40.I have used the edition by Moses Gaster published in London in 1896. For commentaries, see Gaster’s introduction; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 350–52; and Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 169–83.
41.Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 143–350. See also Rebecca Lesses, ‘Speaking Angels: Jewish and Greco-Egyptian Revelatory Adjurations’, Harvard Theological Review, 89 (1996), 41–60, which draws similar conclusions. Texts on which they are based can be found in Lawrence H. Schiffman and Michael D. Swartz (eds), Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah, Sheffield, 1992.
42.I have compared the editions by F. C. Conybeare, in London in 1898 and D. C. Duling, in James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, London,1983, vol. 1, 935–87. For commentaries see the introductions to those editions, and to that by Charles Chariton McCown in Leipzig in 1922; and also Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘The “Testament of Solomon” from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 35–49; Torijano, Solomon the Esoteric King, 41–87; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 372–4; Todd E. Klutz, Rewriting the ‘Testament of Solomon’, New York, 2005; and James Harding and Loveday Alexander, ‘Dating the Testament of Solomon’, www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/guestlectures/harding, accessed 9 May 2014.
43.Key texts were edited by Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, as Ancient Christian Magic, Princeton, 1994. See also Nicole B. Hansen, ‘Ancient Execration Magic in Coptic and Islamic Egypt’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, 427–45; Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 257–64; and Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3470–73.
44.The references are collected in Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Oxford, 2009, 19–21.
45.These data may be found in Robert Kriech Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, Chicago, 1993, 36–8, 72, 111–90; and ‘Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire’, 3345–58; Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, London, 1994, 62–164; Frankfurter, ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt’; Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3429; Ian Meyer, ‘The Initiation of the Magician’, in David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone (eds), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives, London, 2003, 223–4; John Gee, ‘The Structure of Lamp Divination’, in Kim Ryholt (ed.), Acts of the Seventh International Conference of Demotic Studies, Copenhagen, 1999, 207–18; and Joachim Friedrich Quack, ‘From Ritual to Magic’, in Gideon Bohak et al. (eds), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden, 2011, 43–84.
46.Brashear, ‘The Greek Magical Papyri’, 3422–40.
47.S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology, Woodbridge, 1987, 11–29.
48.Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 212–14, collects most of the references, and some of these, plus others which he does not cite, are translated in Daniel Ogden (ed.), Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2009, 49–58.
49.The most prominent proponent of this view in recent years has probably been Christopher Faraone, in his various (splendid) publications.
50.Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, 2009, 165–7.
51.Origen, Contra Celsum, I.6.8.
52.It is now in the National Museum of Wales.
53.It is now in the Ashmolean Museum.
54.Roy Kotansky (ed.), Greek Magical Amulets, Opladen, 1994 supplies the texts.
55.It has been available in English since its appearance as The Magick of Kiranus in 1685, with a modern edition by Demetrios Kaimakis, Die Kyraniden, Frankfurt, 1980. For commentaries, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, London, 1923, vol. 2, 229–31; Henry and Renée Kahane and Angelina Pietrangli, ‘Picatrix and the Talismans’, Romance Philology, 19 (1966), 574–93; and Klaus Alpers, ‘Untersuchungen zum griechischen Physiologus und den Kyraniden’, Vestigia Bibliae, 6 (1984), 13–87.
56.I have not yet located this manuscript myself, but the charm is recorded as present in it by C.J.S. Thompson, The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic, London, 1927, 58, and I have found him to be a reliable scholar when I have been able to check other parts of his work. In my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 186, I reprinted it with the suggestion that it probably represented a direct transmission from ancient to Tudor times, though there was a slighter chance that an early modern scholar had obtained a Graeco-Egyptian text. Since then I have realized that it appears in PGM VIII.65–85, proving its ancient provenance. It is very difficult to believe that an original magical papyrus with the charm could have been obtained from Egypt in the early modern period, though it is not utterly impossible.
57.David Porreca, ‘Divine Names: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 17–29.
58.Ioannis Marathakis (ed.), The Magical Treatise of Solomon, Singapore, 2011, 56, 60, 64, 85, 159, 231. The Golden Hoard Press, which published this edition, has done much valuable work recently in producing good editions of European magical handbooks. The reed pen is also found in Book 1 of a sixteenth-century copy of another famous late medieval grimoire, Sepher Raziel, at British Library, Sloane MS 3846, now published on the Internet at www.esotericarchives.com/raziel/raziel.htm, accessed 9 May 2014.
59.Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 243, fo. 26.
60.PGM II.18; III.425; VII.412; PDM XIV.116.
61.Warren R. Dawson, ‘The Lore of the Hoopoe’, The Ibis, 121 (1925), 32–5.
62.Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century, Stroud, 1997.
63.Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 219, fo. 186v; British Library, Sloane MS 3132, fo. 56v.
64.Andrei Torporkou, ‘Russian Love Charms in a Comparative Light’, in Jonathan Roper (ed.), Charms, Charmers and Charming, Basingstoke, 2009, 126–49.
65.There are different versions in British Library Royal MS 17A.XLII, fos 15r–23, and Sloane MSS 313, fos 27–45; 3826, fos 58–83; 3854, fos 112–39; 3853, fos 1–25; and 3885, fos 1–25, 58–125. Joseph Peterson has edited a composite one at www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm, accessed 28 May 2014, and Gösta Hedegård another at Stockholm in 2002, with careful attention to the different recensions. For commentaries, see these editions, Robert Mathiesen, ‘A Thirteenth-century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from the “Sworn Book” of Honorius of Thebes’; and Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Devil’s Contemplatives’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, Stroud, 1998, 143–62 and 250–65; Katelyn Mesler, ‘The “Liber Iuratus Honorii” and the Christian Reception of Angel Magic’; and Jan R. Veenstra, ‘Honorius and the Sigil of God’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Invoking Angels, University Park, PA, 2012, 113–91.
66.The standard edition is the composite one of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in London in 1888. The introduction, printed on pp. 2–4, is taken from British Library, Additional MS 10862, a work of the mid-sixteenth century.
67.‘Albertus Magnus’, De virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium, Amsterdam, 1648, 128.
68.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a–2ae, Quaestio 96.
69.See sources at n. 6.
70.Julien Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age et à l’époque moderne, Florence, 2007, includes a critical edition of the text. A seventeenth-century version is translated and edited by Joseph H. Peterson, in The Lesser Key of Solomon, York Beach, MN, 2001, 155–220. For commentaries see Michael Camille, ‘Visual Art in Two Manuscripts of the Ars Notoria’, in Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, Stroud, 1998, 110–39; and Julien Véronèse, ‘Magic, Theurgy and Spirituality in the Medieval Ritual of the “Ars Notoria”’, in Fanger (ed.), Invoking Angels, 37–78.
71.Nicholas Watson, ‘John the Monk’s “Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary”’; and Claire Fanger, ‘Plundering the Egyptian Treasure: John the Monk’s “Book of Visions” and its Relation to the Ars Notoria of Solomon’, in Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, 163–29 (
providing the text between them); Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson, ‘The Prologue to John of Morigny’s “Liber Visionum”’, Esoterica, 3 (2001), 108–17 (with the text).
72.These features are especially apparent in British Library, Sloane MS 3854.
73.Joshua Trachtenburg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, New York, 1939. The same idea is repeated with further material in John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition, London, 1974, 31–5; Kieckhefer, ‘The Devil’s Contemplatives’; and Mesler, ‘The “Liber Iuratus Honori”’.
74.Giancarlo Lacerenza, ‘Jewish Magicians and their Clients in Late Antiquity’, in Leonard V. Rutgers (ed.), What Athens has to do with Jerusalem, Leuven, 2003, 401–19. For original early medieval texts by churchmen condemning the invocation of angels and naming of them, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2003, 142, 145.
75.As well as the sources in n. 71, see Jan R. Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandel’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 189–229; Peter Schäfer, ‘Jewish Magical Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 41 (1990), 75–91; Alexander, ‘Incantations and Books of Magic’, 361–3; Michael Swartz, Scholastic Magic, Princeton, 1996; Rebecca Lesses, ‘Speaking Angels’, Harvard Theological Review, 89 (1996), 41–60; and Julien Véronèse, ‘God’s Names and their Uses in the Books of Magic Attributed to King Solomon’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 30–50. For early examples of Jewish angelic magic, see the Book of Tobit, 8.1–3; Sepher ha-Razim and Harba de-Moshe, above; and Schiffman and Swartz (eds), Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts. For Christian magical texts involving heavy use of angels and holy names, see the Testament of Solomon, Magical Treatise of Solomon, Sworn Book, and Sepher Raziel, above; Turner, Henry Cornelius Agrippa His Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, sigs F–K (‘Of Occult Philosophy or of Magical Ceremonies’, L–P2 (‘The Heptameron’), and Z–Dd2 (‘The Arbatel’); Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS D252, fos 85–87v; Peterson (ed.), The Lesser Key of Solomon, 109–45 (‘The Art Pauline’), and 147–54 (‘The Almadel’); and Stepher Skinner and David Rankine (eds), Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee’s Enochian Tables, Singapore, 2004.
76.Pingree’s main relevant publications are listed at n. 10.
77.For a detailed discussion of this, see my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 144–58. Key texts include Al-Kindi, De Radiis, ed. M. T. D’Alverny and F. Hudry, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age, 41 (1974), 139–260; Frank Carmody (ed.), The Astronomical Works of Thabit b. Qurra, Berkeley, 1960; Abu Bakr ibn Washiyya al-Nabati, Kitab al-Filaha al-nabatiyya, ed. Toufic Fahd as L’agriculture Nabateene, Damascus, 1993; and David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix, London, 1986. See also now Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, London, 2015, for the impact of Arabic astral magic on Western views of the cosmos.
78.PGM IV.2891–2942 and VII.795–845.
79.Corpus Hermeticum II and XVI, and Asclepius I.3. I have used the edition published by Walter Scott as Hermetica, Oxford, 1924.
80.For a discussion of this process and its results, see my Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 159–63. Work on it published since then includes Burnett and Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition; Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic, University Park, PA, 2013; and Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister, University Park, PA, 2013, 73–92.
81.Thompson, The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic, 157–8.
82.Samuel Daiches, Babylonian Oil Magic in the Talmud and Later Jewish Literature, London, 1913, 32–3.
83.Lucian, Menippus, c. 7.
84.Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 57–67.
85.PGM IV.2006–25; and VII.846–61.
86.C. K. Barrett (ed.), The New Testament Background: Selected Documents, 2nd edition, London, 1987, 191–2.
87.G. Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, The Hague, 1948, 86–7.
88.Nicholas Campion, The Great Year, London, 1994, 87–94.
89.Al-Nadim, The Fihrist, ed. Bayard Dodge, New York, 1970, 746–7.
90.PGM IV.3172–86, VII.478–83 and XIII.821–88.
91.Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, 87–8.
92.J. E. Circlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, London, 1962, 196–7.
93.Lucian, A Slip of the Tongue in Salutation, c. 5.
94.C. J. de Vogel, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, Assen, 1966, 28–49 and 292–7; quotations on pp. 36 and 44, while the cup with the shield is on 47–8.
95.William of Auvergne, De legibus, c. 27.
96.Sources at n. 72.
97.In verse 27.
98.Antonio da Montolmo, De ocultis et manifestis, c.6.
99.Nicholas Eymeric, Directorium inquisitorium, Roman edition of 1587, 338. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 120, finds other fourteenth-century references to magic circles.
100.They are found, for example, in the various versions of the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Magical Treatise of Solomon and the Key of Solomon, cited above, ‘The Heptameron’, and the ‘Munich Handbook’, ed. Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites. See also Veenstra, ‘The Holy Almandel’, and ‘Sepher Raziel’ and ‘The Dannel’ in British Library, Sloane MS 3853, fos 46–81 and 176–260; plus Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 173 and Rawlinson MS D252, fos 160–65.
101.J. Schouten, The Pentagram as a Medical Symbol, Nieuwkoop, 1968, 29–45.
102.Circlot, Dictionary of Symbols, 196–7.
103.‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Fit 2, verses 27–8; Antonio da Montolmo, De occultis et manifestis. c.6.
104.This is discussed by Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 175.
105.See the commentary on the manuscripts in Ioannis Marathakis’s edition. For overviews of Byzantine texts, see Richard P. H. Greenfield, Traditions of Belief in Late Byzantine Demonology, Amsterdam, 1988; Henry Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Magic, Washington DC, 1995; and Paul Magdalino and Maria Maroudi (eds), The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, Geneva, 2006.
5 The Hosts of the Night
1.I have discussed these developments more fully, with references, in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999, 111–50; and in ‘Witchcraft and Modernity’, in Marko Nennonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 191–212.
2.Again, I have discussed Margaret Murray’s career, ideas and impact in Triumph of the Moon, 194–201, 272–6 and 362. Other considerations of them have been generated from within the Folklore Society, of which she was a leader: Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Margaret Murray’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 89–96; and Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood, A Coven of Scholars, London, 1998.
3.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, London, 1975.
4.The book concerned is the one translated into English as The Night Battles, London, 1983. I have supplied an extensive analysis of its relationship to the ‘Murray thesis’ in Triumph of the Moon, 276–8.
5.Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London, 1992, 7–15: quotations on pp. 8–9.
6.In Triumph of the Moon, 112–31, I outlined the development of this complex of ideas, with full references.
7.Jeroen W. Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, Groningen, 2011, 134.
8.The Frazerian element in Ginzburg’s The Night Battles is discussed in detail in my Triumph of the Moon, 277–8.
9.All these statements can be found in Éva Pócs, ‘The Popular Foundations of the Witches’ Sabbath and the Devil’s Pact in Central and Southern Europe’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witch Beliefs and Witch Hunting in Central and Southern Europe, Budapest, 1992, 305, 335.
10.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, 1980; and ‘“The Ladies from Outside”’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early Modern Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 191–218.
11.For succinct recent summaries of the concept, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, see Jonathan Durrant and Michael Bailey, Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft, Lanham
, 2003, 204; and Doris Boden et al. (eds), Enzyklopädie des Marchens, Berlin, 2011, vol. 14, part 2, cols 795–804.
12.Ginzburg, The Night Battles, 40–48; quotation on pp. 47–8.
13.Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, Budapest, 1999, 25.
14.Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night, trans. Jon E. Graham, Rochester, VT, 2011, 2, 199. For a shorter recent publication which embodies the Grimm construct in full, see Alan E. Bernstein, ‘The Ghostly Troop and the Battle over Death’, in Mu-Chou Poo (ed.), Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions, Leiden, 2009, 115–16. See also Steven P. Marrone, A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, London, 2015, 62–3, for a still more recent and very good work which still swallows whole the Ginzburg and Lecouteux vision of the Wild Hunt.
15.An extended illustration of this argument, with reference to British calendar customs, can be found in my The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford, 1996.
16.I have, again, considered this at length in Stations, and in Triumph of the Moon, 112–31. For a particular critique of Grimm’s methodology, see Beate Kellner, Grimms Mythen, Frankfurt, 1994.
17.The German studies are summarized, with references, in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 202–8; the milestone works for the debate mentioned are Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen, vol. 1, Frankfurt, 1934; and Friedrich Ranke, Kleinere Schriften, Munich, 1971, 380–408. To Lecouteux’s list can be added Jan de Vries, ‘Wodan und die wilde Jagd’, Die Nachbarn, 3 (1962), 31–59; and Edmund Mudrak, ‘Die Herkunft der Sagen vom wütenden Heere und vom wilden Jäger’, Laographia, 22 (1965), 304–23.
18.Karl Meisen, Die Sagen vom Wütenden Heer und wilden Jäger, Münster, 1935. Among writers of most relevance here, Meisen’s texts underpin the work of Carlo Ginzburg, Wolfgang Behringer and Claude Lecouteux.
19.Meisen was a pioneer of this. For later reflections of it, see Mudrak, ‘Die Herkunft’; Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, passim; and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, Charlottesville, VA, 1998, passim.
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