Christian views on magic or magick vary widely among Christian denominations and individuals, as well as whether the subject matter is genuinely paranormal, a superstition, a con art, a stage illusion, or the mechanics of fantasy literature. While it is common for Christian organizations and individuals to actively condemn what they perceive to be satanic practices, some branches of esoteric Christianity actively engage in magical practices and consider them compatible with their mystical version of Christianity.
Biblical references
There are several references to witchcraft in the Bible that strongly condemn such practices. For example, condemns anyone who "casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord, and because of these detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you", and states "Do not allow a sorceress to live" (or in the King James Bible "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live").
It has sometimes been suggested that the word "witch" (Heb. מְכַשֵּׁפָ֖ה məḵaššêp̄āh) might be a mistranslation of "poisoner.""Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live: A Murderous Mistranslation?" by Elizabeth Sloane, at Haaretz.com, 17 August 2017. This view was advanced in the 16th century by Reginald Scot, a prominent critic of the witch trials, on the basis of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.Scot, Reginald (c. 1580) The Discoverie of Witchcraft Booke VI Ch. 1. His theory still holds some currency, but is not widely accepted, and in Daniel 2:2 is listed alongside other magic practitioners who could interpret dreams: magicians, astrologers, and Chaldeans. Suggested derivations of include 'mutterer' (from a single root) or herb user (as a compound word formed from the roots , meaning 'herb', and , meaning 'using'). The Greek literally means 'herbalist' or one who uses or administers drugs, but it was used virtually synonymously with magos and goēs as a term for a sorcerer. The Hebrew Bible provides some evidence that these commandments were enforced under the Hebrew kings:
The Hebrew verb , translated in the King James Version as "cut off", can also be translated as "kill wholesale" or "exterminate".
Others point to a primitive idealist belief in a relation between bewitching and coveting, reflected in the occasional translation of the Tenth Commandment as 'Thou shalt not covet'."Reflections on Ethics 65: The Tenth Commandment: The Hidden Meaning of Coveting" by Joseph Lewis (1946), at apathetic agnostic.com, 2020. This may suggest that the prohibition related specifically to sorcery or the casting of spells to unnaturally possess something.
Some adherents of near-east religions acted as mediums, channeling messages from the dead or from a familiar spirit. The Bible sometimes is translated as referring to "necromancer" and "necromancy" (). However, some lexicographers, including James Strong and Spiros Zodhiates, disagree. These scholars say that the Hebrew word kashaph (כשפ), used in Exodus 22:18 and 5 other places in the Tanakh comes from a root meaning "to whisper". Strong, therefore, concludes that the word means "to whisper a spell, i.e. to incant or practice magic". The Contemporary English Version translates as referring to "any kind of magic".
At the very least, older biblical prohibitions included those against 'sorcery' to obtain something unnaturally; 'necromancy' as the practice of magic or divination through demons or the dead, and any forms of malevolent 'bewitchery'.
Early Paulian Christianity
The Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Galatians includes sorcery in a list of "works of the flesh". This disapproval is echoed in the Didache, a very early book of church discipline which dates from the mid-late first century.Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press ): Didache
Medieval views
During the Early Middle Ages, the Christian Churches did not conduct witch trials.Cohn, Norman: "Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom." London: Sussex University Press, 1975 The Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne later confirmed the law. Among Eastern Orthodox Christians concentrated in the Byzantine Empire, belief in witchcraft was widely regarded as deisidaimonia—superstition—and by the 9th and 10th centuries in the Latin Christian West, belief in witchcraft had begun to be seen as heresy.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period (post-Reformation), belief in witchcraft became more popular and witches were seen as directly in league with the Devil. This marked the beginning of a period of witch hunts among early Protestants which lasted about 200 years, and in some countries, particularly in North-Western Europe, tens of thousands of people were accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death.
The Inquisition within the Roman Catholic Church had conducted trials against supposed witches in the 13th century, but these trials were to punish heresy, of which belief in witchcraft was merely one variety. Inquisitorial courts only became systematically involved in the witch-hunt during the 15th century: in the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who in 1384 and in 1390 confessed to have participated in a type of white magic.
Not all Inquisitorial courts acknowledged witchcraft. For example, in 1610 as the result of a witch-hunting craze the Suprema (the ruling council of the Spanish Inquisition) gave everybody an Edict of Grace (during which confessing witches were not to be punished) and put the only dissenting inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, in charge of the subsequent investigation. The results of Salazar's investigation was that the Spanish Inquisition did not bother witches ever again though they still went after heretics and Crypto-Jews.1978 "A witch with three toes too many"; Out of this World Encyclopedia 23:9-12
Martin Luther Martin Luther shared some of the views about witchcraft that were common in his time. When interpreting Exodus 22:18,Exodus 22:18 he stated that, with the help of the devil, witches could steal milk merely by thinking of a cow.Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA 16, 551 f. In his Small Catechism, he taught that witchcraft was a sin against the second commandmentMartin Luther, Luther's Little Instruction Book, Trans. Robert E. Smith, (Fort Wayne: Project Wittenberg, 2004), Small Catechism 1.2. and prescribed the Biblical penalty for it in a "table talk":
On 25 August 1538 there was much discussion about witches and sorceresses who poisoned chicken eggs in the nests, or poisoned milk and butter. Doctor Luther said: "One should show no mercy to these [women]; I would burn them myself, for we read in the Law that the priests were the ones to begin the stoning of criminals."WA Tr 4:51–52, no. 3979 quoted and translated in Karant-Nunn, 236. The original Latin and German text is: "25, Augusti multa dicebant de veneficis et incantatricibus, quae ova ex gallinis et lac et butyrum furarentur. Respondit Lutherus: Cum illis nulla habenda est misericordia. Ich wolte sie selber verprennen, more legis, ubi sacerdotes reos lapidare incipiebant.
Luther's view of practitioners of magic as quasi-demons was at odds with the Catholic view that emphasized choice and repentance. He also argued that one of the most serious perversions wrought by magic was the threatened degeneration of traditional female roles in the family.Sigrid Brauner "Martin Luther on Witchcraft: A True Reformer?", in: Brian T. Levack [ed.] "Demonology, Religion and Witchcraft: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology" (vol.1) pp. 217-230
Renaissance views
In the era of the Inquisition and anti-witchcraft sentiment, there was a more acceptable form of "purely natural" occult and pagan study, the study of "natural" phenomena in general with no evil or irreligious intent whatsoever.White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance by Paola Zambelli (BRILL, 2007)
Renaissance humanism (15th and 16th century) saw a resurgence in hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of ceremonial magic. Both bourgeoisie and nobility of that era showed great fascination with these arts, which exerted an exotic charm by their ascription to Arabic, Jewish, Romani, and Egyptian sources. There was great uncertainty in distinguishing practices of vain superstition, blasphemous occultism, and perfectly sound scholarly knowledge or pious ritual. The people during this time found that the existence of magic was something that could answer the questions that they could not explain through science. To them it was suggesting that while science may explain reason, magic could explain "unreason".
Marsilio Ficino advocated the existence of spiritual beings and spirits in general, though many such theories ran counter to the ideas of the later Age of Enlightenment, and were treated with hostility by the Roman Catholic Church. Ficino however theorised a "purely natural" magic that did not require the invocation of spirits, malevolent or malicious. Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius reportedly created incantations of his own related to beneficial communication with spirits. His works, including the Steganographia, were immediately placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. However these works were later revealed to be concerned with cryptography and steganography, and the "magical" formulae were cover texts for cryptographic content. Behind their methods however, is an underlying theological motive for their contrivance. The preface to the Polygraphia establishes the everyday practicability of Trithemian cryptography as a "secular consequent of the ability of a soul specially empowered by God to reach, by magical means, from earth to Heaven".Brann, Noel L., "Trithemius, Johannes", in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraff (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), pp. 1135-1139.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), a German magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer, and alchemist, wrote the influential Three Books of Occult Philosophy, incorporating Kabbalah in its theory and practice of Western magic. It contributed strongly to the Renaissance view of ritual magic's relationship with Christianity.Farmer, S.A; "Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486)", Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1999, Giambattista della Porta expanded on many of these ideas in his Magia Naturalis.The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns by Wayne Shumaker (University of California Press, 1972) Giovanni Pico della Mirandola promoted a syncretic worldview combining Platonism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah.
Pico's Hermetic syncretism was further developed by Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest, hermeticist, and polymath, who wrote extensively on the subject in 1652, bringing further elements such as Orphism and Egyptian mythology to the mix.Schmidt, Edward W. "The Last Renaissance Man: Athanasius Kircher", SJ. Company: The World of Jesuits and Their Friends. 19(2), Winter 2001–2002. Lutheran Bishop James Heiser recently evaluated the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as an attempted "Hermetic Reformation".Heiser, James D., Prisci Theologi and the Hermetic Reformation in the Fifteenth Century, Repristination Press: Texas, 2011.
John Dee