Greek Magical Papyri

• 1. Introduction

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  Some of the spells in the Greek Magical Papyri summon dark gods and daemons by name, in high portentous language. Others treat impotence, minor ailments, and what the texts themselves describe as parlor tricks. From fatal curses to love charms, the full range of human anxiety appears within a single manuscript tradition. These texts survived not through careful preservation but through the accident of the antiquities market.

  Written mostly in ancient Greek, but also in Old Coptic and Demotic, the manuscripts date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. Scholars gave the body of material the Latin name Papyri Graecae Magicae, abbreviated PGM. Individual texts are identified by volume and item number. The series catalogued by Karl Preisendanz reached PGM LXXXI, the 81st entry. The best-known single text within the collection is the Mithras Liturgy.

  Whether these texts were forbidden underground literature or the professional tools of Egyptian temple priests has been debated ever since. Both questions remain genuinely contested: who produced them, and who used them. Most of what survives today traces back to a single enigmatic collector who operated in Alexandria in the 1820s.

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• 2. The Anastasi Collection

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  Jean d'Anastasi identified himself as a diplomatic representative at the Khedivial court. His origins remain uncertain; he may have been Armenian. Around 1827, he acquired about half a dozen papyri, which he claimed to have obtained at Thebes, the ancient city now known as Luxor. He then sold them to several of the most prominent institutions in Europe.

  The British Museum, the Louvre, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris all received pieces. So did the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. Hans Dieter Betz, who later edited the English translation of the papyri, believed these pieces came from a single source. He thought they had belonged to the library of an ancient scholar and collector based in Thebes in late antiquity. Anastasi also acquired a considerable quantity of other papyri and antiquities beyond the magical texts.

  PGM III followed a separate path. The diplomat Jean-Francois Mimaut, who lived from 1774 to 1837, acquired it and deposited it at the French Bibliotheque Nationale. Other early papyri entered the market through the Egyptian antiquities trade in the early 19th century, with no single known intermediary.

  The Thebes Cache also contained the Stockholm papyrus and the Leyden papyrus X, which preserve alchemical rather than magical material. The first scholarly editions of any of these papyri would not appear in print until 1843.

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• 3. From Papyrus to Print

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  Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, a British scholar, is credited with the first scholarly publication of any of these texts. Writing for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 1853, he translated PGM V into English with commentary. A Latin translation of the earliest published papyri appeared in 1885.

  Karl Preisendanz collected the texts and published them in two volumes: the first in 1928, the second in 1931. A third volume was already in preparation. The galley proofs were dated 'Pentecost 1941', but the type was destroyed when Leipzig was bombed during the Second World War. Photocopies of the proofs survived and circulated among scholars for decades.

  A revised and expanded edition appeared in 1973-1974, again in two volumes. The second volume was entirely re-edited. The papyri that Preisendanz had planned for the lost third volume were incorporated, though the indexes were omitted. Hans Dieter Betz produced an English translation of Preisendanz's edited texts in the 1980s. He also added further Greek and Demotic material not included in the earlier editions. The full collection can now be searched through the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database, and various concordances and dictionaries have been published to support the study of its texts.

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• 4. Hidden or Official

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  Hans Dieter Betz describes the Greek Magical Papyri as representing only a fraction of the 'magical books' that must have existed in antiquity. He considers them 'underground literature,' kept alive despite organized efforts to destroy it. As evidence, he points to the burning of magical books described in the Acts of the Apostles, at Acts 19:19. He also cites the orders Augustus gave to burn magical texts, as recorded by Suetonius in Suet. Aug. 31.1. What Betz calls 'numerous' early Christian book-burnings complete his case.

  Betz also points to the admonitions to secrecy within certain papyri as further support for the underground interpretation. David Frankfurter takes a significantly different view. Frankfurter attributes the texts to temple specialists. In his phrase, these were 'innovative members of the Egyptian priesthood during the third-/fourth-century decline of the Egyptian temple infrastructure.' On his reading, these were professional documents, not marginal ones.

  Alan F. Segal uses the presence of hymns within the PGM to challenge a deeper assumption. He argues that the standard scholarly dichotomy between magic and religion may not reflect how ancient practitioners thought. If hymns and spells appear side by side without contradiction, the writers may have seen no fundamental distinction between them. Pauline Hanesworth adds a practical dimension: beyond any literary or intellectual purpose, the PGM had practical aims.

  Complicating all of these questions is the nature of the PGM itself. This is a modern scholarly collection assembled over centuries from scattered finds and augmented by academics, not a single ancient archive discovered intact.

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• 5. A Convergence of Gods

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  In PGM IV.1266, Aphrodite is addressed by the Egyptian epithet Neferihri, derived from the Egyptian phrase Nfr-iry.t, meaning 'nice eyes.' Aphrodite was associated with the Egyptian Hathor. The epithet illustrates a pattern that runs throughout the collection: Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, and Babylonian traditions woven into a single framework.

  Betz, in his scholarly introduction, noted how Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, and Aphrodite appear in the PGM. They are not portrayed as the refined aristocratic figures familiar from classical Greek literature. They appear instead as demonic, or even dangerous, closer to the gods of Greek folklore. The context of magical texts made such sinister attributes appropriate. Partly this reflects Egyptian influence, where the terror of the divine and beast cult were familiar elements of religious practice.

  The Egyptian contributions to this mixture, Betz argued, ran in two directions at once. He wrote that 'the indigenous ancient Egyptian religion has in part survived, in part been profoundly hellenized.' At the same time, he found Greek traditions being Egyptianized within the same texts. His conclusion was that the magicians who produced the papyri were 'Hellenistic in outlook.' The result was best understood as 'a Greco-Egyptian, rather than more general Greco-Roman, syncretism.'

  Albrecht Dieterich had already noted the importance of the PGM for the study of ancient religions. Most of the texts combine Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, and other traditions within a single document. On the Jewish elements, Betz was less certain. He declared that 'the origin and nature of the sections representing Jewish magic in the Greek magical papyri is far from clear.'

  Janet H. Johnson noted in 1996 that the texts can only be fully understood when the Demotic portions are properly accounted for. All four of the Demotic magical texts appear to have come from the Theban collections that Anastasi assembled. Most include passages in both Greek and Demotic. Many use Old Coptic, which is Egyptian written with the Greek alphabet supplemented by additional signs, to gloss sounds that Greek lacked. Some passages appear in the older hieratic script. Others use a cipher script, which would have been unreadable to a Greek-speaking audience but fairly simple for an Egyptian to decode.

  Similar formulas appear in defixiones, the binding spells inscribed on curse tablets. Some of those tablets date to the 500s BCE, well before the earliest papyri in this collection. They have been found as far afield as Athens, Asia Minor, Rome, and Sicily.

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• 6. Curses, Charms, and Figurines

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  Figurines appear throughout the spells of the Greek Magical Papyri, in judicial magic, erotic magic, and curse magic alike. The material from which a figurine was made typically corresponded to the type of spell being performed. Archaeological finds from across the Mediterranean basin confirm the patterns the texts describe. Figurines have been recovered from the settings that ancient Greeks associated with the underworld: graves, sanctuaries, and bodies of water. Several have been found inside lead coffins, with the spell or curse inscribed on the coffin itself.

  Alongside spells and recipes, the pages contain what the texts call charakteres and voces magicae. These magic words are often written in shorthand, with standard abbreviations for the more common formulae. The Prayer of Thanksgiving is one of the texts interspersed among them. Some rituals call for the practitioner to assume the identity of a deity. Invocation and visualization are the methods described, as part of a broader magical ascent.

  As far as they have been reconstructed from the surviving pages, these books fall into two broad types. Some appear to be scholarly compilations of spells gathered out of academic interest. Others read more like the working manuals of travelling magicians, containing a full repertoire of formulae for every occasion. Some of those spells gave the practitioner means to subordinate a person of higher social standing.

  The same formulas within the papyri also appear on ostraka, amulets, and lead tablets found across the ancient world. The papyri documented a practice that extended far beyond Egypt.

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