Magic, the pretended art of doing wonderful works by aid of mysterious supernatural means. The term is in general synonymous with sorcery, and was originally applied by the Greeks and Romans to that form of sorcery which was communicated by the Babylonian Magi to the Medes, Persians, and Parthians, and by them spread over the East and even the West. No people have carried magic to a greater height than the ancient Chaldeans, and many of their formulas of propitiation and expulsion of spirits and demons have been deciphered from the cuneiform inscriptions. They practised many forms of magic, but especially astrology, which was raised by a succession of astronomers to the dignity of a pseudo-science. In the same way Egyptian magic was formulated into elaborate system and ritual which far surpassed in completeness anything to be found among the ancient Greeks or Romans. The former held the same views of magic as the less cultured races around them, and the philosophy of the Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists carried mystical symbolism and magical speculations further into new regions of theurgy and thaumaturgy. Theurgic magic also was highly developed in Alexandria, and it descended into medieval and modern Europe bearing many marks of Jewish speculation.
Grimm says Miracle (wundern) is the salutary, Magic (zaubern) the hurtful or unlawful, use of supernatural powers: miracle is divine, magic devilish; not till the gods were degraded and despised was magic imputed to them. Man can heal or poison by directing natural forces to good or to evil; sometimes he even shares the gift of miracle; but when he pushes the beneficent exercise of his powers to the supernatural point, he learns to conjure. The origin of all conjuring must be traced directly to the most sacred callings, which contained in themselves all the wisdom of heathendom—viz. religious worship and the art of song. Sacrificing and singing came to mean conjuring; the priest and the poet, confidants of the gods and participants of divine inspiration, stand next door to the fortune-teller and magician. By the side of divine worship practices of dark sorcery grew up by way of exception, not of contrast. After the introduction of Christianity all heathen notions and practices were declared to be deceit and sinful delusion: the old gods fell back and changed into devils, and all that pertained to their worship into devilish jugglery. Presently there sprang up tales of the Evil One's immediate connection with sorcery and witchcraft; and out of this proceeded the most incredible, most cruel jumbling up of imagination and reality. The great distinguishing mark of sorcery was the desire to work mischief, and thus this definition involves the same ethical condemnation which made Plato denounce sorcery as an illegitimate method of forcing the power of the gods into the service of man. It was from the beginning the inveterate antagonist of religion, originating in dim and confused yet independent glimpses into the secrets of nature; and throughout it we trace the elemental idea of an opposition to the divine will, it being implied that the power of influencing and altering his physical conditions rests within the power of man himself. The sorcerer stands aloof from the ordinary adoration of supernatural powers, employing occult faculties and devices which he supposes to be within his own control. Hence sorcery early becomes differentiated from religion—on the one side legitimate means of contact with the divine, as adoration, inspiration, vows, oracles, miracles, omens, and signs; on the other, thaunnaturgy by occult, incomprehensible arts, skill in natural magic, mesmerism, mumbo-jumbo, and imposture. Originally magic was the rudimentary beginning of medicine and science, but soon it fell back into occult and mystic devices, while two elements present in its first inception—the religious sentiment and real experimental knowledge—developed into morality and science. Magic, says Bastian, is the physics of mankind in the state of nature. It rests on the beginning of induction, which remains without result only because in its imperfect judgments by analogy it raises the post hoc to the propter hoc. The notion that the gods were indifferent to the fate of mortals opened a door to sorcery for finding relief from suffering, but gradually the deteriorating influences made way and the criminal side of the miraculous became specially the function of the craft. Modern India, says Sir Alfred Lyall, swarms with astrologers, soothsayers, and interpreters of dreams, who watch nature to ascertain the will of the gods; but these are quite distinct from the sorcerers, who work independently of them, and soon become knaves and cheats, religious and medical, preying upon the ignorance of their dupes. Among the Mohammedans magic is rife, though condemned by rigid divines; and almost everybody believes in the efficacy of amulets, charms, spells, exorcism, magic mirrors, cabalistic figures, divination, sortilege, and the like. If a man devotes the power he acquires to good ends he is held comparatively innocent; but he may go on to acquire the power of commanding the evil genii to do him all kinds of wicked service, which is execrated as black or Satanic magic.
The superstition of magic and witchcraft belongs essentially to the lower levels of civilisation, and the reputation of it clings to any survivors of an older nationality, like the Lavas of Burma and the Finus and Lapps among their Scandinavian neighbours. Even in Scotland robust Presbyterians long thought more highly of the Popish priests than of their own clergy for casting out devils, laying ghosts, and curing madness. All magical reasoning is based upon the inherent belief of primitive man that casual connection in thought is equivalent to causal connection in fact. The savage ever confounds an ideal with a real connection; he confuses subjective and objective relations. To him it is merely a matter of experience that all nature is personal and animate, and that human agencies can work supernaturally. He is constantly seeking an explanation of physical facts, and he fills up his scanty knowledge of natural causes with hypothetical causes of a metaphysical and supernatural character. This confusion of imagination and reality produces a state of mind capable of accounting for the whole business of magical arts and magical relations, the only real connection between which is mere analogy and symbolism. Coincidences ever strike the primitive man as things in themselves significant, and post hoc ergo propter hoc is to his mind a perfectly valid logical method. Nor does his sorcerer always need to be successful—one lucky hit outweighs half-a-dozen failures, and the sorcerer, through a kind provision of nature, usually ends with being himself more or less the dupe of his own powers. Thus magic may develop into elaborate and systematic pseudo-science—a sincere though fallacious philosophy evolved by processes in great measure still intelligible to our own minds. Augury, divination, oneiromancy, chiromancy, and astrology admitted of being gravely formulated and discussed, and even among 19th-century Englishmen and Americans may be seen not a few strange revivals of magicians like Apollonius of Tyana and Iamblichus, as well as of savage philosophy and peasant folklore, in the freaks of so-called spiritualism, with its voices, its spirit-writing, its untying of ropes, and its rising and floating in the air.
The primitive mind ever needs material support for the religious sentiment, and in this constant condition we find the foundation of fetichism and idolatry. Everywhere the savage sees a connection between an object and a visible representation of it: hence the philosophy of making an image of a person to be injured by burning it, melting it away, or sticking pins into it—of which we have still a surviving shadow in our custom of burning an unpopular person in effigy. Again, a disease tormenting a man may be driven into an image of clay or the like, and in the same elemental idea of connection between object and image we find explanation of the fear of clippings of the hair or parings of the nails falling into the possession of an enemy, our own lingering liking for locks of hair of those we love, as well as many of the usages of early medicine, sympathetic powder, love-potions, the doctrine of Signatures (q.v.). A similar connection exists somehow between a thing and its name: hence a man may be bewitched through a wicked use of his name, and a sorcerer may force the hand of a divinity by invoking with his name. Accordingly, in the history of primitive religions we find the most sacred names kept strictly secret, as by the Jews, Moslems, and the Romans of their tutelary deity.
Magic was strictly condemned under the Levitical law, and by the early Christians was regarded as unlawful miracle. In the middle ages it continued to be studied in its less harmful sides, as astrology and alchemy, and it must not be forgotten that in the one department it was the parent of scientific astronomy, in the other of modern chemistry. Yet the reign of imperfect analogy has given way but slowly before a real scientific method; and though the old theory of demoniacal possession has been exchanged for a real knowledge of the laws that govern lunacy, and occult sympathetic operations have widened out into the vast sciences of pharmacy and medicine, yet primitive magical conceptions still cling closely to our people, and form everywhere the heart of popular folklore.
See the articles ALCHEMY, ANIMISM, ASTROLOGY, DEMONOLOGY, DEVIL, DIVINATION, FETICHISM, FOLKLORE, IDOLATRY, INCANTATIONS, and WITCHCRAFT; also Ennemore, Geschichte der Magie (2d ed. 1844; trans. by W. Howitt, 2 vols. 1854); Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie (4th ed. 1877); Lenormant, La Magie chez les Chaldéens (1874; Eng. trans. 1877); Victor Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages (Eng. trans. New York, 1879); and Fabart, Histoire philosophique et politique de l'Occulte, Magie, &c. (1885); also Caspari, Urgeschichte der Menschheit (2d ed. 1877), and Tylor's Early History of Mankind (chap. vi.) and Primitive Culture (chap. iv.). Horst's Zauberbibliothek (6 vols. Mainz, 1820-26) is a perfect cyclopædia of the doctrine and methods of magic; a complete bibliography of its literature is Grässe's Bibliographie der wichtigsten in das Gebiet des Zauber-, Geister-, und sonstigen Aberglaubens einschlagenden Werke (Leip. 1843).