Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2017

Judeo-Christian Attitudes
Iranian Magic as the Ancients Saw It

Historians of religion have long noted the profound influence of Zoroastrianism and Imperial Persian culture on the formation of Judaism. Doctrines of angelology, demonology, the awaiting of a coming savior, and the resurrection of the dead are just a few of the direct influences. These ideas were adopted due to a protracted exposure to Persian culture mainly during the time of the so-called Babylonian Captivity and the centuries following the liberation of the Jews from the Babylonians by Cyrus the Great (540 BCE). Cyrus is seen as the prototype of the ultimate Messiah, the perfect lord, both spiritually and materially. The Book of Isaiah calls Cyrus the “anointed” (Heb. messiah) of God. This may reflect one of Cyrus’s own religious predilections wherein he gives credit to the gods of foreign peoples for his own conquest of them. For example, he credits Marduk (chief god of the Babylonians) for the Persian defeat of the Babylonian Empire.

For our purposes it is only important to realize that certain ideas about magic and mystery (râz) were adopted by the Jews from the Persians during this time and that the whole cosmological doctrine of divine emanations developed by Zoroastrianism is at the root of kabbalistic thinking. When the Kabbalah first came under Western scholarly examination, it was seen that the Hebrews had developed their kabbalistic ideas under Zoroastrian influence in Babylon and Palestine. This was noted by Adolphe Franck as early as 1843 in his book The Kabbalah. It is also not by accident that one of the great books of Jewish magic is called the Sefer Ha-Razim (The Book of Mysteries), which deals with astrological keys to the invocation of angels. The Hebrew language lacked a word for “mystery” until it was borrowed from Persian râz. The complex interaction between the Jews and Persians during the Talmudic period has recently been chronicled by Jason Sion Mokhtarian in his book Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran.

It should be noted that there is a Hebrew word mag found in the Book of Daniel that denotes a “magician” or “diviner.” This is again a borrowing from Persian. There is also a compound Hebrew-Persian word rab-mag, “chief diviner,” found in Jeremiah (39:3 and 39:13).

The present-day animosity between the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel is a recent development. Historically, there was a friendly relationship between the Jews and Iran. From the time of Cyrus the Great forward, Iran had been a friend and sponsor of Israel and the Jewish people. The Persian Empire was a haven for Jews throughout the centuries. This tradition was even revived by the late Shah of Iran and was one of the many reasons the mullahs hated him so.

The relationship between Iranian ideas and Jewish philosophers is a deep one and goes back to oral transmissions from Zoroastrians to the Jewish writers. Naturally the Jews did not record the fact that certain ideas and concepts have their origin in Persian ideology; that is unnecessary and counterproductive. Just as Cyrus introduced Iranian concepts throughout his empire with a deliberate policy of attributing the new ideas to the conquered people’s old gods and goddesses, so too did the ideology of Eranshahr pass into Judaism unseen and little noted.

It would be an error to think that sorcery and magic were introduced to the Hebrews from Persia. From an early point in their history the ancient Jews had certainly developed their own distinctive forms of these arts and practices. However, a number of key concepts that would exert enormous importance on Jewish magical lore were clearly introduced by Persians. Among these concepts were a systematic angelology and demonology; myths of a coming savior-ruler (messiah), the judgment of the dead, the bodily resurrection of the dead, and even the philosophical basis of a true monotheism. The Hebrew myth of Genesis also owes much to Iranian symbolism: first man and woman, destructive influence of the serpent, and the presence of a cosmic tree.

When early scholars asked questions about the origin of kabbalistic doctrines such as those found in the Sefer Yetzirah, the initial answer might appear to be Neoplatonism. This would have perhaps placed the ideas in the realm of having been passed from the Persians to the Jews by way of the Greeks, which is a road many kabbalistic ideas took—although not necessarily the earliest ones. The Sefer Yetzirah may have come from an early time, say in the first few centuries BCE, with its roots in Mesopotamia. This scenario would place the genesis of the ideas clearly in the theater of the Babylonian Captivity and thus in the time period when Judaism was being influenced significantly by Mazdan concepts. The whole philosophical idea of a theology of emanation seems to have had an Iranian origin.

Following Cyrus’s liberation of the Jews, many of the latter returned to Israel, while others immigrated deeper into the Persian Empire, with some even converting to Zoroastrianism. Seeds were planted in Judaic thought that eventually sprouted as sects such as the Essenes. Others, who fundamentally misunderstood the Magian doctrine (conflating a moral duality of good versus evil with one of spirit versus flesh), developed various types of Gnosticism out of the same ideological material.

The prestige and reputation of the Magian priests of Mazda is nowhere made clearer than in the Christian story of the three Wise Men (Matthew 2:1—16). This short narrative, which became one of the most beloved and iconic passages in Christian mythology, tells of the group of magoi or magi that visited the recently born Jesus. These are Magian priests and astrologers who would have entered the Roman Empire from the Parthian Empire to the east. They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They were also famed for their astrological knowledge, as were such Magians in antiquity. They had, through observations of the stars, determined that a savior (Av. saoshyant) would be born in Israel at that time. (Magian astrologers use methods of observation and prediction based on the visible sky.) The point of the existence of the story is that early Christians wanted to show that they had the approval of the Magians, then thought to be the most prestigious priesthood in the world. It is notable that the magoi or magi not only delivered their gifts but also kept the success of their mission secret from King Herod so as to save the life of the recently born teacher. One apocryphal legend recorded in chapter 3 of the First Infancy Gospel of Jesus Christ tells of how Mary gave the visiting Magians the swaddling clothes of the baby Jesus in return for their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It is said that they took the cloth back home and placed it in the sacred fire, and it was not burned but rendered miraculous powers.⁵

Oddly, the Greek words magos and mageia (“magic”) are used in other New Testament stories in an entirely negative connotation—being translated as “sorcerer” and “sorcery,” respectively—in reference to Simon Magus (Acts 8:9—24) and certain men called Barjesus and Elymas (Acts 13:6 and 13:8). The explanation for this interpretive vacillation in translation is beyond the scope of this discussion. What remains clear, however, is that the Persian-derived nomenclature was well known among the Jews of the region and that certain Jews may have laid claim to the title magos. This was nothing new, as Daniel appears to have been accepted into the college of magi in Mesopotamia.

Many of the sayings and metaphors used by Jesus seem to have been drawn from Iranian teachings. The idea of the ultimate judgment of the dead seems to have a Magian rather than Egyptian connotation, especially when Jesus explicitly refers to a way or bridge that is exceedingly narrow, over which humans pass to be judged (Matthew 7:14). This surely reflects the Iranian Chinvat Bridge, which is said to be narrow or broad depending on the deeds being judged.

The book Jesus the Magician by Morton Smith shows just how much Jesus was a practitioner of magic as depicted in Christian texts. The whole practice of “casting out unclean spirits” as a way to heal people psychologically as well as physically is virtually unknown in Judaism before the time of Jesus and certainly does not appear before the age of Persian influence. The phrase “unclean spirit” (Gk. πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον), frequent in the New Testament, appears only once in the Old Testament (Heb. ruah tum’ah; Zechariah 13:2).

The theology of early Christianity was shaped to a significant extent by Zoroastrian ideas on four fronts. First, the whole rationale of a messiah, or savior, is predicated on the Zoroastrian concept of the saoshyant and a host of other Persian ideas that were absorbed into Jewish thought after the time of the Babylonian Exile. Second, the entire mission of Jesus seems to have been influenced by the Mazdan idea of establishing the Golden Mean (moderation) in doctrines and of providing aid to the poor, already firmly expressed in the Ahunvar, the most sacred of Zoroastrian prayers (first composed by Zarathustra himself at least fifteen hundred years before the life of Jesus). Third was the mythic and ritual significance of the death of Jesus as a way for him to intercede as a substitute for the extreme animal sacrifices being performed at the time in Jerusalem. As Zarathustra had attempted to abolish animal sacrifice and substitute a symbolic rite, so too did the early Christians—and eventually the Jews themselves. Fourth, the idea of the resurrection of the dead was an Iranian innovation, and it became a hallmark of Christian mythology: Jesus raises the dead Lazarus (John 11:1—44), and the mythic “proof ” of Jesus’s divinity comes through his own resurrection. This was all a reference to the Magian teaching of the “final body.”