If you want to know where this all comes from read some of this.
Searching for the Unknown Through Magic and Spiritism
"MEN of Athens, I behold that in all things you seem to be more given to the fear of the deities than others are." (Acts 17:22) That was what the Christian apostle Paul told a crowd assembled on the Areopagus, or Mars' Hill, in the ancient city of Athens, Greece. Paul made that remark because earlier he had seen that "the city was full of idols." (Acts 17:16) What had he seen?
2 Without a doubt, Paul had seen a variety of Greek and Roman gods in that cosmopolitan city, and it was obvious that the life of the people was wrapped up in their worship of the deities. For fear that by chance they might neglect to venerate any important or powerful deity who could thus become incensed, the Athenians even included "an Unknown God" in their worship. (Acts 17:23) That clearly demonstrated their fear of the deities.
3 Of course, fear of the deities, especially of unknown ones, is not limited to the Athenians of the first century. For thousands of years, it has dominated nearly all mankind. In many parts of the world, almost every aspect of the people's life is directly or indirectly involved with some deity or with spirits. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the mythologies of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and others were deeply rooted in ideas about gods and spirits, which played an important role in personal and national affairs. During the Middle Ages, stories about alchemists, sorcerers, and witches were rampant throughout the realm of Christendom. And the situation is much the same today.
Rites and Superstitions Today
4 Whether people are aware of it or not, many things that they do are linked with superstitious practices or beliefs, some having to do with deities or spirits. For example, did you know that birthday observance has its origin in astrology, which attaches great importance to one's exact birth date? What about the birthday cake? It appears to be related to the Greek goddess Artemis, whose birthday was celebrated with moon-shaped honey cakes topped with candles. Or did you know that wearing black at funerals was originally a ruse to escape the attention of evil spirits said to be lurking on such occasions? Some black Africans paint themselves white, and mourners in other lands wear unusual colors so that the spirits will not recognize them.
5 Besides these popular customs, people everywhere have their superstitions and fears. In the West, breaking a mirror, seeing a black cat, walking under a ladder, and, depending on where you are, Tuesday or Friday the 13th are all viewed as omens foreboding something evil. In the East, the Japanese wear their kimono with the left side folded over the right, for the other way is reserved for corpses. Their houses are built with no windows or doors facing the northeast so that the demons, which are said to come from that direction, will not find the entrance. In the Philippines, people remove the shoes of the dead and place them beside the legs before the burial so that "Saint" Peter will welcome them. Old folks tell youngsters to behave by pointing out that the figure on the moon is "Saint" Michael, watching and writing down their deeds.
6 Belief in spirits and deities, however, is not limited to seemingly harmless customs and superstitions. In both primitive and modern societies, people have resorted to various means in order to control or appease the fearsome spirits and to gain the favor of the benevolent ones. Naturally, we may first think of people in remote jungles and mountains who consult spirit mediums, medicine men, and shamans (priests of magic) when sick or otherwise in dire straits. But people in cities large and small also go to astrologers, psychic readers, fortune-tellers, and soothsayers to inquire about the future or to obtain help in making important decisions. Some, even though nominally belonging to one religion or another, pursue such practices with enthusiasm. Many others have made spiritism, black magic, and the occult their religion.
7 What is the source or origin of all these practices and superstitions? Are they just different ways of approach to God? And most important, what do they do for those who follow them? To find the answers to these questions, we must look back into the history of man and get a glimpse of his early ways of worship.
Reaching for the Unknown
8 Contrary to what evolutionists may claim, a human possesses a spiritual dimension that makes him different from and superior to the lower creatures. He is born with the urge to search out the unknown. He is ever struggling with questions such as: What is the meaning of life? What happens after one dies? What is man's relationship to the material world and, in fact, to the universe? He is also driven by the desire to reach out to something higher or more powerful than himself in order to gain some control over his environment and his life.-Psalm 8:3, 4; Ecclesiastes 3:11; Acts 17:26-28.
9 Ivar Lissner in his book Man, God and Magic put it this way: "One can only marvel at the perseverance with which man has striven, throughout his history, to reach outside himself. His energies were never directed solely toward the necessities of life. He was forever questing, groping his way further, aspiring to the unattainable. This strange and inherent urge in the human being is his spirituality."
10 Of course, those who do not believe in God do not view matters quite that way. They generally attribute this human tendency to man's needs, psychological or otherwise, as we have seen in Chapter 2. However, is it not our common experience that when faced with danger or a desperate situation, most people's first response is to appeal to God or some higher power for help? This is just as true today as it was in times past. Thus, Lissner went on to say: "No one who has carried out research among the oldest primitive peoples can fail to understand that they all conceive of God, that they possess a lively awareness of a supreme being."
11 How they endeavored to satisfy that inborn desire to reach out to the unknown was quite another matter. Nomadic hunters and herdsmen trembled at the power of wild beasts. Farmers were particularly attuned to the changes in weather and seasons. Dwellers of the jungles reacted quite differently from people living in the deserts or mountains. In the face of these varied fears and needs, people developed a bewildering variety of religious practices through which they hoped to appeal to the benevolent gods and appease the fearsome ones.
12 In spite of the great diversity, however, there are certain common features recognizable in these religious practices. Among them are reverence and fear of sacred spirits and supernatural powers, the use of magic, divining the future by signs and omens, astrology, and diverse methods of fortune-telling. As we examine these features, we will see that they have played a major role in shaping the religious thinking of people around the world and throughout the ages, even including people today.
Sacred Spirits and Supernatural Powers
13 The life of people in early times seemed to be filled with mystery. They were surrounded by inexplicable and perplexing events. For example, they could not understand why a perfectly robust person should suddenly fall ill, or why the sky should fail to give rain at the usual season, or why a bare, seemingly lifeless, tree should turn green and appear full of life at a certain time of the year. Even one's own shadow, heartbeat, and breath were mysteries.
14 With man's inborn spiritual inclination, it was only natural that he attribute these mysterious things and happenings to some supernatural power. However, lacking proper guidance and understanding, his world soon came to be filled with souls, spirits, ghosts, and demons. For example, the Algonquian Indians of North America call a person's soul otahchuk, meaning "his shadow," and the Malays of Southeast Asia believe that when a man dies, his soul escapes through his nostrils. Today, belief in spirits and departed souls-and attempts to communicate with them in some fashion-is nearly universal.
15 In the same manner, other things in the natural environment-sun, moon, stars, oceans, rivers, mountains-seemed to be alive and to exert a direct influence on human activities. Since these things appeared to occupy a world of their own, they were personified as spirits and deities, some benevolent and helpful, others wicked and harmful. Worship of created things came to occupy a prominent place in almost all religions.
16 We can find beliefs of this kind in the religions of practically every ancient civilization. The Babylonians and Egyptians worshiped their gods of the sun, moon, and constellations. Animals and wild beasts were also among their objects of veneration. The Hindus are noted for their pantheon of gods, numbering into the millions. The Chinese have always had their sacred mountains and their river gods, and they express their filial piety in ancestor worship. The ancient Druids of the British Isles held oak trees as sacred, and they gave special reverence to mistletoe growing on oak. Later, the Greeks and Romans contributed their share; and belief in spirits, deities, souls, demons, and sacred objects of all sorts became solidly entrenched.
17 Though some people today may view all such beliefs as superstitions, these ideas are still to be found in the religious practices of many people around the world. Some still believe that certain mountains, rivers, strangely shaped rocks, old trees, and numerous other things are sacred, and they worship them as objects of devotion. They build altars, shrines, and temples at these places. For example, the Ganges River is sacred to the Hindus, whose fondest wish is to bathe in it while alive and have their ashes scattered on it after death. Buddhists consider it an extraordinary experience to worship at the shrine in Buddh Gaya, India, where the Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. Catholics go on their knees to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico or bathe in the "sacred" waters at the shrine in Lourdes, France, in search of miraculous cures. Veneration of created things rather than of the Creator is still very much in evidence today.-Romans 1:25.
The Rise of Magic
18 Once the belief had been established that the inanimate world was full of spirits, good and bad, it led easily to the next step-attempts to communicate with the good ones for guidance and blessings and to appease the evil ones. The result was the practice of magic, which has flourished in practically every nation past and present.-Genesis 41:8; Exodus 7:11, 12; Deuteronomy 18:9-11, 14; Isaiah 47:12-15; Acts 8:5, 9-13; 13:6-11; 19:18, 19.
19 In its most basic sense, magic is an effort to control or coerce the natural or supernatural forces to do man's bidding. Not knowing the real cause of many everyday happenings, people in earlier societies believed that the repetition of certain magical words or incantations, or the performance of some ritual, could bring about certain desired effects. What lent credibility to this sort of magic was that some of the rituals actually worked. For example, the medicine men-essentially magicians or sorcerers-of the Mentawai Islands west of Sumatra were reported to be surprisingly effective in curing people suffering from diarrhea. Their magical formula was to have the sufferers lie face down near the edge of a cliff and lick the ground from time to time. What made it work? The soil on the cliffs contained kaolin, the white clay commonly used in some of today's diarrhea medicines.
20 A few successes of this kind quickly negated all the failures and established the reputation of the practitioners. They soon became members held in awe and high esteem-priests, chiefs, shamans, medicine men, witch doctors, mediums. People went to them with their problems, such as the healing and the prevention of sickness, finding lost items, identifying thieves, warding off evil influences, and meting out vengeance. Eventually there came to be a large body of superstitious practices and rituals that dealt with these matters as well as other events in life, like birth, coming of age, betrothal, marriage, death, and burial. The power and mystery of magic soon dominated every aspect of the people's lives.
Rain Dances and Spells
21 In spite of the enormous variety in the magical practices of different peoples, the basic ideas behind them are remarkably similar. First, there is the idea that like produces like, that a desired effect can be produced by mimicking it. This is sometimes called imitative magic. For example, when shortage of rain threatened their crops, the Omaha Indians of North America danced around a vessel of water. Then one of them drank some of the water and spit it into the air in imitation of a sprinkle or shower. Or a man might roll on the ground like a wounded bear to ensure that he would be successful in his bear hunt.
22 Other people had more elaborate rituals, including chants and offerings. The Chinese would make a large paper or wooden dragon, their rain-god, and parade it around, or they would take the idol of their deity out of the temple and place it in the sun so that it could feel the heat and perhaps send rain. The ritual of the Ngoni people of East Africa includes pouring beer into a pot buried in the ground in a rain temple and then praying, "Master Chauta, you have hardened your heart towards us, what would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your children the rains, there is the beer we have given you." Then they drink the remaining beer. This is followed by song and dance and the shaking of branches dipped in water.
23 Another idea behind magical practices is that objects that have belonged to a person continue to influence him even after they are separated from him. This led to the practice of casting a spell on someone by working on something that once belonged to that person. Even in 16th- and 17th-century Europe and England, people still believed in witches and wizards who could cause people harm with this kind of power. The techniques included such things as making a wax image of a person and sticking pins into it, writing his name on a piece of paper and then burning it, burying a piece of his clothing, or doing other things to his hair, fingernail cuttings, sweat, or even excrement. The extent of these and other practices can be seen by the fact that Acts of Parliament were enacted in England in 1542, 1563, and 1604 declaring witchcraft a capital offense. In one manner or another, this form of magic has been practiced by people in almost every nation throughout the ages.
The Future in Signs and Omens
24 Often magic is employed to uncover hidden information or to peer into the future by signs and omens. This is known as divination, and the Babylonians were noted for it. According to the book Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion, "they were masters in the arts of prescience, predicting the future from the livers and intestines of slaughtered animals, from fire and smoke, and from the brilliancy of precious stones; they foretold events from the murmuring of springs and from the shape of plants. . . . Atmospheric signs, rain, clouds, wind, and lightning were interpreted as forebodings; the cracking of furniture and wooden panels foretold future events. . . . Flies and other insects, as well as dogs, were the carriers of occult messages."
25 The Bible book of Ezekiel reports that on one military campaign, "the king of Babylon stood still at the crossways, at the head of the two ways, in order to resort to divination. He has shaken the arrows. He has asked by means of the teraphim; he has looked into the liver." (Ezekiel 21:21) Conjurers, sorcerers, and magic-practicing priests were also a regular part of the Babylonian court.-Daniel 2:1-3, 27, 28.
26 People of other nations, both Oriental and Occidental, also dabbled in many forms of divination. The Greeks consulted their oracles regarding great political events as well as mundane private affairs such as marriage, travel, and children. The most famous of these was the oracle of Delphi. Answers, thought to be from the god Apollo, were provided through the priestess, or Pythia, in unintelligible sounds and were interpreted by the priests to create ambiguous verses. A classic example was the answer given to Croesus, king of Lydia, which said: "If Croesus crosses the Halys, he will destroy a mighty empire." It turned out that the mighty empire destroyed was his own. Croesus met defeat at the hands of Cyrus the Persian when he crossed the Halys to invade Cappadocia.
27 In the West the craft of divination reached a peak with the Romans, who were preoccupied with omens and portents in nearly everything they did. People of every social class believed in astrology, witchcraft, talismans, fortune-telling, and many other forms of divination. And according to an authority on Roman history, Edward Gibbon, "the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true." The famous statesman and orator Cicero was an expert in looking for omens in the flight of birds. The Roman historian Petronius observed that judging by the multitude of religions and cults in some Roman towns, there must have been more gods than people in them.
28 In China, more than 100,000 pieces of oracle bones and shells dating from the second millennium B.C.E. (the Shang dynasty) have been unearthed. They were used by the Shang priests in seeking divine guidance for everything from weather to the movement of troops. The priests wrote questions in an ancient script on these bones. Then they heated the bones and examined the cracks that appeared and wrote down the answers right on the same bones. Some scholars believe that from this ancient script, Chinese writing developed.
29 The most well-known ancient Chinese treatise on divination is the I Ching (Canon of Changes; pronounced Yee-Jing), said to be written by the first two Chou emperors, Wen Wang and Chou Kung, in the 12th century B.C.E. It contains detailed explanations of the interplay of the two opposing forces yin and yang (dark-bright, negative-positive, female-male, moon-sun, earth-heaven, and so on), which many Chinese still believe to be the controlling principles behind all life's affairs. It presents the picture that everything is ever changing and nothing is permanent. To succeed in any undertaking, one must be aware of and act in harmony with all the changes of the moment. Thus, people ask questions and cast lots and then turn to the I Ching for answers. Through the centuries, the I Ching has been the basis for all manner of fortune-telling, geomancy, and other forms of divination in China.
