Magic, Myth, and Superstition

Magic, Myth, and Superstition

An Adult Education Forum

What is or is not a Christian practice? How do Christians relate to pre-Christian beliefs?

The topic for this adult education forum stems from several questions, from both family and parishioners, about Native American or Chinese Christians who continue to practice folk belief. This is part of a much larger and older conversation about the relationship between Christianity and paganism.

What’s a pagan?

The word “pagan” literally means country folk, the common people. In the early centuries A.D., Christianity was primarily an urban religion. People in the country practiced ancient rituals and told ancient stories related to family history and the turn of the seasons—gods, magic, and superstitions. Paganism has since come to refer to pre-Christian religious or spiritual beliefs.

What’s magic?

All cultures in all times have believed in an invisible world of spiritual powers all about us: fairies, ghosts, angels, demons, and everything in between. These powers, it was assumed, could be bargained with or appeased—dealt with, in other words. Proper sacrifices or rituals might produce desired results. Much of this involved what we today would call “sympathetic magic,” with humans acting out symbolically what they want unseen powers to do for them. Canaanite fertility rituals are a good example.

The Church never denied the reality of these unseen powers; quite the contrary. The Church’s concern really has to do with the origin of those powers. Miracles come from God, often working His will through holy angels, saints, or relics. Sorcery, or magic, comes not from God but from other, lesser, darker spirits. While pagan societies distinguished beneficial white magic from harmful black magic—and all prescribed death for a witch—the Church forbid both white and black as idolatry. (Today, obviously, the word magician refers to illusionists, with whom the Church has no moral or theological problem.)

What is natural magic?

There is also, however, a third category: natural magic. This is the belief that certain objects may have inherent spiritual or preternatural properties without invoking any outside power. For example, four-leaf clovers are said to dispel glamour (fairy illusions). Salt is believed to repel witches and devils. And everyone knows about garlic for vampires and silver for werewolves, right? This sort of thing is considered natural magic, which traditional theology judges to be morally neutral. Morally neutral means that belief in such superstitions may be silly or ignorant, but it isn’t evil.

Divination, however, is strictly forbidden. Any attempt to discern the future, even something so light-hearted as chestnuts roasting on an open fire, holds an implicit invocation. (Later on, Christians would develop the idea of the cambion, a human being born with his or her own natural magic powers. Today we might call this person a psychic. Merlin and Harry Potter are cambions, not sorcerers.)

What about horoscopes and astrology?

One of the Church’s earliest ideological battles was against the notion of fate, in which most pagan societies strongly believed. Christians do not believe that our future is written in advance, as this denies both the freedom of the human will (with its subsequent responsibility) and God’s radical freedom to act. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.

There are, however, two different sorts of astrology: judicial astrology and natural astrology. Judicial astrology is all about fate. Everything is written in stone. This the Church outright rejects. But natural astrology is the idea that the positions and alignments of planets and stars can influence objects on earth, including crops, fish, our bodily organs, and mood swings. Belief in natural astrology, like natural magic, is considered morally neutral. Maybe the full moon makes your kids act crazy and maybe it doesn’t, but it isn’t a sin to believe one way or the other.

What about pagan philosophy?

The Church arose in the Hellenized world. This means that while early Christians were overwhelmingly Jewish, they also spoke and thought and lived a lot like Greeks (especially the educated ones). Greek philosophy is an extremely powerful and useful mode of thought. Should Jews and Christians adopt it? “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” asked Tertullian. “As God prepared the Jews for Christ by the Law of Moses, so He prepared the Greeks by philosophy,” countered Clement of Alexandria. Clement won the day. Greek philosophy became, and remains, a powerful tool for Jews and Christians alike. We express our faith using a great many philosophical terms. Aquinas perfected Christian philosophy.

What about pagan mythology?

This is the next logical question. If God prepared Jews for Christ by Moses and Greeks by Plato, might He have prepared others by Homer—by pre-Christian myths and poems? The overwhelming answer of historical Christianity has been, “yes!” George MacDonald, G.K Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Sigrid Undset are just a few recent Christian writers who have embraced this. Keep in mind that pre-Christian mythologies have survived only because Christians went to great effort to preserve them.

Christians became the inheritors of the Classical tradition. The gods of ancient Greece and Rome became “abstracts,” symbolic representations of natural or human phenomena. Aphrodite ceased to be the goddess of love and became a symbol for love: likewise Apollo for the sun, Ares for war, Poseidon for the sea, Hades for death, &c. Zeus became something like an inkling of God. Mother Nature and the Virtues fall into this category. Abstracts even have their own hexagonal halos in Christian art.

Celtic deities became fairies, ephemeral creatures of a middling nature between angel and man, in whom many Christians long believed (and many still do). This is superstition, perhaps, but not idolatry, as fairies are considered neighbors and fellow creatures of God rather than as rival gods or goddesses. The Germanic and Norse gods were fully euhemerized, which means that their myths became understood as exaggerated history. Odin was a sorcerer and Thor a warrior, but neither was a god.

Idol or icon?

Pagan just means pre-Christian, and we all have pre-Christian traditions. We are not born but baptized into Christ. Many claim that Christian holidays and traditions are all replastered paganism; that’s hogwash. But there are pre-Christian stories and practices that have been lovingly adopted. When a Native American Christian refuses to look an eagle in the eye, or uses a sweat lodge, or “smudges” with sweet grass, the concern is not the practice in and of itself but the intention behind it. Is it idolatry? Is a deity other than Jesus being invoked? Is it natural magic? Or is it good piety and Christian prayer?

Christians recognize two sorts of religious images: idols and icons. Idols point us away from God in Christ Jesus; icons draw us closer to God in Christ Jesus. Both idols and icons may be drawn from all cultures. Surely there are Native American idols—but there are beautiful Native American icons as well.