MAGIC AND MAGICIANS IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD - 8/13/2022

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

1 FORMATION AND NATURE OF THE GREEK CONCEPT OF MAGIC

• There is no one magic
• The relationship of magic, religion, and science is complicated and ever-shifting
• “their activities were now classified as mageia. The mageia of the religious specialists was not co-extensive with what magic is now understood to be, but embraced a much wider spectrum: private religious practices that were not part of civic cults, Bacchic mystery-cults, purificatory rites, black magic, rites connected with controlling the weather and conjuring up the dead
• “The conception of mageia, to which opposition on the part of doctors and of philosophers such as Plato, concerned to create gods purified of all moral blemish gave rise, did not at first affect the thinking of the mass of their contemporaries. It was basically the product of a debate between two groups of people who stood on the margins of society, the doctors and the philosophers on one side and the religious specialists on the other.” (Idk if thats true)
• Egyptian conceptions of magic probably didnt resemble our idea of magic until it was influenced by the greco-roman world
• “By the fourth century BC, if not earlier, those who professed to be able to conjure up the ghosts of the dead to consult them or to send them to haunt others are treated as magicians, but there is no suggestion in the Odyssey that Odysseus is acting as a sorcerer or that there is anything untoward about his conduct”
• Basically, theres no textual evidence to indicate that Circie was a sorceress, or that her actions were associated with magic, but by the 4th century in athens, she was considered one.
• (23) demeter aiding a root-cutter
• This section has a whole list of things that are considered magic at one time, and not at another

2 SORCERERS IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES BC

The legal position of magic in athens

• Cases involving sorcery
• Legal remedies for people harmed by sorcery
• The control of magicians who were not athenian
• Magic in plato and athenian law

Holy men as magicians - the Miracle-worker-cum-sorcerer

• The magician pure and simple in Classical Athens is an elusive figure. The magic-workers of whom we hear anything are almost always something else besides magicians; most of them are specialists in some form of religious activity. The closest that we seem to come to the magic-worker whose magic is not an extension of his religious expertise is the miracle-worker-cum- sorcerer, the thaumatopoios who is also a goes.
• “He is thinking of manteis who were at the same time agyrtai. The term agyrtes means basically ‘someone who collects a living by begging’.67 It is very often translated as ‘beggar-priest’.”
• Those who conducted ceremonies of initiation in their own premises must on the whole have been people from the margins of society, such as slaves and ex-prostitutes. That much is to be inferred from the story that Demosthenes makes up about Aeschines’ origins

The miracle-worker as magicians - The Thaumatopoioi

• There is another category of person who sometimes doubled as a magician in Athens and no doubt elsewhere in the fifth and fourth centuries of which account needs to be taken. These are the persons known as thaumatopoioi or less frequently as thaumatourgoi. A thauma is a wondrous event that can very often only be explained by invoking a supernatural agent.
• 
  

Magic workers outside of athens

3 SORCCERESSES IN ATHENS IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES BC

• Sorcery and drunkenness
• Sorceresses as purifiers and healers
• Women performing harmful magic on behalf of others

4 SORCERERS OF THE GREEK WORLD IN THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD 300-18 BC

• Magicians, prostitutes, and courtesans
• Magic in Cnidus in the 1st century bc
• The broadeer helenistic world
• Old women as purifiers and healers
• Holy men and women of The East
• Mendicant ssorcerers
• Magic and mystery cults
• Emergence of the learned magician
• Democritus’s Paignia
• Bolus’s Sucessors

5 MAGIC AS A DISTINCTIVE CATEGORY IN ROMAN THOUGHT

• The effect of the transfer
• The transfer of the concept of magic

6 CONSTRAINTS ON MAGICIANS IN THE LATE ROMAN REPUBLIC AND UNDER THE EMPIRE

• Police actions against magicians in rome and italy
• Actions against magicians in the provinces
• Informal actions against magicians
• Sanctions against magicians entering religious structures

7 SORCERERS AND SORCERESSES IN ROME IN THE MIDDLE AND LATE REPUBLIC UNDER THE EARLY EMPIRE

• The middle and late republic
  • The background of magic working and the religious fringe
  • Sorceresses
  • Learned magicians
• Sorceresses in rome and italy
  • Preliminaries
  • The witch as prostitute
  • The procuress as witch
• Sorceresses and wise-women in rome in the 2nd century AD
• Magicians in the 1st and second centuries AD

8 MAGICIANS IN THE PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE UNTIL CONSTANTINE

• The learned magician
• Magicians in the households of the rich and powerful
• Itinerant magicians
• Wandering egyptian and jewish magicians
• Where did they perform
• Activities of the wandering magicians
• Other kinds of magicians
• Sorceresses
  • General standing of female magicians
  • Prostitution and sorcery
  • Mendicant holy women

9 CONSTRAINTS ON MAGICIANS IN A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

• Civil legislation
• Church rule, canon law
• The application of church rule and canon law

10 MAGICIANS FROM CONSTANTINE TO THE 7TH CENTURY

• Christian clerics and priests as magicians
• The drunken old sorceress Christianized
• Harispicies
• Jewish Magicians
• Charioteers
• Wrestlers
• Thespians
• Prostitutes and sorceress
• Amulet-makers and utterers of incantations
  • The eastern Empire
  • Paramedical healers in the west
• Wandering magicians of the greek east
• Learned magicians
• House Magicians
• 
  

ERRATA

“Something needs to be said at this point about the fairly wide array of terms

employed in Greek and Latin to denote witches and sorcerers. In Greek, they

may be called, if male, epodoi or epaoidoi (sing. epodos), goetes (sing. goes),

magoi (sing. magos) and pharmakeis (sing. pharmakeus), and, when female,

pharmakides (sing. pharmakis) or pharmakeutriai (sing. pharmakeutria) and less

commonly goetides (sing. goetis). Sometimes also the masculine forms goetes

and magoi are used for female practitioners. The craft practised by goetes is

known as goeteia, while the transitive verb used to refer to the effect of that activity

is goeteuein or in an intensive form, ekgoeteuein. The craft practised by magoi is

mageia or mageutike (techne) and the verb used to refer to their actions

mageuein. As for pharmakeis the craft they follow is pharmakeia; the transitive

verb used to refer to the effects of their activities is pharmakeuein. In Latin,

sorcerers are magi (sing. magus) or venefici (sing. veneficus) when male, and

cantatrices (sing. cantatrix), sagae (sing. saga) or veneficae (sing. venefica)

when female. Although these terms have very different origins, they come to be

used interchangeably to refer to the same people.” (12)

Epodoi / Epaooidoi

Goetes

Magoi

Pharmakeis / Pharmakides / Pharmakeutriai

• rhizotomia

Cantatrices / Sagae / Veneficae

Astynomoi

asebeia