Throughout the existence of humanity, it was accompanied by religion, magic, and rituals. Thanks to people who preserve their way of life in the form it existed among their ancestor’s thousands of years ago, modern anthropology studies people’s past. In particular, magic that existed near representatives of these cultures was an important element of many religions and cultures of the past. Magic can be considered the belief of people in the ability of a person to influence the forces of nature, objects, and animals. Anthropologists commonly believe that “the effects of magic are something superadded to all the other effects produced by human effort and by natural qualities” (Malinowski & Frazer, 2014, p. 327). A similar phenomenon existed both in the distant past and in our days, which can be seen in the example of magical secret communities. However, ancient iterations of magic rituals can be observed in our time, namely, as an element of mass culture.
A good case study of magic as part of the culture of the human community can be seen in the HBO series “Rome.” The events of the series touch on the era of the end of the so-called First Triumvirate, at the end of the past, and the beginning of the common era. Numerous magical practices were common in Roman civilization during that era, both among the nobility and ordinary Romans. Some rituals and concepts were borrowed from the Hellenistic world, such as the oracles-diviners who can receive visions from the gods about the future. But the hallmark of Roman magic in religion and culture were the augurs and haruspices, who enjoyed influence and power in Roman culture. The augurs used a magical ritual of fortune-telling by the flight and cries of birds, thereby trying to understand the future of individuals, cities, armies, and even the whole world.
Furthermore, a clear example of magical practice and tradition, even older than the institution of the augurs of the Romans, were the haruspices. This tradition traces its history back to the Etruscan Paleo-Europeans. Haruspics provided divinities by the entrails and blood of animals sacrificed to the gods. Their services were used by both the plebeians who donated livestock to the soothsayers and the nobility who sacrificed expensive horses and bulls. Practices like these demonstrate the long-standing interest of people in divination and prophecy obtained through magic.
The series “Rome” demonstrates the activities of both types of magicians: haruspices and augurs. For example, in the first season, a noble character from the Julian clan, to find out her future and the success of her plans, donates to the bull’s haruspex, and those by his blood determine the future of the woman. Moreover, the wife of one of the characters, Lucius Vorenus, asks the haruspex to determine her family’s future by the bird’s organs. Thus, the series reflects similar magical practices from the two contrasting social positions of Roman society.
The augurs, being for the Roman aristocrats an extremely important society of soothsayers, serve the interests of mainly the highest power figures. For example, without ritual on the augurs, Gaius Julius Caesar, one of the important characters in the first season of the series, cannot be elected to the post of the dictator of Rome. This attitude towards this group of magicians or soothsayers demonstrates the importance of magic in the eyes of ordinary Romans, and the series demonstrates this well and clearly. Moreover, for the activities of the augurs, a special zone on the forum, auguraculum, was set aside for their magical rituals with the analysis of the movements and calls of birds. Thus, the series “Rome” is, albeit artistically altered in favor of the audience’s interest, still a good example of how people of past eras perceived magic.
The practices shown in the series are portrayed realistically and correspond to the concepts in anthropology as to the motives of magic invocation. The anthropological reflections on other cultural practices of magic and generalization on the matter help understand the meaning of the magic rituals in “Rome.” Evans-Pritchard and Gillies (1976) describe the wish to find causality in random and unrelated events and seek help from soothsayers for this purpose. The same motive could be found in the women’s decisions who asked the haruspex to tell them about their future by reading special signs from nature. Next, Tambiah (2017) presents the concept of demonstrative acts for further influencing someone or something. This phenomenon could be seen in the scene when Ceasar pays an augur so that he would verify his rule by the magic ritual. Thus, the anthropological concepts are valuable interpretational devices in the popular culture about magic.
To conclude, magic has been a powerful device of humanity whose remnants are seen even in the nowadays rationalized culture of the West. These remnants are sometimes artistically represented in popular culture products, such as in the series “Rome.” It has been shown that the characters of the series exhibit two modes of behavior related to magic, the seeking for causality and persuasion. Hence, anthropology is useful for analyzing modern popular arts that reflect the past in a new form.
References
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., & Gillies, E. (1976). Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford UP.
Malinowski, B., & Frazer, J. (2014). Argonauts of the western Pacific. An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Benediction Classics.
Tambiah, S. J. (2017). Form and meaning of magical acts: A point of view. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(3), 451–473. Web.