The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [1911] - Get a Free Blog

182 THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.
Ananke. But he no longer had confidence in the cere
monies of his old religion. The new powers that had
taken possession of heaven had to be propitiated by
new means. The Oriental religions themselves offered
a remedy against the evils they had created, and taught
powerful and mysterious processes for conjuring fate.s?
And side by side with astrology we see magic, a more
pernicious aberration, gaining gronud.s 8
If, from the reading of Ptolemy s Tetrabiblos, we
pass on to read a magic papyrus, our first impression
is that we have stepped from one end of the intellec
tual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the
systematic order or severe method that distinguish the
work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the
doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those
of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of
logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that com
pels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes bor
rowed from medicine and popular superstition, primi
tive practices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal
rituals, beliefs repudiated by a progressive moral re
ligion, plagiarisms and forgeries of literary or liturgic
texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous
nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and
disconcerting ceremonies all these form a chaos in
which the imagination loses itself, a potpourri in which
an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to
create an inextricable confusion.
However, if we observe more closely how magic
operates, we find that it starts out from the same
principles and acts along the same line of reasoning