Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

***Ahem. People have continued to try to post questions, despite the post being closed. I have deleted these. Follow-up comments to existing questions are fine, but other than that, please save it until the next Magic Monday.***

Comments

Re: Science of the sacraments

[robertmathiesen]

Alan Watts wrote Myth and Ritual in Christianity way back in 1971, and I read it sometime in the '70s. To the best of my memory, it touches on the occult and magical significance of Christian liturgy, though I'm not sure that Watts actually uses the words "magic" and "occult" in it.

More generally, early Christian worship checked pretty much all the boxes in how the Roman Empire defined magic, a thing which Roman law punished as an extremely serious threat to Roman power:

* Magicians met in secret, and had secrets that were revealed only to the ritually initiated. Check! (Baptism and Confirmation, originally two parts of the same ritual. Somewhat later, the so-called "disciplina arcana.")

* Magicians met where the dead were buried. Check! (The catacombs.)

* Magicians used parts of dead human bodies in their work. Check! (Relics of the Saints. Even now, a consecrated Roman Catholic altar contains a tiny piece of a relic, usually a fragment of bone, from a Saint.)

* Magicians ate human flesh and drank human blood. Check! (The consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist or Mass.)

* Magicians worked with other-than-human Powers in their rites. Check! (Angels, at the minimum, and also the three Hypostates ("Persons") of the Christian Trinity.)

* Magicians could command demons (daemones), who had to obey them. Check! (Exorcism.)

* Magicians could make things happen against the ordinary laws of nature. Check! (Miracles, including curing illnesses, healing injuries and driving demons out of the possessed.)

* Magicians did not fear imperial power sufficiently, but had an allegiance to something higher than the Emperor. Check!

* Magicians used "barbarous names of invocation." Check! Christians often "spoke in the tongues ... of angels" (per St. Paul).

I probably could cite a half-dozen more points here, if I took a half hour or so to dig them out of memory.

Very little of this came into Christianity from Second-Temple Judaism, but must have had another, non-Jewish source. The point-by-point line-up with magical practices suggests what that source might well have been.

Despite Christian persecution of Jews, one can still find hints in early Rabbinic Jewish sources that the Jewish authorities agreed with the Romans, that early Christians were a community of magicians, not a religion at all, and that Jesus himself had been a particularly powerful magician.

Pagan authors who concerned themselves with Christianity also accused Christians of being magicians who werte deliberately disguising themselves as religious people, not magicians at all. (The best example is Celsus, "Against the Christians," now extant only in quotations by Origen in the latter's work, "Against Celsus.")

The fine scholar Morton Smith actually published a book, Jesus the Magician (1978), which made a very strong case that the Romans and the earrly Rabbis had been quite right about Jesus as a magician. That book pretty well ended his career as an eminent scholar in the field of Religious Studies (which is still largely a Christan-dominated field of scholarship). I think Smith made a very strong case for his conclusion, however scandalous it might be. (Acadermia is highly allergic to even a whiff of scandal.)

I remember reading one Roman law, though I don't remember now which emperor promulgated it, which made it a capital crime not only to do magic, but even to know how to do magic. That shows how strongly the Romans felt about magic as a threat to the Empire.

In short, one can make a very strong scholarly case that Christian ritual practices, even if they clearly go back to Jesus himself, were rooted in the rituals of contemporary magic.

Of course, self-preservation meant that early Christians had to deny any connection of their worship with magic rituals. You can find such strong denials in the earliest Christian writings, including even the New Testament. And I'm sure that most early Christians were quite sincere in their denials, for early Christian writers had constructed elaborate ways of justifying this denial: they drew a very sharp line between magic and miracles, between angels and demons, etc. etc.

Of course, none of this scholarship need shake the faith of any Christian who can accept such sharp distinctions. Smith, after all, declared at one point in his book that he was an atheist, and therefore he specifically ruled out any divine origin of the miracles done by Jesus and the early Christians.

The Anglican Gregory Dix, in his magisterial The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), carefully delineated the evolution of Christian worship. Though he touches on all the details of early Christian rituals mentioned above, he fully accepts the above-mentioned sharp distinctions between miracle and magic, etc., and writes about much the same things as Smith does, but makes no mention at all (IIRC) of magic anywhere.