Magic (supernatural)

• 1. Introduction

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  Magic has been called many things by many people across many centuries: a gift from the gods, a contract with demons, a sign of backwardness, a form of self-development, and a word so contested that some scholars believe it should be abandoned entirely. The English word itself traces back through Greek and Latin to the Old Persian maguš, a term connected to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to be able." That root hints at something enduring in the idea: magic, whatever else it may be, is about the ability to make things happen.

  What makes magic remarkable is not any single ritual or belief, but the way the category itself has been fought over. It has been used to separate the sacred from the profane, the civilised from the primitive, the orthodox from the heretical. Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer built careers defining it. Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim defined it differently. By the 1990s, many scholars were calling for the term to be retired from academic use altogether. The historian Owen Davies called it "beyond simple definition." The historian Michael D. Bailey went further, calling it "a deeply contested category and a very fraught label."

  This documentary traces magic from the incantation bowls of ancient Mesopotamia through the witch trials of early modern Europe, from the Egyptian god Heka to the chaos magic movement of the late twentieth century. Along the way it asks a question that has never been fully answered: when we call something magic, what are we really saying about it, and about ourselves?

• 2. Words and Their Weapons

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  The Persian maguš, when it crossed into ancient Greek as μάγος around the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, did not simply change alphabet. It changed meaning entirely. The historian Richard Gordon observed that for ancient Greeks, being accused of practicing magic was "a form of insult." This shift in tone was not accidental. Greek city-states were then locked in military conflict with the Persian Empire, and branding a rival's religious practices as magic was a way of marking them as foreign, dangerous, and suspect.

  Sophocles gives us a vivid example. In Oedipus Rex, the character Oedipus calls the seer Tiresius a magos, meaning something close to quack or charlatan. The word had already detached from its Persian origins and become a Greek insult. Hippocrates and Gorgias also used it in surviving texts, each time with the same dismissive edge.

  Latin absorbed this Greek meaning in the first century BCE. The earliest known Latin use of the term appears in Virgil's Eclogue, written around 40 BCE, which refers to magicis sacris, or magic rites. Roman writers then extended the term's reach further. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, claimed that magic had been invented by the Iranian philosopher Zoroaster and carried westward into Greece by a magician named Osthanes, who traveled with the Persian King Xerxes.

  Christian theology inherited this negative framing when the concept moved from Latin into the theological writings of the first century CE. Early Christians associated magic with demons. By early medieval Europe, the Latin term magia had become a word of condemnation, and the template of the magician in Christian thought was provided by Simon Magus, the figure who opposed Saint Peter in the Acts of the Apostles and the influential Acts of Peter.

• 3. Mesopotamia and Egypt

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  In ancient Mesopotamia, the profession of āšipu, an expert in magical arts, was held in extremely high regard. The role was typically passed from generation to generation, and the āšipu served not only as a magician but also as a physician, priest, scribe, and scholar. These were advisors to kings. The Sumerian god Enki, later identified with the East Semitic god Ea, stood as the patron of this class of experts and was regarded as the ultimate source of all arcane knowledge.

  Mesopotamian magical practice covered an extraordinary range of concerns. Defensive rituals called asiputu or masmassutu in the Akkadian language were intended to alter specific realities, particularly threats from demons, ghosts, and evil sorcerers. One ritual to punish a sorcerer was known as Maqlû, or "The Burning." A person believed to be afflicted by witchcraft would create an effigy of the sorcerer, put it on trial at night, and once the nature of the crimes had been established, burn the effigy to break the sorcerer's hold. Another ritual, the Šurpu, also meaning "Burning," allowed a person to transfer the guilt for unknown misdeeds onto objects including a strip of dates, an onion, and a tuft of wool, which were then burned in a purification rite.

  Ancient Egypt offers a different picture. There, magic was not condemned but integrated. In the Egyptian language, the word for magic was heka, also the name of a god. The pharaonic term heka, unlike its later Coptic descendant, carried no connotation of impiety or illegality. The text known as the Instructions for Merikare describes heka as a gift from the creator given to humanity as a weapon to ward off the blows of misfortune. Heka was considered morally neutral, practiced by literate priests and illiterate farmers alike.

  The pyramid of Unas, final pharaoh of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty, preserves the oldest example of royal magical text. Its interior walls are covered floor to ceiling in vertical columns of spells, known as the Pyramid Texts, intended to help the pharaoh survive in the afterlife. These spells were strictly secret, reserved for royalty. During the unrest of the First Intermediate Period, tomb robbers entered the pyramids and saw the inscriptions. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, commoners had begun writing similar texts, known as Coffin Texts, on the sides of their own coffins.

• 4. Defining Lines: Religion and Science

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  Edward Tylor, writing in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, characterised magic as beliefs based on "the error of mistaking ideal analogy for real analogy." In his view, early humans had noticed that things connected in experience tended to be connected in fact, and had then made the fatal error of reversing the logic, assuming that things connected in thought must also be connected in reality. He called magic "one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind."

  James G. Frazer built on Tylor but gave the framework a more structured form. He divided sympathetic magic into two branches: homeopathic, or imitative magic, based on the idea that like produces like; and contagious magic, based on the idea that contact between two objects allows them to continue influencing each other at a distance. He described magic as "the bastard sister of science" and placed it at the first stage of a three-part evolutionary sequence, with religion following magic, and science following religion. Frazer's framework was later challenged by the folklorist Andrew Lang, who showed that Frazer's evolutionary model depended on misrepresenting ethnographic accounts of indigenous Australians.

  Marcel Mauss approached the problem differently. In his 1902 essay "A General Theory of Magic," Mauss defined magic as "any rite that is not part of an organized cult: a rite that is private, secret, mysterious, and ultimately tending towards one that is forbidden." Religion, by contrast, was organised, communal, public. His uncle Emile Durkheim adopted this framework in his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, famously stating: "There is no Church of magic."

  The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski pushed back against the evolutionary model in a 1925 article, arguing that magic, religion, and science were all present simultaneously in every society rather than appearing in sequence. He defined magic as "a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end expected to follow later on," distinguishing it from religion, which he saw as expressive rather than instrumental. By the 1990s, scholars like Wouter Hanegraaff were arguing that the concept of magic had been used as a "scientific" justification for colonial conversion efforts, and that it functioned as an important object of historical study but not as a reliable tool for doing research.

• 5. Witchcraft and Its Victims

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  Ronald Hutton, the historian, identifies four distinct meanings of witchcraft in the English language. The oldest and still most widespread refers to causing harm through supernatural or magical means. The word witch itself derives from the Old English term wicce. In various European languages, the late Middle Ages produced parallel terms for malevolent magical practitioners: sorcière in French, Hexe in German, strega in Italian, and bruja in Spanish.

  In Western societies, the practice of harmful magic was disproportionately associated with women. During the witch trials of the early modern period, around three quarters of those executed as witches were female. Historians have suggested several reasons for this pattern. Women's legal position was more vulnerable, since they typically had no legal standing independent of their male relatives. Many of the activities classified as magical, from fertility rites to preparations that induced abortions, were associated with the female sphere of domestic and bodily life.

  The stakes were not only legal but communal. People regarded as magicians often faced suspicion from their own communities, particularly when they were already members of groups considered morally suspect, such as foreigners, the poor, or women. Yet the picture was not uniformly negative. In European history, authorities often viewed cunning folk and traditional healers as dangerous because their skills were seen as deriving from contact with demons, while local communities valued and relied on those same individuals for their practical help.

  In medieval Europe, Christians frequently accused Jews and Muslims of engaging in magical practices. In certain cases, these accusations led to massacres of religious minorities, including through the allegation of what was called the ritual sacrifice of Christian children. Christians also used accusations of magic against other Christians. Protestants branded Catholic sacramental practices as magical rather than religious, and Catholics spent centuries arguing back. Protestant groups targeted other Protestant factions in the same way. The Arabian cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, condemned a range of practices including divination and the veneration of spirits as sihr, a form of the sin of idolatry.

• 6. Natural Magic and the Renaissance

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  Two Italian humanists, Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, introduced the concept of magia naturalis, or natural magic, as a way of reclaiming the term from its demonic associations. For them, magia was an elemental force woven through natural processes, fundamentally different from the mainstream Christian idea of magic as demonic manipulation. The historian Richard Kieckhefer wrote that this concept took "firm hold in European culture" during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attracting interest from philosophers of various schools including Aristotelians, Neoplatonists, and Hermeticists.

  Ficino and Pico influenced a broad range of later thinkers, among them Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Reuchlin, and Johannes Trithemius. In 1625, the French librarian Gabriel Naudé published his Apology for all the Wise Men Falsely Suspected of Magic, drawing a distinction between what he called "Mosoaicall Magick," which he attributed to God and associated with prophecies, miracles, and speaking in tongues, and "geotick" magic caused by demons. Critics of the natural magic movement argued that the demons had simply deceived its practitioners into thinking they were working independently.

  By the seventeenth century, the distinctions between natural magic and science were blurring. Then the Enlightenment brought increasing criticism of the whole framework. Yet at the same time as natural magic was being tolerated in intellectual circles, Europe was actively persecuting accused witches. The Baroque period also saw figures like Isaac Newton, famous for his science, privately delving into alchemy and accumulating esoteric manuscripts. Michael Sendivogius, a Polish alchemist who lived from 1566 to 1636, emphasized empirical experimentation in alchemy while making notable contributions to early chemistry. Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Flemish chemist, coined the term "gas" even as he worked within a tradition that blended chemistry and occultism.

• 7. Modern Magicians and Contested Terms

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  Aleister Crowley, who favored spelling the word as "magick" to distinguish his practice from stage illusionism, provided what the scholar of religion Henrik Bogdan called "arguably the best known emic definition" of the term. Crowley's definition read: "Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." This formulation influenced those who came after him. Dion Fortune, founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, stated that "Magic is the art of changing consciousness according to Will." Gerald Gardner, founder of Gardnerian Wicca, described it as "attempting to cause the physically unusual." Anton LaVey, founder of LaVeyan Satanism, called it "the change in situations or events in accordance with one's will, which would, using normally acceptable methods, be unchangeable."

  The Wiccan and author Starhawk gave a political dimension to the choice of the word itself, stating: "Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because the words we are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually correct, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement." The chaos magic movement, emerging in the late twentieth century, took a different approach: stripping away symbolic, ritualistic, and theological elements from other occult traditions to reduce magic to a set of basic techniques.

  By the nineteenth century, European intellectuals had shifted away from seeing magic as sinful and toward seeing it as a sign of psychological impairment or racial inferiority. Legal systems followed: rather than punishing practitioners of magic for diabolism, courts began threatening them with charges of fraud. In 1930, the American journalist H. L. Mencken published his Treatise on the Gods, using magic as a lens to critique religion and arguing that the division between the two was misplaced. The Surrealist Andre Breton published L'Art magique in 1957, exploring what he saw as the connections between magic and art. Today the word has also entered scientific language: magic acid, magic bullets, and magic angles are accepted terms, while in everyday speech the word can simply mean a feeling of excitement or sudden delight, a long way from the Persian maguš.