Ronald Hutton is a historian of British religion who has written books about everything from the Druids to Oliver Cromwell. I don't really recommend his books because he is the kind of historian who thinks that telling cool stories might call his scholarly credentials into question. "The sources do not really sustian. . ."
Which makes him, in a way, the perfect historian to take on his topic in this one-hour lecture: the western magical tradition. The western tradition of learned magic really is just a long string of books mainly composed of pieces of other books, without any very cool stories, and Hutton is the man to give us that.
Like every other authority I know, he traces the tradition to Egypt. But not to the Old Kingdom; he focuses on the Greco-Roman period. See, in ancient Egypt there was no distinction between religion and magic. What look to us like spells or other magical acts were used to compel gods, and nobody found this strange. Enter the Greeks, who were strongly prejudiced against using magic to force the gods. The gods, they thought, should be approached in an attitude of humble prayer. So they began driving magical practice out of the temples, and the Romans finished the job. This left Egypt's magician-priests without employment or income. They found, though, that there was still a big public appetite for the services they used to render as priests, so they went into private practice. It with these men, the private magicians of Greco-Roman Egypt, that our magical tradition really begins. They mixed old Egyptian lore with bits and pieces of other religions and styles of magic, always with an eye toward pleasing the customer. The continuity from our oldest papyrus fragments to 16th-century grimoires is amazingly strong, with long sentences surviving word-for-word across 1500 years. Hutton mentions that the Egyptians describe how to make pens from papyrus, how to achieve various effects with olive oil lamps, and how to make potions from the hearts of hoopoes, and these same formulae appear in books written in Scotland or Sweden by men who had never seen any of these things.
I was moved to write about this lecture for two reasons. The first was Hutton's insistence that our distinction between religion, which is good, and magic, which is at least suspect and probably sinister, goes back to Roman Egypt. The basic idea that religious people beseech the gods while magicians try to manipulate them is found in Roman legal texts. In the second century AD there were even pogroms against magicians that may have been bigger than any carried out in Renaissance Europe. But magic was, he says, like the drugs of the ancient world, in that it may have been illegal but everyone knew where to find it.
The second reason was Hutton's Checklist of Egyptian Magic. When you see all of this stuff, he says, you are in the magical tradition of imperial Egypt:
Emphasis on the physical and moral purity of the practitioner.
A willingness to command and personify deities.
The importation of foreign, exotic deities and spirits.
The employment of animal, vegetable and mineral substances.
The use of images, especially statues.
A belief in the power of the spoken word and knowing true names.
Use of obscure, ancient, or made-up languages – “gobbledygook.”
The use of human mediums.
The gathering of spells in books.
And this does strike me as a useful primer on the stuff learned magicians have done throughout the past 2,000 years.
Hutton identifies three major additions to the tradition, one coming from each of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Jewish contribution is the invocation of angels and the power of the one true name of God. Medieval Christian magi pioneered a focus on mathematical and especially geometrical manipulations – magic squares, pentagrams, magic circles. Medieval Islamic magi emphasized what Hutton calls Astral magic, that is, tying magical operations to the sun, the moon, and the stars. (Which, he adds, probably came from ancient Mesopotamia, but it was in medieval Islam that this was fused to the Egyptian tradition.)
Since this is the thing I write about, I note again the complete lack of any theoretical underpinnings for these practices. Not once in his hour of talking does Hutton say a single word about why any of this was supposed to work. In his telling it developed through the interaction of magicians with their clients, and those practices survived that sold the best to the kind of people who consulted magicians. It was then preserved because it was old and presumably authoritative.
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