feats that the magicians who pretend to cure epilepsy maintain they are able to
perform: pulling down the moon, making the sun disappear, causing calm or
storm, creating rain or drought, and making the sea passable or impassable:
Those practicing such feats are to my mind guilty of impiety [dussebein] and of supposing
either that the divine does not exist or does not have power and it seems to me that they
would not be kept from performing the most desperate of deeds, since the gods cause
them no fear. (Hippocrates,On the Sacred Disease1.30)
In short, magicians are guilty of impiety on two scores: in the first place because they
presume to subvert what in the eyes of the author of the tract is properly the province
of the gods and secondly because they will stop at nothing, since they are not at all
afraid of the gods.
The author of the tractOn the Sacred Diseaseis hardly alone in thinking magic-
working impious and wicked and that those who practice it will stop at nothing. It
was a view of magic to which an Athenian audience to tragedy might be expected to
respond sympathetically. Otherwise it is difficult to understand why Deianeira, the
wife of Hercules, after anointing a garment, to be given to her errant husband, with
an unguent that she imagines will keep him from desiring any other woman, declares
that she wishes to know nothing of evil deeds of temerity and that she abominates
women who have recourse to such acts of temerity, but that measures have been taken
to vanquish her rival by using a love-philter (Sophocles,Trachiniae582–6). Deia-
neira, in other words, asserts that she shares in the general abomination of women
who use love-philters, since such women will stop at nothing.
In early modern Europe, those who confessed to having practiced witchcraft may
have asserted that they had sworn fealty to the Devil. It is to be suspected that they
were prompted to make such a confession or felt that that was what they were
expected to do. In classical antiquity, not even those who condemned magic-working
accused those engaging in it of being a race apart, owing loyalty to gods who were
enemies of the gods everybody else worshiped. Those in classical antiquity who
practiced magic, did not, for their part, turn normal religious practices on their
head; their prayers, for instance, are not very different from the prayers of the
worshipers in respectable public cults. There is a good deal of evidence, most of it,
admittedly for a period later than the remit of the present essay, that magic-workers
made a great pretense of their piety. The author of the treatiseOn the Sacred Disease
does say that those practicing magic talk a great deal about the divine and deity, but
that in reality there is no piety in what they say; their piety (to eusebes) and their divine
(to theion) are impious (asebes) and unholy (anosion) (1.27–8).
While ancient magic-workers do not belong to a Satanic cult, it is the case that the
deities they invoke do tend, although not exclusively, to be connected with the nether
regions. In representations in literature of magic-working, it is Hecate, a deity with
strong connections to the Underworld, who is the goddess of choice for women
magicians. In the hellenistic epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes that tells the tale of
voyage made by Jason from Thessaly to Colchis on the southeastern coast of the
Black Sea, the Colchian princess, Medea, owes her expertise in magic to Hecate and as
her priestess tends her shrine on a daily basis (Argonautica 3.251–2, 477–8).
Whether literature is in this matter an accurate reflection of reality is impossible to say.
Magic in Classical and Hellenistic Greece 359