleeding wound of the title hero is not only bandaged but also charmed with an epaoidḗ, a magical chant, and the bleeding is thus stopped (Od. 19.455). The earliest Roman collection of laws, the “Law of the Twelve Tables” (c. 450 BC), threatens with punishment anyone who ruins the crops in another person’s field by magical chant. These early sources show that magical acts were part of medical practice, and that lawmakers regarded harmful magic as a criminal offence to be taken seriously and punished it accordingly.
Magic under criticism
Nevertheless, magical practice was often also met with distrust. In ancient Mesopotamia we find parodies of ritual experts, and the portrayal of the sorceress Circe in the Odyssey leads rather into the realm of the fantastic when she turns Odysseus’ companions into pigs – see vase [6] in [Wall Case 1.2].
Over the course of Graeco-Roman antiquity, an increasing “privatisation” of magical practices can be observed, accompanied by criticism from intellectual elites. Because of that the concept of magic was increasingly used in a negative sense and to set apart foreign practices.
This, however, did nothing to diminish actual magical practice, as the numerous recipe collections, amulets and curse tablets from all around the Mediterranean throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity attest.