On the Origin, Idea, Scope, and History of Ancient and Modern Magic

Among the Chaldeans and Babylonians, individual branches of magic—namely astrology, divination, and necromancy—were especially valued and cultivated. Divination, as one sees in the Bible itself, was spread to the point of madness. The Chaldean soothsayers and nativity-casters traveled through the world in proud confidence in their art—to the ruin of states, as Tacitus especially shows us!—as well as of individual persons, and were highly esteemed by the great and the rich.

It is time that we name the Greeks and Romans, and we wish to linger a little longer on their views of magic, as the two most important peoples, in order to give our readers a vivid concept of the idea and inner nature of magic among these two nations first, and thereby of pre-Christian antiquity in general.

The Heidenthum paganism was, in its inner essence, an idolization of nature itself, and as such, a mere religion of fantasy. Its deities were not spiritual beings existing outside or above the world and independent of it, but either mere nature-symbols—which had no inner life other than that which everyone first gave them through their own fantasy—or idealistically conceived human natures, though called immortals, who were themselves subject, like mortals, to the eternal laws of nature and fate.

Since every force of nature, indeed every concept, was capable of personality according to the spirit of paganism, and