Magicians, witches and legendary figures of the world

Magical figures are the people, real and legendary, who stand for magic: Merlin, Baba Yaga, Circe, Hermes Trismegistus, Dr John Dee, Madame Blavatsky, the sorcerer in a village story, the Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga, and the performers Houdini and Chung Ling Soo. Some lived, some are composite, and some are pure myth. This page looks at who becomes a magic figure, and why. They are described here as stories and as history, and kept apart.

Who becomes a figure

Figures often sit at the edge of society. In many stories the witch is an older woman living alone, the sorcerer a foreigner or a rival tribe, the wise man a hermit. Real figures include John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I, and Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia (1533) shaped European occultism. Others are legend: Merlin appears in Welsh and French tales, and Baba Yaga is a Slavic folk figure who both helps and threatens.

Gender and reputation

The witch figure has been mostly female in Europe, where trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed tens of thousands of people, most of them women. In other places accusation falls on men, on the old, on the poor or on the outsider. The learned magician, by contrast, was often male, literate and protected by rank, a division that shows how class shaped who was punished. Not every figure carries a stigma: Chinese immortals, Indian rishis and Irish saints are honoured, and the line between holy person and magician depends on who is telling the story.

Colonial and modern use

Missionary and colonial writers often cast African and Indigenous healers as the witch-doctor, a term most communities reject. The word covers healers, diviners and rulers who had very different roles. Today, figures are re-used in fantasy and branding. The Merlin of modern fantasy films is a long way from the Welsh Myrddin, and the name of a real tradition may be turned into a costume. Their stories have also been tools of politics: rulers have claimed legendary magicians as ancestors, and enemies have painted rivals as sorcerers to justify their removal.

Scholars and the real person

Historians separate documented people from legend and warn that many reports of magicians were written by their enemies. Evidence for some famous names, including Hermes Trismegistus, who was long thought to be an Egyptian sage, turned out to be later Greek-language writings. Treating a figure as legend rather than biography is no insult to those who revere them. A figure who may be a real person with a name, a date and a grave belongs in a different category from a legend, even when popular memory blends them, and the entries here try to keep them separate.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

Three-legged crow: Jinsha Site Museum. Original author: ancient Shu people., Public domain, source

Onmyōdō: Unknown author, Public domain, source

Zhang Guolao: Hong Zicheng, Public domain, source

Jiang Ziya: Wang Qi, Public domain, source

He Xiangu: Zhang Lu, Public domain, source

En no Gyōja: Wmpearl, CC0, source

Nüwa: 山胖z, CC BY 3.0, source

Uchide no kozuchi: Yashima Gakutei, CC0, source

Yue Lao: 仔仔好帥, CC BY-SA 4.0, source

Wolves in folklore, religion and mythology: Unknown author, CC0, source

Banchō Sarayashiki: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Okiku ,, Public domain, source

Amabie: Unknown author, Public domain, source

Interconnected-arm gibbon: Xuande Emperor, Public domain, source

Tamamo-no-Mae: ウィキ太郎 Wiki Taro, Public domain, source

Dongyue Dadi: H2v5o68z, CC0, source

Kuzunoha: Print artist: Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳) Print artist: Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, source

Magicians, witches and legendary figures