Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome

Lindsay C. Watson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350108950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Parting company with the trend in recent scholarship to treat the subject in abstract, highly theoretical terms, Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome proposes that the magic-working of antiquity was in reality a highly pragmatic business, with very clearly formulated aims - often of an exceedingly malignant kind. In seven chapters, each addressed to an important arm of Greco-Roman magic, the volume discusses the history of the rediscovery and publication of the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a key source for our understanding of ancient magic; the startling violence of ancient erotic spells and the use of these by women as well as men; the alteration in the landscape of defixio (curse tablet) studies by major new finds and the confirmation these provide that the frequently lethal intent of such tablets must not be downplayed; the use of herbs in magic, considered from numerous perspectives but with an especial focus on the bizarre-seeming rituals and protocols attendant upon their collection; the employment of animals in magic, the factors determining the choice of animal, the uses to which they were put, and the procuring and storage of animal parts, conceivably in a sorcerer's workshop; the witch as a literary construct, the clear homologies between the magical procedures of fictional witches and those documented for real spells, the gendering of the witch-figure and the reductive presentation of sorceresses as old, risible and ineffectual; the issue of whether ancient magicians practised human sacrifice and the illuminating parallels between such accusations and late 20th century accounts of child-murder in the context of perverted Satanic rituals. By challenging a number of orthodoxies and opening up some underexamined aspects of the subject, this wide-ranging study stakes out important new territory in the field of magical studies.

1

Introduction

In academic quarters it has become almost de rigueur to initiate discussion of Greek and Roman magic with a host of abstract questions such as ‘what do we understand by the term “magic”? Which of the various definitions on offer best captures its essence?¹ Can magic be legitimately distinguished from religion?² Is the convergence of magical with religious usage so close that the term “magic” should be abandoned altogether as a descriptive category in favour of hybrid labels like “magico-religious phenomena” or “unsanctioned religious activity”?³ Should magic be studied using an emic or an etic approach?⁴ Is “magic” so elusive and nebulous a phenomenon that it is better apprehended using a taxonomic method, breaking the field down into generic categories, divination, cursing, healing and so on?⁵ How legitimate is it to study Graeco-Roman magic in a comparative way, adducing examples of magical praxis from societies widely separated in both time and space from those of the ancient Mediterranean?’⁶

In books on Graeco-Roman magic, questions such as these are routinely incorporated in introductory chapters surveying the development of theoretical and definitional approaches to the study of magic over the last hundred years or so. These commence with Sir James Frazer, whose monumental The Golden Bough in effect first announced magic as a subject of scholarly discourse, and continue through the important contributions of Malinowski, Lévy-Bruhl, Evans-Pritchard, Mauss and Tambiah, to name the most significant figures. Triggered by the issues listed above, supplementary theoretical questions also raise their heads. They include: what contribution can pragmalinguistics make to comprehending the rituals and speech-acts which informed the magic of Greek and Roman Antiquity?⁷ Can cognitive theories of religion help illuminate and unpick the magical mindset of Graeco-Roman times, or assist with the contested issue of whether magic and religion are discrete phenomena?⁸

The above topics have issued in a vast and frankly daunting bibliography. They have also generated a good deal of scholarly heat. Daniel Ogden, the UK’s leading authority on the magic of Greece and Rome,⁹ states in the bracingly polemical preface to his 2008 monograph Night’s Black Agents: Witches, Wizards and the Dead in the Ancient World:

readers will be grateful and relieved to be spared the narcissistic posturings about the definition of magic in an ancient context that ritually populate the introductions to parallel books, not to mention the childish rehearsals of doxography that attend them. Their befuddled authors confuse the attempt to give final definition to an abstract concept, which is self-evidently impossible, with the delineation of a coherent core of source-material for study, which, in this case, is easy … the combination of weak philology with arbitrary theorising has been corrosive. It has produced a wholly unsympathetic history of ancient magic that no one in antiquity could have found intelligible.

Polemical blasts have not been lacking from the other side of the ideological fence. The anthropologist Stanley Tambiah’s critique of Keith Thomas’s monumental 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic attacks the historian for ignoring the symbolism of magic and witchcraft and for being ‘insensitive to the performative features of ritual acts that are familiar to students of the linguistic philosophy of J. Austin and followers’.¹⁰ Tambiah refers here to the distinction made by Austin between ‘illocutionary’ and ‘perlocutionary’ speech-acts, that is, between utterances that are essentially static and descriptive, and those that effect a change in attendant circumstances. A straightforward instance of a perlocutionary utterance would be when the author of a defixio, curse tablet, spoke the formula ‘I bind X’. In the mind of the curser, the situation of the target is materially altered by the words uttered, in that he or she is thereby rendered no longer capable of autonomous action. The theory of performative utterance championed by Austin and Tambiah has been extremely influential in studies on Graeco-Roman magic, but, as C.A. Hoffman points out in a riposte to Tambiah, Thomas is in effect being attacked here for failing to privilege the analytical categories which happen to interest Tambiah; in other words Tambiah is being arbitrarily doctrinaire.¹¹

The present work will not go down the theoretical path sketched above. The reasons are twofold. First, because questions of the kind catalogued there will simply not have troubled the head of, say, a wise-woman who came to purify with eggs and sulphur the house of a sick mistress or a man suffering unsettling dreams,¹² a herbal physician who attempted to heal a disease using plant derivatives culled under specific ritual protocols so as not to vitiate their curative powers, or a person who inscribed or commissioned a defixio with the intention of harming an enemy. Such persons had no need to meditate on the metaphysics of magic. Why so? Because individuals who engaged in magic knew that it worked, or fully expected it to do so. Copious examples of this belief have been assembled in the following chapter: it is worth noting here that, so deep-rooted was the faith in the power of magic that, according to the first century CE sage Apollonius of Tyana, even in cases where magic had been deployed without success, its exponents did not abandon their belief in its efficacy, but rationalised the failure by blaming themselves for some crucial procedural omission (Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. 7.39.1–2).

A second reason for avoiding an excess of abstraction is that, amid the thicket of theory, there is a risk of losing sight of a key fact: that magic is a profoundly pragmatic business with concrete, clearly delineated aims, no matter how diverse, be these causing someone to fall helplessly in love with you, tilting the outcome of a chariot race in your favour, silencing an opponent in court, obtaining a revelatory vision of a deity, acquiring grace and charm in the eyes of others, or even ridding an orchard of caterpillars by leading a woman who is experiencing her first menstruation, with hair and clothes unbound, three times around the garden beds and hedge.¹³ To put it another way, magical acts have a sharp and exclusive focus on the end result, large or small, and all its energies are ultimately channelled towards that outcome.¹⁴

The present work will concentrate on aspects of Greek and Roman magic that best encapsulate the practical, goal-focused nature of ancient magic, its purpose of eliciting quite specific outcomes, a feature that remains a constant in the thousand or so years covered by this study and expresses itself in a multiplicity of ways. Some of these topics will be familiar, some less so, others are decidedly contested in the specialist literature.

Chapter 2 examines the large corpus of amatory spells, in both the Greek Magical Papyri (of which more below) and curse tablets. These characteristically invoke, in a manner that can only be described as solipsistic, physical and psychic torments upon the love-object, with the intention of reducing that person to a condition of utter debilitation in which they will perforce yield to the spell-caster’s desire for complete sexual compliance, as the only way to be rid of their sufferings. The chapter argues against the fashionable trend to rationalise the violence of the spells by treating it as purely symbolic, or as a therapeutic retrojection of the agent’s own amatory pangs back onto the party who occasions these. On the contrary, it is suggested, the violence is real, so that to speak of ‘love-magic’ is a complete misnomer; ‘sex-magic’ would be a better label. The second half of the chapter takes issue with the widely canvassed view that, when it comes to erotic magic, there is a radical disconnect between life and literature: according to this thesis, in reality it is men who practise such magic, whereas in literary accounts amatory magic is portrayed as an entirely female preserve. Examination of texts ranging from the fourth century BCE to late Antiquity reveals this to be a false dichotomy. In regard to amatory magic there is ample evidence for female agency, and of women’s capacity for erotic self-determination.

Chapter 3 opens by surveying the main features of defixiones, curse tablets, which enlist supernatural means to ‘bind’ or hobble the actions or well-being of others for the benefit of the curser. The (generally agonistic) contexts in which they are used are forensic, amatory, competitive and economic. A further, specialised category is ‘prayers for justice’; these solicit divine assistance to punish persons perceived to have wronged the curser, usually in the shape of a theft. From early times defixiones may seek to encompass the death of an enemy: there is some reluctance to acknowledge this feature of curse tablets. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to examining the various ways in which major recent finds of defixiones, especially from Bath, Rome and Mainz, have altered or modified perceptions of the medium by throwing up a host of unexpected features. These include using the sanctuary of non-chthonic gods for deposition of the defixio, the investing of the curse-text with a patina of literary allusion, a taste for retributive violence and cruelty which exceeds that hitherto seen, the enlisting of cultic protocols to fashion individual curses, and an extreme instance of the magical principle of ‘pluralising for power’. The chapter concludes with a glance at a British curse tablet which may or may not have had a part in the genesis of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The fourth chapter is concerned with the use of herbs in magic, an integral part of the art from its very beginnings. The magical dimension of herbs and plants is especially on view in the bizarre ritual and gestural protocols which attended their picking, the goal-focused, hands-on pragmatism of magic in the countless, often quaint-seeming curative regimes of which they form part. Botanical derivatives were fundamental to ancient therapeutics, both rational and folk-medicinal. Herbal magic proves a convenient venue for examining the thought processes and rationales that governed the collection, selection and administration of plants, in particular the key principles of magical sympathy, antipathy and contiguity. These various ideas are illustrated and analysed in some detail, as conveniently illuminating a broad swathe of magical beliefs. Here I draw particularly on the Investigation into Plants of Theophrastus, on the medical writers Dioscorides and the more magically inclined Marcellus Empiricus, but above all on the Natural History of the Elder Pliny, who is an indispensable fount of information on Greek and Roman magic, in a work which is remarkable for its blend of scepticism, polemic and credulity in regard to magic. The conclusion of the chapter draws attention to the characteristic admixture in ancient therapeutics of the pharmacologically potent with the arrantly magical, and notes that the particular medicinal properties ascribed in Antiquity to medicinal plants are sometimes confirmed by modern science; this suggests that, for all its magical overlay, the traditional medicine of Greece and Rome was a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Violence of Amatory Magic
• 3 Defixiones: A Recent History
• 4 Magic and Herbs
• 5 Animals in Magic Patricia Watson
• 6 Fictional Witches
• 7 Human Sacrifice in Ancient Magic?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright