One of the two Australian stamps issued for Christmas this year reproduces Durer’s engraving of the Adoration of the Magi. Oddly enough, hardly any of the facts linked with them and portrayed in the picture are Scriptural.
One of the favourite stories at Christmas tells of the magi — the three kings — who, following a star, came from the East to pay homage to the Christ-child in the manger at Bethlehem.
But going back to the Gospels, the original source, the relevant passage in Matthew (2:1) merely speaks of “magi” (often rendered “wise men”) without an indication of their number and not saying at all that they were kings. Equally, their traditional names said to have been Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar, do not appear in the New Testament either.
All these fanciful details were added much later, and are mere fiction. Tertullian, a lawyer who was converted to Christianity in AD 190 to become a famous father of the church, was the first to suggest that the magi were “almost kings” (in his Latin text fere reges). But by the sixth century their royal status was taken for granted and linked with the passage in the Psalms (72:10) that spoke of far-off kings who “shall bring presents” and “offer gifts”.
That there were three of them is a claim first made by Origen, another father of the church and an eminent biblical scholar, who died about AD 254. He thought that such must have been their number as — according to the Gospel — they had carried three different gifts — the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh, and they must have done so separately.
It was from fabulous ancient Persia that the world was given all magic. It stems from the old Persian word magov, which was the original title bestowed by the Medes, long before Zoroaster, on their priestly class.
These priests, like the Hebrew Levites, jealously guarded the monopoly of their profession. Worshipping the fire, they kept it burning continuously in their temples. The earth was equally holy to them, and therefore to defile it with human remains they decried as sacrilegious.
Indeed, it was those priests who, for this reason, built the first towers of silence on which to place the bodies of the dead for their flesh to be devoured by vultures.
When eventually — in the sixth century BC — the original nature worship was replaced by the dualism of Zoroaster, the magov retained his position and his word was law. He wore a distinctive white robe and a tall felt cap with side flaps that covered his jaws. His numerous functions comprised the offering of certain animals which were regarded as creatures of the world of darkness.
But to visitors from foreign lands nothing was so impressive and more conspicuous in their practice than the occult part of their ministry: the way they interpreted dreams and omens, appealed with incantations to invisible forces, and looked into the future. To the Greeks this seemed their sole occupation, and therefore they adopted their name and made it part of the Greek vocabulary, in which magos became the description of a sorcerer, a wizard, a person endowed with supernatural power.
The Romans then borrowed the term from the Greeks, and assimilating it to their own tongue, created the magus, much better known in the plural form — the magi. It was merely another step to call all the work of the (new type of) magi — magic!
It is a telling example of the survival of errors, and how superficial observation can cause the adoption of totally novel notions which, like modern magicians in their conjuring work, might focus people’s attention on the fanciful and conceal from them the real and complete features. And oddly enough, in Persia itself, the original sacred magi, through religious contempt of Zoroastrian priests by another faith, became so debased that its modern derivation magh came to mean a low-class innkeeper.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One