It is evident from this incantation that use was made of magic images and knots, and of the properties of trees and herbs. Magic images were made of clay, wax, tallow, and other substances and were employed in various ways. Thus directions are given for making a tallow image of an enemy of the king and binding its face with a cord in order to deprive the person whom it represents of speech and willpower.[74] Images were also constructed in order that disease demons might be magically transferred into them,[75] and sometimes the images are slain and buried.[76] In the above incantation the magic knot was employed only by the sorceress, but Fossey states that knots were also used as counter-charms against the demons.[77] In the above incantation the names of herbs were left untranslated and it is not possible to say much concerning the pharmacy of the Assyrians and Babylonians because of our lack of a lexicon for their botanical and mineralogical terminology.[78] However, from what scholars have been able to translate it appears that common rather than rare and outlandish substances were the ones most employed. Wine and oil, salt and dates, and onions and saliva are the sort of things used. There is also evidence of the employment of a magic wand.[79] Gems and animal substances were used as well as herbs; all sorts of philters were concocted; and varied rites and ceremonies were employed such as ablutions and fumigations. In the account of the ark of the Babylonian Noah we are told of the magic significance of its various parts; thus the mast and cabin ceiling were made of cedar, a wood that counteracts sorceries.[80]
Greek culture not free from magic.
One remarkable corollary of the so-called Italian Renaissance or Humanistic movement at the close of the middle ages with its too exclusive glorification of ancient Greece and Rome has been the strange notion that the ancient Hellenes were unusually free from magic compared with other periods and peoples. It would have been too much to claim any such immunity for the primitive Romans, whose entire religion was originally little else than magic and whose daily life, public and private, was hedged in by superstitious observances and fears. But they, too, were supposed to have risen later under the influence of Hellenic culture to a more enlightened stage,[81] only to relapse again into magic in the declining empire and middle ages under oriental influence. Incidentally let me add that this notion that in the past orientals were more superstitious and fond of marvels than westerners in the same stage of civilization and that the orient must needs be the source of every superstitious cult and romantic tale is a glib assumption which I do not intend to make and which our subsequent investigation will scarcely substantiate. But to return to the supposed immunity of the Hellenes from magic; so far has this hypothesis been carried that textual critics have repeatedly rejected passages as later interpolations or even called entire treatises spurious for no other reason than that they seemed to them too superstitious for a reputable classical author. Even so specialized and recent a student of ancient astrology, superstition, and religion as Cumont still clings to this dubious generalization and affirms that “the limpid Hellenic genius always turned away from the misty speculations of magic.”[82] But, as I suggested some sixteen years since, “the fantasticalness of medieval science was due to ‘the clear light of Hellas’ as well as to the gloom of the ‘dark ages.’”[83]
Magic in myth, literature, and history.
It is not difficult to call to mind evidence of the presence of magic in Hellenic religion, literature, and history. One has only to think of the many marvelous metamorphoses in Greek mythology and of its countless other absurdities; of the witches, Circe and Medea, and the necromancy of Odysseus; or the priest-magician of Apollo in the Iliad who could stop the plague, if he wished; of the lucky and unlucky days and other agricultural magic in Hesiod.[84] Then there were the Spartans, whose so-called constitution and method of education, much admired by the Greek philosophers, were largely a retention of the life of the primitive tribe with its ritual and taboos. Or we remember Herodotus and his childish delight in ambiguous oracles or his tale of seceders from Gela brought back by Telines single-handed because he “was possessed of certain mysterious visible symbols of the powers beneath the earth which were deemed to be of wonder-working power.”[85] We recall Xenophon’s punctilious records of sacrifices, divinations, sneezes, and dreams; Nicias, as afraid of eclipses as if he had been a Spartan; and the matter-of-fact mentions of charms, philters, and incantations in even such enlightened writers as Euripides and Plato. Among the titles of ancient Greek comedies magic is represented by the Goetes of Aristophanes, the Mandragorizomene of Alexis, the Pharmacomantis of Anaxandrides, the Circe of Anaxilas, and the Thettale of Menander.[86] When we candidly estimate the significance of such evidence as this, we realize that the Hellenes were not much less inclined to magic than other peoples and periods, and that we need not wait for Theocritus and the Greek romances or for the magical papyri for proof of the existence of magic in ancient Greek civilization.[87]
Simultaneous increase of learning and occult science.
If astrology and some other occult sciences do not appear in a developed form until the Hellenistic period, it is not because the earlier period was more enlightened, but because it was less learned. And the magic which Osthanes is said to have introduced to the Greek world about the time of the Persian wars was not so much an innovation as an improvement upon their coarse and ancient rites of Goetia.[88]
Magic origin urged for Greek religion and drama.
This magic element which existed from the start in Greek culture is now being traced out by students of anthropology and early religion as well as of the classics. Miss Jane E. Harrison, in Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek religion, suggests a magical explanation for many a myth and festival, and even for the Olympic games and Greek drama.[89] The last point has been developed in more detail by F. M. Cornford’s Origin of Attic Comedy, where much magic is detected masquerading in the comedies of Aristophanes.[90] And Mr. A. B. Cook sees the magician in Zeus, who transforms himself to pursue his amours, and contends that “the real prototype of the heavenly weather-king was the earthly” magician or rain-maker, that the pre-Homeric “fixed epithets” of Zeus retained in the Homeric poems “are simply redolent of the magician,” and that the cult of Zeus Lykaios was connected with the belief in werwolves.[91] In still more recent publications Dr. Rendel Harris[92] has connected Greek gods in their origins with the woodpecker and mistletoe, associated the cult of Apollo with the medicinal virtues of mice and snakes, and in other ways emphasized the importance in early Greek religion and culture of the magic properties of animals and herbs.
These writers have probably pressed their point too far, but at least their work serves as a reaction against the old attitude of intellectual idolatry of the classics. Their views may be offset by those of Mr. Farnell, who states that “while the knowledge of early Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we cannot say that we know anything definite concerning the practices in this department of the Hellenic and adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are dealing.” And again, “But while Babylonian magic proclaims itself loudly in the great religious literature and highest temple ritual, Greek magic is barely mentioned in the older literature of Greece, plays no part at all in the hymns, and can only with difficulty be discovered as latent in the higher ritual. Again, Babylonian magic is essentially demoniac; but we have no evidence that the pre-Homeric Greek was demon-ridden, or that demonology and exorcism were leading factors in his consciousness and practice.” Even Mr. Farnell admits, however, that “the earliest Hellene, as the later, was fully sensitive to the magico-divine efficacy of names.”[93] Now to believe in the power of names before one believes in the existence of demons is the best possible evidence of the antiquity of magic in a society, since it indicates that the speaker has confidence in the operative power of his own words without any spiritual or divine assistance.