Magic and religion are not the same. Witches and seers are not priests. And wiser men than I have pointed out that magic is about power, not piety. So, is there some fundamental difference between the two? Or is magic simply a pagan distortion of true religion - the invocation of false gods on a crude and blasphemous quid pro quo principle?
Well, they certainly weren't the same thing for the pagan Romans. Pliny the Elder contemned the magic of the Chaldeans (i.e. the Syrians). And the Roman authorities themselves were always trying to clamp down on wandering magicians, such as dream interpreters and sortilegi and the like. Soothsayers who read entrails could be expelled from the city of Rome. The early Christians themselves were accused by their enemies of being magickers. (Jesus Himself was said to have returned from his exile in Egypt tattooed with spells.) In fact the only sort of "magic" that the Romans approved of was augury - finding out how "auspicious" the day would be for a senate meeting, and so on - and that only when done by carefully sanctioned public officials in strictly controlled circumstances. For what it's worth, Tom Rowsell has made the point with admirable clarity that magic per se is no more comfortable in "official" pagan religions (such as the Roman state religion) than it is in Christianity.
Nor were things very different in the barbarous North. For the Vikings certainly, magicians could be either good (e.g. seeresses) or bad (e.g. witches). From Tacitus's point of view, Veleda was bad (Histories 4.61): the Germans on the other hand would presumably have disagreed. Tacitus also says the Germans' rune magic was 'simple' ('Sortium consuetudo simplex.' - Germania 10), but that if the auguries were good it was the German custom to back them up with more conventional readings of the voices and flights of birds (avium voces volatusque interrogare), not to mention the courses of sacred white horses yoked to holy chariots. Although all this could be done in private by the pater familiae, in public it would be done by the sacerdos civitatis. And of course both would first have to invoke the gods (precatus deos).
Then again, magic is not exclusively pagan either. The first magician we learn of to have converted to Christianity was Simon Magus (Acts 8), and although he gets a bad press it's rather more because he was also the first heretic than because of what he did for a living.* Divination continued to be used by Christians (and Jews!) long after the conversion. Whatever the origins and ancientry of English magic, moreover, it clearly persisted into the late mediaeval and early modern periods, and indeed the evidence for its "pagan" origins is not altogether easy to come by.
In practice, English divination for example was either Christian in origin or, at a stretch, a pre-Christian practice that came to become almost wholly Christianized. In a sermon for today's feast, Ælfric is quite uncompromising in his condemnation of augury. Indeed, he condemns omens from birds, horses, dogs and sneezing as not just superstitious and diabolical but as 'deofollicum hæðenscype devilish heathenry' and any man who trusts in them as 'na cristen, ac bið forcuð wiðersaca no Christian but an infamous apostate'. So, one is tempted to wonder if the early modern and essentially Christian practice of porch-watching (or "the church-porch vigil") had an Anglo-Saxon and even pagan precedent.
In its most famous manifestation, which is love divination (or "sex magic"), English divination tends to involve the invocation of the saints. St Agnes, St Catherine, St Anne, St Faith and St John have all had prayers aimed at them over the years either for or to identify eligible future spouses. It is probably fair to imagine though that they become associated with such auguries in the English calendar mostly because their feast days fall close to days of secular magical significance.†
I suspect the reason we today think of magic as being "the same sort of thing" as religion is partly because of the decline of religion - not to mention the concomitant rise of a quasi-superstitious belief in "science" (which in its true sense is itself simply natural magic). And this of course has led most people simply to lock "religion" and "magic" away in the same abandoned back room of an as yet un-reopened mind.
Unfortunately though, it also almost certainly has something to do with Margaret Murray's "witch-cult" hypothesis. Bear in mind, after all, that she even has an entry on 'Witchcraft' in the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929–1968 editions). According to Murray, witches didn't do deals with the Devil. Instead they were a cult that had worshipped the goddess Diana since neolithic times.
Well... yeah!
*The other magician who encounters the Apostles was Elymas Magus (Acts 13), who of course didn't fare quite so well.
†Divination and prophecy, it should go without saying, do not mean the same thing. Whereas the former may in practice mean invoking a deity for some prognosticatory sign or portent, the latter means being literally inspired by one.
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