Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2017
Testimony of The Greeks and Romans
Iranian Magic as the Ancients Saw It
Pliny the Elder, a famed first-century CE historian, boldly claimed that Zoroaster was “the inventor of magic.”1 This assertion was already an age-old belief among the Greeks, however, and it continued with the Romans who followed in their footsteps.
Early Greek sources such as Herodotus call the magoi a tribe of the Medes that constituted a priestly caste.2 R. C. Zaehner records sources placing magoi is Samaria, Ethiopia, and Egypt.3 Xenophon, in his biography of Cyrus the Great, identified the magoi as religious authorities and educators.
The role of the Persians and their magoi in the development of Greek ideas about both magic and philosophy is a historical problem. Greek philosophy begins to take root suddenly in the middle of the sixth century BCE in the city-state of Miletus on the coast of what is today Turkey. Although this city established many colonies throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, including one in Egypt (Naukratis, founded in the eighth century BCE), it was not until the borders of the Persian Empire approached the gates of Miletus itself that philosophy can be said to have developed there. Cyrus brought the city into the Persian Empire in 546 BCE. It is noteworthy that Egypt, that other legendary cradle of “magic,” had been in contact with Greece for a couple of centuries earlier without any of these philosophical ideas developing among the Greeks. The very word philosophy, which literally means “love of wisdom,” suggests a connection with the Magians who also loved wisdom (Av. mazda).
In the wake of the Persian Wars, which saw two invasions of the Greek heartland by Darius and Xerxes in the fifth century BCE, the Greeks became even more familiar with Persian ideas. This familiarity did not mean that they always understood the essence of Zoroastrian or Magian thought. The Greek attitude toward Persian culture generally fell along two lines: those who opposed Persian imperial aims and relentlessly propagandized against the foreign onslaught, and those who admired Persian ideology and wisdom. The latter group sometimes even supported Persian aims to make the Greek city-states a part of their empire.
Persian mageia was seen either as horrible witchcraft or as a system of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, depending on the camp to which the writer belonged. The great Greek philosophers of the seventh to fourth centuries had a generally positive attitude toward the Persians and their mageia. In his treatise On Philosophy, Aristotle says that the “magoi are more ancient than the Egyptians.” He also places the lifetime of Zoroaster at six thousand years before Plato. Diogenes states that “Zoroaster is the originator of wisdom” and says that Aristotle actually wrote a book called Magicus. Some of Plato’s followers claim that their teacher was a reincarnation of Zoroaster. Colotyes of Lampsacus says that Plato took his “Myth of Er” narrative, part of his book The Republic, from a Zoroastrian source.
The aforementioned Pliny the Elder further states that Pythagorus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato all traveled at one time or another to study the sciences of Zoroaster.4 The story that Pythagorus had exposure to Persian ideas is further supported by Porphyry.
Supposedly there was a Magian sage named Ostanes (Persian: Hushtâna) who accompanied Xerxes to Greece and who remained behind to teach Magian ideas in Greece. The name of this Magian was later applied to many apocryphal books of magic in antiquity.
The impact of Zoroastrian philosophy and magical ideology can be clearly traced in Greek thought following the sixth century. However, the Greeks hardly accepted the pure form of Zoroastrian theology. Rather it appears, as has most often been the case, that the exotic Persian ideas were only partially understood but that they sparked an explosion of original Greek speculations rooted in the Indo-European cosmological substrate that the Greeks and Iranians shared in common from prehistory. Persian magic is the applied science of ritual and cosmology. Those Greeks who opposed the Persians saw their ideology as witchcraft; those who admired them called it philosophia.
The Greeks widely ascribed the invention of astrology to Zoroaster and the Magians. The name of Zarathustra was even reshaped by the Greeks into “Zoroaster” and given the popular (false) etymology as a compound made up of the Greek words zóros, “undiluted or shining,” and astron, “star.” In fact, history shows that the Persians did not invent astrology. That distinction goes to Mesopotamia and Egypt. But when the Persians conquered both Mesopotamia and Egypt under the Achaemenid emperors in the sixth century BCE, they quickly synthesized and systematized astrological ideology into a coherent philosophical and operative system of magic. A system that had been used for general purposes was made into a part of the science of the Magians. The Persians were the first to cast horoscopes on nativities (of persons and institutions), which included the calculation of ascendant planets. This is another reason why the magoi (Lat. magi) are placed in the legend of the nativity scene of Jesus. The Persians so perfected the science of astrology that they were credited with its virtual invention. We will see how an aspect of astrology—the division of the year into 360 degrees, divided into 12 zodiacal signs of 30 degrees each—is a fundamental feature of the workings of Mazdan magic.
When Rome carried on its own centuries-long struggle against the Persian Empire, the Romans generally adopted many of the same polarized attitudes that had been held earlier by the Greeks. For a Roman such as Pliny, the magoi or magi of the Iranian world were famed for their religious, scientific, and philosophical sophistication within the company of Greco-Roman philosophers; but for Roman political propagandists, the same Persians could be vilified as practitioners of “magic.” Each side had its own agenda. At the most basic level, the classical resistance seems to have been against the Zarathustran insight that there is no true god but Consciousness, and that man is endowed with this gift, with which he can begin to awaken, philosophize, and directly observe the abstract principles upon which the gods are based.