Persian Empire
Deep Dive 10 min read

The Magi: The Priestly Class of Ancient Media

The English words magic, magician, and mage, and the French magicien, the Italian mago, the German Magier, all descend from the name of an actual ancient Iranian priestly class. The Magi were the priests of the Medes, attested in the Assyrian sources of the ninth century BCE, prominent in the Achaemenid court, powerful in the Sasanian state, and remembered in the West as the Magi of the Gospel of Matthew who followed a star from the East to the infant Jesus. The semantic shift from “Median priest” to “practitioner of the dark arts” is one of the more striking reversals of meaning in the history of religious vocabulary. It happened in the Hellenistic period, as the Greek magos acquired a pejorative sense, and the negative meaning is the dominant one in the New Testament. The positive sense — the wise man from the East, the Magus as sage — survived in the Magi of the Gospel and in the Three Kings of medieval legend, and was later taken up by Renaissance figures like Paracelsus, John Dee, and the Rosicrucians.

Magi scholarship in English is centred on Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians (1975) and the multi-volume History of Zoroastrianism (1991–, with Grenet and others), Shaul Shaked’s Dualism in Transformation (1994), and Albert de Jong’s Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (1997), which is the indispensable book on the Graeco-Roman material. Stausberg’s Zoroastrianism (2022) is the most recent overview. Matthew Stolper’s work on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, and the recent work of Mark Garrison and Wouter Henkelman on the Achaemenid cult, are reshaping what we can say about the Magi in the Achaemenid period. For the Achaemenid state, Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander (2002) is the right starting point.

For the connected topics, see the clusters on Zoroastrianism, Persian Mythology and Ahura Mazda, and Mithraism. The long-tail on whether Zoroastrianism is still practised treats the modern descendants.

The Median Magi in the Assyrian and Greek sources

The Magi are first attested in the Assyrian sources. The term magu appears in the inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BCE) referring to Median priests, and in the inscriptions of Sargon II and Sennacherib as a class of Median and possibly Babylonian functionaries. The Greek magos is, in origin, an unadapted borrowing from Old Persian magush (Median maguš).

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, gives the most detailed Greek account: the Magi were a tribe (phylon) of the Medes who interpreted dreams, performed sacrifices, and accompanied the king. Strabo, in the Geography 15.3.15, reports that the Magi in Cappadocia and Pontus were a hereditary priestly class with a monopoly on the cult of fire. Plato, in the Alcibiades (122a), calls the Magi the instructors of the Persian kings and the interpreters of the Avesta. The Greek tradition, from Herodotus onwards, was that the Magi were the foundation of the Greek theoretical sciences: the doctrine of the two principles, the doctrine of the soul, the doctrine of the cosmic cycle. Aristotle, in the De Mundo, attributes to the Magi a doctrine of the two principles, the good and the evil.

The reality, as Stausberg and de Jong have both argued, is that the Magi as a class were, in the Hellenistic period, a much more diverse phenomenon than the Greek sources acknowledge: hereditary Median priests, Persian fire-temple officiants, Babylonian star-readers, and freelance wonder-workers, all called magos by Greek writers, with the result that the Greek tradition gives us a single picture of a class that was, in practice, several classes.

The Magi in the Achaemenid period

The political role of the Magi in the Achaemenid Empire is the subject of considerable debate. The Behistun inscription of Darius I (c. 520 BCE) does not, in fact, prominently mention the Magi; the famous passage about the death of the “Magus” Gaumata — the imposter who took the throne of Persia in 522 BCE — refers to Gaumata as a Magus, in the sense of a Median priest, who impersonated Bardiya, the son of Cyrus. The passage is one of the sources for the political role of the Median priesthood in the early Achaemenid state, but it tells us about an event, not about the regular duties of the Magi at court. Boyce and Shaked both caution against reading too much from this single passage. Whether the Magi formed a separate caste, a learned class, or simply a guild of ritual specialists is, in the older scholarship, contested.

The Achaemenid evidence beyond Behistun is thin. The Magi are attested in a few personal names. The Persepolis Fortification Tablets — Matthew Stolper’s work on these is the modern standard, with the publication continuing under his students — document a “house of the Magi” in the Achaemenid heartland, but the tablets are administrative, not theological, and the role of the Magi in the Achaemenid cult is reconstructed from later sources and from archaeology. Margaret Cool Root’s work on Achaemenid art and Mark Garrison’s recent work on the Elamite and Persian archives have put the cult of the Magi in a clearer light, but the picture is still incomplete. The recent work on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets has identified a figure called Aspacabara, “holder of the horse of the Magi,” and a “Magus” named Naksh-i-Rustam who supervised workers; the evidence is fragmentary and the institutional role is not yet clear.

In the Parthian period (247 BCE – 224 CE) the Magi continued as a recognised priestly class, and the evidence is somewhat better. The Greek and Latin sources from the period treat the Magi as a hereditary caste, with a special role in the cult of the dead and in the imperial coronation ritual. Plutarch, in the Life of Artaxerxes (the Artabanus story in the Artaxerxes), describes the Magi as officiating at the royal funeral. The fire-temple tradition continued, and the Sasanian dynasty inherited the institution from the Parthian and Achaemenid states.

The Sasanian Magi

The Sasanian period is the high point of the Magi as a corporate body. The Sasanian state, in important respects, functioned as a Magian state: the dynasty was Zoroastrian, the state religion was Zoroastrian, and the Magi were the principal religious officials. The terminology is Middle Persian: mobad (priest), herbed (teacher), dastur (the senior priest of a community), and mobadan mobad (the high priest of the empire). The mobadan mobad sat on the imperial council and, in some periods, was the most senior religious figure in the state.

The great Sasanian fire temples were the principal institutions of the Magi. The fire of Adur Farnbag in Fars, the fire of Adur Gushnasp in Media (at Takht-e Soleyman, in the mountains of Azerbaijan), and the fire of Adur Burzen-Mihr in Khorasan were the three great fires of the Sasanian state. The “five great fires” sometimes listed in older literature are not securely attested; the standard list is of three. The fire of Adur Gushnasp was the fire of the wuzurgān, the great noble families, and was associated with the investiture of the Sasanian king. The fire of Adur Farnbag was the fire of the priests, and the fire of Adur Burzen-Mihr was the fire of the warriors. Takht-e Soleyman, with its lake and the temple complex around it, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a major Zoroastrian site in Iran.

The Sasanian Magi were organised in a hierarchy. The mobad performed the Yasna ritual, the herbed taught the catechism and trained the students, the dastur presided over a community. The mobadan mobad was the chief priest of the empire and was often a member of the royal council. The Sasanian council of mobads was, in the late Sasanian period, a major forum for theological debate; the Bundahishn was compiled, in part, to settle the dispute between the orthodox and the Zurvanite positions, and the famous theological council under Khosrow I Anushirvan (531–579 CE) was called to clarify the relationship between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. Mary Boyce’s “The Pious Foundations of the Zoroastrian Priesthood” (BSOAS 1968) Boyce’s article on the institutional economics remains the indispensable study of the Sasanian church.

The Biblical Magi and the Western tradition

The Magi of the Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12) are the most famous Magi in the Western tradition. The Gospel of Matthew, written probably in the last quarter of the first century CE, describes them as Magi who came from the East to Jerusalem, followed a star, and brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. The identification of the Magi with the Median priestly class is a Christian development; the Greek magoi in Matthew could mean astrologers, magicians, or Persian priests, and the choice of meaning is not clear from the text.

The cult of the Magi developed in the Christian West. The Gospel of Matthew gives the number of the Magi as three (by inference from the three gifts); the names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar are attested from the sixth century. The relics of the Magi were said to have been translated from Persia to Constantinople by St. Helena, then to Milan by Bishop Eustorgius, and finally to Cologne by Frederick Barbarossa in 1164, where the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral remains. The feast of Epiphany on 6 January celebrates the visit of the Magi in the Western church; the Dreikönigsfest is still observed in German-speaking regions, and the chalk inscription of the three kings’ names and the year on the lintel of the house is a German Catholic custom that I have seen in Bavaria but never, to my knowledge, in Catholic Austria.

The Magi in the astrological tradition

The association of the Magi with astrology is ancient. Manilius, in the Astronomica (first century CE), Pliny the Elder in the Naturalis Historia, Plutarch in the De Iside et Osiride, and the later Greek astrologers (Vettius Valens, Firmicus Maternus, Hephaestio of Thebes) all attribute the origin of astrology to the Magi of Persia. The figure of the Magus in the Hellenistic and Roman astrological tradition was the Persian sage who could read the stars and interpret the will of the gods.

The transmission is real but indirect. The Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek traditions of astrology each contributed to the later synthesis, and the Magus was a literary figure as much as a historical one. In the Sasanian period, the tradition continued: the Shahrazur astrology, the Zik of the Sasanian church, and the Bundahishn’s cosmographical sections all reflect a developed astrological tradition attributed to the Magi. The Arabic and Persian astrologers of the early Islamic period — Abu Ma’shar (Albumasar), al-Kindi, and the astrologers of the Abbasid court — inherited this tradition. The Zand itself, the Pahlavi exegetical tradition, is a body of commentary rather than an astrologer, and conflating the two is a mistake I have seen made in undergraduate essays.

The Magi in the Christian and Islamic traditions

The Christian treatment of the Magi was more favourable than the Greek. The Gospel of Matthew presents the Magi as the first Gentile visitors to the infant Jesus, and the Magi in Christian art are typically depicted as noble, bearded, and Eastern. The Christian rejection of the cult of the Magi as a positive religion — the Christian fathers were quick to point out that the Magi of the Gospel were not the priests of the Persian Mithras cult, even if the two groups shared a name — was less a rejection of the Magi themselves than an attempt to distinguish Christian piety from the cult of Mithras. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Eusebius all make this point.

The Islamic treatment of the Zoroastrians (called al-Majus in the Arabic sources) is more complicated. The Qur’an mentions the Majus in the verse on the religious communities of the book (Qur’an 22:17), and the classical jurists debated whether the Zoroastrians were Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book) with a recognised legal status or simply a tolerated community (dhimmis) without a revealed scripture. The dominant view, by the time of the classical jurists, was that the Zoroastrians were dhimmis but not Ahl al-Kitab in the strict sense; the status entitled them to protection but not to the same legal privileges as Jews, Christians, and Sabians. The Sassanid tradition of the Magi as the senior priestly class was preserved in the early Islamic administration, where the dastur continued to function as the head of the Zoroastrian community.

For further reading

  • Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1975).
  • de Jong, Albert. Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (1997).
  • Shaked, Shaul. Dualism in Transformation (1994).
  • Stausberg, Michael. Zoroastrianism (2022).
  • MacKenzie, D. N. A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (1971).
  • Russell, James R. Zoroastrianism in Armenia (1987).
  • Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009), for the Sasanian institutional context.
  • Garrison, Mark B. “The Ritual Landscape of Persepolis” (in Topoi 2017) and subsequent articles on the Achaemenid cult.