Abstract

Explicit, general criticism of magic is one of the distinctive features of early Greek thought. The Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease launches an attack against all purifiers and any attribution of the so-called sacred disease to divine intervention. The author goes on to insist that every disease has a nature (phusis) and a natural cause. Early Chinese physicians did not write polemics against magic or codify standards of causal explanation. Nevertheless, by the second century BCE , a group of elite physicians, basing their practice on vessel theory, developed a point of view from which they regarded traditional attributions of illness to spirits and demons as false. Demons and incantations are consistently excluded from their writings and several texts make this general rejection explicit: ‘the Way is without demons and spirits’ (Suwen 25 / Taisu 19). How was this possible without direct criticism? Drawing on comparative evidence from ancient Greece, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia, I will explore the question of how a community of investigators comes to reject magic.