The English word magic is derived through the Latin, Greek, Persian, Assyrian from the Sumerian or Turanian word imga or emga ("deep", "profound"), a designation for the Proto-Chaldean priests or wizards. Magi became a standard term for the later Zoroastrian, or Persian, priesthood through whom Eastern occult arts were made known to the Greeks; hence, magos (as also the kindred words magikos, mageia, a magician or a person endowed with secret knowledge and power like a Persian magus.
In a restricted sense magic is understood to be an interference with the usual course of physical nature by apparently inadequate means (recitation of formularies, gestures, mixing of incongruous elements, and other mysterious actions), the knowledge of which is obtained through secret communication with the force underlying the universe (God, the Devil, the soul of the world, etc.); it is the attempt to work miracles not by the power of God, gratuitously communicated to man, but by the use of hidden forces beyond man's control.
Its advocates, despairing to move the Deity by supplication, seek the desired result by evoking powers ordinarily reserved to the Deity. It is a corruption of religion, not a preliminary stage of it as Rationalists maintain, and it appears as an accompaniment of decadent rather than of rising civilization. There is nothing to show that in Babylon, Greece, and Rome the use of magic decreased as these nations progressed; on the contrary, it increased as they declined. It is not true that "religion is the despair of magic"; in reality, magic is but a disease of religion.
