God Against the Gods (7 page)

The Three Magicians

Among the most famous—and fiercest—of the laws that Moses is shown to bring down from Mt. Sinai are the ones that criminalize the practice of magic. “There shall not be found among you a soothsayer, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer,” decrees Moses. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
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Magic working is condemned with equal fervor in the Christian Bible, where it is explicitly linked with all the other outrages of paganism: “The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
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Ironically, an intriguing and illuminating clue to the function of sorcery in the pagan world is buried away in one of the most beloved passages of the Christian Bible. “Three wise men” come in search of the newborn Jesus, or so goes the conventional English translation of Matthew 2:1-2, “for we have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him.” The “wise men” are plainly called “magi” in the Greek text, the plural form of “magus,” a word that was used among the pagans of Babylonia and Persia to identify seers, soothsayers and sorcerers. “Magus” is the root of “magic,” and so we might more accurately call the men who followed a star to Bethlehem the three magicians.

“Magus” came to be used in Jewish and Christian circles as a derogatory term to describe someone who trafficked in black magic: a sorcerer, a deceiver, even a poisoner. But the original meaning of the word in the pagan world was honorable and even exalted—it was used to identify a teacher or a physician, an interpreter of dreams, an astrologer or an augur, all of whom were regarded throughout antiquity as wholly trustworthy practitioners. They were experts in the ancient equivalent of “information technology,” as historian Robin Lane Fox puts it, a set of tools and techniques that were believed to reveal (and, sometimes, to bend) the will of the gods.
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Indeed, the Gospel of Mark allows us to glimpse the workings of pagan magic—the three wise men are, among other things, astrologers who observe the night sky, see the star over Bethlehem, and recognize it as the sign of the birth of the “King of the Jews.”

To be sure, the magi of antiquity were the inventors and users of what we would today call magic tricks. At some shrines and temples, the priests used smoke and mirrors, quite literally, to amaze and be-dazzle the worshippers—the arrival and departure of the god would be simulated with fireworks or flashes of torchlight reflected from a temple ceiling or a pool of water. An initiate into a mystery religion might be conducted through an underground passage and into a subterranean shrine, and his senses would be stimulated first by foul odors, then the aroma of incense and finally by light bursts and trumpet blasts. One famous magus was credited with causing the torch held by a statue of Hecate, a goddess of sorcery, to burst into flame, a feat that surely owed more to chemistry than the black arts. At a temple to Apollo, the priests would carry an idol of the god into his shrine on a litter, and the idol appeared to rise of its own accord as it passed through the threshold—the idol was fashioned out of iron, and a magnet was apparently installed in the lintel.

“[W]orship involved the chanting of hymns and secret formulae, the lighting of torches and burning of incense, sudden blazes of light, obsessive music, theatrical effects—moving statues, doors opening of their own accord, and so on—and it normally took place in underground chambers,” writes historian Robert Browning about the cult of Cybele. “It sounds trivial, like something from the fairground. But so does almost any other religion, described from the outside.”
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Such acts of legerdemain were not intended to entertain the worshippers, of course, but rather to put them into an appropriate state of awe and wonder and thus prepare them for the offering of prayer and sacrifice to the gods. The point was made by modern archaeologists at work in Greece, who discovered an ancient marble bust with a curious funnel-shaped opening at the mouth—they contrived to attach a length of bronze tubing to the opening in the bust, and they found that when someone spoke into the tube, his voice seemed to come from the statue’s mouth. “[T]he effect was powerful and strange,” the archaeologists explain, “a voice which would sound to an emotional mind both weird and mysterious.”
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To ancient monotheists as well as modern skeptics, the wonder-working priests and priestesses were resorting to cheap tricks to exploit the fearful and needy men and women who gathered in their shrines and temples. But there is quite another way to understand the use of “special effects” in the rituals of paganism. The ancients were taught by poets and playwrights, as well as priests and priestesses, to believe that gods and goddesses routinely manifested themselves in the here and now. Perhaps they were willing to go along with the trick in much the same way that modern audiences happily pay for the opportunity to momentarily suspend their disbelief in a Las Vegas magic show or a movie full of special effects.

“Because men expected their gods to be ‘present and manifest,’ who could blame the priests if they helped the gods live up to expectations?” proposes Fox. “Again, the line between religion and magic vanishes.”
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Spilled Guts and Startled Birds

Sorcery was not always or only a matter of dazzling the crowds at a pagan shrine. More commonly, sorcery was put to use in paganism in the effort to answer the fundamental questions of
all
religion: What does the deity want of us? What is the deity willing to do for us? And how can we persuade the deity to do our bidding, whether we seek a happy marriage, a healthy child, a successful career, a safe journey or the cure of a disease? Such are the concerns of ordinary men and women, no less in ancient times than in our own.

The ancients resorted to fortune-telling at every opportunity. The scheduling of a haircut, a manicure or a bath might be submitted for approval by an augur or an astrologer. For an emperor, the will of the gods was believed to be a matter of life and death—the imperial fortune-tellers, known as the College of Haruspices, were always consulted before any new undertaking, whether it was a matter of setting off on a voyage or marching off to war. That is why soothsaying will figure as prominently and crucially in the lives of both Constantine and Julian, a Christian and a pagan, as it did in the lives of kings and commoners alike throughout the ancient world.

The tools and techniques that were used by magi of various kinds strike us today as crude or weird or perhaps even slightly pathetic. They would examine the spilled guts of an ox that had been sacrificed to the gods to see what meanings they could read in the lobes of a fresh liver. They would ponder the significance of the place and timing of a lightning strike, the direction of a startled bird’s flight, the posture of the corpse of someone who had dropped dead in the street. They would consult the vast libraries of oracular writings—the so-called Sibylline books were only the most famous example—and extract a revelation from the ambiguous words and phrases that they found there.

The seers were credited with the ability to wring meaning out of every happenstance, or so we are asked to believe by the ancient historians. Alexander the Great always had an augur at his side, and he was said to heed the augur’s readings of what might strike us as random and unremarkable events. A swallow that landed on Alexander’s head and then rose again, for example, was said to be a sign that he would survive a conspiracy against his life. An eagle that perched on the railing of a warship predicted victory in an upcoming battle. And when a pair of crows were spotted in a sandstorm in the deserts of Egypt, they were identified as pathfinders sent by Zeus to guide Alexander to the shrine where he would be hailed as the son of the god.

The most famous soothsayers of all were the strange but powerful women who secreted themselves in shrines and grottoes, put themselves into a deep trance and channeled the eerie voices of the gods and goddesses: the oracles of Eleusis and Delphi, Claros and Miletus, are perhaps the single best example of “the conjunction of an uncanny place and a canny person.”
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Their voices were meant to sound weird and spooky, and their utterances were intentionally vague, thus allowing the hearer to find meaning in bursts of gibberish—the oracles at the shrine of Apollo at Didyma, who worked in a laurel grove enclosed by an elaborate temple, were called “the Grunters.”
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Indeed, the ancients may not have always been wholly credulous when they beheld one of the oracles as she grunted out the words of a god. The term “Pythia,” for example, was originally the title of the oracle at Delphi who was believed to give voice to the utterings of Apollo himself. The name refers to the Python, a dragonlike serpent whom Apollo, according to myth and legend, battled and slew at the site of the oracular shrine. Even in antiquity, however, the word came to be used to identify a stage ventriloquist who threw his voice for the amusement of the crowds.

The Royal Road

More than one form of “information technology” favored by the ancients was also used by enemies of paganism—and many of them are still in use today. Just as Freudians regard dreams as the “royal road” to the revealed wisdom of psychoanalysis, for example, the ancients were convinced that gods and goddesses spoke to both kings and commoners as they slept. Both Constantine and Julian insisted that they had been granted visions and revelations in their dreams, and their claims were perfectly plausible to their contemporaries. Indeed, no single experience of life was freighted with greater or more various meaning in the ancient world than a recollected dream.

Some pagan temples, in fact, were equipped with dormitories where a troubled man or woman would spend the night in the earnest hope that the god would appear in a dream or a vision, a practice that is known by the technical term “incubation.” On the advice of the priests, they would fast for days in advance and then sleep in the cured skins of a sacrificed beast, all in the hope of inducing an especially rich and meaningful dream. Back at home, a man might finger the figurine of a god or goddess before going to bed for the same purpose. “Dream-seeking” and “dream-sending” potions were prescribed,
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and Plutarch preserves the recipe for a concoction of sixteen spices that were burned as incense to encourage such dreams, although modern science has proven that they were not hallucinogenic or even intoxicating.

Artemidorus of Daldis, a kind of a proto-Freudian, compiled a series of dream-books in which he painstakingly records the most intimate details of the dreams reported to him by his contemporaries, and then offers a key to the interpretation of dreams. A dream about Aphrodite in which the goddess appears bare-breasted, he insists, is an omen of good things to come, but the appearance of the goddess fully nude is a bad omen to all dreamers except working prostitutes. And if the dreamer engages in sexual relations with the goddess, the meaning of the omen depends on whether or not the encounter was pleasurable.
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What did these earnest seekers want from the gods? A few of them sought nothing less than an epiphany—a physical encounter with the god or goddess—or a revelation of the secrets of the cosmos. But, according to the books of oracles that have been preserved from distant antiquity, a far greater number asked questions that were touchingly ordinary, the same kind of questions that are posed nowadays to tarot readers and telephone psychics: “Will I receive my wages?” “Will I get a holiday?” “Will I be successful” Other questioners were afflicted with even more poignant concerns: “Will I be divorced from my wife?” “Will my son be born with a big nose?” The most dire question turns out to be a highly practical one: “Have I been poisoned?”
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One of the less celebrated furnishings of a typical pagan temple helps us to understand the poignance of the encounter between pagan men and women and the deities whose care and comfort they sought. Along with the statuary that depicted the gods and the goddesses in all of their glory, the domed sanctuaries where the priests and priestesses conducted the solemn rituals of worship, and the altars where incense was burned and libations were poured, some temples included an oversized model of an ordinary human ear, fashioned out of plaster or clay or stone. Worshippers were invited to whisper their most intimate questions and their most urgent pleas into the ear—and then they hastened back to their homes, to sleep and perchance to dream.

The God of the Hanged

Of all the supposed sins of paganism, according to the Bible, the primal offense was human sacrifice. “They shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters,” writes the Psalmist, “whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood.”
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And archaeological evidence confirms that the offering of human flesh and blood to the gods and goddesses is a practice that dates back to the beginnings of the human race. Human beings, it seems, have always convinced themselves that killing a fellow human being and offering the corpse as a gift is the best way to soothe the anger of a vengeful deity or win the goodwill of a mercurial one.

“[B]lood and violence lurk fascinatingly at the very heart of religion,” writes anthropologist and historian Walter Burkert. “
Homo religiosus
acts and attains self-awareness as
homo necans
”—that is, “Religious man” can also be regarded as “Man the killer.”
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