Magi

Summary

The Magi were the priests of the western Iranians, and no other name is known for their priests under the Medes, the Achaemenids, the Parthians and the Sasanians. The oldest record of them is the Behistun inscription, which Darius I had carved on a rock face in western Iran after 522 BCE. Darius says in it: after Cambyses had secretly killed his brother Bardiya, a man who was a Magus, Gaumata by name, rose up in a town by a mountain called Arakadri on the fourteenth of the month Viyakhna, 11 March 522, and lied to the people, saying: I am Bardiya, son of Cyrus, brother of Cambyses. All the people went over to him from Cambyses, Persia, Media and the other lands, and he seized the kingdom. No one, Persian or Mede or of our own house, dared say anything against Gaumata the Magus, for the people feared him: he killed many who had known the real Bardiya, so that they would not know he was not Bardiya. Until I came: I prayed to Ahura Mazda, Ahura Mazda helped me, and with a few men I killed Gaumata the Magus and his foremost followers at a fortress in Media on the tenth of Bagayadi, 29 September 522, and I restored the temples he had destroyed and the pastures, herds and houses he had taken from the people.

Herodotus tells the same events as a story: two Magus brothers rebelled against Cambyses while he was in Egypt, and one set the other on the throne as Smerdis son of Cyrus. Seven Persian nobles broke in, killed them and cut off their heads, and ran out with the heads shouting, and the Persians killed every Magus they met until nightfall stopped them. Herodotus says that day is the greatest feast the Persians keep, which they call the Killing of the Magi, and on it no Magus leaves his house. Herodotus also says the Magi were one of the six tribes of the Medes; that they interpreted dreams for Astyages, king of the Medes; that the Persians offer no sacrifice without a Magus present, who chants over it "the song of the birth of the gods"; that the Magi leave a dead body until a bird or a dog has torn it, and kill with their own hands ants, snakes and everything that creeps or flies. With Xerxes, the Magi poured libations to the heroes at Troy.

The idea their stories turn on is that the Magus is the man without whom no sacrifice is accepted: he chants the birth of the gods, interprets dreams and keeps fire, earth and water pure. That is why kings feared him when he came near the throne, and the day of their killing became a feast; and then the Magi became the kings' own priests: the Persepolis tablets record Magi drawing barley and wine from the royal stores, among them a Magus who received grain for libations to Mithra, to a mountain and to a river. From the work of a priest who sees what others do not, the word took its meaning among those who watched from outside: for the Greeks the magos was at once sorcerer and sage, and from it came the word for magic in the languages of Europe; Matthew's Gospel has "Magi from the East" following the star to Bethlehem; and the Qur'an names the Magians among the communities between whom God will judge on the Day of Resurrection.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Persian essay makes the Qur'anic Majūs the Persian word itself, gives it an Arabic root in majja and majusa, and draws a road from the Akkadian mašmašu, the incantation priest, into Persian, then Greek, then Latin, then English magic: "all the words for magic in Europe go back to a Babylonian priest". The first end of the road holds letter for letter: Majūs is maguš, the Old Persian nominative of the Behistun inscription; Persian g is Arabic j, and š becomes s as Aramaic š does in the words that entered Arabic. The last end holds too: the Greek word for magic was made from the Greek word for the Magus. But the Akkadian start does not hold. Darius's Babylonian scribes wrote the title ma-gu-šu as a word foreign to their language, and the Akkadian priest's name has other letters, m and š twice over. The word travelled from Persian into Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, not from Akkadian into Persian. What remains is the essay's majja: m and j are the letters of mag-, and from the same root comes majmaja, to speak without being plain; the detail is under Linguistic Root.

Linguistic Root

Forms of the word

Majūs and maguš

Lane says the Majūs are a nation and the word is Persian; majūsī is one of them, majjasahu is to make someone a Magian and teach him the religion, and tamajjasa is to become one. The Arabic word keeps the Old Persian nominative maguš with its final š, the form the Aramaeans wrote mgwš on the Persepolis tablets and in the Elephantine papyrus and Darius's Babylonian scribes wrote ma-gu-šu. Persian g is Arabic j, and Aramaic š is Arabic s, as in sabt from šabbtā and masīḥ from mšīḥā.

The road from mašmašu

The essay derives the word from Akkadian mašmašu, the incantation priest. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has two entries that settle the matter. The first, magušu, it defines as "magus (member of a priestly class in ancient Media and Persia)" and calls an "Old Pers. word", citing the Babylonian sentence of Behistun: when I had slain Gaumata the magus. The second, mašmaššu, is the exorcist, a Sumerian loanword; in the incantations the exorcist calls himself Marduk's messenger. The Akkadian priest's letters are m-š and m-š; the Magus's are m and g. Bartholomae's Old Iranian dictionary gives the word's origin as unknown and records that a derivation from Assyrian, proposed in 1904, was rejected by Nöldeke and Bezold. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says no satisfactory Indo-European etymology has been found and that some scholars have taken the word from a pre-Median language of the country.

Majja and majmaja

The root the essay reads is majja. Lane: majjahu min fīhi, he cast forth a drink or water from his mouth; the bees majjat the honey; the sun majjat its spittle; speech the ears reject is speech they tamujjuhu. From the same root reduplicated: majmaja fī khabarihi, he was not explicit in his information; majmaja al-kitāba, he made the writing indistinct; majmaja bi-fulān, he led someone along an indirect course of speech, turning him from one state to another. The Persian word, once its case ending and stem vowel are removed, is mag-, m and g, and Arabic j answers g. On this reading, proposed on the method, the Magus is the man whose speech is not plain on its surface: he chants the birth of the gods in words the bystanders do not follow, and he reads Astyages' dream and gets it wrong, as Herodotus tells. This is an image that meets the story, not evidence that the Iranians named their priests in this sense.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Magi and Zarathustra

Scholars disagree about how the Magi relate to the religion of Zarathustra. The Avesta has no indisputable mention of them, and its word for priest is āθravan, keeper of the fire. Some hold that the Magi were professional priests who served any Iranian god for pay and took Zarathustra as their prophet only in the fourth century BCE; others that they were Zoroastrians from the start. The Greeks counted Zarathustra himself among them: Plutarch calls him "Zoroaster the Magus", the sense his translator Babbitt gives in a note to "the sage", and says he taught that Oromazes is most like light and Areimanius like darkness. Under the Sasanians the Magi became a powerful estate supporting the throne, their chief became the mowbed, and Kirdir in the third century CE tried to make their faith the religion of the state.

Fire and sacrifice

Greek and Latin writers tell that the Magi carried the sacred fire before the Persian armies on silver altars and chanted behind it, that they guarded the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae and sacrificed a horse there every month, and that the fire of the Magi in Cappadocia was never let go out, tended with bundles of rods by men in tall turbans. A relief from Daskyleion shows two Magi at a fire altar with nose and mouth covered. Seals on the Persepolis tablets show two men beneath Ahura Mazda's emblem holding a mortar and pestle before a fire altar, the mortar in which haoma is pressed.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Persian myths does not read the Magi; it reads the fire they tended as a symbol of energy, technique and cleanliness: it is not blown on, lest breath pollute it, it is never put out, and it is fed with clean wood. That is what the witnesses describe of the Magi themselves: they cover their mouths at the altar and tend a fire that is never extinguished.

The Greek accounts of the Magi hold two things that never separate: the priest without whom no sacrifice is valid, and the man to be feared. At Behistun and in Herodotus the Magus comes near the throne by a lie, is killed, and his killing becomes a feast; then he returns as the king's priest. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says that from the fourth century BCE the word came to mean a conjurer or soothsayer and still meant a wise man, like the Magi who came from the East.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Encyclopaedia Iranica says the Greeks confused the Magi with the Chaldeans, the priests of Babylon, because the two groups did similar work in some respects: dreams, stars and incantations. In Babylon the exorcist said in his incantations that he was the messenger of Marduk, and it is from his title that the Persian essay derives the word Magi. The Magi themselves had a place in Babylonia after the Persian conquest: tablets from Uruk show a Magus checking a temple's flour store, and documents from Nippur name a settlement called "the reed huts of the Magus".

The priest who interprets the king's dream about the child who will take his kingdom stands at the start of many stories: Astyages' Magi read his dream about Cyrus, his grandson, and the child is exposed and returns, as Zal is exposed in the Shahnameh out of shame at his white hair. The page on the daevas tells of the sanctuaries Xerxes destroyed because their people worshipped the daevas, as Darius says Gaumata the Magus destroyed temples.