Ogilvy - The great wizards of antiquity: the dawn of Western magic and alchemy

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Great Wizards of Antiquity: The Dawn of Western Magic and Alchemy 2019 by Guy Ogilvy.

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First e-book edition 2019

E-book ISBN: 9780738755816

Book design by Ted Riley

Cover art by Eric Hotz

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

Editing by Annie Burdick

Interior illustrations by Eric Hotz

Map in Preface by the Llewellyn Art Department

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-4412-4

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the following for their part in bringing this book into being:

My family and friends, in particular my mother and Sabrina Rowan Hamilton for insisting and assisting; Jack Price for advising me to attend the London Book Fair; Bill Krause of Llewellyn, who I met there, and the whole team at Llewellyn, particularly Elysia Gallo, for her faith and patience; finally, my wife Victoria and my old mucker Frank Mollett for their unflagging su pport.

Dedication

For Martha, Joe, Millie, Ivo, and Jack.

Co ntents

: Prehistoric and Mythic Magic

: The Return of the Lion Man

: Orpheus and the Magic of Music

: The Pre-Socratic Sorcerers of Ancient Greece

: Prophets, Caves, and S ages

: Plague-Busters, Skywalkers, and Time-Travel lers

: The Man with the Golden T high

: Sorcerers in Philosophers Clot hing

: The Western Alchemical Tradition

: Graeco-Egyptian and Islamic Alc hemy

: Chrysopoeia in Christe ndom

: The Stranger of One Nights Acquaint ance

: Alchemy T oday

P reface

This book is what the great Charles Forte would have described as a Book of the Damned; its pages are filled with characters, tales, and notions that the sensible, rationalistic modern world has long since damned as being bogus, beyond the pale, deluded, or just plain preposterous. This is not a book about stage magic, trickery, and sleight-of-hand, although some of the great wizards whose stories I shall be telling certainly resorted to trickery on occasion. Unlike the real wizards of this book, all the most skillful illusionists I know are card-carrying atheists who scoff at the notion of higher powers or inherent meaning at play in the universe. If, gentle reader, you are also of such a mind, fear not; your time may not be entirely wasted. There are plenty of splendid tales to amuse you here, which you may find fascinating even if you believe them to be founded on nonsense. You may even be intrigued to discover that most of the characters I will be parading here played, albeit often unwittingly, an important role in opening the Pandoras box that created the scientistic world of today, where orthodox reality is defined by weights and measures and reduced to its constituent material parts. There is, to be sure, great wonder and amazement to be experienced even in such a pragmatically constrained worldview, but the great wizards who form the subject of this book were inspired by the knowledge that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in such a philosophy. Their inspiration led them to explore the nature of being, with results that ultimately shed light upon material reality in the same way that a four-dimensional object might cast a three-dimensional shadow. In this respect, an adept might consider scientific realism to be a semantic shadow-play quite incapable of illuminating the true nature of being; a sort of reductio ad absurdum . Ha ha! Small wonder that magicians have tended to make rationalists so cross over the cent uries.

Traditional magic is as old as human history and has been practiced by all peoples in all times throughout the world. It is, perhaps, hard for many living in the real world of today to imagine that magic could ever have been a reality, that it ever could have worked. There is a well-developed tendency these days to believe that such childish notions were the product of ignorance, superstition, and fear; the hag-ridden, benighted fancies of our repressed forebears, subjugated as they were by domineering theocracies in league with brutal monarchies determined to control them and keep them in the dark. The reality, however, is much more complex and infinitely more intere sting.

There was a time, even in historical Western Europe, the cradle of secular materialism, when reality was more fluid, when the world was steeped in magic and mystery. Indeed, if truth be told, the fairy tales, myths, and legends of high medieval gothic Europe remain a nagging part of who we are, still haunting our dreams as vivid and compelling reference points in our cultural imagination, as do the great dramas of Greek and Norse mythology, the magic and romance of the Arabian Nights, and the mystique of ancient Egypt. It is from the latter realm that the magical traditions of Europe are principally drawn, and it is on these traditions and their most inspired and daring practitioners that this book will largely focus.