The Big Idea

(J.R.R. Tolkein's Silmarillion abounds not only with Fantasy magic, it also lists a full set of literary Pagan deities.) My previous two posts on this topic first defined what magic actually is in the Bible (an appeal to spirits or spiritual powers as opposed to seeking God) and also looked at how two millennia of Christianity have affected how the world thinks about magic (primarily it has separated out magic and religion as different things--which was not originally the case in Paganism). I repeatedly refuted the idea that "magic," Biblically speaking, is primarily understood as a quid pro quo exchange, making it fundamentally different from prayer. No, for ancient Pagans, a prayer was a ritual and a spell was too--they were essentially different aspects of the same thing. I also stated in my first post that I believe literary magic--magic in fantasy fiction, poses a real hazard for people but that hazard is not generally where Christians concerned about this...

(The FIRST title page above is a 1520 copy of the "Malleus Maleficarum," a manual on witchcraft originally published in 1487. The manual presumed all powers of ascribed to Witches were real and could only be explained as being a result of being in league with the Devil. NOTE the Catholic Church condemned this book as heresy not long after publication. It nonetheless remained popular and went through multiple editions. The SECOND title page is from the "Discovery of Witchraft," first published in 1584, which concluded witchcraft is almost entirely a result of charlatans or overactive imaginations and has almost no basis in reality.) Christianity has had a strong cultural influence on how magic has been seen throughout the centuries. Before examining that influence in some detail, it's worth repeating a few pertinent details from my last post on this topic and fleshing them out by looking at magic as seen in the Hebrew Scriptures. Magic in the real world (as...