LECTURE IV
GRAECO-ITALIAN MAGIC
The Greek words for magic and magician, μαγεία and μάγος, are admittedly of Persian origin, and in all probability did not find their way into Greece before the Persian War, that is, before about 480 b.c. It was therefore an obvious inference, which was drawn in 1863 by O. Hirschfeld (de incantationibus et devinctionibus amatoriis apud Graecos Romanosque), that as the name magic was not known in Greece before the Persian Wars, neither was the thing. The inference is indeed obvious, but it is not necessarily correct: magic is practised by tribes who have not developed any general term for magic. It is therefore conceivable, at least, that the Greeks and Italians also before 480 b.c. practised magical rites, even though they then had no word for magic in general. The question is one of facts and not merely of words. What do we know of the facts before 480 b.c.? Unfortunately, according to M. Mauss, in his article on magic in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, ‘we are in almost complete ignorance of the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece.’ In view, then, of our almost complete ignorance, it may perhaps be allowable to start from a hypothesis—the hypothesis that the primitive and original forms of magic amongst the Greeks and Romans were much the same as they are amongst the undeveloped peoples who possess them at the present day, and, like the Greeks and Romans of the earliest times, have no general term for magic.
Amongst the tribes of Central Australia, the person who employs magic to cause sickness or death to his enemy does not omit to use what the natives call ‘singing’. This ‘singing’ is conducted ‘in a low voice’ (Frazer, Golden Bough2, i. 13); and the sort of thing the magician ‘in muttered tones hisses out’ is ‘May your heart be rent asunder’, or, ‘May your head and throat be split open’ (Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, 534 ff.; Northern Tribes, 456 ff.).
In the Torres Straits the sorcerer points a spear in the direction of his victim and ‘sings’ similarly, ‘Into body, go, go. Into hands, go, go. Into head, go, go’ (Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, vi. 228, 229). The ‘singing’ assists, Mr. Haddon says (ib., p. 231), ‘in furthering the injury he wishes to inflict.’ Now, was ‘singing’, of this magical nature, a sort of rhythmical muttering in a low voice, known to the Greeks and Romans? In the first place, we have the Latin words incantare, incantator, incantamentum, all implying a singing which is magical in its intention and effects—incantation or enchantment. Next, we have carmen, which means not only song in general but ‘singing’ in the magical sense, in Tibullus (i. 8. 17), Ovid (Met. vii. 167, 203, 253; xiv. 57, 20, 34, 44, 366, 387; Fasti iv. 551, 552), Horace (Ep. v. 72; xvii. 4, 5, 28; Sat. i. 8. 19, 20), Virgil (Ecl. viii. 69; Aen. iv. 487), Juvenal (Sat. vi. 133), Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxviii. 10, 18), Tacitus (Annals, iv. 22), and in other passages for which I may refer to Adam Abt (Die Apologie des Apuleius, 22) and L. Fahz (De Poetarum Romanorum DoctrinaMagica, 138, 139). In Greek we have the same magical singing expressed by the words ἑπάδειν, ἑπωδνή, ἑπῳδὁς; in Euripides (Bacchae 234, Hippolytus 478, 1038, Phoenissae 1260), Sosiphanes (Fr. 1), Aristophanes (Amphiaraus, Fr. 29), Anaxandrides (Fr. 33. 31), Antiphanes (Fr. 17. 15), Xenophon (Mem. iii. 11. 16, 17), Lucian and Heliodorus, and other passages to be found in Abt (ib., p. 43).
It may, however, be objected that all these quotations are of course later than 480 b.c.; and therefore prove nothing as to ‘the primitive and original forms of magic in Italy and Greece’. Indeed, in the Bacchae, for instance, and in Plato, Rep. ii. 364 a, the magic referred to may reasonably be regarded as exotic and not native to Greece. But fortunately we find the word ἑπαοιδή, in the magical sense, in Homer (Od. xix. 457), which takes this group of words in this sense far back beyond 480 b.c. The Homeric use of the word in this sense, however, will not avail against any one who chooses to maintain—though it is impossible to prove, and difficult to believe—that the Greeks originally knew no magic, and borrowed it in Homeric or pre-Homeric times from some neighbouring people. And though the fact that the Twelve Tables ordained punishment for the man ‘qui malum carmen incantassit’ in all reasonable probability indicates that ‘singing’ in the evil sense was a practice already at the time rooted in Italy and not newly imported from abroad; still in this case, as in the case of the Homeric ἑπαοιδή, the objection may be made—though it cannot be supported by anything approaching proof or even probability—that the Italians, as well as the Romans, alone amongst early peoples were incapable of developing the belief for themselves. As against this objection we can only fall back on the evidence of comparative philology. And that evidence is particularly interesting, because, as interpreted by O. Schrader (Reallexikon der Indogermanischen Altertumskunde, ii. 974), it shows that amongst the Indo-European peoples much the most common expression for doing magic is ‘singing’. The presumption that ‘singing’ of the magical kind goes back to Indo-European times is as strong as any that linguistic evidence can produce. For the Slavonian, Lithuanian, and Teutonic words I will refer to Schrader’s Reallexikon, ii. 975. Of the Greek and Latin words I may mention βασκαίνω and βασκανία, which are connected with βάζω, ‘speak’; γόης and γοητεύω with γόος, ‘howling’; fascinum and fascinare with fari.
If, then, we may with some plausibility illustrate the carmen, the incantatio, and the ἑπαοιδή of the Greeks and the Romans, with the ‘singing’ of the Torres Straits and Central Australia, the question arises, What exactly is it that the magician ‘sings’? In the Torres Straits it apparently is the spear which is ‘sung’, for the words used are, ‘Into body, go, go’; and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say that in Central Australia also it is the stick or the bone which is ‘sung’. But when we examine the words of the ‘singing’ or charm, as given by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, we find that they do not refer to the stick or the bone which is used in the magical rite, but to the person against whom the rite is directed: ‘May your heart be rent asunder, may your head and throat be split open.’ The inference, therefore, seems to be that it is the victim that the ‘singing’ or spell is originally directed against; and only later that the stick or bone itself comes to be bewitched, just as money, which is valuable for what it will purchase, comes to be regarded by the miser as an end in itself.
If this is so, it opens up another possibility of interest which I must be content merely to suggest for consideration and investigation. It is that the earliest form of ‘singing’ or spell may be connected with cursing. Some forms of cursing or imprecation invoke the assistance of the gods, but not all; and it may be that those are the earliest which operate directly and without reference to gods. Caliban invokes no gods when he cries:
All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him By inch-meal a disease!