PART II
4
IT MAY BE remembered (from the first chapter) that when Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote his famous and very influential study of beliefs concerning magic among the Azande people of Central Africa, he distinguished between ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ as means of causing magical harm. The former was more of an innate power, wielded spontaneously by those born to possess it, while the latter was something that anybody could learn and which required the manipulation of certain material substances in concert with the casting of spells. It was also noted that a similar division of beliefs was held by many other traditional societies, but not by all or even by most, which is why the distinction was abandoned by anthropologists as a general one. What is worth emphasizing now is that Sir Edward found it easy to employ these terms because they had been used traditionally in his own language to characterize forms of magic, although these did not map exactly onto those in which the Azande believed. ‘Sorcery’, a term of which the origins will be considered later, has heavily overlapped in its meaning with ‘witchcraft’, but has been used even more broadly to cover most forms of magic. Unlike witchcraft, it was often extended to include the most elaborate and sophisticated variety of magical activity as a whole. I will refer to this here – as historians frequently do – as ‘ceremonial magic’, meaning the employment of elaborate rites and special materials to achieve magical ends, normally learned from written texts. The difference between this kind of magic and witchcraft (as defined earlier) was discussed in early modern Europe. One of the main apologists for ceremonial magic in seventeenth-century England, Robert Turner, declared that ‘magic and witchcraft are far differing sciences’. He explained that witchcraft was the work of the Devil, produced by a pact which he made with a witch, while a ceremonial magician, or ‘magus’, was a priest or philosopher dedicated to the worship of the one true God: ‘a studious observer and expounder of divine things’.1 Two generations before, another Englishman, the clergyman George Gifford who was one of his land’s first demonologists, had articulated a similar distinction. He quoted an assertion that the witch was a person who entered into the service of Satan, while the ceremonial magician ‘bindeth him [Satan] with the names of God and by the virtue of Christ’s passion and resurrection’.2 In the early sixteenth century the best-known of all early modern theorists of magic, the German Cornelius Agrippa, had made the same kind of claim at greater length.3 Likewise, Johann Weyer, the sixteenth-century author who argued most famously against prosecutions for witchcraft, distinguished the witch (lamia or venefica), reputed to make a pact with a demon to be granted her malevolent wishes, and the magician (magus), reputed to summon and bind a demon to his own service.4 The distinction has become part of the common parlance of historians, so that one of the leading twentieth-century experts in medieval beliefs concerning witchcraft and magic, Norman Cohn, could say that it was ‘generally believed’ by the 1970s that ceremonial magic had nothing to do with witchcraft because the former was mostly the preserve of men, who sought to control demons, while the latter was mostly that of women, who were servants and allies to them.5 The self-image of such magicians, in the medieval and early modern periods, drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, representing themselves as part of the elite of pious and learned men.6
At the time, those who engaged in ceremonial magic would have been aware of two considerable problems with its public reputation. One was that in practice it overlapped with witchcraft as some of its texts contained rites designed to gain power over others and to injure or kill them. It also blended seamlessly into the officially disreputable world of common magicians, who offered services such as divination, healing, counter-magic and detection of witches for a fee. The other and larger problem was that mainstream Christian theology completely rejected the distinction between witchcraft and ceremonial magic, holding that all magical operations were effected (or apparently effected) by demons, and magicians therefore entered into a pact with those whether they realized it or not. This was precisely the point that Gifford himself argued in order to refute the contrast between magician and witch that he had just made; and in doing so he was adhering to a view which had been enunciated by leading churchmen for over a thousand years.7 None the less, during the period of the early modern witch trials, people who offered magic for benevolent purposes were in practice punished less severely than those accused of witchcraft, while the scholarly ceremonial magicians were very rarely tried as witches. The later Middle Ages was a much more dangerous time for such magicians, largely because consultation of one was made a frequent political charge as part of factional fighting within regimes; but the rate of execution of them was still low compared with that in the subsequent witch trials.8 Even Jean Bodin, one of the most famous and effective proponents of those trials, gave ceremonial magicians the benefit of the doubt by saying that those who attempted to invoke good spirits, or those of the planets or elements, were not witches, though they might be idolaters.9 As it was largely dependent on the transmission of texts, ceremonial magic has left a documentary trail for historians to follow despite its character as an officially proscribed and persecuted tradition. Sufficient manuscripts of it survive from the ancient world, the Middle Ages and the early modern period to allow the identification of key works and genres and the tracing of their passage between different cultures and languages, above all from Greek to Arabic and Latin, from Arabic to Latin and Greek, from Hebrew to Latin and vice versa, and from all of these into the vernacular of different peoples.10 If all this research – by now a considerable body – were synthesized, then a full sense of the development of scripted forms of magical knowledge, over the past couple of millennia, would be achieved. Such an enterprise, however, still awaits its executor. In 1997 Richard Kieckhefer, who had emerged by that time as the foremost scholar of medieval magic, could say that ‘One might easily be persuaded that there is a history of the uses of magic and reactions to magic, but not a history of magic itself: virtually every magical technique seems timeless and perennial.’ He accordingly declined the temptation to ‘wander endlessly through thickets of the history of magic, from the Greek magical papyri of antiquity through Arabic and Byzantine sources onto the grimoires of the early modern era’.11 Kieckhefer’s fellow American, Michael Bailey, argued in return that there was indeed a history of ceremonial magic in Europe which extended from the fourth to the eighteenth centuries, being framed by the two big ruptures of the triumph of Christianity and the Enlightenment. He thought, however, that it was only a unified tradition from the twelfth century onwards, and the (very good) historical survey that he provided was concerned mainly with uses of magic and reactions to it, in Kieckhefer’s sense, rather than with its components.12 What is proposed here is to try to cut a path through Richard Kieckhefer’s ‘thickets’, along the route that he mapped out, and see if any continuous tradition may in fact be identified, and whether that may be traced from the regional cultures of attitudes to the supernatural mapped out earlier in the ancient world.13
The Magical Papyri and their Relations
It was suggested earlier that the ancient Egyptians made no distinction between religion and magic, had no concept of the witch figure and had no hostility to magic, while the ancient Romans made a distinction between religion and magic, had a well-developed concept of the witch figure, and passed increasingly stringent laws against the practice of magic. An obvious question to ask may be what happened when Egypt became part of the Roman Empire and these starkly contrasted sets of cultural attitudes ran into each other. The answer seems to have been an extremely creative response on the part of the Egyptians. Roman rule eroded both financial support for the temple system and the privileges of its priests.14 This forced the lectors out into wider society to offer their magical services, and the process seems to have been associated with the development of the texts mentioned above, the Greek magical papyri.15 These were mostly written, as the name suggests, in Greek, the dominant language since Alexander’s conquest, though some are in Demotic, a script embodying the native tongue. They are difficult to date, and have been generally consigned vaguely to a period spanning the first four hundred years AD, though where some can be ascribed to a narrower span of time, it is the late third and fourth centuries. While the attitudes, techniques and contents of the operations prescribed in them represented a continuation of previous Egyptian tradition, the scope of those operations became more extensive.
One aspect of this change was that they became more elaborate and ambitious. The basic nature of their rites was to invite or summon a deity to a consecrated space and then state a request to her or him. Sometimes the being concerned was under compulsion, and was dismissed as well as made to manifest, likewise by set procedures.16 In several texts the deity was expected to be invoked by the magician into the living body of another person, usually a young boy, through whose mouth the divinity answered questions and gave addresses.17 The earlier concept of arcane correspondences between various components of the natural world was developed into very complex ritual combinations of speech, action, timing, colours, tools, vegetable matter, incenses, fluids, animal parts and animal sacrifices. One, fairly typical, operation required unbaked bricks, an ‘Anubian head of wheat’, a falconwood plant, the fibre of a male date palm, frankincense, a choice of libations (wine, beer, honey or the milk of a black cow), grapevine wood, charcoal, wormwood, sesame seeds and black cumin.18 Solid objects, notably rings, were invested with permanent divine power (the ancient Egyptian heka) by deities in special rites. The belief that superhuman beings could be made responsive or obedient by knowledge of their secret or ‘true’ names was retained, so that one spell could claim that the hidden name of Aphrodite was Nepherieri, Egyptian for ‘beautiful eye’, and repetition of it would win a woman’s love.19 Another informed the sun god Helios that he had to grant the speaker’s wishes, ‘because I know your signs and forms, who you are each hour and what your name is’.20 This tradition was also developed into the recitation of (often lengthy) formulae of apparently meaningless words, supposed to be charged with power. At times the magician actually assumed, or pretended to assume, the identity of a deity.21 The second novel feature of these texts was their cosmopolitan nature, which was, again, an extension of native practice that had long been to add deities and spirits from other cultures to the existing stock. In keeping with the Hellenistic culture that had dominated the whole Near East since the time of Alexander, they incorporated Graeco-Roman deities, heroes and sages into invocations. The deities concerned tended either to be associated with supreme power and wisdom, such as Helios, Zeus and Mithras, or with magic itself such as Hermes and Hecate, or with love spells, such as Aphrodite and Eros. From Jewish culture came Jehovah (usually known as Iao), Moses and Solomon, and angels. The result was very often a luxuriant eclecticism, so that one rite included an invocation to the Greek god Apollo, identifying him with Helios, the Hebrew archangel Raphael, the Hebrew demon Abrasax and the Hebrew divine titles Adonai and Sabaoth, and calling him ‘flaming messenger of Zeus, divine Iao’. Another made Helios into an archangel, while yet another addressed a single male deity by the names of Zeus, Helios, Mithras and Serapis, fusing four major pagan gods.22 A third new feature was an interest in enabling practitioners and clients to achieve power, knowledge and worldly desires. The old lector priests had been more concerned to aid people who came to their temples seeking protection against ill fortune or enemies. The authors of these texts needed to be able to provide whatever customers asked of them. Some expressed an assumption that their skills would be passed on by the training of pupils and the transmission of writings.23
A final new feature of the recipes found in these papyri was that they appropriated for the practical purposes of magic the language and atmosphere of the late Roman mystery cults. These were closed initiatory societies devoted to particular deities, in which the members were given through ritual the sense of an especially intense and individual relationship with the beings to whom the cults were devoted. One papyrus defined the highest object of magic as being ‘to persuade all the gods and goddesses’. It then termed the practitioner ‘blessed initiate of the sacred magic’, destined to ‘be worshipped as a god since you have a god as a friend’.24 A ‘charm of Hecate Ereschigal against fear of punishment’ (which thus twinned a Greek-Anatolian goddess with a Mesopotamian one) proclaims, ‘I have been initiated, and I went down into the underground chamber . . . and I saw the other things below, virgin, bitch and all the rest.’ A ‘spell to establish a relationship with Helios’ asks to be ‘maintained in knowledge of you’ (the god) in order to achieve all worldly desires.25 A rite to Typhon, ‘god of gods’, promises the power to ‘attain both the ruler of the universe and whatever you command’, as a consequence of the ‘godlike nature which is accomplished through this divine encounter’.26 The most famous of these texts, the so-called Mithras Liturgy, prescribes a means to ascend to the realms of the celestial deities, obtain a vision of the greatest of these, and come to the brink of achieving immortality. It refers to its practitioners as ‘initiates’. The object of this mighty enterprise, however, is to obtain a divine answer to any question concerning earthly as well as heavenly matters.27 The magical papyri, therefore, bear witness to an attempt made in the Greek-speaking world during late antiquity to apply religious forms to magical purposes.
Simultaneously, a parallel, or perhaps a connected, attempt was being made to apply magical techniques to religious purposes embodied in the concept of theurgy. This has eluded any modern scholarly consensus over either the literal meaning of the term or the practices which it signified, but there is apparent agreement that it consisted of the harnessing of magical forms in order to assist the ascent of the human soul to the divine, and personal encounters or unions between humans and deities.28 This process was similar to some of those just described in the magical papyri, but there was an essential difference, that those encounters were regarded in theurgy as ends in themselves and not as means to greater practical knowledge and power for the practitioner. The first known text to articulate this was the lost one known as the Chaldean Oracles, which survives only in fragments quoted by later authors. Its name cashed in on the Graeco-Roman respect for (and fear of) Mesopotamian magicians, commonly called Chaldeans in the Roman world, though it seems that the text itself emerged in Syria in the second century AD.29 It has brief references to rites intended to achieve union with or acceptance by the greatest of deities, including magical names in ‘barbaric’ languages and the use of a special sort of stone.30 There are also passages doubtfully attributed to the Chaldean Oracles which speak of compelling deities to manifest, of using a human being as a medium through which they can speak, and making a magical statue of a goddess from special plant and animal materials; all practices familiar from the papyri.31
The concept of theurgy as expressed in the Oracles made a potentially good fit with one of the main contemporary schools of pagan philosophy, Neoplatonism, which likewise emphasized the need for humans to reunite with the primal divine. However, the first Neoplatonist to deal with it, Porphyry, drew a very clear distinction between Greek philosophical tradition and the methods of the magical papyri, condemning the notion that deities could be compelled by human will, ridiculing the use of ‘secret’ names in invocations and warning that those who sought to call deities to them could summon evil spirits instead. This was a clear assertion of the Graeco-Roman distinction between religion and magic, and suspicion of the latter, and moreover he made it in explicit opposition to Egyptian views, which he thought a contamination of European beliefs. Written around the year 300, his argument was contained in his Letter to Anebo, a remonstrance addressed to a probably fictional Egyptian priest.32 This was answered by another leading philosopher from Porphyry’s tradition, Iamblichus, who recommended the magical practices of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and especially the former, as a means of revitalizing Graeco-Roman paganism. He defended them as having been revealed to humans by deities themselves, as channels by which those humans could communicate with the divine, with which deities willingly co-operated. This being the case, virtuous and pious people had nothing to fear from evil spirits. He defined theurgy as the power to manipulate symbols that enabled direct contact with goddesses and gods, such as special stones, herbs, animal parts and incenses. According to him it had this power because the natural world, being ultimately the product of a single supreme deity from whom all things emanated, was essentially interconnected. The theurgist understood the precise identity of the material substances, numbers and words that could be combined to encourage deities to respond to overtures. On the other hand, Iamblichus advised most of his readers to work with lesser spirits rather than actual deities, and warned that it was dangerous for all but the most experienced practitioners to attempt a union with the celestial powers. He also condemned common magicians as impious and reckless fools who attempted to control the system of mystical correspondences for their own selfish benefit, and probably would fall prey to evil entities.33
Later Neoplatonists also seem to have worked in this tradition. Maximus, who lived in Asia Minor in the mid-fourth century, was later reputed to have animated a statue (of Hekate) in classic Egyptian and Mesopotamian tradition.34 Proclus, the leading philosopher of fifth-century Athens, seems to have acknowledged the ability of priests to mix stones, plants and incenses that corresponded to particular deities, to call upon those, and repel unwanted spirits.35 It is possible that he also referred to rites to animate statues, and others to call a deity into a human being (after magician and medium had been ritually purified), and speak through that person, in the manner of some in the magical papyri.36 He appears to have believed that special incantations could summon divine beings.37 A successor of Proclus at Athens, Damascius, likewise seems to have stated that by whirling a top, or sphere, it was possible to summon or dismiss supernatural beings.38
In the same period of late antiquity in which the magical papyri and theurgy appeared, Jewish magic apparently became a textual tradition with a specialized apparatus, expressed in manuals, amulets and the incantation bowls. Two handbooks survive which embody this tradition and may date back to the ancient world. The more likely to be ancient is Sepher ha-Razim, the ‘Book of the Mysteries’, which was conjecturally reconstructed in 1966 from fragments of different dates in different languages. It was written at some point between the late fourth and the ninth centuries, probably in Egypt or Palestine. It describes seven different categories of angel, with rites to deploy their power in the service of the magician – for a great range of constructive and destructive purposes – by using animal sacrifice, elaborate conjurations and favourable positions of planets. The author was an educated Jew, familiar with the Graeco-Egyptian magic of the kind found in the papyri and using similar recipes and long lines of Greek words and technical terms: in addition, Helios, Hermes and Aphrodite make guest appearances.39 The other is Harbe de-Moshe, the ‘Sword of Moses’, which existed by the eleventh century but survives only in three different late medieval and early modern versions. The core of it consists of a succession of adjurations of angels for practical purposes, mostly healing but also a range of other desires from winning love and destroying enemies to controlling demons. These mostly use apparently meaningless words, the voces magicae, combined with material substances such as potsherds, vegetable, animal and mineral matter, and oil and water.40
Gideon Bohak has made a study of the cultural influences on late antique Jewish magic, including its lesser but much more numerous manifestations as amulets, and concluded that its burgeoning as a scribal tradition in the period was a direct consequence of the development of Graeco-Egyptian magic. Its texts show many Greek words and a particular borrowing of those developed specifically by the Graeco-Egyptian magicians for conjuration and invocation, individually or in long phrases. Jewish authors took over the voces magicae in particular, on a large scale, and with them the associated tradition of making geometric shapes out of words to combine the power of texts and mathematics. Graeco-Egyptian formulae were retained by Jews far into the Middle Ages, appearing regularly in the hundreds of amulets and spells found in the Genizah or store room of a synagogue in Cairo, dating from the ninth century onwards. These promised the control of demons, the finding of treasure, enhanced popularity, winning of love, ruin to enemies and healing of illnesses. Bohak has also emphasized, however, that Jews embedded the large quantity of pagan magical technology that they borrowed in rites and texts which were entirely their own. They very rarely included pagan deities, although they transformed a few into angels, or drawn figures and symbols, and placed a much greater emphasis on biblical verses and heroes. They also avoided the threatening of superhuman beings, and positive references to magic itself.41 Alongside Jewish ceremonial magic developed a Christian equivalent, and its first extended text to survive seems to be the Testament of Solomon, which appears to have been in existence by the sixth or seventh century. Written in Greek, and most probably in Egypt or Palestine, it provides the reader with names, words or formulae and the use of plants, stones and animal parts, to control and banish a long list of demons, and especially those that cause disease. This is done for the good of humanity, and with protective angels, and the book mixes together Jewish ideas with some from the magical papyri and Graeco-Egyptian astrology.42 In Egypt itself the adoption of Christianity by the whole population between the fourth and sixth centuries finally made the Graeco-Roman suspicion of magic general, and extinguished the ancient ease with it. None the less, Christian magical texts continued to be produced in Coptic, the language into which the native one evolved in the same period. This provided one medium whereby features of the magic in the pagan papyri, especially rites of protection and execration, got through to medieval Arabic works. The Coptic texts mostly (though not always) replaced pagan deities with angels and biblical figures, but they retained the native tradition of wielding power over the beings they summoned by claiming knowledge of their true names, and the use of voces magicae.43
Thus it can be demonstrated that, just as official attitudes across the Roman Empire were hardening further against magic as a means of manipulating divine power for selfish ends, an unprecedentedly sophisticated form of magic had appeared which was dedicated to achieving exactly that kind of manipulation. It is most obviously recorded among Graeco-Egyptian pagans, but aspects of it also leaked into Greek philosophy and Jewish and Christian culture. One obvious question is whether it was Egypt that produced this new kind of magic and then exported it to the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world, and beyond, or whether Egypt represented just one corner of a development occurring all over that region, and possibly all over the Roman world. There are references to magical books in other parts of that world, from Rome to Syria, usually getting confiscated and burned by the authorities.44 None, however, has survived to show whether they contained complex ritual magic, and if so, whether that was influenced by the kind recorded in Egypt. If we could be certain that Sepher ha-Razim and the Testament of Solomon were produced either inside or outside Egypt, then we would be further towards reaching an answer, but we are not. It may be, moreover, that the survival of the Egyptian material is itself an accident created by the dry climate of the country, which preserved material such as papyrus exceptionally well, and may have caused records of late antique ceremonial magic to survive there and not elsewhere. Indeed, even that survival may have been to a great extent fortuitous, as most of the magical papyri may have come from a single deposit, probably in a tomb.
The two sides of the case may be summed up as follows. In favour of the arguments that the sophisticated magic found in the Graeco-Egyptian texts was home-grown, and diffused from there across the empire, it can be argued both that the country possessed an ideology unusually favourable to the use of magic and that all the essential features of the magical papyri were already long present in its culture. These included a heavy emphasis on the need for magicians to purify themselves physically and morally before carrying out a rite (an old requirement for Egyptian priests); the willingness to command, and sometimes personify, deities; an eclecticism which allowed the importation of foreign divinities and lesser spirits into the lists of those invoked or opposed; the employment of mineral, animal and vegetable substances, and incense, in ritual; the use of images in it, especially animated statues and statuettes; a belief in the numinous power of words spoken aloud; the emphasis on knowledge of a being’s true name; voces magicae; the importance of choosing the correct day and hour for an operation, and of purifying the ritual space; a stress on the proper objects and colours for use in rites; a disposition to treat writing, and the act of writing, as something magical in itself; the use of a human medium to speak messages from deities; and the gathering of collections of rites in books.45 Above all, Egyptians had long been accustomed to the concept of complex ceremonies designed to manipulate humans and superhumans in order to make things happen, regarded as acceptable to morality and religion. Moreover, the non-Egyptian deities and spirits that feature in the magical papyri are drawn overwhelmingly from those ethnic groups heavily settled in Egypt, and above all in its Hellenistic capital of Alexandria: the Greeks and Jews. Only three Mesopotamian or Syrian deities are included, while possible Persian elements are scattered and few, and there is no specifically Roman content.46 The making of long lists of lesser spirits seems to have been originally a Mesopotamian custom, as remarked earlier, but by the time of the magical papyri it was thoroughly naturalized in Egypt. Astrology provides a famous case of an occult tradition which can be demonstrated beyond doubt to have reached Egypt from outside but was transformed there into the enduring model which it was to retain in Western civilization. It definitely developed in Mesopotamia, where an early exceptional interest in heavenly bodies evolved during the second millennium BC into an omen-literature based on their movements and changing conditions, which required increasingly exact observation during the first millennium. The Greeks took this tradition over once Alexander had conquered Mesopotamia, and it was they who extended it into the idea of the horoscope. The Greek-speaking communities in Egypt then produced the zodiac, and the first true astrological texts, and so put predictive astrology into the form in which it was to endure, with some lesser accretions, until the present.47 Against all this must be lodged the powerful argument that most if not all of the features of the magical papyri noted as being found in earlier Egyptian attitudes and practices may be found in other ancient cultures, above all Mesopotamian. The Egyptian evidence could after all quite credibly represent only one corner of a phenomenon happening all over the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean basin in late antiquity, and have assumed an unwonted prominence because of unusually favourable conditions for survival. It may, however, be worth adding here that the chances that Egypt was crucial to the development of complex ritual magic are still very good. It alone can be demonstrated to have possessed all the cultural, political and social contexts for such a development, at just the right time, as well as the best surviving evidence for one. A further factor may also be added to the issue: that in exactly the period at which the complex magic of the papyri was appearing, Egyptian magicians were acquiring an even greater reputation as magicians in the Roman world. They had, as said earlier, long enjoyed such a reputation, but the literary works of the Roman Empire make the skilled Egyptian worker of magic – and usually a learned, sophisticated magic embodied in books – a key figure. In keeping with general Graeco-Roman attitudes to magic, he is usually a disreputable one, ranging from the shady to the downright villainous.48
There is an immediate rejoinder to be made to any attempt to relate this development to reality: that Greeks and Romans habitually regarded the practice of magic as a coherent learned tradition as one associated with foreigners, Persians and Mesopotamians being specific targets of this linkage as well as Egyptians. Mesopotamians, and even the occasional Hyperborean (literally from the back of the north wind, in this context effectively Never-Never Land) continued to feature in literature as magicians, though not as frequently as Egyptians. They may all fairly, therefore, be considered to be manifestations of the propensity of human societies to create stereotypical portraits of the Other, against which to define their own values.49 The problem here, however, is that – as seen – Mesopotamians and Egyptians could in reality be considered to have developed sophisticated systems of magic, which impressed Europeans, and during the late antique period Egyptians were actually doing what Greek and Roman authors were representing, by developing such systems further into unprecedentedly complex and sophisticated forms, for private hire. Moreover, portraits of mighty Egyptian magicians of the sort portrayed in the Graeco-Roman sources (though more admiring) are found in Egyptian texts dating back as far as the Middle Kingdom of the early second millennium BC.50 Indeed, there is one reference that seems to go beyond caricature and generalization to show how Egyptian magic might actually have made its impact on the Roman world. It is from an attack on Christianity by a pagan called Celsus, preserved because quoted by a Christian opponent, which portrays self-described magicians (goētes) wandering that world who for a few coins
make known their sacred lore in the middle of the market place and drive evil spirits out of people, expel diseases, call up the ghosts of heroes, display illusions of banquets and dinners with food and drink, and make things move as though they were alive although they are not really so, but only appear as such in the imagination.51
Celsus adds that they have learned these tricks from Egyptians. Again, this could have been pandering to a stereotype, but it does prove that there were real people around at the time who were claimed, or claimed, to have learned the kind of magic contained in the papyri from the kind of people who wrote those texts. Finally, one of the few surviving kinds of source material for magical practices in the European lands of the empire consists of metal amulets bearing protective texts in Greek. These support the sense of a form of magic spreading from the Near East, and perhaps from Egypt in particular. Two examples from the opposite end of the empire, the province of Britain, may make the point. One from the Roman fort at Caernarvon had magical figures and voces magicae of the sort found in the papyri, with Hebrew words and mention of the Egyptian god Thoth.52Another, from the temple complex at Woodeaton in Oxfordshire, uses a Hebrew divine name in its invocation.53 Throughout the empire in general, these amulets lack appeals to mainstream Greek or Roman deities, or those of other European provinces: instead they use the deity and spirit forms, the voces magicae and the drawn figures, of the magical papyri.54 None of this proves that it was Egypt that developed and exported the tradition of complex ceremonial magic; but it does perhaps make it very likely.
The European Magical Tradition
It may be seen whether a path can indeed be made through Richard Kieckhefer’s ‘thickets’ now that the starting point has been established in late antiquity. Occasionally, complete works can be traced directly across the subsequent millennia, and the best example here may be the Kyranides, an exposition of the medical properties of animal, vegetable and mineral materials and the way in which they might be transfused into amulets. This appears in fourth-century Egypt, as the work of an Alexandrian scholar called Harpokration, though he seems to have drawn on an earlier text. It then passed into the use of medieval Western Europe through a Latin translation of a Byzantine Greek one made in the twelfth century from what was claimed to be an Arabic version made out of the original ancient Greek one.55 Sometimes also, the literary equivalent of living fossils can be found in works of ceremonial magic, which signal a transmission from the ancient Mediterranean and indeed specifically from Egypt. Perhaps most striking is the charm ‘to see visions and cause dreams’, calling on the power of the god Bes and the goddess Isis, which is found in one of the Greek magical papyri and has also apparently survived in an English manuscript of the sixteenth century.56 A study of divine names in two Latin manuscripts from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries found a substantial continuity in them of the Hebrew collection found in the Greek magical papyri, and even those of the Graeco-Egyptian pagan deities Helios, Mithras, Selene, Horus, Apollo, Isis, Osiris, and Thoth – so much more alien to Christian tradition – had survived.57 The Magical Treatise of Solomon, a handbook that exists in copies made between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, includes garbled forms of the names of the Egyptian gods Osiris, Serapis, Apis and Kephra among the spirits it lists for adjuration. It also has directions for the making of reed pens for the writing of spells, which are ill suited to parchment and vellum, the usual materials for medieval books, which respond much better to the usual quill pens of the period.58 They are, however, perfectly matched to papyrus, the ancient material for literature, most closely associated with Egypt.
The same game can be played with other relics of the ancient Mediterranean in northern texts, such as the use of an olive oil lamp in a spell copied in England in 1622.59 A case study of this effect is that of the magical reputation of the hoopoe, one of the most striking birds of the Mediterranean region, with its prominent crest and colourful plumage. Its body parts, and especially its heart, were already regarded as efficacious in magical rites during ancient times, and feature as such in both the Greek and the Demotic magical papyri.60 This belief passed into Coptic magic, and into that of the Arabs who conquered Egypt in the seventh century, where it became the most prominent bird to be used in spells.61 This association crossed subsequently into European magic, a fifteenth-century German manual of which could recommend it as ‘possessed of great virtue for necromancers and invokers of demons’.62 The hoopoe does breed in Germany, but it is a rare summer visitor to England, and was probably still rarer in the colder climate of the late medieval and early modern periods. When manuscripts copied in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries also recommend the use of a hoopoe’s heart in spells, therefore, we are looking at another living fossil of ancient Levantine tradition.63 Another scholar has noted that a formula used in love (or lust) spells of the magical papyri, ‘let the woman not eat or drink’ (until she succumbs), is then found in late Roman tablets, late medieval Dutch and German books of magic, seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish magical recipes, and those in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Slavonic texts.64
These details establish a continuous transmission of lore from the ancient eastern Mediterranean, and sometimes specifically from ancient Egypt, to early modern Europe. It is also significant that the same basic techniques recur in ceremonial magic all the way from the magical papyri in which they first appear until the modern period: complex rites which unify actions, materials and words; an emphasis on the power of special names and of voces magicae; a stress on the purification of the magician and the working space before the rite; a use of particular equipment, often specially made; care to find a special time at which to work; measures to protect the magician against the forces raised; the quest for a servitor spirit to carry out the magician’s will; and an eclectic and multicultural range of source material. It should be made clear that all of these characteristics were by no means present in all works of ceremonial magic compiled between the fourth and nineteenth centuries; rather, they were a list of actions and artefacts from which magicians could choose according to will and tradition to make up their own assemblages. Nor is there a steady succession of relevant material across that period, as the survival of texts becomes much greater in the late Middle Ages. Nor is there any suggestion of steady progression towards greater sophistication over time. On the contrary, for example, the operations in the Coptic magical papyri are generally less elaborate and cosmopolitan than those in their pagan predecessors, and the handbooks of magicians in Renaissance Europe were only as ornate and ambitious as those of late antique Egypt. None the less, those Renaissance handbooks were compiled using the collection of techniques listed above, which had descended to them from the ancient world, and which appears there now only in the Egyptian texts.
It is striking also that, just as the complex magic in the late antique papyri was developed in clear opposition to the values (and the law) articulated by Roman imperial rulers, so it survived as an often self-conscious and explicit counter-culture. One of the most famous, or notorious, handbooks of the later Middle Ages, the Sworn Book of Honorius, was intended as a direct response to a papal campaign against ceremonial magic as demonic, probably that of John XXII in the 1310s and 1320s. Its introduction audaciously asserted that the pope and his cardinals were themselves possessed by demons, and that it was the magicians who served the cause of truth, under the inspiration of the Christian God, and were exemplars of piety and offered a sure means to salvation.65 The introduction to an equally famous grimoire from the early modern period, the Key of Solomon, claimed that its contents had been explained to the author by an angel sent deliberately by the true God for the education of humanity.66 A treatise On the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Animals, known from the early fourteenth century and popular until the seventeenth, asserted that although magic could be used for evil ends, it was not inherently bad, ‘since through knowledge of it evil can be avoided and good obtained’.67 As early as the thirteenth century, its greatest Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, noted (with disgust) the argument used by practitioners of ceremonial magic that it was no sin to achieve good ends by using (captive) demons, because the true God had made scientific truths subject to human knowledge, and demons understood more of those than humans.68
Generally, as said, late medieval and early modern European magicians drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, and presented themselves as exemplars of pious and learned masculinity.69 As one aspect of this attitude, Roman Catholic magicians rapidly enlisted religious forms in the service of magical goals in a manner that would have been wholly intelligible to the authors of some of the magical papyri. By the early thirteenth century, soon after ceremonial magic had established itself in the world of Roman Christianity, some of them had developed the ars notoria, or ‘notary art’, named after the images and diagrams – a form of aid to magic, once again, found in the Egyptian papyri – which were a feature of it. Its aim was to achieve intellectual skills, and comprehensive knowledge, by prayers to the Christian God and the company of heaven, usually accompanied by purifications and rites that included voces magicae and had to be enacted at propitious times. It emphasized its descent from the ancient Levantine magical tradition by including passages in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, a language of ancient Mesopotamia.70 Its texts continued to be copied until the seventeenth century, and by the fourteenth it had produced two spin-off traditions. A French monk called John de Morigny composed a version that removed the images and voces magicae and so purged it of those aspects most readily associated with magic, emphasizing instead the appeal to heavenly powers.71 The Sworn Book of Honorius employed some of its techniques for the ambition of obtaining one of the greatest desires of pious Christians, the beatific vision of their God in his glory. This duplicated the ambition of the Neoplatonists, of using magical rites to achieve religious aims, and the rites prescribed not only demanded a fervent Christianity and a life of monastic austerity but incorporated some of the established liturgies of the Roman Church. Some versions at least of the book, however, accompanied this devout aim with promises that the successful operator would also learn how to command angels and demons, and so acquire superhuman powers that could accomplish every worldly wish.72
Thus far the enduring and general characteristics of the European tradition of ceremonial magic have been emphasized, as derived from ancient roots most apparent in the Egyptian papyri. It is worth asking now whether particular ethnic and cultural groups might have contributed special features to it since the end of antiquity; and the answer seems to be that there have been three such contributions, associated with each of the three great religions of the book. Though they overlapped in time, each one was also broadly consecutive. The Jewish element has been identified, from the work of Joshua Trachtenburg in the 1930s onwards, as taking the form of a stress on the employment of angels as magical helpers, and the efficacy of the hidden name or names of the one true God.73 Both were rooted in ancient magic, the magical papyri having already fully embodied a sense of the importance both of enlisting spiritual assistants and allies and of knowledge of their true names to effect this process. Both were also associated with major features of Judaism, its interest in angelic beings, its preoccupation with the sanctity of language rather than of visual imagery, and its intense monotheism. Neither of them accorded well with orthodox Christianity. Church Fathers and ecclesiastical councils condemned the invocation of angels, and recognized only the archangels mentioned in the Bible as possessing individual names, while the idea that the speaking of special names galvanized or even controlled heavenly powers did not accord with the concept of divine majesty.74 None the less, Christian magic eventually assimilated both, and especially communion with angels, as major themes.75 The distinctive Islamic contribution to the European magical tradition, probably most emphasized among scholars by David Pingree, was astral magic, rites designed to harness the powers of heavenly bodies to influence earthly affairs and above all to draw them into material objects, known as talismans.76 This tradition seems to have developed in Mesopotamia, then the heart of the Arab Empire with its capital at Baghdad, in the ninth century, though such a conclusion must be drawn from possibly misattributed later copies of texts and this kind of magic was known throughout the Islamic world, including seemingly its major western outlier in Spain, by the eleventh century.77 If it did develop in Mesopotamia, it is tempting to suggest that this was a natural outgrowth from the ancient preoccupation of the region with celestial powers and the movements of the heavens, and indeed this is exactly what may have happened. On the other hand it is difficult to trace a direct development for astral magic from the Babylonian and Assyrian texts through the intervening millennium to the Islamic period. The Arab Empire itself functioned for a few centuries as an information superhighway extending from the Pyrenees to India, and its core territories embraced most of the old Hellenistic cultural zone including Egypt, in which Mesopotamian ideas might have mutated into astral magic outside their homeland, as a parallel case to that of astrology. If the earliest texts of that magic were said to have been produced at Baghdad, this may simply reflect the fact that it was the imperial and cultural capital by the date concerned.
Astral magic depended heavily on the idea of concealed correspondences which linked different parts of the cosmos and meant that the right combination of words, animal, vegetable and mineral matter, and times, could work magical effects. Such correspondences informed the handbook by Bolus of Mendes, and underlie most of the operations in the magical papyri, and the contents of the Kyranides and Neoplatonist theurgy. The papyri contain several recipes for charging material objects, above all rings, with magical power. They also include a love spell consisting of an invocation to the planet Venus, involving a special incense and a charm worn on the person, and, elsewhere, a set address to an angel thought to animate the sun, using laurel leaves inscribed with zodiacal signs, to gain a prophetic dream.78 The Hermetic texts, produced in Egypt at around the same time, accord a major role to the planets, as immediate agents of an all-powerful creator god.79 Late antique Egypt therefore already had all the raw material for the system which subsequently appeared in the Islamic world, whether or not it proved directly influential in its development. What is not in doubt is the means of its transmission to Christian Europe, by the mass translation of Arabic texts into Latin during the twelfth century. There it caught the imagination of intellectuals, and became part of the medieval Christian tradition of ceremonial magic.80
The distinctive contribution made by Christian Europe itself to that tradition seems to have been geometric: the use of the consecrated circle as the normal venue for a magical operation, with special significance often given to its four cardinal directions (east, south, west and north), and the identification of the pentagram as the most potent symbol of magic. All of these figures undoubtedly had ancient roots. One ancient Mesopotamian rite of exorcism had the āshipu sprinkle an usurtu, usually translated as a ring, of lime around the images of the deities on whose power he intended to call.81 Another had one fumigate ‘the circle of your great deity’ into which two protector gods were to be invited.82 A genuine – though occasional – practice may therefore have lain behind the description of the rites of a Mesopotamian magos by the Greek satirist Lucian, to prepare a client for a journey to the underworld. One consisted of the magician ‘walking all around’ the client to protect him from the dead during the journey.83 Circumambulation, the ritual processing around a sacred space before use of it, was a feature of native Egyptian religion from the earliest times, though it did not have the same significance in the magical papyri.84 Instead those occasionally included a circle as one of the figures drawn as part of a rite, to have signs inscribed inside it, and just once, the magician stands inside one.85 It features in (legendary) ancient Jewish magic in one story from the Roman period, of ‘Onias the circle-maker’, who ended a drought in Palestine by drawing the figure and then standing inside it to pray to Yahweh for rain.86 In Anglo-Saxon magic it was sometimes drawn round injured or diseased parts of the body to contain an infection, or dug round plants before gathering them, to concentrate their power.87
The significance of the cardinal points of the compass had been known since ancient Mesopotamia, where as far back as the third millennium BC kings of the Sumerian city states had styled themselves rulers ‘of the four quarters’.88 One Muslim writer claimed (at second hand and with unknown accuracy) that the people of Harran in northern Syria, who were believed in the early Middle Ages to practise a religion which represented a continuation or a development of Hellenistic paganism, prayed to the cardinal points.89 Those points feature in a few operations in the magical papyri, but – like the circle – not regularly.90 Some Anglo-Saxon charms were designed to be hung around the four sides of a byre or sty to protect the animals inside, or cut into the four sides of a wound, or onto a stick to charge it with power.91 As for the pentagram, five-pointed stars are found in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman art or on coins, and also in the Christian early Middle Ages, but without any single tradition concerning their meaning and use: in many contexts they seem simply to have been decorative.92 The satirist Lucian said that the followers of the philosopher Pythagoras used the sign as a password, indicating the wishing of health; which would make sense if it acted (as it did in part later) as a symbol of the human body, though a satire is not perhaps the best place in which to seek solid information about a private belief system.93There is no real evidence that the pentagram had any special association with magic in the ancient world. It appears once on a warrior’s shield painted on a Greek cup, which may have reflected a belief in its protective qualities, or it may just have been a decorative star. The most careful study of its ancient significance, to date, concludes (reluctantly) that its wide distribution in ancient times may have been ‘simply a question of the taking over of a motif, say a decorative motif, with or without any particular meaning, together with numerous others’, and ‘the magic meaning of the pentagram . . . was not yet apparent’ (before the later Middle Ages).94
As soon as Western Europeans acquired complex ceremonial magic in the twelfth century, seemingly as the result of their translation of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts, they showed their own preference for the quartered circle and the pentagram. In the course of his condemnation of that magic, in the early thirteenth century, William of Auvergne, archbishop of Paris, described an operation called ‘The Major Circle’ which involved summoning spirits from the four quarters. He also denounced the belief that the pentagram had an active magical power, and was especially associated with Solomon, the wisest of biblical kings, who had been reimagined in the late antique period as a mighty magician.95 The Sworn Book of Honorius, from its earliest surviving manuscripts, of the fourteenth century, put the figure at the centre of the ‘Seal of God’, which was the most important work in the achievement of the beatific vision. Consecrated circles also feature in it.96 In that same century one of the most famous pieces of medieval English chivalric literature, produced by one of its most devout authors, the poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, placed the image on the shield of its hero.97 An Italian scholar from that century, Antonio de Montolmo, called the circle the most perfect figure for magical operations, and gave his own instructions for consecrating it.98 A contemporary of both the Gawain poet and Antonio, the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric, included in his celebrated manual for heresy-hunters a description of an operation involving the use of a set text to invoke a spirit into a boy, through whom it would then answer questions. This is a practice familiar from the magical papyri, with the difference that now the boy had to stand in a ring drawn on the earth.99 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from which books of ritual magic survive in relative abundance, the circle, often with its cardinal points marked, and the pentagram, are the standard figures of magical operations.100 The pentagram had also penetrated popular culture, as it appears in many parts of Western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages, on houses, cradles, bedsteads and church porches, as a protective symbol.101 The reasons for the new importance of the design are easy to propose. One of the prime concerns of the considerable intellectual ferment of Western Europe in the twelfth century, often called the ‘Twelfth-century Renaissance’, was the reconciliation of ancient learning with creative literature, Christian beliefs and knowledge of the natural world, to bring humans into harmony with the divine plan for the universe. As part of it both Honorius of Autun and Hildegard of Bingen asserted that the human body is constructed on a base formed by the number five, having five senses, five limbs (including the head as one) and five digits on hands and feet. This made the pentagram an obvious symbol of the microcosm that the human form represented of the divine image in which it had been shaped.102 The fourteenth-century author of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ repeated its association with Solomon and the divine form, and added one with the five wounds of Christ, an increasingly important symbol in the Western Christianity of the period. As such, he added, it was especially potent in repelling evil. As for the circle, the Italian scholar Antonio da Montolmo, working around the same time, declared that it was the essential symbol of the true God, as the prime mover of the universe (presumably referring to the circuits of the sun, moon and seasons and the spheres of the universe).103 The special interest in those spheres in later medieval cosmology might account in itself for the circle’s new arcane importance. Neither the moralists who condemned ceremonial magic in the medieval and Renaissance periods, nor the authors of the books of it, could agree on its actual function in operations. To some it was a fortress for the magician, which protected him from the demons (and sometimes from irritable angels) whom he conjured; to others it was a focus of power in itself, which could be radiated outwards from it.104 How much the importance of these figures may be called a general hallmark of later medieval Christian magic, and how much one of Western Christianity in particular, is debatable. They appear abundantly in the different versions of the Magical Treatise of Solomon, which, as it is written in Greek, is generally presumed to be a Byzantine work and so would make them characteristic of magic in both the great halves of medieval European Christianity. They do not seem to feature, however, in the actual records of Byzantine magic and nor are there references to the Magical Treatise there, while none of its copies can be proved to come from the Byzantine Empire; where the origin of the medieval examples can be located, it is Italian.105 It is possible that it was composed in a Greek-speaking area of the Latin Christian world, such as Sicily, and that the importance of the circle, quarters and pentagrams was a feature of that world alone.
What may emerge from this sequence of suggestions is how small the European contribution to the Western tradition of ceremonial magic was, even though some Europeans took it up with enthusiasm in all centuries since the twelfth. Whatever the priority of Egypt in it, this magic was essentially a product of the Near East, which may be proposed to have made three huge contributions to European views of the supernatural, in successive waves. The first affected European paganism, by encouraging it to treat its deities as a squabbling family, with individual and collective stories attached to its members. The second was the delivery of Christianity, and the third was the provision of ceremonial magic, as an ideology and practice that could be combined with most religions. At the same time, this magic represented a way of dealing with superhuman beings that was at odds with Christianity, and indeed with pre-Christian European tradition. Each successive flowering of it was part of a more general period of intense creativity in European and Near Eastern religiosity. Its appearance was contemporary with the burgeoning of the pagan mystery religions and of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermetism, the development of rabbinical Judaism, and the growth and triumph of Christianity. Its next period of development was that of the maturation of Islam as a major religion, and the next accompanied the twelfth-century renaissance of Western Christianity. The period of the Renaissance proper and the Reformation saw another great flowering of ceremonial magic, and then another followed in the spiritual ferment of late nineteenth-century Europe, and then (arguably) another in that of the late twentieth-century West. Its story seems to be inseparable from that of European and Near Eastern religion as a whole.