Download PDF | Petropoulos (ed) - Greek Magic. Ancient, Medieval and Modern BB-Routledge (2008).
212 Pages
GREEK MAGIC
Magic has always been a widespread phenomenon in Greek society, starting from Homer’s Circe (the fi rst ‘evil witch’ in Western history) and extending to the pervasive belief in the ‘evil eye’ in twenty-fi rst-century Greece. Indeed, magic is probably the most ancient and durable among social and religious phenomena known to classical and other scholars, and it can be traced over a span of some three millennia in sources in the Greek language as well as in an impressive range of visual and other media. Th ese include curse tablets from fourthcentury bce Athens, the medico-magical gems of late antiquity, early Christian amulets, and various exorcism prayers from the medieval and later periods.
Organized chronologically, the intriguing panorama off ered by this book guides the reader through the ancient, medieval, modern and even contemporary periods, highlighting the traditions, ideologies and methods of magic in each period of Greek history. It brings together the latest insights from a range of experts from various disciplines: classicists, art historians, archaeologists, legal historians and social anthropologists among others. J.C.B. Petropoulos is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the Democritean University of Th race and Chairman of the Board of Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplio. He specializes in Greek poetry and is generally concerned with social-anthropological issues relevant to ancient Greek literature and society. He also has an interest in the reception of ancient Greek sub-literary and ‘popular’ song tradition beyond antiquity in the Greek-speaking world.
INTRODUCTION
Magic in ancient Greece J.C.B. Petropoulos Th e Greek word μαγεία comes from the Old Persian makuç, originally a member of an ancient Median tribe or clan which became specialized in religious functions. St Matthew, as many of us know, recognized that the Magoi (in Greek) were competent astrologers intimately familiar with the sky. But well before the Christian era, Herodotus revealed the members of this γένος to be carrying out, in 480 bce, actions which in other classical and post-classical sources are oft en called γοητεία, φαρμακεία, μαγγ ανεία or even μαγεία: if Herodotus is to be believed, these men performed unspecifi ed φαρμακεία (φαρμακεύσαντες) on the Strymon River in Th race and slightly later appeased blustery winds off the coast of central Greece by chanting spells (καταείδοντες).1
Magic, however, was hardly a Persian import. Its origin dated to unknown times in the Greek world and it was largely the province of local men and women. By the time of Heraclitus (c. 500 bce) male practitioners might be called μάγοι2 but more oft en, at least in the case of itinerant professionals, they had other names, such as γόης, μάντις or αγύρτης. In Chapter 4, Sarah Iles Johnston explores the death-related activities of this exclusively male occupational class. If magic was not late, neither was it peripheral to archaic, classical and later Greek society. As David Jordan and others have recently shown (see Chapter 2), while Plato was expounding his (rather peripheral) philosophical religion, mainstream Athenians were cursing their neighbours through magical means. In time, from the Hellenistic period onwards, magic became more and more elaborate and ‘syncretic’, borrowing much from Eastern mystery religions and especially Near Eastern and Egyptian lore, as William Brashear shows in Chapter 6.
How, in general, did the ancients’ magic work? For one thing, it operated outside the sphere of public, or polis, religion; it was always private and usually had the character of mystery, or secret, cultic practice. Second, it mobilized, manipulated or even occasionally coerced the demons of the dead (νεκυδαίμονες) or certain (usually underworld or chthonic) gods, and it did so in an automatic, mechanical manner. Magic, in other words, normally lacked the element of χάρις – of reciprocity; hence the notions of supplication or vow were absent or extremely rare in, say, defi xiones (κατάδεσμοι). Gods and demons were either commanded or otherwise ‘induced’ (Plato uses the ambiguous term πείθειν)3 to carry out the spell-operator’s invariably selfi sh acts. Th ese acts were meant to be either harmful (‘black magic’, which Circe works at fi rst; see the discussion by Nanno Marinatos in Chapter 3) or benefi cent (compare the medicinal eff ects of a number of magical gems, as examined by Arpad Nagy in Chapter 7).
Because of its destructive potential (which even Plato allowed),4 and also because it worked outside the polis, oft en reversing civic religious rituals and ideas, magic was defi nitionally an anti-social activity in the Graeco-Roman world. Perhaps, as Brashear and Iles Johnston demonstrate, the driving force behind magic in general was the φθόνος and the frustrations engendered in an agonistic, competitive society. What is more, a number of laws and other texts which date from the early fi ft h century bce onwards and which proscribe magical acts show that the Greeks and Romans regarded this phenomenon as a potentially harmful subset of religious activity. Yet despite its alleged anti-social ‘marginality’, magic formed the penumbra or background of much high literature and even of the visual arts.
It is quite probable, as Antonio Corso argues in Chapter 5, that Praxiteles himself and other sculptors used magical processes to create lifelike, seductive statues of mortals and gods.5 Indeed, now our own ‘rational’ twentieth century has drawn to a close, it is high time we remembered that the ancient Greeks’ legacy to Western culture was not only democracy and rational enquiry, but also numerous magical beliefs, practices and fi gures such as the medieval and modern witch and warlock.6 Whether or not it is true, as the anthropologist M. Winkelman has argued,7 that magical traditions generally have a serious basis in parapsychology, the study of Greek and Roman antecedents is a vast and compelling chapter in the history of religion and society. Wilamowitz put it well: He was eager, he said, to study Greek magic ‘in order to understand my Hellenes, to be able to judge them fairly.
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