Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/220

Rh 202 MAGIC Greek developed in Western civilization. In these classic nations and there may be traced the rude old magic inherited from Koman k ar b ar i c ancestors, to which in later times were added ceremonies and calculations imported as Oriental wisdom. Ancient literature shows the Greeks as a people whose religion ran much into the consultation of oracle-gods at many temples, of which the shrine of Apollo at Delphi was the chief. No rite could keep up more perfectly the habit of savage religion than their necromancy (ve/cpo/xavreta, veKvofj-avreia) or consulting ghosts for prophecy ; -there was a&quot; famous oracle of the dead near the river Acheron in Thesprotia, where the departing souls crossed on their way to Hades (Herod., v. 92). The myth of Circe turning the companions of Odysseus into swine shows the barbaric belief in magical transformation of men into beasts, and the classic sorcerer was believed to turn himself into a wolf by spells like the medicine-man of some modern savage tribe. Not less clearly does the story of Medea and her caldron typify the witch-doctress with her pharmacy (&amp;lt;f)ap/j.aKLa) powerful both to kill and bring to life. The worship of Hecate, the moon, sender of midnight phan toms, lent itself especially to the magician s rites, as may be seen from this formula to evoke her : &quot; O friend and com panion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices !&quot; This magical record, pre served by an early Christian writer, may be compared with the poetic picture in Theocritus s idyll of the sorceress (Idyll., ii.), where the passionate witch cries in similar words to Hecate, the moon, to shine clear while she compels by sacrifice her faithless lover, and goes through her magic ritual of love and hate, striving to force her beloved home to her by whirling the brazen rhomb, scattering his bones with the scattered barley, melting him to love by the melting wax, casting into the fierce flames a torn shred of his cloak and laurels to crackle and blaze and be con sumed that his flesh shall be consumed likewise. . This ancient witchcraft ascribed magic power to such filth as pounded lizards and the blood of creatures untimely dead, revolting messes made familiar to moderns by Shake speare, who introduces real magic recipes in the witches caldron in Macbeth. The early Greeks lived in the same fear as southern nations still do of the arts of &quot; fascination &quot; (flaa-Kavia, Lat. fascinatio) worked by envious praise, or ill-wishing, or the evil eye ; and they sought to avert these bad influences by the means still in use, spitting and symbolic gestures, and the use of charms and amulets. As to ancient Rome, much of the magic in the Latin poets, such as Virgil and Horace, is only Greek sorcery in a Latin dress. But severe Roman laws against those who practised such malefic arts as making hail and spoiling the crops show that here also the sorcerer was at his usual work. . What is more remarkable is the high official place given to divination in old Rome, where every public act was done under magical sanction. The auspex, or bird-viewer, and the augur, whose similar name seems to refer also to omens from the flight and cries of birds, in fact carried on super natural divination not by omens from birds only, but by a variety of magical processes forming a complex traditional system, partly adopted from the Etruscans, as to which some curious remarks have come down to us in the treatise On Divination by Cicero, himself an augur, though living in the days when the ancient lore was falling into contempt. The Roman divination was, as its name implies, a religious system of consulting the gods, who sent the signs to guide mankind. Jupiter, the Heaven- father himself, was heard and seen in thunder and lightning; wherefore these heavenly manifestations were of the highest import, observed by the augur in the templum or division of the sky marked out with his lituus or curved wand ; there was no better omen than when Jove lightened on the left. Among birds, the fierce eagle, Jove s messenger, gave the highest presage of victory, while the owl with its dismal cry was unluckiest. The good or ill signs given by many birds depended on whether they were on the right or left hand, and the sacred chickens gave their omens according as they were eager or not to feed, and dropped crumbs on the ground. All prodigies were recorded as portents in Roman affairs ; and those which Livy mentions year by year, whether they were real or fictitious, in either case had their effect on the minds of men who saw national signs in a heavy hailstorm, a calf born with two heads, or a bullock found when sacrificed to have no heart. It was in quest of such portents that the haruspex made his professional examination of the entrails of the victims, and reported the aspects of the head of the liver or cleft of the lungs, as a sacred guide to warriors and statesmen in the conduct of national affairs. Public divination being on this footing, it is not to be wondered at that, in the time of the empire, foreign soothsayers thronged to Rome to practise their craft among rich and credulous dupes. It appears that the magic of Egypt and Babylon still held a prominent place, for Juvenal refers to both in his sixth satire, where he rails at the superstitious women of his time for putting their trust in Chaldaean astrologers, all the more, if under the laws against magicians they had been put in prison or banished, while ladies would not go out for a drive or take a meal without consulting their book of lucky and unlucky hours, which bore the Egyptian name of Petosiris. In the classic world, however, the growth of knowledge and accurate reasoning began to have their effect in bring ing magic to the test of facts, and proving its failure. Greek philosophy, with its physical theories of the universe, had shaken the old religion, and with it the old magic. Though the Romans kept it up as a matter of statecraft, the judgment of statesmen and philosophers revolted from it, holding rather with Ennius, who pointed out the absurdity of the hungry fortune-teller promising others wealth and begging a drachma for himself, or with Cato, who wondered that one diviner could meet another and not burst out laughing. These are both quoted by Cicero, with other passages argued quite in the modern spirit, as where he asks on what principle a raven s croak should be propitious on the right but a crow s on the left, or how a chicken eating a cake could help dropping crumbs. Historically attacks of this kind have a particular value, as recording many magical details which we do not know from the believers themselves. Of such details Pliny s Natural History is full, though he hates magic as the most fraudulent of arts ; and among the most instructive accounts of classic astrology must be reckoned the treatise written against it by Sextus Empiricus. Had sceptical philosophy had its way, magic would have perished ages earlier out of the civilized world. But there were other in fluences already at work, not only to preserve it, but even to give it another great expansion before its final decay. The Pythagorean philosophy, while on the one hand Pliilo- bringing in the science of Egypt and Babylon, and develop- sophic ing it into Greek mathematics and physics, on the j^ urR j other hand favoured the growth of magic by mystical mag i c. speculations, such as those on numbers. Not that the Pythagoreans began this delusive science, which had long been at home in Babylon, where the occult powers of the planetary 7 and the zodiacal 12 were recognized, and spiritual arithmetic was carried so far as to indicate good deities by whole numbers and evil demons by fractions. But the Pythagoreans developed it further in their mystic