The Caretaker

GRECO-ROMAN MAGIC - 8/25/2022

Added 2022-08-25 16:42:50 +0000 UTC

GRECO ROMAN MAGIC

INTRODUCTION

Intro

We know basically nothing
We have to pull what we can from literary sources
Scant mentions from philosophers and historians
We do have historical evidence though
Public records of questions asked of the oracle
Defixiones
Its not much
It would be fatuous to doubt that there were in most communities of any size in the Greek and Roman worlds people who practiced magic.
Theocritus is probably fairly accurate
Basically, we gotta divorce the modern perception of witchcraft from the realities

Terms For practicioners

Etymologies of wizardry
“Magic-working was very often practised in conjunction with some related calling.”
“Witches are persons possessed of an inherent but disordered power; sorcerers are persons who engage in magical manipulations to achieve their ends”
What did greek practicioners call themselves

Terms for what magicians did

The most general term in Greek for the procedures pursued by magicians is manganeia or manganeuma. The term does not seem to be related to the words
magos and mageia, but there is reason to suspect that most Greeks will have believed that manganeumata

TECHNE

Means craft

TERATOSKOPOS

CHRESMOLOGOS

MAGOS / MAGOI

MANTEIS

GOETES

metragyrtai or menagyrtai

Kathartai

Alazones

AGYRTAI / AGYRTES

(59) The impression to be gained from our sources is that magicians were more

likely than not to be seers or manteis and that some of the seers who performed

magic could also be described as agyrtai, a term used to refer to mendicants. The

earliest instance of a man being characterized as a mantis and agyrtes as well as

a magos is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of about 430 BC.

(60) He assumes that Teiresias must have been

put up to doing this by his brother-in-law Creon to deprive him of his throne by

subterfuge and that Creon had suborned Teiresias, whom he characterizes as a

magos, cunning in his scheming, a devious and underhand agyrtes, who can only

see where there is profit to be made, but who is blind in his own craft (techne)

(60) The implication of the passage is that there was a class of persons who presented

themselves as manteis but who were also magoi and agyrtai and that the last

category of person was prepared to turn its hand to all sorts of underhand

schemes, provided it made a profit from it.

(60) It sounds then as if the magos-cum-agyrtes who represented himself as a

mantis would have been a familiar figure for Sophocles’ audience.

(60) That to some

extent is confirmed by the author of the treatise On the Sacred Disease, who

hypothesizes that the first persons to treat epilepsy as a divinely-sent condition

must have been men of the kind who are now magoi, purifiers (kathartai),

agyrtai and charlatans (alazones), but who present themselves as being

especially punctilious in their worship of the gods and at the same as the

possessors of a superior understanding.

(60) The figure of the agyrtes-cum-mantis is next encountered in Plato’s Republic

in a speech in which Adeimantus challenges Socrates to present a case for living

a morally upright life, if it is possible by assuaging the anger of the gods to be

cleansed of the consequences of any wrongdoing.

(60) According to Adeimantus,

there are persons who claim to be able to perform this service: they are the

agyrtai and manteis who come to the doors of the rich and seek to persuade them

that they have acquired the capacity from the gods through sacrifices and

incantations (epodai) to heal in a pleasurable and festive form not only any

crimes the party approached may have committed but also any crimes his

ancestors may have committed; the agyrtai and manteis also let it be known that

if anyone wishes to harm an enemy, he will be able to do so at no great expense,

whether by conjuring up a ghost (epagoge) or by employing a binding-spell

(katadesis), as they will persuade the gods to serve them.

(61) That is not all that

Adeimantus has to say about the agyrtai and manteis who come to the doors of

the rich; he also maintains that they cite lines from Homer to support the view

that the gods can be bought off by prayer and sacrifice and that they provide what

he calls a hubbub of books by Musaeus and Orpheus that lay down the rules for

the sacrifices they perform and, furthermore, that they seek to persuade not only

individuals but whole cities that releases and purifications (katharmoi) can be

procured for men while they are still living by means of sacrifices conducted in a

pleasant and joyous manner and that they are good also for death, in which event

the ceremony is called teletai; what it does is free men from the ills in the

afterlife that would otherwise affect them.

(61) Plato in the Laws makes mention of persons whose conduct bears a marked

resemblance to the agyrtai and manteis of the Republic, although he does not

refer to them under such a description, but only as asebeis or impious persons.

(61) Since the actions

of the asebeis of the Laws are virtually identical with those that the agyrtai and

manteis of the Republic promise to perform for the rich men to whose doors they

come, namely, to cure the effect of wrongs committed through a power acquired

from the gods by sacrifices and incantations, and since the persons who

commission the asebeis seem to be persons of the same social standing as the

rich men whose doors are besieged by agyrtai and manteis, there are grounds for

thinking that the asebeis of the Laws and the agyrtai and manteis of the Republic

are either the same people under different descriptions or persons who have a

good deal in common.

(63) Our quest into the identity of the holy man who performs magic will begin

with a figure with whom he is on several occasions associated, the agyrtes. When Plato speaks about agyrtai and manteis making their way around the doors of the rich he almost certainly does not have separate categories of person in mind, but a single category. He is thinking of manteis who were at the same time agyrtai. The term agyrtes means basically ‘someone who collects a living by begging’.

(63) Men will have given to agyrtai for a variety of reasons: sometimes it will have been in return for services rendered; on other occasions, they will have imagined that in supporting a beggar-priest they were winning the favour of his god.

(63) The figure of the agyrtes is to be encountered first in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:

the Trojan princess, Cassandra, who has been given the gift of prophetic vision

by Apollo, asks the Chorus of Argive elders, when she sees revealed before her

what turns out to be the feast of Thyestes, whether she has hit on the truth or

whether she is a false mantis of the sort who knocks on doors and babbles

nonsense;69 when at a later stage in the series of visions that roll before her eyes

she sees a two-footed lioness who will kill her lying in bed with a wolf in the

absence of the lion, she throws off the insignia of the seer’s (mantis) craft that

she wears and complains of having to endure being called a wandering agyrtes, a

wretched beggar half-dead from starvation. There are a number of lessons to be

drawn from the episode: one is that by 458 BC, when the play was performed,

agyrtai were so well-established a feature of Athenian life that Aeschylus is not

conscious of the anachronism involved in introducing them into a drama set in the

Heroic Age; secondly, some agyrtai presented themselves as manteis and

specifically as the kind of mantis whose prophetic gift consisted in ecstatic

visions; thirdly, some of them made their way from door to door; and finally,

those who pursued the calling were often destitute and were greatly despised.

(64) The agyrtai about whom we hear most are the acolytes of the Mother Goddess,

Cybele.

(64) They were known as metragyrtai or menagyrtai Such persons were

probably already a presence in the Greek world early in the fifth century; the

ecstatic ravings of metragyrtai may be what Aeschylus has in mind when he

makes Cassandra complain that she is treated as an agyrtes; and Pindar knows of

the drums (tympana) and the castanets that were a feature of the worship of

Cybele.

(65) Confirmation that metragyrtai were a familiar feature of the religious

landscape is not to be found until later in the century: the comic poet Cratinus,

who was a somewhat older contemporary of Aristophanes, alluding to the

eunuch-acolytes of the Mother Goddess, the Galloi, calls the famous seer

Lampon a Cybele-collectress (agersikybelis);73 and there is a play by Sophocles

called Tympanistai, the chorus of which, to judge from its title, must have been

made up of the drummers who played a part in the cult of Cybele. Lampon was

not the only religious expert to be subject to such insults:74 in the 380s or shortly

thereafter the Athenian military man Iphicrates called a member of the family

who provided the torch-bearer in the Eleusinian Mysteries a metragyrtes

(65) Metragyrtai will generally have moved around in bands with different persons in

the band performing different rôles That is implicit in the story told by the

Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus, who was active in the latter part of fourth

century and in the early third century, about the ultimate fate of Dionysius the

Younger, who had once upon a time been tyrant of Syracuse: he brought his life

to a miserable close in Corinth as a metragyrtes and drum-bearer

(64) The moral standing of metragyrtai was also low:

they served as a touchstone for turpitude.

(65) The persons called agyrtai will have been a heterogeneous group and will

have come from very different backgrounds. It would be natural to assume that

metragyrtai had their roots in the north-western part of Anatolia, in Phrygia, and

that they had emerged from there to spread the cult of the Mother Goddess.

(64) Had they been, Clearchus could not have told a story about Dionysius the

Younger ending his days as a metragyrtes.

(65) That agyrtai were vagabonds, persons of no fixed abode who made their way

from city to city begging for a living, may be a largely correct assumption, but it

is not one that can easily be proved.

(65) Plutarch, in his life of the early Spartan

lawgiver, Lycurgus, does say that Lycurgus allowed no sophist nor mendicant

soothsayer (mantis agyrtikos) nor keeper of courtesans to set foot in Laconia.The

implication of the anecdote is that manteis agyrtikoi wandered from place to

place. Plutarch’s source is probably Hellenistic. The passage has certainly

nothing to tell us about conditions in Sparta in the seventh century BC, but will

be testimony to the wanderings of agyrtai in the period from which it comes.

(65) Not

all agyrtai will necessarily have spent their lives wandering from place to place;

some of them may well have been rooted in a city and confined themselves to

making their way around it begging

(65) The mother of Epicurus is a case in point.

There is some reason to think that she would have been called an agyrtria if she

had really, as an opponent of Epicureanism maintained, made the rounds of

humble dwellings in Athens accompanied by her son, who read out purifications

(katharmoi) for her. While there may well have been persons who could be

called agyrtai who were permanently, if not necessarily legally, resident in a

community, the suspicion must be that many agyrtai did wander from city to city. It is likely, therefore, that agyrtai will for the most part have lacked legal

standing in the communities in which they sought their livelihood.

(65) We are still a long way from being able to pin down who agyrtai actually

Were. It is virtually certain that anyone who owned enough land to live off or

who had a craft to make a living from would not have gone out on the road as an

Agyrtes. Agyrtai by their nature are basically persons who are destitute, although

some of them may eventually become sufficiently successful to settle down and

establish themselves in a community.

(65) Although destitute and essentially beggars, agyrtai were not

necessarily utterly obscure and nameless individuals.

(65) It is possible to get a little closer to who the wandering mendicant religious

experts were by looking at a kind of religious expert who has a good deal in

common with the agyrtes, but about whom we are rather better informed. He

may very well have been called an agyrtes.

(70) Those who undertook to perform

purificatory ceremonies that were part of an initiation-rite will have required the

texts to whose authority Plato says the agyrtai and manteis who came to the

doors of rich men appealed.

(78) Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

exemplifies the former type: she feels that as an inspired seer (mantis) reduced to

slavery she suffers the indignities endured by mendicant holy women (agyrtriai)

who wander hither and thither.

(89) The indications, such as they are, suggest that introducing

incantations into these ceremonies was one of the factors that caused trouble. It

will suffice to point to the mention of incantation in the Aesopic fable and to the

three references in Plato to incantation, in one instance characterized as goeteia,

in the purificatory rituals enacted by agyrtai and manteis and by impious persons

of a beast-like character

(89) They are to be read about in Plutarch’s tract On

Superstition, a work that probably derives from a Hellenistic work on the same

topic, where we learn that mendicant holy men (agyrtai) and sorcerers (goetes)

tell someone troubled by a dream that he has to employ an old woman expert in

purifications or a perimaktria, literally a woman who kneads a substance all

around something, to cleanse him of the effects of the dream.

(90) Women who purify those who have had disturbing dreams or visions are not said

to perform magic, but the author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred

Disease certainly takes the katharmoi, intended to cure epilepsy, performed by

the persons he refers to as magoi, kathartai and agyrtai as acts of mageia.

(92) Plato’s use of the masculine gender in

describing the magic-working of agyrtai and manteis proves that he believed

men practised black magic, but does not mean that he was not speaking generally

and not also thinking of women.

(95) It is also likely that magic-working was portrayed in New

Comedy: Menander had a play, the Thettalae, in which witches played a part and

more intriguingly he wrote a Menagyrtes, which must have had something to do

with one of the begging-priests of the Mother Goddess.

(113) The argument is based on the interesting assumption that

those whose authority is invoked in spells and incantations will be magicians and

secondly that there is an intrinsic relationship between the mystery-rites practised

by agyrtai and magic-working. The latter assumption also underlies the

euhemeristic account that Strabo, who relies here on some earlier Hellenistic

source, gives of the career of Orpheus: he was at first a sorcerer (goes) who made

a living as a mendicant (agyrtes) from music, the seer’s craft (mantike) and

mystery-rites, before he became more ambitious and went on to attempt greater

Things.

(113) The rationalization he offers for the stories told about the

journeys through the mountains the Idaean Dactyls undertook and for their

ecstatic possession by the divine (enthousiasmos) is that their mountain-walking

signifies their concern with mining and hunting and in general with acquiring the

necessities of life, while a mendicant way of life (agyrtikon) and sorcery

(goeteia) are closely related to divine possession, the performance of religious

ritual and the craft of the seer (mantike).

(148) A Greek would have called them agyrtai.

(149) It is entirely possible then that the praetor took the action out of a

desire to defend what he saw as traditional Roman religious practice from the

inroads that foreign cults were making and out of a concern to keep agyrtai from

profiting from the ignorance of the masses.

(150) Hispalis in banning astrologers from

Rome and Italy was to protect traditional Roman religious observance. At the

same time, it is also very likely that his edict was motivated by a genuine dislike

of priests making a living from selling their expertise, which is to say, acting as

Agyrtai.

(158) A Greek-speaker asked to find a general term that covered all of the forms of

seer and priest described in the preceding paragraphs would have called them

agyrtai or perhaps would have used the hendiadys agyrtai kai manteis to

characterize them.

(216) To begin with the terminology used in speaking of itinerant magicians: in

Greek they continue to be classified as agyrtai or begging holy men, although

sometimes they are also called ageirontes, a participle from the same root as

agyrtes that means ‘those taking up a collection’, and sometimes yet again as

planetai, ‘wanderers or vagabonds’, or planoi, the deeply ambiguous term that

means primarily ‘one who creates delusions in the minds of other men’, then

‘sorcerer’, but that may also have connotations of vagabond or wandering

beggar;77 the term laoplanos, ‘one who deludes the masses’, is also found; 78 in

Latin there is no term that is the exact equivalent of agyrtes, but in practice a

circulator was what in Greek would have been called an agyrtes. In Late Latin

glossaries, agyrtes is given as an equivalent of circulator. A circulator gets his

name from his gathering a circle (circulus) of onlookers about himself and this is

precisely what most circulatores will have done

(217) In the later text, the Constitutiones apostolorum, the ochlagogos is

found in the immediate company of the magician (magos), the utterer of

incantations (epaoidos), the astrologer, the diviner (mantis), the snake-charmer

(therepodos),84 the agyrtes, the maker of amulets and the purifier.

(217) Not all agyrtai, ageirontes and circulatores were magicians. In fact the

majority of them will have had different, though related, accomplishments.

(226) A speaker in a dialogue by Plutarch in which the decline of oracles uttered in

verse is discussed explains the passing of such oracles by the disrepute that the

hucksterish, mendicant (agyrtikon), altar-besieging and vagabond element to be

found at shrines of the Great Mother and Serapis had brought oracles delivered in

verse; some of them made up their own verse-oracles, others chose them by lot

from tablets; slaves and women were entranced by the metre of the oracles and

by their poetic diction.

(226) Philo Judaeus, writing in

Alexandria two generations at least before Plutarch, speaks of a magike coined in

a false form that is pursued by begging-priests of the Mother Goddess

(Menagyrtai), by those who frequent altars (bomolochoi) and the basest of

women and slaves.

(230) Artemidorus, the author of a work on the interpretation of dreams written in

the second half of the second century AD, tells us a little more about the

diviners, most of whom must have been agyrtai and some of whom will have

combined that calling with being a sorcerer, to be found in the agora and

wherever great crowds of people congregated.

(231) Since

Artemidorus was interested in what diviners from dreams had to say and

naturally thought that oneiromancy was a legitimate technique, he was inclined

to give this class of diviner the benefit of the doubt and not label them as agyrtai,

goetes and bomolochoi in the way that supercilious people did.

(237) Plutarch, in the essay in which

he treats of excessive fear of the divine, says that those who suffer from it when

they have frightening visions in sleep do not laugh off the vision on waking up

or rejoice at its only having been a dream, as others would, but get into a state of

upset and take themselves to mendicant holy men (agyrtai) and sorcerers

(goetes), on whom they spend money; these persons then advise them to find

some old woman to cleanse them of the demonic visitation that they have

experienced, to wash themselves in the sea and spend the day sitting on the

Ground.

(237) It is first of all to be remarked that Plutarch is in all likelihood not

speaking about two separate categories of person, agyrtai and goetes, but that

there is a hendiadys and that the persons really intended are mendicant holy men

who turn their hand to sorcery.

(237) The old women carry out the rituals. The

implication of the passage is that the old women who perform the ritual of

purification are mere technicians, while the agyrtai are the true experts.

(240) The last category of female magic-worker to be examined is the mendicant holy

woman. That such women were more of a presence than our sources reveal

seems likely. For one thing it is possible that some references to agyrtai are

generic and encompass both men and women. The one reference that there is to a

female mendicant, an agyrtria, is in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

(240) It is to be

found in a comparison that Damis, the companion of Apollonius, makes of his

meagre prophetic gifts with those of an old mendicant woman (agyrtria) who

prophesies about little sheep and such like things.

(300) The mendicant holy men (agyrtai) who in the pagan period were to be

encountered at the crossroads of a town, in its marketplace or in the vicinity of

the temples of the Mother Goddess or Isis did not disappear with the

Christianization of the Roman Empire.

(300) The Fathers of the Church certainly still continue to speak of agyrtai

(300) Epiphanius

invariably refers to the founders of the various heresies that he catalogues as

agyrtai, because of the similarity they bear in his eyes at any rate to wandering

Mendicants

(300) From the warning that Chrysostom issues against giving heed to

diviners (manteis), oracle-mongers (chresmologoi) and finally, agyrtai it is

apparent that mendicant holy men were still present in Antioch at the end of the

fourth century.

(300) Not much information is to be gleaned from John Chrysostom on what these

people did and who they were, although he does say that ambiguous prophetic

utterances of the kind given Croesus by the Pythia at Delphi were characteristic

of the forecasts made by agyrtai at crossroads.

(300) While Epiphanius’ traduction

of the various heresiarchs as agyrtai may do these persons less than justice, it

does throw a good deal of light on who the agyrtai of his time were, where they

came from in the world and how they behaved.

(300) His description of the life and

career of Mani or Cubricus, the founder of Manichaeism, may not be of much

help to those who wish to reconstruct the origins of Manichaeism, but it does

provide an insight into the agyrtai of Late Antiquity and their social

Circumstances.

(300) Epiphanius speaks disparagingly of Mani as a sorcerer (goes) and a mendicant

(agyrtes) in recounting Mani’s unsuccessful attempt to cure the son of the

Persian king.

MANTIS

(15) Magic-working was very often practised in conjunction with some related

calling. Persons who presented themselves as expert in one or the other of the

sub-specialities of the craft of the seer, for whom the most general term in Greek

is a mantis, frequently turned their hand to magic-working.

(49) Demosthenes in the speech Against Aristogeiton and that she

was a seer (mantis) who was condemned for impiety (asebeia) and executed for

the offence according to the account given by Philochorus in the sixth book of

his history;9

(59)(Seers as holy men) Very often the magician is a soothsayer (mantis or

chresmologos) or an interpreter of prodigies (teratoskopos); he may also offer

ritual purifications (katharmoi); he may provide initiations into mystery-rites;

and finally, he may be a mendicant holy man (agyrtes).

(59) The earliest instance of a man being characterized as a mantis and agyrtes as well as a magos is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of about 430 BC. There Oedipus, searching to find the killer of his predecessor as ruler of Thebes, Laius, is dumbfounded to be told by the mantis Teiresias, whose advice and help he has sought, that he himself is Laius’ killer.

(60) These reflections on the prophet’s craft lead Oedipus to address Teiresias directly

and to ask him when had he ever shown himself to be a clear-sighted mantis.49

The implication of the passage is that there was a class of persons who presented

themselves as manteis but who were also magoi and agyrtai and that the last

category of person was prepared to turn its hand to all sorts of underhand

schemes, provided it made a profit from it.

(60) There is nothing in the context that makes it certain that a magos is for Sophocles a magician, but it is hard to see what other rôle the unscrupulous mantis who doubles as a magos can have.

(60) It sounds then as if the magos-cum-agyrtes who represented himself as a

mantis would have been a familiar figure for Sophocles’ audience.

(60) Although the author of the treatise does not

call the persons he attacks manteis, what he describes is undoubtedly a form of

mantis: they interpret the sounds made by epileptics while having a convulsion

and the form the convulsion takes as signs of possession by particular deities.

(62) In both cases

there is to be a distinction in the penalties imposed on those who practise

pharmakeia, between those who are professionals and those who are not: the court

is to assess the penalty to be paid by a non-professional who does not understand

what he is doing, whereas if a doctor or a seer (mantis) or interpreter of prodigies

(teratoskopos) is convicted of engaging in their respective forms of pharmakeia,

there is a mandatory penalty of death.

(63) there is after all the conviction and execution

for asebeia of a mantis who was notorious as a sorceress, the Lemnian sorceress,

Theoris, whom the historian Philochorus described as a mantis condemned for

Asebeia.

(63-64) Who then were the manteis who practised magic and in what kind of religious

environment did they operate? The question is a difficult one to answer, not least

because there is reason to believe that considerable differences existed amongst

the manteis who practised magic: different kinds of mantis will have served very

different clienteles and will have offered somewhat different services.