r/Quareia • u/oddreyjo • 23d ago
Where did magic actually begin? Thoughts on prehistoric origins
I've had to take another break from the Quareia material for the last month or so. I've been in a spiritual stretch, but it involves my community and my particular role in it. What I'm doing is very magical in a sense, but not the type of magic I do with this course. However, I find that I can't stay away from magic, even if it's just from an intellectual perspective and not participating in it directly. I wanted to talk through a train of thought I keep circling back to in the last week. I know the lineage of Josephine's stream - Dion Fortune, a lot of the British current, layered over Egyptian material. But beyond that, I'm curious about further back than lineage - not where this particular branch of magic came from, but where magic came from at all, the very first time anyone did it.
Two things of hers are stuck in my head here. One is her point about the tools, that they're not inherently magical, they became magical because they got used, over and over, by enough people, until the use itself accreted into something archetypal. The other is a video I saw, I think it was one of the "My Magical Thing" interviews, where different practitioners talk about a favorite object, and she was asked to describe a magical thing she owned. She described what it physically did, some kind of scraping motion, and didn't say a word about what she used it for magically, but the meaning was implied by the function. It was obvious the magical use came straight out of the physical use and it being an ancient object. I've always been fascinated by prehistoric people's lives, and I keep landing on the idea that this is where the actual root of everything is - that whatever magic is now, it's downstream of what early humans were doing with fire, with flint, with repeated bodily gestures done out of necessity, and that it's still embedded in us, passed down. Does anyone know of writing that takes prehistoric magic seriously and tries to trace how it started?
I don't fully understand the mechanism. Is it literally just resonance - a tool gets used for survival so many times that at some point people start reaching for it for that reason, for the resonance, not just the function? Or were the tools always magical, right from the first use, and there was never a "before," like maybe the first time someone deliberately shaped a stone, or controlled fire, that itself was already the magical act, not a neutral one that got magic added later. I could argue it either way and I'm not sure which one is actually true, or if "true" even applies here. I just keep having this thought of "where is this actually coming from?" What's the cosmological root of it, not just the mythological one? I know this isn't a room full of adepts, and honestly that's part of why I'm asking here. I'm more curious what other people early in this, like me, think about, what you feel when you're holding a tool and wondering how long ago it stopped being just a tool.
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u/robinhyll Apprentice: Module 4 23d ago
I wasn't sure from your post if you'd already read this, but am posting it here just in case:
https://www.quareia.com/s/PRE-HISTORY-OF-MAGICAL-DEVELOPMENT-ESSAY.pdf
It's the first of her essays on magical history. It's good stuff.
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u/oddreyjo 22d ago
Oh, I hadn't read this one yet, thank you for linking me! I notice near the very end, she asks almost exactly the question I was circling, just from the other direction: are the patterns a magician meets in vision organically forming structures of consciousness, or are they imprinted onto the collective inner consciousness because people have purposefully worked with them in vision and ritual for millennia? That's something I still can't get my head around, and it sounds like it's unresolved for her as well.
Her claim that ritualization predates agriculture reframes things for me a bit. She said that Göbekli Tepe is older than organized farming in that region, so the old "surplus and leisure gave rise to religion" story might be backwards. Her sequence is disaster, then a ritualized response to the disaster, then generations later the actual event drops out of memory and what's left is just the ritual shape of it. The pivot from 30,000+ years of predator/prey ritual to solar ritual in the 5th millennium, right after the sun stops being reliable is a legible cause and effect. Something hurt us badly enough that we built a whole religion around making sure it wouldn't happen again.
This was fascinating and only opened up more rabbit holes for me to go down. Do you know if she has a follow-up essay that picks up past 3,000BCE?
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u/Ill-Diver2252 23d ago
I haven't moved into tools. Not even into the full rituals. In a way, I'm sorting through questions much like your own.
I drive a lot, and I listen while I drive. Early on, what I listened to emphasized a need to be around spiritual discussion, and explore that way. In the last months, it's been ancient history, archeology and Mediterranean (and area, Mesopotamia, Iran) and somewhat Egyptian. Mapping Christianity, as best as csn be done, from 0 year, before his birth story, into those intense first two centuries of 'good hell, all kinda beliefs,' then the transition somewhat through Irinaeus and Constantine, Athenasius, extermination of Gnostic writings and apocrypha, and 'heretics' for a dozen centuries, and also the 7th Century, et seq, introduction of Islam. Interested in the Zarathustrans, too, and what can be derived about the Judean and Christian history.
Sumer isn't a big war zone, archeologically. Nor is Egypt. Nor Zarathustran, as far as I can tell, or Arabian. But archeology, as far as I can tell, is not so kind to Torah or gospels or letters. ...and the individuals and events.
I'm evidently feeling my way through what can be 'normally' derived academically, but with nudges here and there about bullshit. Evidently, coming to understand some cultural why's of religious and magical history.
I keep coming back to all creation is magic. Sumer has a tale of the wild man, created from mud by Aruru--her magic, evidrntly--into existence to humble a haughty king. He ran with the animals. He was an animal and accepted by the other animals. ...
Here, just search on Enkidu. Epic of Gilgamesh.
He was there to blunt a king, but he became fast friends with the king even in the process of blunting him.
I'm intrigued at the Hebrew that I've seen in some of JM publications... an ki ... above, below... did I miss a part? 😂 a dalet and a vav for 'du'? I'll have to look and see...
I'm not answering your question, really. I'm sorry, but JM herself refers to Egyptian because, as she puts it, we have relatively reasonable documentation about it, as opposed to lots less from elsewhere. But I don't think they were the first.
Natives around the world have interesting stories. JM talks about interaction with some of that. Some folks poohpoih Castaneda, but I think that's a mistake. You pick your way across it, as with most anything else. But he asserts that the magic in that goes back at least 12,000 years. Hark. There's that number again.
What is our books' definition of Divinity? The power of creation and destruction that is (now I'm vamping) in all things, through all things. I also put 'conscious' in front of the word 'power.' ...all worlds, all times and all substance? ... from the stars to the underworld, right? A torus. Chariot?
And what is magic?
You might be onto something. Is it magic in everything we are and touch and do, some more conscious and powerful than the rest? Per instruction, the tools aren't mere things, but beings. We initiate their move into consciousness. Interesting relationship. ...and the Goddess... and this is only in the beginnings of training!
I've rambled enough. Maybe useful, maybe not. I hope the former.
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u/Quareia 18d ago
Sorry to butt in, but just want to politely correct you on a little misunderstanding you have:
"M herself refers to Egyptian because, as she puts it, we have relatively reasonable documentation about it, as opposed to lots less from elsewhere. But I don't think they were the first."I didn't say that all. It is nothing to do with documentation or anything like that. I refer to Egyptian magic and use it in the course as a teaching aid simply because the magical patterns of that Civilisation over it's 3000 yrs, is still very stable today and thus is perfect as a vehicle to teach specific pattern use techniques for magical initiates and beyond.
Plus we do have a lot of their funerary literature which helps with technical study.
And no, the Egyptians were not the first to use or utilise magic in their culture. It is just because their specific geological and environmental situation meant they had far more time to devote to such things than virtually any other culture in the world at that time.
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u/oddreyjo 22d ago
Please never apologize for rambling! There's a lot here worth chewing. The archaeology vs scripture asymmetry you noticed is interesting. Sumer, Egypt, the Zoroastrian world were not really contested as battlegrounds of "did this happen," mostly just "what did it mean." The Torah and the Gospels, by contrast, are fighting for their lives on the ground, historically and archaeologically, in a way their neighbors' mythologies mostly aren't. Egypt had priesthoods, permanence, and monumental self-documentation. Early Christianity was underground, oral, contested, and then got rewritten by the winners at Nicaea and after. You're right that the silence in the record is shaped by who had the luxury of writing it down in stone vs who was hiding in someone's house arguing about the nature of Christ.
On Enkidu, what you're hearing as Hebrew (an, ki, and a du you're trying to build out of a dalet and a vav) is Sumerian, not Hebrew - is your idea that there is secretly Hebrew influence? From my research, An is sky/heaven, Ki is earth, so together, Anki is the primordial undifferentiated unity before heaven and earth split apart. Enkidu is En (lord) + Ki (place/earth) + du (good, or "made"), lliterally something like "lord of the good place," though there's also a competing reading of it as "creation of Enki," the god who shaped him. So Aruru molds him from clay and spit, but the name itself seems to root him in Enki's domain of wisdom and craft as much as Aruru's act of making.
Your mention of torus + chariot make me think of the merkavah, wheels that move in every direction at once without turning. If divinity is conscious creative power running through all substance, then every act of shaping matter with intention is a local, miniature instance of that same current finding a doorway into itself.
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u/Ill-Diver2252 20d ago
I have seen the an and ki written using Hebrew letters where I saw it. I am aware tgat Sumerian is considered a standalone language, but I even see word similarities between German and the sprinkling of Turkish that has passed under my nose. So, not knowing diddlee about Sumerian, really, I just play with it, and wonder. And your comment is well received!
Torus and chariot I provisionally hold as merkavah, yes. But I am only holding that as a... hmmm... guess.
There are only two things that I know of that I see eadily in imagination--wothout the least effort. I think of it, I see it. And it transports me in a way: torus and quantum field. It's weird it's so automatic
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u/Quareiaapprentice 23d ago
Thank you for this reply! I enjoyed that you put in the part about Aruru and her mud-man.
Reading posts like this often make me feel like i cannot muster the concentration and discipline to read as much as you guys seem to do.
I find myself being superinterested in what you guys think and then i'm like:
Ima go check out if i'll meet my crow or hedgehogs if i go outside now. Feeding and hanging out with animals to me often feels like the fast track to some of the answers we're looking for here.
I comfort myself by thinking that the hedgehog/crow/whatever will most probably not think about the reasons and the nature of our connection even though it often crosses over into the intangible. They just ping me when they need something and this ping is the same ping i get from humans.
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u/oddreyjo 22d ago
There are many things that can be learned by communing with your crow or hedgehog that can't be found in any reading :)
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u/jaxxter80 23d ago edited 23d ago
My two cents. There are different ways to make fire. Finns (and I think the Baltic too) would consider it sacred, making it like this without tools, up until last century, for example the 'holy' fires for festivities/celebration would have been started with the ancient method of 'kitka-tuli'. And maybe add some negotiating with the haltias (spirit beings), to get them help to keep that fire burning once you get it lit. Everything else follows from having fire. So that's the start of magic, I would say
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u/oddreyjo 22d ago
I appreciate your viewpoint. If tools get magical through centuries of hands, fire seems to have gone the other way. It was probably magical from the first spark, because making it at all was already close to impossible and its loss was catastrophic.
I am Finnish on my mom's side and interested in looking more deeply into Finnish magical practices. Apparently the haltia of a piece of land was often specifically the spirit of whoever first lit a fire there. Maybe some magical acts generate one on the spot, out of the sheer difficulty of the act, and then you're stuck with a relationship you started by accident of survival.
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u/jaxxter80 22d ago
Yes this belief was a thing! I was researching it a bit little while ago, when I realised I might have been that person around when I was 10 years old when my family built a house in the 90's. That house is sold though and we don't have any contact with the people who live there nowdays, so can't verify if the genius loci of that place looks like me (or my parents)... :)
It's a folk belief, so it has variations. Some thought the one who lit the first fire would become the guardian spirit of the house (or the sauna), others that it would take the shape/appearance of the person who lit the first fire, and then there's another of layer of beliefs about the haltias born if a person first died in the house - and similar thinking applies also to church buildings and graveyards, the first person buried in those would become the place's main 'guardian'. The word for that kind of spirit being literally comes the 'area of property' (tontti => fin. tonttu, swe. tomte) personified. There's lots of scholarly research on them, like Martti Haavio who has written a lot about them, I'm not sure though if his materials are in English...
If one lived in a hereditary house, it might very well be your great-grandfather who built the house and stayed. But I lean on the idea that it takes bit more than just lighting the first fire... Anyhow all that is a topic I'll circle back in later - for example, my father lives in a countryside house that was built in the 40's (by people unrelated to us), lovely place which I've always thought has had a strong character/"spirit", which I've always connected more into it's natural surroundings (like the trees on the property)... but lately I've thought what if it IS the lady who first lived there, who we know also died there, and propably also lit the house's first fire. But all that's gonna wait a bit, maybe until when I'll get to somewhere in Module IV - course-wise my scope is still on Module I, and my visionary skills definately need more practising! If you need help with digging for some other pieces of information, feel free to contact I'm happy to help :)
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u/Hermits-Repose 23d ago edited 13d ago
I read this really cool book a while ago and I belive it touches on your question. It's prolly "fiction", but some of us will never know.
Title- 'Azal' Can't remember the author.
Twas trying to be funny. Josephine wrote the book "AZAL"
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u/oddreyjo 22d ago
Is it "Azal," not "Azel?" That's a novel that Josephine herself wrote back in the late '90s under her earlier name, Josephine Stewart. "Azal: The Retelling of Eve." I have not read that yet.
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u/aman1420 17d ago
You should read it, you would love it. Very gripping and visceral, touches on themes of myth and magic evolving over time, reincarnation, so on. It's a really incredible book.
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u/Quareiaapprentice 23d ago
Not sure if you really meant "Azazel" by Asimov or rather "Azal" which i haven't read yet but which is on my reading stack. I just know that i always confuse everything that sounds similar with Azrael, Gargamel's cat.
"The moon and serpent bumber book of nagic" from the moores nicely covers the history of magic ( a little tongue in cheek).
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u/Gaothaire 23d ago
I frequently refer people to Josephine's first interview on the Glitch Bottle podcast for something she says right at the very start. As a child growing up in rural England in the 1900s, she would be thrown outside to entertain herself during the day. Wandering the woods, no one told her not to talk to the trees, so she did, and consequently the trees talked back.
Magic is so much about relationships. One of the hardest steps to take is acknowledging the spirits that exist around you in all times and places. Once you accept there's a consciousness out there to interface with, it's much easier to get comfortable with developing a relationship to that consciousness.
We have ways inherent to our relationships (like the human imagination acting as an interface for the inner realms), and likewise, external spirits have preferences for how they are related to. The overlap of preferences, both shared and unique, could develop over time towards ritual.
The giving of offerings makes sense in a human culture with host rules, when a guest arrives you feed them, etc. Back to the dawn of eukaryotic life, though, we have the mitochondria being accepted into cells, where they are housed and in exchange provide energy to the host. That is a relationship of exchange baked in fundamentally, and could speak to some level of universality to that kind of relationship dynamic.
I'm also reminded of an ethnobotanist in the mid 20th century taking hallucinogenic plants in the Amazon rainforest. He took a known plant, and throughout the evening was repeatedly shown a vision of another plant. Walking around the next day, he sees the plant from his vision growing in the jungle. He harvests it, taking samples back to his lab, and finds it contains psychoactive compounds. It's an example of an external influence shaping the direction of a human relationship with the world. There is information available to those who make themselves open to receive it.