ABSTRACT
Arguably the rst individual in Western tradition to hazard a few theoretical, albeit passing, observations on magic was the sophist Gorgias ( h century bce) in his rhetorical jeux d’esprit, Helen: incantations, he noted, belonged to a range of arti ces (technai) which he subsumed under the heading of goêteia (‘enchantment’); and mageia,1 spells, he added disparagingly, operated in the domain of falsehood and illusion (‘these are errors of the soul/intellect and beguilement of opinion’).2 Around the same time the Hippocratic treatise on epilepsy (On the Sacred Disease, 2) drew a fundamental distinction between scienti c medicine and the charlatan methods of magoi. Plato, like Gorgias, remarked on the ready availability of mageutikê (sc. technê)3 – what we might call the technology of magic. inkers such as Gorgias and Plato – not to mention Plutarch4 and Plotinus5 among many others – looked at magic \ om within their indigenous (Greek) culture. Probably the rst to take an outsider’s point of view were St Paul and the Early Church. Magic was usually still taken in deadly earnest – the emperor Constantine even o cially distinguished between its black and white versions, but now the theoretical terms in which magic and superstition in general were analysed (and roundly condemned) became self-consciously theological and moral: all pagan practices were demonic and evil tout court.6 Needless to say, the Church Fathers had no reason to formulate any ner distinctions between pagan religion and pagan magic.
