The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Greece

  The oldest European society from which evidence exists for attitudes to magic, including witchcraft, is the ancient Greek, which still has a far shorter recorded history than those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, extending back to the seventh or eighth centuries BC. By the fourth century at the latest the Greeks had developed their own distinctive set of beliefs, different again from any held in the great Near Eastern civilizations. One aspect of it was a distinction between religion and magic, often to the detriment of the latter, which was fundamentally that articulated at the opening of the present book, and indeed subsequently held by most Europeans until recent times.25 It first appears in a medical tract concerned with epilepsy, On the Sacred Disease, which has been dated to the years around 400 BC and so may well push back the distinction concerned into the fifth century. This opposes the disreputable use of spells and medicines which seek to compel divine beings, ‘as if the power of the divine is defeated and enslaved by human cleverness’, to the legitimate actions of people who only supplicate for divine aid.26 Shortly afterwards, the great Athenian philosopher Plato repeated it, attacking those who promised ‘to persuade the deities by bewitching them, as it were, with sacrifices, prayers and incantations’.27 It seems, therefore, that by the central part of the classical age of Greek civilization, intellectuals, at least, were confidently articulating a matched pair of definitions that would become an enduring part of European culture. The opposition between them made by the Greeks was different from that which was applied in modern times – theirs was one between magic and normative religious practice, rather than between magic and religion as such – but it is still striking.28 It was accompanied by hostility towards most categories of magician. The list of these remained more or less standard at Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries, in both stage plays and works of philosophy, and also in occasional other kinds of text: the agurtēs, a kind of wandering beggar-priest; the goēs, who is now generally assumed, from the linguistic relationships of the word, to have specialized in dealings with ghosts, either exorcizing them or setting them on people, and perhaps with other forms of spirit; the epoidos, or singer of incantations; the mantis, an expert in the revelation of hidden things, especially the future; and, most significant for future developments, the magos, who seems to have offered a range of services which incorporated most of those just described, and whose craft, mageia, became the root of the word ‘magic’. In addition to these was a string of lesser practitioners, usually noted (and condemned) in the plural: ‘oracle-mongers’ or ‘oracle-interpreters’; specialists who interpreted signs and portents; and those who ‘performed wonders’. They also included pharmakeis (masculine) or pharmakides (feminine), who seem to have specialized above all in potions; and rhizotomoi, ‘root-cutters’, who appear from their name to have worked a magic, and in modern terms also a medicine, based primarily on herbs. Greek writers did not use these terms with consistency, and the categories must have been very porous, each practitioner offering a personal portfolio of services that would often have overlapped them. Not all of the references were pejorative, the mantis, in particular, sometimes being lauded in inscriptions for helpful predictions or advice, but diviners and portent interpreters who received official approval tended also to have an official status. The Greeks lacked the powerful temple system, with its specialist priesthood, of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and their sources provide instead an insight into a flourishing world of popular magic that is barely visible in the Near Eastern texts. The very disapproval expressed by the surviving sources of that world testifies to the hold it exercised over the imaginations of many Greeks. On the other hand, it would be unwise to dismiss those expressions of disapproval as the grumbling of elitist intellectuals, attempting to reform popular beliefs. The playwrights, who also condemned magicians, had, after all, to please crowds, as the theatre at Athens was an art form with mass audiences.29

  It has become something approaching a consensus among experts that this hostility to magic appeared in Greece in the fifth century BC, as one response to a number of developments.30 One of these was war with the Persians, which caused Greeks to define themselves more clearly against foreigners, and eastern foreigners in particular. Certainly the term magos, which gave rise to ‘magic’, was in origin the name for one of the official Persian priesthood, serving the Zoroastrian religion. Greek city states were also engaged in a greater definition of their own identities, with a new concept of citizenship, and (for some) new enterprises in imperialism. It is certainly true, in addition, that during the period of the late sixth and the fifth centuries, the Greek imagination became more interested in underworld deities and in the spirits of the dead, as entities with whom living humans might work for their own profit. It is also likely that some of the forms of magical practitioner condemned in the sources only appeared at this time. The work of the magos or goēs in exorcizing unwanted spirits does make these figures look remarkably like the Mesopotamian exorcist-priests, transplanted to Greece and turned into wandering and freelance operators.31 Furthermore, it is true that there is no securely dated and unequivocal condemnation of magic in Greek that can be placed before 450 BC.32 A faint note of caution may be entered, however, against this apparent absence of evidence, as sources for the subject are much scarcer before the fifth century, and those most relevant in the earlier period, such as plays and works of philosophy, are missing. The argument for a new attitude from around 450 BC has sometimes drawn attention to the apparent absence of any condemnation of magic in Homer’s poetry, and this may indeed be very significant. On the other hand, too much should not perhaps be inferred from one poet, and the kinds of magic apparently approved by him (scattered throughout the Odyssey) are those used by figures – a goddess or an official seer – or for purposes – healing or soothing – which later Greeks would also have been likely to find acceptable. It is possible that the classical Greek hostility to magic, when defined as an attempt to gain control over deities, has deeper roots than the fifth century.

  What seems to be missing from this composite picture is witchcraft. There is no sense in any archaic or classical Greek text of hidden enemies within society who work destructive magic under the inspiration of evil. Plato called for the death penalty for any kind of magician who offered to harm people in exchange for financial reward, while those who tried to coerce deities, for any reason, should be gaoled. His targets, however, were service magicians offering morally and religiously dubious services in addition to the usual, theoretically benevolent, kind.33 Furthermore, the fact that he needed to make this prescription perhaps indicates that no such laws already existed in his home city of Athens. There is no clear record of any trial of a person for working destructive magic in the whole of ancient Athenian history. There were a few in the fourth century of tragic women who gave men lethal poisons under the impression that those were love philtres. The same century also produced the case of a foreign woman who had settled in Athens, Theoris of Lemnos, whom the texts call a pharmakis, mantis, or a hiereia (priestess) and who was put to death, with her whole family, for asebeia, impiety. Unfortunately, the same texts do not allow firm conclusions to be drawn regarding the nature of her offence. One said that it was to provide ‘potions and incantations’ and another that she was an impious mantis, which together would make her a convincing victim of the Greek animosity towards many forms of magic. Another, however, accuses her of teaching slaves to deceive their owners.34

  The wider picture is equally enigmatic. Matthew Dickie has gathered hints that magicians were arrested and punished in Greek cities from the history of Herodotus, the drama of Euripides and a dialogue of Plato. He also points out, however, that such people were almost never practitioners of magic pure and simple, but doubled in other roles, such as priests, oracles or healers, so that their offences would be hard to match conclusively to magic.35 One of the fables credited to Aesop tells approvingly how a female magician (gune magos) was sentenced to death for selling spells, which,
she claimed, averted the anger of the deities, and so interfered with their wishes. This would be a perfect illustration of the Greeks’ horror of trying to coerce divine beings; but we do not know if it ever matched reality.36 The city state of Teos passed a law that decreed capital punishment for any persons who made destructive pharmaka against its citizens, collectively or individually. It may be presumed that this term covered magic as well as chemical poisons, but it is not clear if the measure was enforced, and if it was intended against fellow citizens as well as outsiders. Rules for a private cult at the Greek city of Philadelphia in Asia Minor made members swear not to commit a list of antisocial acts, which included a list of magical practices; but vengeance was left to the gods.37

  Especially interesting and puzzling in this context are curse tablets, sheets of lead which are inscribed with spells or invocations to subject other humans to the author’s will, usually by binding, punishing or obstructing them. Their targets span all ages, and social roles and levels. Many call on the power of underworld or nocturnal deities or spirits, or the human dead, and they are found in pits, graves or tombs. They appear from the fifth century onwards, especially around Athens, and the set formulae used in many of them suggest either a widespread convention that most people understood or the use of professional or semi-professional magicians to make them. The very need for literacy indicates that specialists were involved. No known law forbids them, though Plato railed against them (and explicitly attributed them to hired magicians),38 and scholars are divided over whether they were regarded as socially acceptable or would have been covered by the penalties against murder, assault and impiety. None of the authors seems concerned about the censure of society, though they do worry about the reactions of the spirit forms invoked. On the other hand, they certainly violated cultural norms, not merely by appealing to dark deities and ghosts but by using exotic names, retrograde writing and the reckoning of descent through female lines. It is hard to believe that they were ever a respectable means of mobilizing spiritual power, but how disreputable, illicit or illegal the resort to them was is completely unclear. In a different society, they would have been stereotypical acts of witchcraft, but they do not seem to have been classed as those in Greece.39

  It is of a piece with these patterns that there seem to be no clear representations of witches in archaic or classical Greek literature. Two characters in mythology bear some resemblance to them, as powerful female figures who work destructive magic: Circe and Medea. Circe uses a combination of a potion and a wand to turn men into animals, and Medea uses pharmaka for various magical ends, including murder. Neither, however, is human, Circe being explicitly a goddess, daughter of the sun and a sea nymph, while Medea is her niece, product of a union between Circe’s brother and either another ocean nymph or the goddess of magic, Hecate herself. Nor are they unequivocally evil, Circe becoming the lover and helper of the hero Odysseus once he overcomes her with the aid of the god Hermes, and Medea assisting and marrying the hero Jason. Medea certainly murders to help her beloved, and then again in an orgy of vengeance when he casts her off; but the attitudes of the Greek texts towards her remain ambivalent, and (like Circe) she escapes retribution for her actions. Both were to be immensely influential figures in later European literature, as ultimate ancestresses of many of its magic-wielding females; but it is difficult to see either, in their original context, as a witch as defined in this book.40

  Certainly magicians were stereotypically feminine in ancient Greek literature, and also assumed to come from the lower social ranks: it was believed that respectable women did not have the necessary knowledge. Sources that refer to the different kinds of service magician operating in real life, however, generally treat them as male: women were regarded as working mostly for their own personal benefit. Undoubtedly, the great majority of all attributed curse tablets were composed by men.41 There is a possibility that women were more vulnerable to actual prosecution for working or trying to work magic, to judge from the Athenian evidence, but it seems dangerous to generalize from such a small number of trials. When literary sources portray women as using magic, it is generally not of an aggressive kind, motivated by pure wickedness and aimed at subverting society in general, but a defensive variety, intended to win or retain a man’s affection or punish him for withdrawing it.42 There was a tradition, established by the fifth century BC and enduring till the end of antiquity, that Thessaly, the north-eastern part of Greece, was especially noted for pharmakides powerful enough to drag the moon down from the sky at their command.43 Why Thessalian women should have acquired this fearsome reputation has never been explained, though it signalled that the region was not quite part of Greece proper. Not much seems to have changed as the classical age of ancient Greek civilization, extending across the fifth and fourth centuries, gave way to the Hellenistic one after the conquests of Alexander the Great extended Greek culture around the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. The Sicilian poet Theocritus, who probably worked in Egypt, produced an enduringly famous work about an Alexandrian woman enacting a rite to retrieve or punish a faithless boyfriend with the help of her maid. It was entitled the Pharmakeutria, but shows how much the concept of pharmaka had moved beyond drugs, because her methods consist entirely of a mixture of incantations, material substances of different kinds and special tools.

  The one distinctly new development of the age was the educated collector of magical lore, publishing books on the arcane properties of animal, vegetable and mineral substances. Like Hellenistic culture itself, this took in lands far beyond Greece, and indeed drew heavily on the accumulated traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syria: the first and most famous author in the genre, Bolus of Mendes, came from Egypt.44 Accordingly, save that they are written in the Greek language, there is some question over how far such texts can be termed Greek. Otherwise, in the older Greek world itself, things look like classical business as usual, and it is equally hard to find the witch figure in it. An oracle from Claros in Asia Minor responded to a city in the region which blamed an outbreak of plague on an evil magos and wanted a remedy: the answer was to destroy the wax figurines used by the magician by invoking the power of the goddess Artemis. There is no indication of whether any action was also intended against an actual person identified as the culprit. Likewise, a lead tablet offered to the oracle at Dodona to the north-west of Greece posed the question, ‘Did Timo harm Aristobola magically?’ but we cannot tell who Timo was, and what would have been done if the reply had been affirmative.45

  Rome

  The pagan Romans, both in their republican and imperial periods, were heavily influenced by Greek culture, and it is not surprising to find them embracing the same distinction between religion and magic; though it may equally be argued that the distinction concerned must have appealed to their own attitudes for it to have taken root. In the first century of the imperial period, and Christian era, both the playwright and philosopher Seneca and the scholar Pliny condemned magic as a wish to give orders to deities.46 In the third century, the biographer of the holy man Apollonius of Tyana portrayed his hero as securing his acquittal from a charge of being a magician by claiming that he merely prayed to the god Heracles, who answered his plea.47 Apuleius of Madaura, tried on a similar accusation, defended himself by contrasting somebody like him, who obeyed the deities, with a genuine magician who was popularly believed to ‘have the power to do everything that he wanted by the mysterious force of certain incantations’.48 In the same century the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus accused some rivals of making incantations designed to draw down the higher divine powers to serve them.49

  There seems to be a consensus among historians that Roman attitudes to magic crystallized between the last century BC and the first one AD, and had hardened into legal and social convention by AD 250.50 Some have attributed this development to a new desire to categorize varieties of religious experience, and to exclude activities which appeared to conflict with normative expressions of it. This has been related
in turn to a greater definition of outsiders and threats to society produced by the incorporation of more and more people, and classes of people, within Roman citizenship. Others have laid more emphasis on the appearance of an individualized elite soaked in Greek ideas. The definition of the magician as an outsider and menace is generally reckoned to have appeared between the time of writers such as the poet Catullus and the politician and scholar Cicero in the mid-first century BC and that of Pliny in the late first century AD. The former still used the term magus, taken from the Greek, in its original sense of a Persian priest, but none the less Cicero could speak of the invocation of underworld spirits as a new and perverse religious practice. Pliny lambasted ‘magia’, the practices of the magi, as ‘the most fraudulent of crafts’, designed to ‘give commands to the gods’ by discovering and wielding the occult powers within the natural world, and traced its progress from Persia and the Hebrews through Greece to the Roman world, so emphasizing its foreign origin as well as its pernicious character.51