The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The teaching

Taught from Lucian's Lover of Lies and Goethe's ballad of 1797, with Dukas and Disney after them.

Pancrates and the pestle

Lucian tells the oldest form inside a satire. In the house of a sick man named Eucrates, learned men trade tales of wonders, and Eucrates tells his own. As a young man in Egypt, sailing up the Nile, he met Pancrates, a sacred scribe of Memphis, shaven and dressed in linen, who had lived twenty-three years underground in the shrines learning magic from Isis, and who rode on crocodiles. At every inn where they stopped, Pancrates would take the bar of the door, or a broom, or the pestle, dress it in clothes and say a spell over it, and it would walk like a man, draw water, buy food and wait on them, and when they had no more need of it another spell made it wood again.

Half a spell

Eucrates longed to learn it, but Pancrates kept the spell to himself, until one day Eucrates, standing in a dark corner, overheard it: three syllables. When Pancrates went to the market he took the pestle, dressed it, spoke the syllables and told it to fetch water. It brought a full jar. Enough, he said, be a pestle again; but it would not stop, and went on carrying water until the house was flooded. In despair he took an axe and split it in two, and each half took up a jar and fetched water, so that now he had two servants instead of one.

Pancrates came home, saw what had happened, turned them back into wood, and went away and was never seen again. To this day, says Eucrates, he can make the pestle carry water, but he cannot undo it.

Goethe's broom

Goethe moved the tale into a sorcerer's workshop and gave it to the pupil left alone. The old master has gone out for once, and the apprentice, who has noted his words and works, means to make the spirits do his own will. He dresses the old broom in rags, sets it on two legs with a head on top, and sends it to the river with a pail, and the broom runs and pours and runs again until the basin is full and the floor is awash. Then he finds he has forgotten the word that stops it. He threatens, he begs, and at last seizes an axe and splits the broom in two, and both halves rise up as servants and fetch water twice as fast. As the master comes in he cries out: “Die ich rief, die Geister, werd ich nun nicht los”, the spirits that I called I cannot now be rid of.

The master's word

The master ends it in a breath: into the corner, broom, broom, be what you were. Dukas set the ballad to music a century later, and Disney gave the apprentice's part to Mickey Mouse, who falls asleep in the master's hat dreaming that he commands the stars and the sea, and wakes to find the water rising round his chair.

What the story teaches

Lucian told it to laugh at credulity: his teller is a man of standing and of philosophy who believes every wonder, and the one guest in the room who doubts goes home saying that against such tales the antidote is truth and sound reason. Goethe kept the wonder and changed the lesson, and his last lines give it: the spirits come forth as spirits only at the call of the old master, and only for his purpose. The apprentice had the words and lacked both the purpose and the end, the knowledge of what the power was for and how to send it back.

The books of ritual magic make the same point as a rule: no operation in them is complete until the spirit has been given its licence to depart, and the apprentice knew how to call and not how to dismiss.