It's a kind of magic - Looking at the history of magical practices

Hey there, traveler!

That’s right, it’s Dar here with today’s cadaver on the dissecting table: magic. Given that magic isn’t technically one trope but a broad term used to define many things mostly in fiction genres it won’t be a single post but a short series about the topic. Let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by this short word, where did it come from and what’s the big deal? This episode is more of a ‘fun facts from the history of magic’, but I think they are interesting enough to inspire some readers. So have fun!

Magic is roughly saying a supernatural method to affect beings or forces that we can’t manipulate with mundane methods. From witches’ brew to voodoo dolls, chants and sacrifices, magic can appear in many forms but the main gist is the same: the user does something symbolic and commands a force to alter reality in some way. Some may think magic was born with J.R.Tolkien, but as you can guess from the introduction, it is a tale as old as time.

The more ancient civilizations accepted magic as a fact, a tool against certain dire events. Ancient Mesopotamia, for example, had a jurisdiction system in place as it was believed that nearly every person could cast magic, and thus cursing someone and protecting oneself from such a curse was no more extreme than getting into a fistfight. There was the offender, the evil magician who cast the curse and the defendant, who used magic in self-defense. This wasn’t as spectacular as one would think, it mostly consisted of imprisoning magic energies, unwillingly committed sins or the essence of some illnesses into objects, and then burning them to cleanse the magical power, be it ill or beneficial from this world.

In Egypt, there was a personified apparition of magic called heka, and they thought magic was a tool given to men by the creator to ward against certain events. Their use of magical energies came from the understanding that humans shared the divine nature of gods, they could create things and effects with words. Yupp, like Skyrim, only more desert-vibe. Do you know the pictograms and hieroglyphs inside pyramids? Those are words of magical nature, tailored to provide the dead royal with the means to survive in the afterlife. Fun fact, they were written inside the pyramids to keep them secret from the commoners, as it was a prerogative of the pharaoh to be guided by such spells.

But not all was rosy. The modern term ‘magic’ has a Greek origin and comes from the time of the Greek-Persian wars. The greeks learned this word from the Persians who followed a different religion then the polises, so the term ‘magos’ (meaning mage or magician) quickly gained a derogative connotation and referred to the alien, heathen religions of the Persians. This however quickly diluted and spread into the Hellenic masses and quickly became synonymous with charlatan and quack. This was the time magic and religion became inseparable for quite a long time after, the former being an improper, insulting form of the latter.

That derogative meaning continued into early and later Christianity. Theologists described magic as the opposition to miracles, supernatural phenomena created by God’s power (basically the same concept with a different source). This was further strengthened by the fact that the Celtic and german tribal religions (the so-called heathens) still thought of magic as a method to control the natural world and more importantly to commune with the divine. During the Middle Ages as Christianity spread magic was always an opposing force and almost solely present in druidic and supposedly in Jewish and Islamic religions. This is an important fact because these cultures became the foundations for the modern representation of magic, including the witches, the future tellers, the alchemists, and astrologists.

An interesting thing happened when Europe went to conquer the world. Our brave ancestors brought their beliefs and conventions with them, and that meant the way they thought about magic. They were quick to stamp every foreign religion, be it African, indigenous American, or Asian as magic, and tried to replace it with some good-old Christianity. That resulted in some quite fascinating things. For example, the Portuguese word feitiço means spell or incantation, but when they applied this to some West-African religious practices, the concept of fetish was born. Another example (my favorite) is the Haitian and Louisiana voudou, the mixture of some African beliefs and strong Christian pressure by the French. This created a religion worshipping Bondye (from French Bon Dieu, meaning „good God”) and the loa, the lesser deities or spirits connecting mortals to Bondye. Due to the forced but unwilling shift in faith, there are some really interesting anomalies, like the correlation of the death loa Maman Brijit and St. Brigitte of Ireland. Just to give an example why is this my favorite mythology, voudin rituals include the summoning of a specific loa into a „Mount”, a practitioner who lets the loa inhabit his or her body for a while. Then, you have to buy the loa’s attention with gifts. In other religions, this would be animal sacrifices or burning food, but not here. The loa are not so old-timey. Some of them need a good cigar, others desire pink champagne, while Baron Samedi, for example, the tophat wearing king of death likes his followers to host a funeral for his Mount so he can magically spring to life and laugh.

 

However as modern age approached like a steaming, oil-smelling mechanical monster, some magic turned out to be very real and very mundane and people had a new name for it – science. The line between technology, actual magic, and quack machinations became blurred and people were uncertain what to believe anymore. This uncertainty gave way to the witch hunts where basically anything unexplainable was marked as magic and thus diabolical. This public uproar raged on for quite some time in short and long periods all over the globe before the whole thing turned into skepticism.

The Modern Age brought with it a philosophy of intellect’s absolute dominance over every other virtue. An intelligent man didn’t believe in dubious practices, an intelligent lady never turned to clearly fraud future-tellers and mediums. This, however, went an interesting way. As it was no longer punishable by being burned alive but only shunned and ill-advised, it sparked a certain curiosity in people. Young girls bored out of their minds found an interesting mystery in these charlatans, and with that magic was reborn. During the Victorian era seances multiplied, secret magical organizations grew like mushrooms after the rain and the whole romantic (and terrifying) way we think about magic came into existence.

I think I’ll stop here for today. Next week we’ll move onto the mages, the practitioners and adepts of magic and take a look at how their real-world counterparts evolved during the ages. Did you find it interesting? Do you know more facts about historical magic practices? Which age and culture is your favorite to draw inspiration from to create a unique magic system? Let your voice be heard in comments or reblogs!

Cheers,

Dar