A few years ago now I gave a class on Christian religious baggage at a Heathen event. The title of the class was Uncloaking Elephants, because I wanted to focus on some of the baggage that most tend not to see in the first place. Unlike their easily-seen cousins, these proverbial elephants don’t just huddle in the corners of our mind-rooms; they’re part of the décor—in some cases, the very foundations of those spaces.
They’re the default assumptions of our overculture, premises we accept without question, their religious roots usually forgotten.
One such “elephant” that has been coming to mind of late concerns the concept of magic. If you’ve ever been to any of my classes, you’ll know that I talk about magic a lot. (Hell, I even have a definition I use while teaching!) But the truth of the matter is that this is just me making use of an elephant as koine; “magic” is common parlance. Were it up to me though, I’d actually take that elephant and toss it off a cliff.
Fuckety-bye, Dumbo!
An Elephant Named “Magic” Plummets To The Earth
But why? Why would I take a perfectly proficient proverbial pachyderm and yeet them to their demise?
Because words are more than containers for ideas; they also delineate conceptual boundaries, and in aggregate, form entire frameworks. Most of the time, those containers are simple, their boundaries easily delineated. A “chair,” for example, is a piece of furniture where people may plant their butts (comfort level may vary). Other words, however, defy concise definition, which is naturally the group within which we find the word “magic.”
Common though it is, this term confounds practitioners and scholars alike (no matter what some may tell you). To quote the academic Richard Kieckhefer, who has spent literal decades studying this very topic, in The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Magic (2019):
”What is magic? We know perfectly well what it is if no one asks us, but when someone asks and we try to define it, we are confused.” (p.15)
Yet that confusion (which is by no means limited to Professor Kieckhefer) doesn’t prevent academics from operating under certain assumptions.
To see where I’m going with this, consider the following from pages 226-227 of European Paganism by Ken Dowden:
“I have excluded magic, because by definition it is not capable of being institutionalized within religion, though plainly actions which we or others might dismissively categorize as magical can be performed by priests as ritual—or by individuals who happen to be recognized religious professionals as acts of, for example, medicine.”
Here we see Dowden inserting a well-worn divider between magic and ritual, and in so doing, once again separating priest from witch.
Quite an odd trajectory for a term originally used to refer to a class of Zoroastrian priests.
A Flashback For “Magic” On The Brink Of Death
The Greek sources are full of interesting births. A god gets a migraine and pops a fully formed goddess of wisdom from his head with the help of an ax. Some foam oozes from the castrated junk of a primordial god and births a love goddess. You get the idea…
Another interesting birth for you now: a group of priests, or magi, attract enough attention from some 5th century BCE Greeks to wind up in texts and produce a baby elephant…or something.
Silly elephant stories aside, this is the origin story of the word “magic,” a word that has carried the implication of foreignness and the social “other” ever since the first Greek spilled some ink about them. The magi as recorded in those early texts were ritualists (as one might expect for priests), but also practitioners of mysterious arts like astrology and magical healing. The first etic definition of magic and the magical was, simply put, whatever acts or practices the Greeks associated with that Persian priestly class (Kieckhefer. Magic in the Middle Ages. p. 10).
So far our elephant has remained relatively small and is yet to gain stealth. For the next part of the story though, we’ll need to fast-forward almost a millennium—to the 4th century CE, to be exact—and exchange the columns of Greece for those of Rome. A time when Christianity was ascendant in the empire and the early Christians secure enough to flex their socio-political power.
*Insert Leveling-Up Montage*
And naturally, a good deal of that flexing involved spreading the word like Jimmy Pop spread the turd back in the late 90 s. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
However, jokes about Jimmy Poop and Jesus aside, a key part of the Christian conversion strategy back then was conflating Pagan ritual technologies with magic.
Remember that earlier prejudice against the magi and connotations of the social other? Well, the 4th century Christians made good use of those biases. Presenting themselves as the social in-group, they painted the Pagans as outsiders and labeled their own seemingly magical acts as “miracles.” Early Christian narratives from the classical world during this time are full of exorcism narratives, all written with the goal of depicting the Pagan (ergo “magical”) as foolish and weak, and their own god as the mighty victor (MacCullen, Ramsey. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. pp. 8-10; 91-93).
However, it would take more than some 4th century smacktalk to attain religious dominance. You see, for the average Greco-Roman Pagan, one’s shrine of choice was where you went for healing and/or oracular help—functions that the Christians would have to either replace or sully if they were to convince the Pagans away from their older cults (MacCullen. pp. 53 – 57).
Another part of the wider strategy to chip away at Pagan cultus was labeling Pagan spirits and deities “demons” by default (from the Greek daimones; Latin daemones). A far cry from the sulfur-smelling pit fiend of later lore, the original Greek daimon was (among other things) an intermediary between humans and gods.
With the Pagan holy powers now “demons” and the practices of their cults “magic,” anything savoring of Paganism (and later heresy) became both “magical” and “demonic” by definition, and as such, eventually the antithesis of religion, society, and culture (Kieckhefer. Magic in the Middle Ages. p. 38).
End montage.
The elephant named “Magic” has now attained its final form and is all set to become another piece of the over-cultural default. They’re the woody knot in a doorpost or mantelpiece ornament gathering dust that have been there forever.
Practically invisible.
Elephant Meets Ground = Splat
Eventually all things come to an end: our proverbial pachyderm meets the ground in a bloody mess.
Toward the beginning of this post, I said that words both contain meanings and delineate their conceptual boundaries. The way we define and understand words shapes our ability to think about a subject or problem in a very real way. By conflating the already maligned “magic” with the Pagan, those 4th century Christian clerics have left us with an ideological catch-22 that has us struggling to arrive at a consensus definition for a word that originally referred to a kind of priest while also denying that any connection with priesthood exists.
Madness.
But this is why “magic” is so difficult to define, the reason for the countless discussions and arguments about where the line lies between “magic” and “religion.” (A pointless debate when you really think about it.)
This is why we see scholars such as the aforementioned Ken Dowden confidently asserting that magic “by definition” is “not capable of being institutionalized within religion” (in a chapter with multiple primary source quotations, some of which directly contradict that entire notion).
Over and over, we keep trying to force a round peg into a square hole.
Our current common understanding of the word “magic” (itself the product of a 4th century Christian conversion strategy) is more hindrance than help. It actively limits our ability to think about Pagan/Heathen cultus while, more nefariously, perpetuating the inference that our traditions are automatically inferior (especially if they look a little woo-woo magical)
Worse still, that status as a default assumption impedes our ability to engage with historical evidence without first editing or ignoring the parts that don’t fit. (Or alternatively: creating caveats and/or additional frameworks to explain the numerous exceptions.)
So yeah, we should yeet the elephant—that old foot soldier of conversion—and the premise it came to represent. Their memory will remain, so we’ll keep the koine (for now).
It’s time to stop letting that ghost call the shots and ask ourselves what might be instead.
Sources
Dowden, Ken. European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic In The Middle Ages.
McCullen, Ramsey. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries.
The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Magic (from Mitchell, Stephen. Old Norse Folklore: Magic, Witchcraft, and Charms in Medieval Scandinavia.)