Ancient Mediterranean world
The root word for magic (Greek: mageia; Latin: magia) derives from the Greek term magoi, which refers to a Median tribe in Persia and their religion, Zoroastrianism. The Greco-Roman tradition held that magicians possessed arcane or secret knowledge and the ability to channel power from or through any of the polytheistic deities, spirits, or ancestors of the ancient pantheons. Indeed, many of the traditions associated with magic in the Classical world derive from a fascination with ancient Middle Eastern beliefs and are concerned with a need for countermagic against sorcery. Spells uttered by sorcerers and addressed to gods, to fire, to salt, and to grain are recorded from Mesopotamia and Egypt. These texts also reveal the practice of necromancy, invoking the spirits of the dead, who were regarded as the last defense against evil magic. Greco-Egyptian papyruses from the 1st to the 4th century ce, for example, include magical recipes involving animals and animal substances, along with instructions for the ritual preparations necessary to ensure the efficacy of the spells. Divination took many forms—from the Etruscan art of haruspicina (reading entrails of animal sacrifices) to the Roman practice of augury (interpreting the behaviour of birds)—and was widely practiced as a means of determining propitious times to engage in specific activities; it often played a role in political decision making. Ancient Roman society was particularly concerned with sorcery and countersorcery, contests associated with the development of competitive new urban classes whose members had to rely on their own efforts in both material and magical terms to defeat their rivals and attain success.
Ambivalence toward magic carried into the early Christian era of the Roman Empire and its subsequent heirs in Europe and Byzantium. In the Gospel According to Matthew, the Magi who appeared at the birth of Jesus Christ were both Persian foreigners of Greco-Roman conception and wise astrologers. As practitioners of a foreign religion, they seemed to validate the significance of Jesus’ birth. However, magus, the singular form of magi, has a negative connotation in the New Testament in the account of Simon Magus (Acts 8:9–25), the magician who attempted to buy the miraculous power of the disciples of Christ. In medieval European Christian legends, his story developed into a dramatic contest between true religion, with its divine miracles, and false demonic magic, with its illusions. Nonetheless, belief in the reality of occult powers and the need for Christian counterrituals persisted, for example, in the Byzantine belief in the "evil eye" cast by the envious, which was thought to be demonically inspired and from which Christians needed protection through divine remedies.