Q: What does The Urantia Book say about majick (ie:paganism, witchcraft, spells etc)?

A: Thanks for your note to TruthBook.com. Please see Paper 88, Fetishes, Charms and Magic. These sorts of topics are part of our spiritual evolutionary legacy. From primitive man and even to the present time, magic has fascinated mankind. These things were a necessary part of our spiritual evolution. Magic and witchcraft were some of the ways that primitive man could try to understand and control his environment. These things were the precursors to science.

“Civilized man attacks the problems of a real environment through his science; savage man attempted to solve the real problems of an illusory ghost environment by magic. Magic was the technique of manipulating the conjectured spirit environment whose machinations endlessly explained the inexplicable; it was the art of obtaining voluntary spirit co-operation and of coercing involuntary spirit aid through the use of fetishes or other and more powerful spirits.” (88:4.1)

And even today, we see the remnants of this superstitious kind of thinking; astrology is still quite popular, and other means of trying to foretell the future hold interest for many people.

Again, from The Urantia Book:

“Gradually science is removing the gambling element from life. But if modern methods of education should fail, there would be an almost immediate reversion to the primitive beliefs in magic. These superstitions still linger in the minds of many so-called civilized people. language contains many fossils which testify that the race has long been steeped in magical superstition, such words as spellbound, ill-starred, possessions, inspiration, spirit away, ingenuity, entrancing, thunderstruck, and astonished. And intelligent human beings still believe in good luck, the evil eye, and astrology.

“Ancient magic was the cocoon of modern science, indispensable in its time but now no longer useful. And so the phantasms of ignorant superstition agitated the primitive minds of men until the concepts of science could be born. Today, Urantia is in the twilight zone of this intellectual evolution. One half the world is grasping eagerly for the light of truth and the facts of scientific discovery, while the other half languishes in the arms of ancient superstition and but thinly disguised magic.” (88:6.7)

You might also be interested in Paper 86, Early Evolution of Religion, and Paper 87, The Ghost Cults for even more information about those long-ago times in our distant past.

About paganism, we read:

“In the times of Jesus the religions of the Occident included:

1. The pagan cults. These were a combination of Hellenic and Latin mythology, patriotism, and tradition.

2. Emperor worship. This deification of man as the symbol of the state was very seriously resented by the Jew and the early Christians and led directly to the bitter persecutions of both churches by the Roman government.

3. Astrology. This pseudo science of Babylon developed into a religion throughout the Greco-Roman Empire. Even in the twentieth century man has not been fully delivered from this superstitious belief.

4. The mystery religions. Upon such a spiritually hungry world a flood of mystery cults had broken, new and strange religions from the Levant, which had enamored the common people and had promised them individual salvation. These religions rapidly became the accepted belief of the lower classes of the Greco-Roman world. And they did much to prepare the way for the rapid spread of the vastly superior Christian teachings, which presented a majestic concept of Deity, associated with an intriguing theology for the intelligent and a profound proffer of salvation for all, including the ignorant but spiritually hungry average man of those days.” (121:5.2)

Thanks so much for this interesting question. I hope my answer has been of help to you today. Please click on any of the links to open the text so you can read even more about these interesting topics.