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Rating: 
Summary: On casting lots......
Review: WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC IN EUROPE: BIBLICAL AND PAGAN SOCIETIES, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark is the first in a six-volume series of scholarly essays on the subject of magic and witchcraft in Europe from the Iron Age through modern times. I have read five of the six books, and found them to be very scholarly, extremely interesting, and best of all-objective. The last book in the series, Volume 4. "The Period of the Witch Trials" (known as the "burning times" in 15th Century Europe), is scheduled to be published in late 2002. The historians, linguists, archeologists, and other social scientists who worked on these volumes are academics and experts in their subject areas. Volume I contains two essays, "Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia" by Marie-Louise Thomsen and "Magic in Ancient Syria-Palestine and in the Old Testament." Thomsen's essay examines and comments on literary and other material found in archeological digs in Mesopotamia. Treasures unearthed in what is today modern Iraq speak of lost empires (Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian) and wonders of the ancient world such as the White Ziggurat and the Hanging Gardens. Mesopotamia (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the Moon God Sin and the Goddess Inanna ruled) has produced numerous ancient cuneiform writing tablets which describe the power of precious stones, amulets for the protection of babies, love charms, potency incantations, and a variety of other practices for dealing with ghosts, evil portents, healing and the removal of curses. The work of Babylonian astrologer/astronomers still amaze. Cryer's work tackles the notion of the Bible as "truth" head on. He sets about constructing the story of magic in ancient Israel and Judah (Syria-Palestine) using archeological evidence and other extra-biblical material, as well as the Bible. He says the Old Testament is an "anno mundi" chronology that takes the moment of creation as it's starting point. However, "the Biblical anno mundi chronology is badly out of synchronization with world history." Cryer argues extra-Biblical material cannot be used merely to "illustrate" Bible text, i.e. the Bible should not be treated as a privileged source by scholars but must be subjected to the same scrutiny and analysis as other historical documents. For example, "All indications are that the territorial states of Israel and Judah existed...." However, the archeological record does not support the stories of Moses and the wandering of the Jews in the wilderness following 400 years in Egypt. Cryer suggests the Durkheimian distinction between the religion of the group and the magic of the individual may be misleading. He says Jewish priests of the Old Testament practiced magic as part of their religion, but their magic was not very different from that of non-Jewish "sorcerers" or magicians they condemned. Cryer provides numerous examples from Biblical text that reveal magical thinking/action, and he compares them with similar thinking in texts from Mesopotamia. He suggests that it comes down to this-the magic others do is evil while the magic sanctioned by your group is religion. He says the Old Testament priests condemned astrology because they did not know how to do it. Regarding the magical practice of "casting lots" to predict an outcome, Cryer suggests the magi/priest knew it would work on average, but could not explain why. Casting lots is not very different from what modern statisticians do when they conduct an exit poll in an election. Even today, no one can explain WHY probability works (ask any mathematician). It is MAGIC.
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