The Magi

The Magi (Old Persian magu-, Elamite maku, Babylonian magu, Greek magos, Latin magus) are the only recorded designation for the priests of all the western Iranians across the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian periods. To the Greeks they were the indispensable men of Persian religion, the officiants without whom no sacrifice could be made; to the administrators of Darius's own kingdom they were a title in the ration-lists, drawing barley and wine from the royal storehouses for the cult. They are, at once, one of the best-attested and one of the most elusive of the peoples of the empire: named on clay from Persepolis to Babylon to Elephantine, described at length by outsiders who did not share their tongue, and yet silent themselves, for no Magus of the Achaemenid age left us his own account of what he believed. This entry follows the priests through the evidence, and keeps the great question about them, how far they were already the Zoroastrians the later Greeks took them for, an open and well-defined uncertainty.

A Median tribe, or a priestly class

The fullest ancient account is Herodotus', and he is explicit: the Magi were one of the six tribes of the Medes (1.101), a hereditary priestly clan who held an influential place at the Median court as interpreters of dreams and readers of signs (1.107).^[1] Many classical writers followed him in taking the Magi for a Median people. But the word magu- has no agreed Indo-European etymology, and this has left the question open. Some scholars supposed it an aboriginal, pre-Iranian element absorbed into Median society; Émile Benveniste argued instead that magu signified a member of a particular social class already in proto-Iranian, and kept that sense into the Avesta.^[10] Others cut the knot the other way: Strabo (15.3.1) calls the Magi a Persian tribe, and Giuseppe Messina and Ernst Herzfeld held that they were a class or estate rather than a tribe at all. The Elamite and Babylonian scribes who copied Darius's Behistun text simply transliterated the title, finding no word of their own for it, which suggests they met it as something foreign and specific. De Jong, weighing the same evidence, notes that the Avestan cognate of magu- appears to mean "(member of a) tribe", so that the very word may have been confused with the name of an actual tribe, and that nothing in the Greek or the Iranian record requires the Magi to have been Medes at all.^[11] Dandamayev's judgement, in the reference treatment, is cautious: whether the sixth-century Persians already had priests of their own whom they called Magi, and whether the term also covered any Mede who performed priestly functions and so carried no ethnic sense at all, cannot now be settled.^[8] What is clear is that in Media and Persia alike, the Magi were the only recognised body of priests, though the old Elamite cults kept their own.

The priests of the ration-lists: the Persepolis tablets

The surest Achaemenid evidence for the Magi is the least literary. In the Elamite Fortification tablets from Persepolis, the maku appear repeatedly, mostly as recipients of rations, grain, flour, rams, wine, beer and fruit, drawn from the royal warehouses for the requirements of the cult and for their own keep. They are found not only at Persepolis but across all of south-western Iran. Their personal names, where given, are Iranian. Their functions here are strikingly concrete: one document has the Magus Ukpi issued twelve measures of grain, three for the ceremony called lan, and three each for the worship of Mithra, of a mountain, and of a river, a libation-service to river and peak that matches exactly what the Greeks report.^[6] Another Magus bears a title Ilya Gershevitch read as framazd, an "outstanding memoriser", probably a priest who knew the sacred hymns by heart; others carry titles that George Cameron, Gershevitch and Walther Hinz took for Old Iranian words for a fire-tender or fire-kindler, though the readings are contested. De Jong sets out the same set of functionaries the tablets seem to distinguish, a Magus (magu-), a fire-priest (ātrvaxša-), a high-priest (āθravapati-) and a specialist in the hymns (framazdā), while stressing that the interpretation of these Elamite spellings remains unsettled.^[11] The tablets also show the Magi were not only cultic functionaries: the same men handled and disbursed grain, so that the title magus even appears as the personal name of a grain-handler. Alongside them the tablets name another word for priest, Elamite šatin, more common than maku, whose bearers serve Iranian gods (Ahura Mazdā among them) but sometimes the supreme Elamite god Humban as well, so that the two terms may have overlapped in sense. Here, in the driest administrative record, is the firmest ground we have: from at least the reign of Darius I, the Magi were the official priests of the Achaemenid crown.

What they did: fire, sacrifice, and the chant

Herodotus gives the classic description of the Magus at the rite, and marks his necessity:

"A Magian man stands by them and chants over them a theogony (for of this nature they say that their incantation is), seeing that without a Magian it is not lawful for them to make sacrifices." (Herodotus 1.132, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

The act of sacrifice was performed by the layman himself; the Magus was the officiant who made it lawful and sang over it the birth of the gods. Herodotus stresses, too, that the prayer at such a sacrifice was never for the self alone:

"For himself alone separately the man who sacrifices may not request good things in his prayer, but he prays that it may be well with all the Persians and with the king." (Herodotus 1.132, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

De Jong, reading the whole passage closely, isolates just these features as the ones that struck Herodotus: that the rite was directed not to the good of the individual but to the community and the king, that a Magus had to be present, and that the flesh was not burned for the god but simply carried away.^[11]

Xenophon adds, from the perspective of the court he admired, that the Magi were the priests of the Persian kings, into whose hands the ceremonies of libation, incantation and sacrifice were given, whose instruction the kings followed in religious matters, who taught the king's own sons, and who took part in the coronation of each new king (Cyropaedia 4.5.14, 8.3.11–12).^[5] They accompanied the army on campaign with the sacred flame: Curtius Rufus describes Persian soldiers bearing the holy fire on silver altars before the troops, the Magi following behind singing ancient hymns; and Herodotus has Xerxes' Magi pour libations, sacrifice white horses to the Scamander, and cast offerings into the Hellespont for good omens (7.43, 7.113). The fire-cult and the barsom appear most vividly in the much later Strabo, describing the Magi of Cappadocia, a Hellenistic scene not to be read straight back into Persis, but continuous in its ritual furniture:

"In the midst of these there is an altar, on which there is a large quantity of ashes and where the Magi keep the fire ever burning. And there, entering daily, they make incantations for about an hour, holding before the fire their bundles of rods and wearing round their heads high turbans of felt, which reach down over their cheeks far enough to cover their lips." (Strabo 15.3.15, trans. Jones)^[4]

The bundle of rods is the barsom (Avestan barəsman), the sheaf of twigs the Iranian priest held during worship; the felt drawn over the lips is the ancestor of the ritual mouth-veil (paitidāna) that kept the human breath from defiling the flame. The gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure, showing a figure in Median dress holding just such a bundle of rods, give the same rite a face in the Achaemenid present.

The dead, and the war on the creatures of the Lie

Two practices caught the foreign eye above all, and both belong to the purity-religion the Magi kept. The first is the treatment of the dead. Herodotus reports that the Magi did not bury a dead man until his body had been torn by a bird of prey or a dog, and that they, unlike other men, killed with their own hands everything that crawls and flies (1.140), a habit that fits the later Zoroastrian war on the xrafstra, the noxious creatures of the Hostile Spirit. Strabo makes the exposure of the priests' own bodies explicit:

"They smear the bodies of the dead with wax before they bury them, though they do not bury the Magi but leave their bodies to be eaten by birds." (Strabo 15.3.20, trans. Jones)^[4]

The logic is the purity of the good creations: a corpse must not be allowed to defile earth or fire or water, and so the Magi's own dead were given not to the ground but to the birds, the rite that later Zoroastrianism formalised in the dakhma. The same care for the elements shows in the smallest daily habit:

"Into a river they neither make water nor spit, neither do they wash their hands in it, nor allow any other to do these things, but they reverence rivers very greatly." (Herodotus 1.138, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

Boyce reads Herodotus' account of Persian practice in his own day (1.131f.) as the earliest description of the Zoroastrian purity laws in action, the killing of noxious creatures, the avoidance of polluting water, the exposure of the dead, and holds that the open-air sacrifices he reports accord closely with living Zoroastrian lay usage.^[9]

The name, and its long spread

From the priests' own title, magu-, comes a word with an extraordinary afterlife. Through the Greeks magos gave mageia, the arts of the Magi, and the word grew ambiguous: it kept its dignified sense, a wise man of the East, but it also acquired a contemptuous one, and was used for conjurers, sorcerers and soothsayers. De Jong shows the derogatory sense was in fact old, already present in the tragedians and in the Heraclitus fragment of about 500 BCE, so that the two meanings, "Persian priest" and "magician", ran together in Greek almost from the first and make it the central difficulty in reading any classical notice of the Magi.^[11] That double meaning is the root of the English "magic" and "magician". The dignified sense endured in the Christian tradition through one famous passage, the magoi who came from the East with gifts for the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:1), rendered in English as the "wise men" or, keeping the word, the Magi. The confusion in Greek writing between Magi and "Chaldeans" (the Babylonian priest-astrologers) followed naturally, Dandamayev notes, from the similarity of some of their activities;^[8] the association of the Magi with astrology and occult craft is a Hellenistic overlay on the Iranian priesthood. The word had by then travelled far: the earliest Greek mentions are in Aeschylus' Persians (472 BCE), where a Magus named Arabus falls at Salamis, and in a fragment of Heraclitus of about 500 BCE.

Across the empire: Babylon, Egypt, and the reach of the priesthood

The documents show the Magi wherever the empire's Iranians went. In Babylonia, where Persian and Median officials and soldiers were stationed, Magi came to perform the rites, and the local records name them, always with Iranian names, in their administrative and legal capacities: a Magus checking a temple's flour-store at Uruk, another supervising workmen, a Magus named Zattumšu holding a field near Kish next to the lands of Marduk's own temple, a Magus among the witnesses to a business deal. In Egypt, an Aramaic deed of 434 BCE from the Jewish military colony at Elephantine lists a certain Mithrasarah, a Magus of Iranian name, among the witnesses when a Jewish colonist gave his wife half of his house.^[7] Their presence at Persepolis is confirmed in Aramaic as well as Elamite, one Aramaic docket on a Fortification tablet naming the mgw. Later, Arrian records that the Magi were appointed to guard the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae and to sacrifice a horse there each month (Anabasis 6.29), an endowed cult of the royal dead that, as Boyce notes, was maintained until Alexander came. The priesthood was, in short, an institution of the whole empire, not a local curiosity.

The Magi and the seizure of the throne: Gaumāta and the Magophonia

The Magi enter Achaemenid political history at its most violent hinge. The very earliest attestation of the word magu- is in the Behistun inscription: in 522 BCE, by Darius's account, a Magus named Gaumāta claimed to be Bardiya son of Cyrus, seized the royal power, and was overthrown by Darius and his six confederates. In the Babylonian version of the text he is called "a Mede, the Magu"; in the Elamite, again the title is simply transliterated.^[3] Herodotus tells the same story with the usurper under the name Smerdis, a Magus whom Cambyses had made steward of his household and who impersonated the murdered prince (3.61). Whether Gaumāta was a real pretender or a fiction with which Darius covered a coup against the true Bardiya is one of the deepest problems of the reign, argued in full on the accession entry. Herodotus places at the climax of the killing a debate among the conspirators, and gives Darius an argument that is startling in the mouth of the king who cut "guard thyself against the Lie" on his own rock:

"For where it is necessary that a lie be spoken, let it be spoken; seeing that we all aim at the same object, both they who lie and they who always speak the truth." (Herodotus 3.72, trans. Macaulay)^[2]

The Greek tradition holds that the slaying of the pretender and his brother was remembered in an annual festival, the Magophonia, the "killing of the Magi", on which (Herodotus 3.79) no Magus might show himself abroad. The privileges the victorious Seven took for themselves were made law:

"This they also determined for all in common, namely that any one of the seven who wished might pass in to the royal palaces without any to bear in a message, unless the king happened to be sleeping with his wife; and that it should not be lawful for the king to marry from any other family, but only from those of the men who had made insurrection with him." (Herodotus 3.84, trans. Macaulay)^[2]

How much of this is history and how much Darius's own shaping, carved into the rock and echoed by the Greeks who drew on Persian informants, cannot now be recovered. It is worth stressing that the episode does not show a Persian hostility to the Magi as such: the priesthood continued as the crown's own priests without interruption, and under Xerxes, Dandamayev observes, its influence grew rather than shrank.

How Zoroastrian were they?

The hardest question about the Magi is their relation to Zoroaster, and it is genuinely unsettled. The Greek writers make it reasonably clear that the later Magi were Zoroastrians: Aristotle, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, reports that the Magi taught two first principles, a good spirit called Zeus or Oromasdes and an evil one, Hades or Areimanios, the earliest outside statement of the dualism; and a chief Magus, Ostanes, travelled with Xerxes as a figure Greek tradition knew as a Zoroastrian high priest. But the religion of the earlier Magi is fought over. Some scholars have held the Magi Zoroastrians from the first; others, that they were the prophet's enemies. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin thought it unlikely they followed Zoroaster at the outset, and argued that the supreme god of the Medes was Mithra, not Ahura Mazdā; Gershevitch made the sharpest case for a distinction, taking the early Magi not as adherents of any one religion but as professional priests, technical experts who served the cult of any Iranian god for pay, and who adopted Zoroaster as their prophet only in the first half of the fourth century BCE, becoming thereby the authors of the syncretism we call Mazdaism.^[10] De Jong's own assessment, surveying the same debate, is that the customs Herodotus ascribes to the Magi (the exposure of the dead, the killing of noxious creatures) are typical of evolved Zoroastrianism, so that the Magi of that account "are ... best regarded as Zoroastrian priests", even while other passages may preserve traces of non-Zoroastrian Magi whose religion can no longer be recovered.^[11] R. C. Zaehner supposed they altered Zoroaster's teaching to fit the older popular notions of Iran. Against the whole approach, Mary Boyce argued the strong case for continuity, that the early Achaemenids and their priests were already Zoroastrians in the broad old-Iranian mould from which the reform grew (see the Ahura Mazdā entry, where her thesis is set out and weighed). Dandamayev's own conclusion is a deliberate agnosticism: it is difficult, he writes, to say when and to what degree the Magi adopted Zoroastrianism, just as it is difficult to say whether the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrians or not.^[8] In the polytheistic world of the time there were no fixed dogmas, and it was natural that the Magi, alongside the teaching of Zoroaster, absorbed other religious ideas and became the makers of eclectic and syncretistic tendencies. This compendium keeps that uncertainty rather than resolving it: the Magi were the Mazdā-worshipping priests of the western Iranians, and the precise shape of their creed in Darius's day is one of the things we do not know.

The priests in the record, and after

There is one material trace of the Magi at their work in the Achaemenid heartland: seal impressions on the Persepolis tablets show two figures beneath the emblem of Ahura Mazdā, holding a mortar and pestle before a fire-altar; a relief of the fifth century BCE from Daskyleion in Asia Minor shows two Magi at a fire-altar, in tunic and trousers, their noses and mouths covered. After the empire fell, the priesthood endured and spread, to Cappadocia (where Strabo found them), to Central Asia, and on into the Parthian and Sasanian ages, where at Nisa a Magus signs for great quantities of wine in the state stores, and where under the Sasanians the Magi became a powerful estate, exempt from the head-tax, their chief priest bearing the title mowbed (from magu-pati, "chief of the Magi"). In the last quarter of the third century CE the Magus Kirdēr rose to that office and pressed a militant Zoroastrian orthodoxy as the state church, leaving four rock inscriptions of his own, the priesthood at last speaking in the first person, seven centuries after Gaumāta.