A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 1 (of 2) / During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era

by Lynn Thorndike

Divination in early China.

Of the five classics included in the Confucian Canon, The Book of Changes (I Ching or Yi-King), regarded by some as the oldest work in Chinese literature and dated back as early as 3000 B.C., in its rudimentary form appears to have been a method of divination by means of eight possible combinations in triplets of a line and a broken line. Thus, if a be a line and b a broken line, we may have aaa, bbb, aab, bba, abb, baa, aba, and bab. Possibly there is a connection with the use of knotted cords which, Chinese writers state, preceded written characters, like the method used in ancient Peru. More certain would seem the resemblance to the medieval method of divination known as geomancy, which we shall encounter later in our Latin authors. Magic and astrology might, of course, be traced all through Chinese history and literature. But, contenting ourselves with this single example of the antiquity of such arts in the civilization of the far east, let us turn to other ancient cultures which had a closer and more unmistakable influence upon the western world.

Magic in ancient Egypt.

Of the ancient Egyptians Budge writes, “The belief in magic influenced their minds ... from the earliest to the latest period of their history ... in a manner which, at this stage in the history of the world, is very difficult to understand.”[16] To the ordinary historical student the evidence for this assertion does not seem quite so overwhelming as the Egyptologists would have us think. It looks thinner when we begin to spread it out over a stretch of four thousand years, and it scarcely seems scientific to adduce details from medieval Arabic tales or from the late Greek fiction of the Pseudo-Callisthenes or from papyri of the Christian era concerning the magic of early Egypt. And it may be questioned whether two stories preserved in the Westcar papyrus, written many centuries afterwards, are alone “sufficient to prove that already in the Fourth Dynasty the working of magic was a recognized art among the Egyptians.”[17]

Magic and Egyptian religion.

At any rate we are told that the belief in magic not only was predynastic and prehistoric, but was “older in Egypt than the belief in God.”[18] In the later religion of the Egyptians, along with more lofty and intellectual conceptions, magic was still a principal ingredient.[19] Their mythology was affected by it[20] and they not only combated demons with magical formulae but believed that they could terrify and coerce the very gods by the same method, compelling them to appear, to violate the course of nature by miracles, or to admit the human soul to an equality with themselves.[21]

Mortuary magic.

Magic was as essential in the future life as here on earth among the living. Many, if not most, of the observances and objects connected with embalming and burial had a magic purpose or mode of operation; for instance, the “magic eyes placed over the opening in the side of the body through which the embalmer removed the intestines,”[22] or the mannikins and models of houses buried with the dead. In the process of embalming the wrapping of each bandage was accompanied by the utterance of magic words.[23] In “the oldest chapter of human thought extant”—the Pyramid Texts written in hieroglyphic at the tombs at Sakkara of Pharaohs of the fifth and sixth dynasties (c. 2625-2475 B.C.), magic is so manifest that some have averred “that the whole body of Pyramid Texts is simply a collection of magical charms.”[24] The scenes and objects painted on the walls of the tombs, such as those of nobles in the fifth and sixth dynasties, were employed with magic intent and were meant to be realized in the future life; and with the twelfth dynasty the Egyptians began to paint on the insides of the coffins the objects that were formerly actually placed within.[25] Under the Empire the famous Book of the Dead is a collection of magic pictures, charms, and incantations for the use of the deceased in the hereafter,[26] and while it is not of the early period, we hear that “a book with words of magic power” was buried with a pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. Budge has “no doubt that the object of every religious text ever written on tomb, stele, amulet, coffin, papyrus, etc., was to bring the gods under the power of the deceased, so that he might be able to compel them to do his will.”[27] Breasted, on the other hand, thinks that the amount and complexity of this mortuary magic increased greatly in the later period under popular and priestly influence.[28]

Magic in daily life.

Breasted nevertheless believes that magic had played a great part in daily life throughout the whole course of Egyptian history. He writes, “It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how completely the belief in magic penetrated the whole substance of life, dominating popular custom and constantly appearing in the simplest acts of the daily household routine, as much a matter of course as sleep or the preparation of food. It constituted the very atmosphere in which the men of the early oriental world lived. Without the saving and salutary influence of such magical agencies constantly invoked, the life of an ancient household in the East was unthinkable.”[29]