The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  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.52 Another, 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.