- Joined
- Jul 3, 2023
- Messages
- 3,252
- Reaction score
- 13,489
- Awards
- 15
For the Greeks, the Romans and the Jews, Egypt was the land of mystery and magic par excellence. For the Egyptians, magic was intimately wrought up with everyday living - there were no controllers of right-thinking, no prohibitions against sorcery or divination. In fact, the gods were credited with the invention and use of magic. The pharaohs openly engaged in it. The spells - protective, maleficent, healing, execratory, amatory, binding — were committed to writing, collected in handbooks and formularies and deposited in temple libraries. Ancient Egyptian magic anticipates much of what can later be found in Greco-Roman magic.
Since the Egyptian gods had to be revivified every day, they were dependent on man to perpetuate the rituals and that ensured their existence. Hence the magician could threaten to interrupt the ceremonies and so command and force the gods to do his will. His claim to esoteric, divine, secret knowledge, especially the name of the god or demon, also put him in a superior position and gave him the upper hand over the object of his incantations. Making short shrift of things, the magician could simply say he was a god too, the equal of any that heaven or hell pitted against him.
Perhaps the best serious introduction to the Greek Magical Papyri I've ever seen, never mind the sometimes extreme proliferation of footnotes (you can safely ignore most of them since they merely serve to list sources corroborating the author's views). Even if you're familiar with the PGM, there is lots of useful information: for example, I never knew that spells became more and more complex and the barbarous names longer and more frequent over time, in contrast to ancient Egyptian spells which tended to be short, simple and to the point.
It's also interesting how scholarly terminology has changed over time - while the author takes barbarous names seriously and makes a sincere effort to explain them, he still calls them 'hocus pocus words' in 1995, something contemporary scholars couldn't get away with without being immediately branded by their colleagues as unscientific and disrespectful. The second part, the bibliography, is of course only of interest to specialised scholars.
Since the Egyptian gods had to be revivified every day, they were dependent on man to perpetuate the rituals and that ensured their existence. Hence the magician could threaten to interrupt the ceremonies and so command and force the gods to do his will. His claim to esoteric, divine, secret knowledge, especially the name of the god or demon, also put him in a superior position and gave him the upper hand over the object of his incantations. Making short shrift of things, the magician could simply say he was a god too, the equal of any that heaven or hell pitted against him.
Perhaps the best serious introduction to the Greek Magical Papyri I've ever seen, never mind the sometimes extreme proliferation of footnotes (you can safely ignore most of them since they merely serve to list sources corroborating the author's views). Even if you're familiar with the PGM, there is lots of useful information: for example, I never knew that spells became more and more complex and the barbarous names longer and more frequent over time, in contrast to ancient Egyptian spells which tended to be short, simple and to the point.
It's also interesting how scholarly terminology has changed over time - while the author takes barbarous names seriously and makes a sincere effort to explain them, he still calls them 'hocus pocus words' in 1995, something contemporary scholars couldn't get away with without being immediately branded by their colleagues as unscientific and disrespectful. The second part, the bibliography, is of course only of interest to specialised scholars.
Last edited:
