Religion and Magick Jenny jennyg@compuserve.com Thu Oct 21 18:46:33 1999 I just read a very eye-opening essay: Georg Luck's "Witches and Sorcerors in Classical Religion" (in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark's _Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome_).*p*The relationship between religion and magick is a hot topic of debate in academia. The standard line has been that religion and magick are completely different. Religion is the worship of divine forces; magick is attempting to cause change supernaturally.*p*As a Witch, this division has always struck me as bogus. My magick is religious, my religion is magickal. I can't separate my rites into two neat categories. And I don't think I'm alone in this. If a Catholic lights a novena candle and prays to St. Jude for the impossible -- is that religion or magick?*p*For reasons like this, many scholars argue we should scrap the "magick vs religion" dichotomy. But there's a problem with that: most ancient cultures *did* distinguish between religion and magick. They had different words for them (religio vs magia in Latin, for instance). And they generally seemed to think that "magick" is bad (or questionable) while "religion" is good...*p*This presents a conundrum. If religion and magick are the same, why do people treat them differently and have different words for them? If they ARE different, why can't we tell them apart?*p*Georg Luck suggested a solution that I find brilliant (at least for ancient cultures -- modern society is slightly different):*p*"Magick" is somebody else's "religion." Our religion is "religion", a stranger's is "magick" (and thus kind of scary, kind of bad, kind of exotic).*p*To back his argument, Luck gathered hundreds of references to "mages" and "witches" in Classical literature and showed that "religion" was generally local beliefs, whereas "magick" came from far away, strange locations.*p*Even our words reflect this. Consider "magic". "Magic" comes originally from "magos", the name for Persian priests. During their war with Persia, Greeks began using "magos" as a derogatory term for "magician" -- ie., a person with supernatural powers that were kind of suspicious. *p*The principal word for "witch" in Greek is "goes" (which later gave us "goetia", a medieval word for evil magick). A goes was a "singer to the dead". A person (usually a woman) who propitiated the untimely dead by singing to them. Luck argues that women like this were vestiges of an earlier religion, focused on some of the Goddesses of Asia Minor.*p*Same thing happens in Latin. "Magus" (the main Latin word for magician) comes from the Greek. But several rarer words for "witch" or "sorceror" show hostility towards other religions: Aegyptius ("Egyptian" -- a land famous for their mage-priests); Chaldaeus ("Chaldean" -- the name of priestly astrologers from Babylon); Mystes ("an initiate of the Mysteries").*p*And nothing changes when we hit the Middle Ages. Christians kept the old "Magus" and "Goes" words. Plus they "demonized" other Pagan terms. Some examples include: demon (from Greek daemon, a neutral spirit); giddy (meant "possessed by a demon" in the Middle Ages; originally meant something like "speaking for/possessed by a god"); valkyrie/waelcyriar (comes to be a rare term for a witch); perhaps even "witch" (etymologically, it seems to come from a root meaning "holy one").*p*There are many different words for "witches" and "mages" of course, and not all of them relate to foreign religions. However I think Luck's theory does a good job of explaining some of the dichotomy and hostility we see in early texts.*p*A very intriguing theory, one I'll keep in mind as I do more reading!*p*Jenny*br*