notion back to the Romans and from them to the Greeks. The oppositions that define
magic for us are already present in the Greek notion, although not exactly in the same
form. There is the opposition between magic and proper religious practice; there is
the opposition between rational scientific inquiry and magic; there is an opposition
between magic and what is legal; and finally there is an opposition between magic and
morality. Magic for the Greeks, as for us, is something that is inherently secret; it is
esoteric knowledge to which only a few adepts have access.
Although there is no great difficulty in tracing the notion of magic with which we
operate back to the Romans and from them to the Greeks, it is a much trickier
business to reconstruct the emergence of the concept of magic in the Greek world of
the fifth century BC. Many of the pieces in the story are missing. But what is tolerably
certain is that those who practiced what came to be called magic were persons on the
margins of society, suspected of performing actions likely to incur the ire of the gods.
One of the words that the Greeks used to refer to a magician ismagos(pl.magoi), a
term originally used to denominate members of a caste of Iranian fire-priests. It has
been suggested that members of the caste made their way to the Greek cities of Asia
Minor in the second half of the sixth century BC and from there to the rest of the
Greek world. The suspicion with which the rituals performed bymagoiwere met may
have led to the word’s acquiring a derogatory connotation. Part of the derogatory
connotation comes from the feeling that the rituals performed bymagoisubvert
proper religious practice and are for that reason impious and so likely to draw down
the wrath of the gods on those who have anything to do with them. The opposition
between magic and religion that is an inherent part of the modern concept of magic
has its roots in part in the distrust that itinerantmagoiencountered as they made their
way from city to city in Asia Minor and in Greece proper.
The rituals that themagoiwho wandered throughout the Greek world carried out
seem very often to have mimicked mystery cult. Why this should be so is a puzzle,
since the rituals of mystery cult have nothing to with the fire sacrifices thatmagoi
performed in honor of Ahura-Madza, the supreme deity in the Iranian pantheon. At
the heart of mystery cult is the idea of a secret revealed only to a select few that effects
a transformation in those who have witnessed and heard it and at the same time holds
out the promise of better times in this life and of a blissfully happy afterlife. The
notion that magic is by its nature secret and is privy to hidden and powerful forms of
knowledge has its origins inmagoiappropriating the rituals of mystery cult for their
own purposes.
A medical treatise, written in the late fifth or early fourth century BC, that seeks to
demonstrate that the so-called sacred disease, which is to say epilepsy, is no more
sacred than any other disease, illustrates two of the reasons why those who practiced
magic were thought to be guilty of impiety (dussebeia) and of not according the gods
the respect that was their due. It was that persons who boasted of being able to cure
the so-called sacred disease by magical means in effect, despite their pretended
concern for piety, either denied the existence of the gods or imagined they were
more powerful than the gods, since if they could really achieve what they boasted of
being able to do, they either had powers superior to those of the gods or denied their
existence altogether; they were furthermore impious in the sense that they were
prepared to stop at nothing, since the gods inspired no fear in them (Hippocrates,
On the Sacred Disease1.24–31). The writer makes his point by adducing some other
358 Matthew W. Dickie