The creation of the world and it’s importance to Magic
Many practitioners of magic opt for the scientific view of creation. They view the stories of creation as a poetic exploration of powers / forces of nature that encouraged the world to form. They often conclude that they are an expression of creativity. Some believe that men created the gods, not the other way around. That men believed in the gods, this belief caused the gods to form. The creation myth however have a crucial role in magic in giving us symbols that we can use to resemble the forces that constructed the forces of nature.
Many pagan creation stories begin with a metadivine realm. This is the primordial world, it pre-exists everything. This realm often has a quite simple existence and is of key importance in the practice of magic.
Often the metadivine realm is very simple having 2-4 elements in it. The Zoroastrian creation myth describes light and darkness as the only things in existence in the metadivine realm. Hesiod’s famous Greek text, called Theogony (birth of gods) is one of the more complicated ones consisting of space/a chasm (called Chaos), earth (Gaia), depths (Tartarus) and desire (Eros). One text we will look at more Enuma Elish only the fresh water and salt water sea existed.
What springs out of these realms are the forces of nature: wind, sun, crop growth, angels etc. These forces of nature in the pagan world become the gods and goddesses. Nature were the Gods of the pagan world. There is no distinction really made between the sun seen in the sky and the local sun god.
What becomes clear is that the pagan view of the gods in the middle east is that they were somewhat lower than their meta-divine counter parts. In some way dependent upon it. Magic then was often the attempt to go beyond the powers of the gods to the meta-divine realm to attain a change of fate or destiny. Let’s consider the writing of Nahum Sarna in Exploring Exodus who is writing about the plagues that appear in the second book of the Torah (and the bible).
Theses “signs” [the plagues] appear to belong to the realm of wonder-working magic so well known from polytheistic cultures. Egypt, especially, was the classic land of magic, which played a central role in its religious life. In fact, magic permeated every aspect of life. The number of gods in Egypt was almost unlimited. On version of the Book of the Dead mentioned over five hundred. This prodigious multiplicity of divine beings in itself meant that no god could be either infinite or absolute. Moreover, the inherence of gods in nature, their dependence upon the physical and the material for their continued existence, further limited their scope. They, like human beings, were deemed to be subject to superior forces inherent in the primordial realm of existence, a meta-divine realm from which the gods themselves derive. Human destiny was thought to be controller by two distinct forces, the gods and the powers beyond the gods. Neither of these was necessarily benevolent. In fact, antagonism and malevolence were considered to be characteristic of the divine relationships with man. Inevitably, religion became increasingly concerned with the elaboration of ritual designed to propitiate or neutralise the numerous unpredictable powers that be. Man had to be able to devise the means where by those powers inherent in the meta-divine realm could be activated for his benefit.
What becomes clear is a picture of man manipulating metadivine powers, which in turn effect the force of nature, for religious purposes.
Jack Newton Lawson expanded on this idea further in his 1992 thesis, “The Concept of Fate in Ancient Mesopotamia of the 1st Millenium : Toward an understanding of Shimtu”. Lawson looks at the idea of fate in the world of Ancient Sumeria and observes that even the gods are subject to fate.
Enlil, Marduk [two Sumerian gods] and Ishtar [Sumerian Goddess] (among others) are referred to as gods who determine human fate. However the gods themselves are apparently subject to fate or determination if only in the form of ‘necessity’; for as can be seen in Enuma Elish and Atrahasis: they gestate, give birth, die; they eat, drink, suffer illness, etc. … it would appear the gods are subject to some form of fate or determination.
So if gods are subject to fate and forms of divination which inform what the forces of nature will do has become a practice then the gods themselves seem to have their fate written. We note that in the creation myth known as Enuma Elish after Marduk separates the primordial Tiamat (the destructive ocean that prevents created things from persisting), he is able to pick up the tablet of destinies from the Metadivine realm to secure his power over the other gods. This suggest some form of written destiny or fate. Magic is the process through a person might seek to change their destiny or fate so the question is how does a person change it?
The process of changing one’s fate in Ancient Sumeria, in the birth place of much of our modern culture was achieved through one of two ways. Asking a deity or through Magic. Let’s look first at asking a deity. Often this was done through prayer or hymns for example this extract from a hymn to Nabu presented by Lawson in his thesis.
O son of the mighty prince Marduk, in your mouth is justice,
In your great name, at the command of your great divinity,
I, [so-and-so], your sick servant,
Whom the hand of a demon, an evil spell, a demonic power has overcome and pursued me,
Let me live, let me be well, [whatever/whenever] I plan let me attain.
This shows that prayer is an ancient tradition which goes back many millennia. Placating a god to ask for your fate to be changed was not unusual then and there is evidence of it in writing for thousands of years right up to modern day where we have people ask for things from the god of Abraham, saints, the dead, other deities all over the world. Why do they do this, because there is a belief that such a deity has the ability to hear or understand the prayer and the power to alter the fate of the person praying.
When you look at Babylon, A. Leo Oppenheim suggests that divination often took place using the carcass of something dead. Something that had met its fate. These often occurred by examining the entrails, a practice which persisted through Ancient Greece and Rome. Also actions appear to be taken to write words on the entrails as if to take a declaration to the metadivine realm that was currently bringing “fate” on this animal. This connected the divination process to the metadivine realm, the realm of fate. Other methods seem comparatively tame, such as gazing into a mixture of water and oil. This is also symbolic of the metadivine realm which consisted of Apsu the fresh water god and the Tiamat the salt water goddess co-mingling in a similar way the water and oil were co-mingling in a bowl.
Man manipulated something which symbolically resembled the content of the metadivine realm. Man believed that this would alter the course of nature and her forces because it could manipulate fate that would move in sympathy for its representations in realms below it.
We see a similar forms of magic in the divine hierarchies of Christian Magic that came later when a Magician would pray to god, Archangels, then angels and finally elementals. They attempt to go to the director of fate and to influence the directors of natural forces to the forces themselves.
This mechanism of practising magic is often unpopular with modern witches who prefer to develop a common friendship with the natural forces rather than control them using their bosses in a military-like hierarchy. I remember when I last discussed this with Circe who commented that it is very “Startrek” everyone having a place in a hierarchy like an army officer. I do however think of it like having a job in a business, you often have your boss and the team that you manage. It is worth noting that in a business you have to do what your boss says and everyone is subject to the will of one person, the CEO. I like to think of business as a fascist structure built in a democratic society. The question here is do you want to model your spirituality after a fascist structure? If you were to model it one way or another does that change how it works? We will explore other forms of magic later, when you have an opportunity experiment with these different mentalities and see what works.
The Problem of Magic in monotheistic culture
So what then happens if you decide to form a cult based on the worship of a god who is part of the metadivine realm? The answer is Judaism. Suddenly the entirety of fate is worshiped as one entity. This means that one entity is then responsible for the delivering of all fates and suddenly we have a creature that can only be concluded to be all powerful since he is fate personified.
The Hebrew cult grew out of the desire to worship the highest god and the god with the most supreme power, a god with power over other gods. In fact the whole point of the plagues of Egypt in the second book of the Torah / Bible is to communicate to the reader that this god has supreme power over the forces of nature and supreme power over what the Egyptians worshipped as gods.
Suddenly two claims are being made here which are:
- The Hebrew god is all powerful.
- The Hebrew god is benevolent.
These claims give rise to many questions which scholars have been unable to answer for years. For example, if the all-powerful god that determines all fates is entirely benevolent, why does suffering happen? Surely god was not powerful enough to prevent that suffering from happening and therefore is not all powerful, or he wanted that suffering to happen and therefore is not entirely benevolent.
If this is so, the metadivine realm cannot really can accept statements written on carcasses or in clay any more, instead we are dealing with an entity which does as he wishes. So, despite the fact a priest can beg the metadivine god for a certain fate, Magic is no longer relevant within the monotheist’s world view, because no matter what is done in the magical practice the deity makes the decision. The Magickal mindset is very hard to suppress though.
So in monotheistic cultures Magical actions such as writing words on the entrails of animals become not suitable, divination becomes banned and any honouring of pagan deities is also banned. However the practice of magic and divination NEVER dies as we will see through the rest of this.