Review : Ancient Magic

Pretty soon when reading Philip Matyszak's Lost Cities I could tell this was an author I needed to read more of. There was something ineffably... good about his writing style, tinged with tantalising hints that (commendable though that book was) he could deliver something very much better again if given half the chance.

Ancient Magic in Greece and Rome : A Hands-On Guide is just such a book, a delight from start to finish. Small but information-dense, by presenting an unusual focus on the ancient peoples it shows their world view in a totally different way to what you'd gather from any standard history. It takes its subtitle quite literally, giving precise instructions for necromancy, casting love spells, and defence against the dark arts. But it's also frequently hilarious. Matyszak loves his subject through and through, both for the philosophical aspects, the social history, but also for the sheer craziness compared to modern understanding. It's never mocking or belittling, but joyously revels in the madness of the human mind. 

I have to give this one a solid 9/10. The only thing holding it back (like many of Thames & Hudson publications, which seems to be a common trend) is the lack of a decent summary and conclusions.

Here I'm going to follow the structure of the book itself and jot down some personal highlights, before concluding with a more general look at the nature of magic.

Necromancy

One thing I was only dimly aware of was how prevalent belief in reincarnation was in classical antiquity (I think, on reflection, Plato does mention this but in one of his duller passages). But the nature of the dead was complex and controversial. They existed, says Matyszak, outside of time, giving them potentially prophetic insights. The difficulty with prophecies from the dead was twofold. First, there was no consensus as to how sentient the dead remained, but in general it was thought to be a diminished, pale existence compared to the land of the living. So assuming you could get hold of one, there was no guarantee the shades would have anything useful to say.

Which brings up the second, practical aspect. Not only were the dead, if they wanted to talk at all, not very unlikely to want to talk about anything you were interested in (after all, they had their own concerns to be getting on with), but summoning them in the first place was frightfully tricky. You had to be quick, because they might reincarnate : "There is no use in discovering the spirit of Cleopatra if she is currently Doris Smith of Fishgate". 

The actual summoning ritual, which consists of digging a small trench and adding blood and some more mundane ingredients (milk, honey, wine, water) is not actually that hard. The difficult part is timing and location. It would work more or less anywhere, but battlefields were best. The problem is in getting to talk to anyone specific. For the amateur necromancer, this was more a case of pot luck than requiring any particular skill. Professional witches, on the other hand, could be far more powerful. But their rituals were not at all for the faint of heart. Quotes Matyszak of Lucan :

... if she needs warm blood she unhesitatingly takes it gushing from a fresh-cut throat, or slits a womb so that the child of the unnatural birth may be placed on the fiery alter for a ghoulish feast of still-quivering flesh.

Despite this clearly antisocial behaviour...

Or as he says elsewhere :

At best, the experiment will fail, wasting both your time and several bucketloads of sheep's blood. At worst – you might succeed.

I told you he was funny.

The curse of love

The rituals to engender both love and hate are frighteningly similar. One of Matyszak's most interesting points is that the concept of romantic love may not have really existed in antiquity : sex and love were seen as interchangeable, with romance being a medieval social construct. This certainly chimes with the behaviour of so many of the protagonists of Homer's epics, especially Paris and Helen, but surely it's a step too far to say the concept didn't exist. That's difficult to believe, but certainly at the very least it wasn't expressed as openly as in later periods.

This has some very disturbing consequences. I can't summarise this any better than the author, so I won't try.

For the Greeks and the Romans, romance was mostly about inserting Part A into Part B to make Person C. Love was a violent process, an attack by the gods upon the minds of otherwise well-balanced individuals, and this violence is reflected in the enchantments employed by those wishing to inspire such feelings in the object of their affection.

Make her love me with lust, longing and rut. Make her mad with desire. Burn her limbs, her liver, her woman's body... make her stop ignoring me... wanton with mad lust... obey my every wish.

'Love magic' is not the correct name for these spells. In essence and intent, they are rape by magical means.

There could be even more extreme violence than this. The women from Thessaly could "draw down the Moon" at will to make the liquid for a love potion, but each time cost the life of a child. I mean, there's modern-day toxic masculinity... and there's the next-level world of antiquity. 

I have to mention a few other odds-and-ends I learned in this chapter :

•  Effigies are not at all a modern Voodoo invention but date from at least the classical period, being used in much the same way as often depicted in many a horror movie. Normally popular fiction makes up its own lore but apparently not in this case.
• The goddess Hecate was often found at crossroads*, then referring to a T-junction : the three routes symbolise Earth, heaven and hell (or equivalents thereof). 
• Demons were not originally innately evil at all, but just the agents of the divine powers, the workhorses by which they got shit done. They could even refer to spirits of the deceased, rather than being a unique class of entity.

* I originally had a typo here : crosswords, which would have made reading the newspaper a lot more interesting.

Finally the most everyday sort of curse : the jinx. This, says Matyszak, comes from the Greek word for the wryneck – the Eurasian woodpecker. It could be magically summoned and enchanted to ensure that magical spells were actually efficacious. While some magic required highly-trained professionals, some of the oldest sort was open to all.

Creatures

Just as I assumed Voodoo dolls were a comparatively modern idea, so too did I think that vampires and werewolves were mainly a medieval Slavic belief. While their concept was certainly refined in medieval eastern Europe, the basic roots go back much further. Even the modern notion of the vampire as a seducer can be found in the Greek myth of a the Lamia, a beautiful woman who professed love and a desire even for marriage, all for the ultimate goal of feasting on human flesh. Bloodsucking creatures in general were common, including small flying variants (not at all dissimilar to bats) though only of danger to children. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, because it actually happened, was the Roman cure for epilepsy : to drink the hot blood slit from the throat of a gladiator.

Werewolves too are well attested to in ancient literature. Here many of the familiar elements of the lore do appear to be later inventions, such as their aversion to silver or the compulsion to transform in the full moon (though there is one weak hint of this in ancient sources). There are even accounts of people voluntarily becoming werewolves, although quite why they'd want to do this is unclear. Wereweasels, on the other hand, were very much a thing, because weasels were considered intensely magical – an idea which has died completely in popular culture.

Unexpectedly, dogs seem to have been considered more magical than cats. A grim consequence of this was the annual Roman crucifixion of dogs, who were considered messengers to the gods, as part of a fertility rite. Much happier is the suggested cure for a cold of "being gently rubbed down with a puppy".

The Penguin Book of Dragons mentions a much later (medieval or post-medieval) description of dragons as originating from the bones of noblemen. Matyszak elaborates : the classical Greeks believed that evil snakes arose from the "spines of evil men". Interestingly there's a connection to the phoenix, which was not originally associated with fire. Instead its rebirth happened by way of a "little worm" which arose from the bone marrow of its progenitor, eventually developing into a bird itself. The connection with fire seems to have been a confusion with the mythical Egyptian deity Bennu. 

Prophecy

As with the "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" books, there are some ancient ideas which are... uncanny. Are we predisposed to think in a certain way, or is our ancient heritage still shaping the way we construct modern scientific ideas ?

For instance, Matyszak says that the ancients believed that events had ripples which propagated both forwards and backwards in time. Just as the consequence of a stepping on a butterfly might be readily predictable on timescales of seconds or minutes (e.g. you feel horribly guilty) but more and more difficult on the longer term (you stop caring / you're so depressed you crash your car and die / you set up a butterfly sanctuary) with effects every more and more unrelated and dissimilar to the original event (you had jam on your toast instead of butter one Thursday morning three years later), so too did the events occurring further and further back in the past. This is why augury and omens* took the forms they did, of weird configurations of entrails or the unexpected flight of birds.

* Interestingly, augurs tended to be male whereas oracles were female. 

Oracles, says Matyszak, probably did actually work – after a fashion. They weren't seeing the future, but could be very skilled at reading people and patterns. Being tremendously cosmopolitan places, receiving visitors from all over the world, they'd have a unique insight into how human beings in similar situations tend to act and think. Couple that with tremendous self-confidence, a dash of hallucinogenic fumes, and a careful determination to keep things at least a little ambiguous and boom, you've got yourself an oracle.

The basis for astrology is similarly "rational". This has its basis in the modern notion of "free will" as meaning something more like "unhindered". That is :

People freely took the path leading to their preordained future. Humans can choose, but fate knows what their choice will be.

I prefer the notion of the alterable wyrd, personally, but no matter. The point was that since everything was connected, looking at the stars and planets for clues made as much sense as anything else; it wasn't necessarily that the planets had a direct influence on human affairs, so much as everything was governed by the same root cause. Presumably it also helped a good deal that the distance to and nature of the celestial objects was then utterly unknown. But initially, astrology was thought to be a solid, level-headed and thoroughly rational notion. There were even attempts to look for precise correlations between astronomical events and human affairs, though they were unsuccessful :

The problem with a more complete set of observations was that humans kept interfering with the outcome. Taken to the logical extreme, if we accept the ancient view that the future was fixed, then what these omens foretold is that successful expiatory measures would be taken.

What is magic ?

Which brings me to the final point, and the main underlying theme of the book. What's the difference, if any, between a magical process and a regular one ? That is, accepting that magical processes do not actually happen, what's a useful definition of magic ? I've speculated on this before at length, but let me first collect some of Matyszak's thoughts on the matter.

• Magic as simply an unknown process by which something occurs
• Magic as an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable
• Magic as the use of powers beyond this world

The first two are interrelated and not mutually exclusive. They're by far the most common interpretation in the book, similar to Arthur C. Clarke's famous pronouncement on sufficiently advanced technology. Matyszak begins the book by noting that to the ancients everything was magical.

Flowers turned magically into fruit, and caterpillars into butterflies. Magic filled clouds with energy enough to destroy a house with one well-aimed thunderbolt. 'Magic' was the use of natural forces to bring about a desired result.

And elsewhere :

A  perfectly healthy youth could sicken and die painfully within a few days. The human mind is seldom prepared to believe that such things 'just happen'. If someone dies unexpectedly, there must be a reason for it. In a world that knew little about burst appendixes or massive heart attacks, there was a simple explanation : dark magic. 

The thing about spells is that they have to be done exactly right... even the most minor mistake meant that the entire ritual had to be started again from scratch. Even Medea, the greatest witch who ever lived*, spent most of her teenage years in study. 

* Matyszak says that there was a genetic component to marriage; it certainly helped if you had divine ancestry. But it doesn't seem to have been by any means a necessity : anyone could do at least a little basic magic.

All this is in marked contrast to the medieval appeal of magic which was all about breaking the rules, not following another, parallel or different set of rules. We might describe this magic of classical antiquity magic more as pseudo-natural rather than truly supernatural. 

If this is what we mean by magic, then a Hogwartsian school for witches and wizards was definitely a possibility. In that case, contrary to my earlier ruminations, Existential Comics would have a point : such a school would really just be learning about science, after a fashion. That is, either just bunk science if it didn't work, or science beyond our current understanding if it did.

Not that it didn't allow for some pretty extreme results according to ancient beliefs. As well as restoring the dead and summoning spirits, really skilled practitioners were thought to be able to reverse rivers, pull down the moon, make forests walk, or bring about hurricanes. But this would still be due to direct, attributable, measurable causes.

Is that really magic ? Or, to spare readers yet another lengthy philosophical digression, let me try a different approach. Would it seem like magic, if the whole process of cause-and-effect could clearly be followed from start to finish ? I'd say no, not really. In fact even if the cause couldn't be determined but the end result could be precisely and reliably predicted, it would very quickly stop seeming magical at all. If the same curse causes 100% of targets to develop itchy testicles, then it doesn't matter that you don't know how exactly it works. 

And to be fair, some rituals that might once have counted as magic do in fact work :

To test the power of incantations, try this spell for summoning the god Morpheus. After consuming the appropriate potion (ground cocoa beans in warm milk), readers should softly chant, "One white sheep, two black sheep, three white sheep..."

The moderns believed that they had to stand before a mirror and rub bristles over their teeth. If this was not done regularly, they would lose their friends and their teeth would fall out.

Alight, Matyszak, your point is well made. However, does this mean that all varieties of magic are just the result of a poor scientific understanding ? Is there a notion which is at least conceptually valid (that is, not to say something which actually does happen !) which doesn't fit within the scientific world view, something which could ever seem truly magical rather than just scientific ignorance ? 

I maintain my original answer of yes. For something to qualify as magic in the modern sense, avoiding the boring meaning of mere ignorance, it must involve some degree of the unknowable and the unpredictable, some aspect of mystery. Sometimes it should fail for no clear reason, or have unforeseeable side-effects. Crucially, this has to be true at a very deep level indeed, e.g. something that is not just beyond our current knowledge, but forever beyond our apprehension. Standing stones which can't be counted come to mind; a forest which misdirects travellers without reconfiguring itself (as in Middle Earth) might be another. This is much closer to Matyszak's third definition, i.e. sorcery, the use of powers beyond this world. 

Whether that would itself operate on its own set of rules, but those rules are beyond human comprehension, I leave for now. Clearly there are many different sorts of magic : an unknown method, a thing occurring with a true (not merely apparent) lack of causality, impossibilities, ignorance, emotional evocation by incantation... 

To me, saying "magic isn't really magic" is fine if you're talking about stage magicians, which are mere tricks. We all know what those are. But if you want "magic" more generally to simply be a synonym for "ignorance", that seems to be unnecessarily belittling the human condition. As Matyszak shows, as so many of the other books of mythology I've been reviewing here lately show, this would be to unfairly dismiss a huge part of the human psyche. 

None of this is to say that anything truly magical ever actually happens : it doesn't, and that's not the point at all. The point is to acknowledge the much more irrational part of ourselves, to recognise that imagination does not follow the logical rules and processes of physics. And that, perhaps, is something genuinely magical, or at the very least wondrous. As the old saying goes, when philosophical thought has done its best, the wonder remains.