PART II
CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVES
4
CEREMONIAL MAGIC – THE EGYPTIAN LEGACY?
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 o
f 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
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