The Magi

The Magi (Old Persian magu-, Greek magos) were the priestly specialists of Iranian religion. Herodotus lists them as one of the six tribes of the Medes, which has suggested to many that the priesthood had a Median origin and was absorbed into the Persian state cult; whatever their beginnings, by the Achaemenid period a magus was the indispensable officiant at any act of worship. Herodotus reports that a Persian who would sacrifice does not build an altar or kindle a fire, but leads the victim to a clean place and calls upon the god, and that no sacrifice may be made without a magus present, who chants over it a 'theogony'.

Their functions ran through the whole of life. They tended the sacred fire and guarded it from pollution, wearing the paitidāna (later padām), a cloth over the nose and mouth so that the breath should not defile the flame, and carrying the barsom, a bundle of sacred twigs, during the rite. They interpreted dreams and celestial omens for the king; they presided at the oath, sworn under the eye of Mithra the covenant-keeper; and they conducted the distinctive Iranian death-rite of exposure. Herodotus notes with a foreigner's fascination that the Magi, unlike other men, killed with their own hands ants, snakes, and other creeping and flying things — a practice that fits the later Zoroastrian war on the noxious creatures of the Lie.

The Magi also enter Achaemenid political history at a decisive moment: it was a magus, Gaumāta, who (in Darius's telling) seized the throne by impersonating the dead Bardiya, and whose fall Darius says the Persians afterwards commemorated in a festival, the magophonia or 'killing of the Magi'. How much of this is fact and how much Darius's propaganda is impossible to recover.