WITCHCRAFT
AMONG THE ANCIENT PEOPLES
by Devon Scott
Among the
ancient peoples, religion and white magic were strictly bound; proofs
about a magic for social purposes are even dated back to Prehistory when
it was used for fertilizing fields, procreating to make the
species go on, and propitiating the capture of animals. Witchcrafts and
fierce struggles against wizards are witnessed since the first law texts:
Hammurabi of Babylon’s code (about 1800 b.C.) inflicted very severe
punishments to those accused to damage others by witchcraft.
In
Mesopotamia priest-magicians, astrologers, prophets were state employers,
since divination was used for the state and the religious cult was
always integrated with magic rituals, spells, invocations, execrations
and purifications; even doctors used magic, since illness was thought to
be caused by demons, evil spirits or revengeful wizards.
Extra-priestly magic was much feared; those who carried out it were
judged demon’s accomplices.
In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian
Creation poem, innumerable entities cause illnesses and
plagues, aggressions to newborn babies and their mothers, lecherous
demons search for sexual relationships with men and women, devils
hidden between trees and deserts, waters and wind.
Wizards were allied
with them, thus becoming very powerful, almost unbeatable, capable of
enchanting things, animals and persons, and able to cause physical and
psychological evil through the use of negative names, formulas, puppets
that represented their victims.
Against the wizard you could use
exorcisms, curses or , more prosaically, denunciations to the
authorities: the law of retaliation being in boom, it was very risky to
be a professional wizard, even though that was a very profitable
activity.
In
Egypt magic was a gift to men by Ra the god, created to give them a
weapon to defend themselves in every adverse circumstance of life.
Deities themselves had recourse to magic in their critical moments; Isis
usually used magic to kill her enemies; she could carve animals in the
clay and bring them to life; and she knew formulas or magic words to be
written on talismans.
Magic
was considered as an important element of religion, culture and social life
and politics; in fact
Egyptians cultivate no concepts of a destiny higher than everything (as
that about Greek and Roman fate); that’s why to have recourse to
rituals, be that beneficial or malefic, was the solution to any problem.
As it’s easy to deduce, wizards were full-time working men making
spells for love, returning health to patients, enriching, giving birth
to beautiful and healthy children, preserving wives' virtue and
husbands' fidelity.
People
who wanted to damage their enemy could ask for the intercession of demoniac
legions, led by a god with his face on the back of the head; or
they could pay a witch by profession, in order to curse their enemy’s
shadow. They thought in the shadow there was one of the two souls, that’s
why the witch trampled upon the shade and, stabbing that, said: “I cut
your root. Can not you project shade anymore!”.
Even
among the Hebrews, despite several repeated biblical prohibitions and
threats of heavy human and divine sanctions, divination and witchcraft
were really diffuse. You have only to read the Bible to find examples of
spells, imitative magic, necromancy, malefic rituals and prophecies.
In
Jerusalem temple there was a state prophet, called "Ephod’s
oracle"; he was a priest with the privilege to talk directly to God,
after being surrounded by the ephod, a belt tangled and embroidered in
gold wires, combined with an armour decorated with precious stones. He
only did predictions about the destiny of the people of Israel. If God, for
some reason, did not want to answer, the oracle did not say a word.
People was forced to go and speak to Teraphim, little statues of 
familiar oracles (similar to Roman Lars), that everyone had in his home
and whose predictions were considered as pure gold; or they had to go
and speak to fortune-tellers, necromantic people (they predicted future
thanks to the spirits of the dead) and witches. The indignant prophet
Ezekiel was complaining about the fact that all those people exercised
their profession against prescriptions laws, filling their
pockets with much gold.
Even
kings had their weaknesses: Saul, who issued severe laws against magic
and the forecasts of the future, condemning to exile all those who were
practising them, consulted the Ephod so many times that he obtained a
reaction of absolute mutism by an enraged god. In order to know his destiny he
only could seek the advice of a very famous witch, who lived in Endor, a
town in the southern part of Nazareth, who usually forced the dead to appear
and do prophecies. The woman made appear the spirit of Samuel,
who mortally terrorized everyone with his dark forecasts.
In
the ancient Greece low magic, with his rituals, exorcisms, spells and
witchcrafts was unknown. Terms which define these things only appeared
during the classical age; the Greek word magos, in fact, derived
from the persian term: magi, excellent magicians. Herodotus said
that magoi, in persian society, had the responsibility for
sacrifice, funeral rites, divination and the interpretation of dreams;
therefore they were magicians-priests. Then there were the goes (from
which the goezia term derives, indicating black magic), those who
made the dead go out from their tombs.
The
lack of confidence in magic powers came from the fact that Greek
religion was based on the concept of fate, an ineluctable destiny that
had no regard for anybody, man or divinity, and made spells useless. It
was accepted that heroes, engaged in some astonishing enterprise, were
given an outfit of magic objects, by which it was possible to overcome
any obstacle: shoes winged to fly, helmets or cloaks to make invisible,
rings and magic mirrors, and other useful accessories were given by some
merciful god. In the same way Sibyls were known to be in possession of
the gifts of divination and prescience, but Apollo had a
finger in those things. Zeus’ magic insemination for beautiful girls
was considered as habitual and, to act this way , he turned himself into
a gold rain, an animal or other different things for the occasion.
Thrace and Thessaly, furthermore, were told to be earths lived by
maleficent women, who performed execrable black magic acts,
sacrificing
children and extracting ointments from their body in order to secure
youth and beauty, but they were only legends.
On
the right side there is Dosso Dossi’s "Circe",
an oil painting (1490-1542)
Only in two mythological
episodes there are two women exercising magic, Circe and his grandson
Medea. Circe is a character of Homer's Odyssey, a beautiful enchantress
able to turn men who arrived up to her into pigs. Fallen in love with
Ulysses she was forced to make her victims get back in human form. Much
more dark, tragic and complex was Medea, morbid passion personified,
acting till the atrocious final revenge: rather than a witch, she was a
woman ready to do everything in the name of love and driven mad by her
rejected love; she was a characteristic figure that inspired many authors
as Euripides, Seneca, Ovid and even Pasolini.
After
dealing with Persians, Greeks discovered magic and rushed headlong into
that with neophyte zeal; nowadays we should affirm that, getting wind of
business, they also became the greater industrial producers of amulets
made of semi-precious stones in Naucrati, on the Nile delta, the
first
Greek stable settlement in Egypt. The spreading of necromancy, filters
to make fall in love, kill or cause abortion and formulas to destroy
enemies, became so an alarming phenomenon that a law occurred to forbid
wizards the initiation to the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries. In fact
the cults of mystery, unlike the Olympic official religion (so called by
the place of the main deities, Mont Olympus), theorizes a mystical
union between man and divinity and an afterlife through the
transmigration of the souls; therefore an initiate even practising black
magic was considered 
as unthinkable.
On
the left side there is Eugene Delacroix’s "Medea",
an oil painting (1798-1863)
No one was immune from magic
contamination, neither philosophers; in Alessandro's History Aristotle
is said to have given a protection box to Alexander the Great that was
to be always taken with him; inside the box there were several broken
weapons, magically worked in, useful to disable every other weapons used
against him.
Devon Scott
English
Version by Paola Mastrorilli
