Magus the Magician?

Various modern authors start their academic treatises on ancient magic with the paraphrased proclamation that the word ‘Magic’ comes from Persian and denotes some form of fire priest. Fritz Graf’s first sentence in Chapter Two of his hugely influential Magic in the Ancient World (1994) says almost exactly that. He isn’t lying, but the evidence he is citing is much more interesting and deserving of additional column inches in, say, chapter one of a PhD project or even an online blog.

By all accounts, including Graf’s, the first actual mention of a version of the word ‘magic’ comes from the Behistun Inscription; a rather lovely multi-lingual inscription surrounding a relief sculpture on a cliff at Mount Behistun in modern day Iran. The initial author of the text was none other than Darius the Great (not the “famed” PopStars and Pop Idol musical chap Darius), but the Achaemenid Emperor (reigned 522 BC – 486 BC).

Figure 1: The Behistun Inscription (AD 2006) (C) Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]

Arranged into five columns of text, the Behistun Inscription in Old Persian Cuneiform is an autobiographical text, similar to the (much later) Res Gestae of the Roman Emperor Augustus in its function, recounting the great deeds of the Emperor. Incidentally, he is the large bloke, third from the left on Fig. 1 standing on top of one of the failed usurpers to his rule – history quite literally being written by the winner in this case.

This usurper, or attempted usurper I should say, was Gaumâta.  Gaumâta the Magian. Mr the Magian, according to Darius, raised a rebellion against him by pretending to be Smerdis, the brother of Cambyses II, from whom Darius took the Empire. Gaumâta / Smerdis’s rebellion lasts from 1st July to 29th September 522BC. Darius won.

In recording Gaumâta as a ‘Magian’, or more accurately he does so as ‘Gaumâta the Magus’, where ‘magus’ is a singular form of ‘magian’, Darius is probably using the epithet as a reference to a geographical or social group rather than using it as a vocation (think ‘Philip the Arab’ or ‘Robin of Loxley’) (see Fig.2)

Figure 2: Old Persian Cuneiform text from the Behistun Inscription (Col. 1, Line 36).

There is latterly a great amount of confusion amongst ancient authors about whether the Magi/Magians are a group of people united by place or profession, or both. There is a very useful Livius.org page about it here. I intend not to delve into the detail from the later authors at this point, but suffice to say that the Magians, whoever, wherever, and whatever they were, became regarded as practitioners of some kind of holy, religious or esoteric knowledge. They become associated closely with Zoroastrian texts and remain involved in religious practices, according to the Book of Arda Virafat least, until after the time of Alexander the Great. Whether this definition defines them as ‘magicians’ by modern standards is another question entirely…

Etymologically, and in Brief. From the Cuneiform ‘maguš’ we get the Greek ‘μάγος’ and then the Latin ‘magus’. It is from that point that the story of magic in the Roman world really begins.