A Brief History of Magick
hrough most of the human history that we know, human cultures included a mix of magick, religion, science, philosophy, and trickery or illusion. Magick was often performed in the name of, or through the power of, a deity: the pharaoh blessed the crops as Amon-Ra incarnate; Moses parted the Red Sea in Jehovah’s name; the Delphi oracle delivered the wisdom of Gaia and, later, Apollo. All gods and goddesses performed miraculous feats, but certain deities are especially patrons of magick: Isis, Hecate, and Inanna were among the first.
Often enough, the practice of magick was confined to a priestly class. They alone could enter the inner sanctum of the temple, read the omens in the stars, and receive the commands of the gods. Occasionally they impressed their congregations with “secret” skills that were actually rudimentary science, as in predicting eclipses. Sometimes they used blatant trickery to make idols “speak” or great temple doors swing open at a word from the king. And sometimes they performed magick that was true, real, and effective.
But all was intertwined as part of the human quest for understanding the world and our place in it. It was not until very recently that a historian could say, “Along with magic and science, religion makes up the third point of an eternal triangle of ideological warfare.”[1]
Magick Everywhere
However blended with other endeavors, humans have done magick in all cultures throughout history; each culture has created its own special techniques and understandings. In many African villages, according to Malidoma Patrice Somé, all positive magick and ritual were community endeavors; the solitary magician was suspect, and probably working to harm the village. Among the Norse, the written letter was a thing of mystery and awe, and the magick of runes and bindrunes became a high art. Hindu magicians developed the tattvas, those combinations of elemental symbols and colors that could become gateways to other realms of energy and consciousness. The strega of Italy saw magick as a way to fight oppression by the wealthy and powerful, and developed it as a weapon.
Always there have been commonalities, because all magicians are human and share the same structure of mind and emotion at the deepest levels of being. Magicians everywhere know that invisible forces can be concentrated and channeled to change the world, whether they do it with dance, song, pranayama breathing, or words of power. They know that other worlds exist close to ours, accessible through the mind: the underworld of the shaman and the astral planes of the ceremonial magician. They know that higher powers can be invited to inhabit our bodies and speak through our lips; hence the oracles of Gaia and Apollo at Delphi, who counseled the kings of Greece; the Asatru priestess speaking for the Norse gods in seidhe; the Vodoun mambo being “ridden” by the love goddess Erzulie; and the modern Wiccan priest aspecting the hornéd god, or the priestess Drawing Down the Moon.
Let us look at a few of the highlights of magick in various times and cultures, and let us begin as close to our beginning as possible.
Magick at the Dawn of Humankind
Most of the story of our species occurred before written history. Humans and our hominid ancestors go back two million years and more: eighty thousand generations at least. Writing has only been in common use, in some cultures, for one-fifth of one percent of those long eons. We will never know most of the struggles, experiments, discoveries, and traditions that comprised the magick, science, or religion of our ancient forebears.
We have found a tiny fraction of the artifacts from our Paleolithic ancestors, though doubtless there are thousands more remarkable objects buried beneath windswept desert dunes, hidden deep in unknown caves, or sunk in the sediments of lakes and coastlines. What can we learn from the cave paintings, carvings, artifacts, and graves?
We see paintings in deep caves where no reasoning being would live that depict animals, hunters, and people dancing in masks and the skins of animals. We find sculpted and carved images of women, either pregnant or fat, with large breasts, hips, and bellies. We find bones incised with records of the changing phases of the moon, or with plants and animals (in one remarkable blade, seeds and a bull bison on one side, and flowering plants and a cow bison on the other). We find small bone and ivory carvings, usually of animals, that are perforated as though to hang on a leather thong. We find ancient flutes, again of bone, and images of bows that may have been made for music rather than hunting. We find the skulls and bones of cave bears carefully collected and arranged. And we find skeletons sprinkled with red ochre and buried in a fetal position with grave goods close by.
If these long-ago people thought like us, then their magick may have been to honor the spirits of their prey, gain success in hunting, revere a mother goddess and a hornéd god of animals, seek the strengths and protection of animal spirit allies, and prepare the dead to be born again into a new life. But all we really have are a few silent, enigmatic clues, and a great deal of imagination and speculation.
Magick in the Fertile Crescent
The ancient civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria were places of learning, science, and magick. The science of Mesopotamia included astronomy, writing, arithmetic, irrigation, and architecture. The magick of Mesopotamia included the power of the spoken word. A thousand years before the Common Era, Babylonian exorcists could invoke the powers of benevolent gods, banish demons of illness, and heal with words and hands.
Their astrologers could interpret the signs of the night sky; their wise men or baru were among the first to divine the future by reading the entrails or livers of animals. Many magicians specialized in the creation of amulets, charms, and talismans for protection.
Life, Death, and Magick in Khemi
Egypt was known as Khemi or “the Black Land” in the days of the pharoahs. Their magickal arsenal may have been vast and elaborate, but what has survived are occasional documents such as the Book of the Dead, artifacts such as their mummies, inscriptions on papyrus documents and temple walls, and thousands of amulets or talismans.
Their magick was intimately tied to the cycles of nature. They knew that the human spirit followed a similar cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and their magick was designed to aid the process. Magick was used to protect the body, which continued to be home to part of the soul after death; it could provide resources for the spirit to survive the journey to the underworld and ensure prosperity in the next life. Magickal amulets could protect body parts, stand in for the mummy if it was damaged or destroyed, and help procure a positive judgment at the Weighing of the Soul. The most popular forms were the udjat or Eye of Horus, the scarab beetle, the djed or Pillar of Osiris, and the ankh, symbol of life.
The shabti were another form of magick: these were tiny servitors made of clay who would grow and harvest the crops in the next life, and serve the deceased as commanded. This reflected the Egyptians’ belief in the magick of replication and substitution: a clay figure, painted eye, or false door was as effective as the real thing, since all matter was living, organic, and spirit-filled.
Redundancy was built into Egyptian magick: if one amulet was good, two or twenty were better. Creation myths were not replaced, but new ones were added. A spell or incantation might be used, and then another performed for the same purpose, just to be safe. Deities multiplied and overlapped. The Egyptians welcomed new magick but discarded nothing.[2]
The Magick of Old Europe
In central, western, and northern Europe, all too little was recorded. We have the stone circles and other megalithic monuments of the pre-Celtic peoples; we have some folklore recorded by early Christian monks in the Celtic enclaves of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; and we have the Eddas and runic inscriptions of the Norse. Later, fragments of Druidic lore were recorded by the Romans, their bitter enemies.
We can guess at many things. That they worked a magick of animal totems seems clear, because many clan and family surnames are those of animals, and they danced with horned masks. Old herbal compendiums suggest that plants were used for magick as well as healing, and certainly the Druids believed that each species of tree contained its own symbolism and powers. Folklore tells us that amulets and talismans were popular, from hag (or holey) stones to rowan twigs or iron nails. The use of “witches’ bottles,” “witches’ ladders,” and “witch balls,” lingering into historical times, tells us that unseen energies were trapped, directed, or diverted.
Protective magick was extremely important, for the world was filled with uncanny spirits and creatures: boggarts and brownies; the Fair Folk, seelie wicht or Gentry; pookas and goblins; spectral black dogs and great orms; giants and trolls; and the shades of the dead. So people memorized spoken charms and carried amulets, and later hung magickal brass ornaments on their horses and nailed horseshoes or Brigit’s crosses over their barn doors.
Here, as elsewhere, religion and magick went hand in hand. During autumn thunderstorms, Odin or Herne led the Wild Hunt through the dark sky, and goddesses lived in every spring and holy well. Much magick was used to placate, propitiate, and protect.
Science and Magick in Greece and Rome
Some say that science really began with the Greeks. They gave us the study of logic, geometry, the concept of the atom, the formation of cells and planets, and the whole view of the cosmos as an orderly machine operating by fixed laws.
And yet Plato, Aristotle, and most of the great philosophers of that era also firmly believed in magick. They spoke of divination, the elements, astrological horoscopes, the evil eye, and the correspondences of bodily organs with celestial objects. All around them were practitioners of thaumaturgy or “low magick for a price,” magickal healers, and quacks, as well as theurges who taught of the spirit. Greeks invented or rediscovered the magick wand, spoke to the dead through necromancy, and sometimes pushed nails into clay images in a Vodoun-like curse.
The culture of Rome continued the Greek mix of science and folk magick, much of it concerned with healing. The naturalist Pliny and others list a thousand remedies that involve rubbing strange substances on the body at the correct phase of the moon. Some worked because the healer and patient expected them to, and some were actively harmful. Today we would view such remedies as a mixture of practical herbalism, psychology, magick, and rank superstition. Throughout the Roman Empire, magick and religion were still intertwined: often a legionnaire would wear an amulet sacred to Mars to help him in battle, or one sacred to the Celtic horse-goddess Epona if he were a cavalryman.
When Christianity appeared on the scene, one of its early branches was Gnosticism, whose believers knew the search for knowledge was the best path to God and that all faiths had wisdom to offer. With sufficient esoteric knowledge, humanity could fight past demons and evil forces and come to a direct experience of divinity. Magick had an important place in Gnosticism, but there wasn’t much need for the authorities and dogmas that existed elsewhere in the emerging Roman Church.
Magick Versus the Church
New forces were afoot that would strike a heavy blow against all forms of magick. Emperor Constantine of Rome converted to Christianity and declared magick illegal throughout the Empire. He was followed by a long string of Christian monarchs who reviled magick. Perhaps they saw magick as deceit and trickery, the game of charlatans who preyed upon the gullible; some so-called “magick” certainly was. Possibly they wished to reserve magick for the church: the transformation of the wine to the blood of Christ is certainly a magickal act. Perhaps they feared that magick came a little too close to the miracles of Jesus, such as healing, walking on the Sea of Galilee, or changing the water to wine at Cana. Certainly Constantine was serious: “There shall be no more divination, no curious inquiry, forevermore.”[3]
Early Christianity was only one of many, many religious sects, and it soon set aside the passivity of the early martyrs to attack its competitors. As the new faith spread through Europe, zealous churchmen and rulers lashed out against any who did not accept the authority of the church.
The Crusades against the “infidels” who held the Holy Land were followed by the Inquisition that aimed to destroy heresy within Europe. Gnostics and Pagans, Jews and Muslims, Cathars, Albigensians, Waldenses, the Knights Templar, homosexuals, and Witches all became targets over the following centuries. Some were attacked for their “heretical” beliefs, some because they practiced magick (and non-Christian magick must have come from the Devil), and some because they held land, wealth, or power. Folk magick was still practiced in the rural corners of Europe, and wise women and cunning men continued their healing in the villages; alchemists and a few magicians with wealthy patrons quietly sought the Mysteries. However, for all practical purposes, spiritual and temporal control was in the hands of the Church of Rome.
But by the sixteenth century, the church had other rivals for the minds of humanity. Experimentation and measurement led to the advance of science, and the Reformation in Christianity took Western society away from the more magickal, Pagan-based practices of the Roman Catholic Church to a more abstract religion based on faith and dogma—which still, like the Roman Church, forbade the practice of magick.
Between the hammering of the Roman Church, the impressive advances of science and engineering, and the austere beliefs of the Protestant churches, the study of magick seemed doomed. But across the sea from Europe lived a different world.
Magick Comes to the New World
In North America, Native American cultures were no strangers to magick. For most tribes, it was closely bound up with their spiritual practices, except for the renegades who used magick to harm the community: the malevolent sorcerers who could change their skins and move like animals, who knew the secrets of poison and curse.
When other peoples arrived in the New World, they brought their beliefs and their magick with them. The German immigrants, called “Pennsylvania Dutch,” had their hex signs for protection and good fortune; the settlers of the Ozarks and the Appalachian Mountains practiced the “pow wow” folk magick of their ancestors. Black slaves brought the religions of Africa and blended them with Catholic beliefs to create new Afro-Caribbean magick and spirituality: Vodoun, Santeria, Candomblé, and more. Jewish immigrants brought knowledge of the Qabala, and others came who held the lore of their Witch or Norse ancestors.
Despite the headlong rush of technology in the nineteenth century—the railroads and telegraph and factory—a curious thing happened: the Spiritualist movement appeared. The gaze of the American public went from science to séances, table-rapping, communication with the dead, ectoplasmic apparitions, levitation, and other mystical phenomena.
The Western Tradition Rises
Back in Europe, the Enlightenment was eclipsed by the Romantic Movement. As though in reaction to the Industrial Age, many people began looking to a (largely mythical) past and matters of the spirit for their inspiration. Suddenly medieval romances, including the legends of King Arthur, were popular again. New orders of Druids arose and gathered at Stonehenge (not originally a Druid temple) in white robes. Folklorists began gathering the old legends and customs of the countryside, and Egyptology bloomed to the point that mummies were shipped to England and viewed at “unwrapping parties.” The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882.
Divination became quite stylish, and dream interpretation, palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, tarot cards, and Gypsy fortunetelling became all the rage.
In the meantime, magickal orders thrived. The Masons and Rosicrucians, who had been around for a long time, reappeared; and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created to teach the Western Tradition of ceremonial magick to initiates. That the “Western” tradition was based on a Jewish mystical system (the Qabala) and on the mythology of Egypt, mixed in with esoteric Christianity, struck no one as odd. It was “dedicated to the ideal that a select brotherhood of adepts would reform the entire world by perfecting both self and nature as illuminated through secret doctrines passed down through the ages.”[4]
The Golden Dawn grew and splintered under the impact of several strong and willful leaders, and was succeeded by a string of other temples, lodges, and orders more or less in its image. A few still exist today, while others lasted only as long as their charismatic founders.
Wicca and Paganism: “We’re Back”
Back in America, the Spiritualist movement had faded and people were distracted by a World War, the Great Depression, and another World War in rapid succession. But the 1950s and ’60s brought a youth culture that turned on with rock-and-roll, sexual freedom, the hippie lifestyle, marijuana, and so-called New Age practices—a motley collection of channeling, crystal healing, organic gardening, tarot reading, meditation, and spirit guides.
About the same time, a retired British civil servant named Gerald Gardner was reinventing Witchcraft as the religion of Wicca, a form of nature-oriented spirituality that included the practice of magick. Through the efforts of Ray Buckland and others, Wicca spread to the United States, and soon cropped up in Canada and Australia as well. Other varieties of Neopaganism appeared concurrently, such as Asatru (the Norse religion of the Vanir and Aesir gods), new Druid organizations, feminist Goddess spirituality, and other magico-spiritual groups based on the practices of ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Sumerians, Celts, Picts, and so on.
Though the New Agers, Neopagan groups, and occasional family-tradition Witches were far from identical, they did and do have overlapping attitudes and beliefs, in particular an openness to magick and a self-empowered spirituality quite unlike the churches on Main Street.
The Triumph of Science and Religion
For all the interest within the youth counterculture and in rare pockets of mature freethinkers, it seemed as though Western society in the late twentieth century was firmly non-magickal. The power centers belonged to science and technology, which had brought us the Good Life of fast cars, television, and scented toilet paper; to the merchant class, whose spirituality focused on profit and market share; to the mainstream churches, whose doctrines had become traditional and comfortable; and to the conservative Christians, suspicious of science and intolerant of the occult.
It was into this mixture that the New Agers, the Pagan priestesses and priests, and the new magicians came. Some exist in the economic mainstream as nurses and computer technicians and real estate agents; others live on the fringes, making arts and crafts in out-of-the-way nooks. Those who practice magick (and let it be known) are sometimes dismissed as kooks by the excessively left-brained, or are feared by conservative religionists. But bold and imaginative thinkers, whether shamans or scientists, have always been on the fringe of society. The value of magick is proven by its effect on the individuals who practice it and its capacity to improve society, whether or not it is understood or given credit by the majority of people.
Magick lives. It lives in the hearts of those who preserve or revive their traditional cultures, and it lives in the minds of those who are curious and open-minded enough to explore its possibilities.
Science Discovers Magick
But wait. Who are those others who march this way, conjuring with invisible forces and reciting arcane incantations? They are the quantum mechanic mages, the prestidigitory physicists, the—scientists?
As we discuss in chapter 4, the more we explore the foundations of matter and energy, the farther we reach into the vast reaches of space, the more wonders we encounter: things that are neither particle nor wave, reality transformed by the eye of the beholder, instantaneous communication that cannot be measured or traced, neutrinos, gluons, photinos, selectrons, charm, strings, branes, muons, and quarks, oh my!
It seems that the old Arts, once scorned and nearly exhausted, may yet receive validation and renewal by scientists who dare to look deeply at the fabric of reality—and see magick there.
Exercises Toward Mastery
1: Artifact Meditation
Find a book or online article that shows interesting artifacts of stone, bone, ivory, or wood from before recorded history. Pick one and meditate on it; ask yourself how it might have been used in magick, and give your imagination free rein.
2: Research the Magick of an Ancient Culture
Pick one culture—Greek, Chinese, Sumerian, Norse, African, Polynesian, whatever interests you—and do some research, online or in the library, until you feel you have a beginning understanding of how magick fit into their lives. If you feel motivated, write an essay on it and submit it to a Pagan or magickal journal or ’zine.
3: Read About Famous Magicians
Appendix VII, “Magicians Through the Ages,” briefly introduces some real and legendary people who are remembered as great practitioners of the Art. Read about them and see if there is one who especially intrigues you. Then find a biography (or autobiography) for that person. Think about their experience with magick and whether you might have made any different choices than they did.
Blesséd be.
To follow this path further, read:
Behind the Crystal Ball: Magic, Science and the Occult from Antiquity Through the New Age by Anthony Aveni (Times Books, 1996)
Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization by Dan
Burton and David Grandy (Indiana University Press, 2004)
The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe by Valerie I. J. Flint (Princeton University Press, reprint ed. 1994)
The Secret Teaching of All Ages (An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings Concealed with the Rituals, Allegories, and Mysteries of All Ages) by Manly P. Hall (Philosophical Research Society, Diamond Jubilee Edition, 1988)
The Occult: A History by Colin Wilson (Random House, 1971)
[1]Anthony Aveni, Behind the Crystal Ball: Magic, Science and the Occult from Antiquity Through the New Age (New York: Times Books, 1996), xi.
[2] Dan Burton and David Grandy, Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 9–34.
[3] K. Seligman, The History of Magick and the Occult (New York: Harmony, 1948), 73–74.
[4] Aveni, 208.