The Greek Magical Papyri

Handbooks, Not Doctrine

First attested
2nd century BCEPapyri of the second century BCE are the earliest in the corpus; the great codices are fourth century CE — PGM IV at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Supplément grec 574, digitised on Gallica) and PGM XIII, headed "Holy book called Monad, or Eighth Book of Moses", at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (AMS 76). No ancient book called the Greek Magical Papyri ever existed: the name, the roman numerals and the line numbers are Karl Preisendanz's, 1928–31.
Claimed
around 1300 BCEasserted by The handbooks themselves, which ascribe their recipes to figures of remote antiquity: PGM XIII is headed as a book of Moses, and other recipes in the corpus are credited to Solomon, Pythagoras, Dardanos and Egyptian kings. Modern esoteric writing repeats those ascriptions as though they dated the texts.

The claim runs about 1.2 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The Greek Magical Papyri is not an ancient book but Preisendanz's 1928–31 numbering, and one of its spells — PGM III.591–611 — carries the same Hermetic prayer that closes the Latin Asclepius and stands in Coptic at Nag Hammadi: the ancients drew lines around these texts, but not the one we draw between magic and philosophy.

Working spell-books from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt — the fullest record of ritual as it was actually done.

Papyri Graecae Magicae is Karl Preisendanz's title for some eighty texts from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, second century BCE to fifth century CE — mostly working handbooks, but also amulets and curses naming their owners and victims. The largest were bought around 1827 by the dealer Giovanni Anastasi. Preisendanz edited them in 1928 and 1931; his third volume reached galley proofs dated Pentecost 1941, its type destroyed in the Leipzig bombing. Hans Dieter Betz translated the corpus in 1986. The recipes leave the client's name blank — NN — and press: now, now, quickly, quickly. Copies for reuse. Iaō and Sabaōth stand beside Osiris and Helios; the Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving survives at PGM III.591–611, in Coptic at Nag Hammadi and in the Latin Asclepius. Albrecht Dieterich named PGM IV.475–829 the Mithras Liturgy in 1903; Franz Cumont denied it.

Light

Ritual as practised rather than as described by philosophers and prosecutors — cures for scorpion sting, fever and insomnia beside rites of ascent. David Frankfurter reads the compilers as Egyptian priests improvising a living as their temples lost state support.

Shadow

Much of the corpus is coercion. Attraction spells name a woman and demand she burn and not sleep until she comes. Christopher Faraone argued in 1999 that these form a genre used largely by men, distinct from the philia charms wives used.

Sources and verification11 sources · 8 links

Primary source

  • Karl Preisendanz (ed.), Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri, vols 1–2 (Teubner, Leipzig and Berlin; 2nd ed. by Albert Henrichs, 1973–74), 1928, vols 1 (1928) and 2 (1931)The name, the roman-numeral sequence and the line numbering that every later citation uses — an editorial construct of 1928–31, not an ancient book. The projected third volume reached galley proofs dated Pentecost 1941 and the type was destroyed in the bombing of Leipzig; surviving proof sets circulated among scholars.
  • Brian P. Copenhaver (trans.), Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius (Cambridge University Press), 1992, Asclepius 41That the Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving closes the Latin Asclepius, and that the Hermetica are Greek philosophical-religious literature of Roman Egypt of roughly 100–300 CE — the same country and centuries as the papyri.
  • Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press; 1st ed. 1986), 1992, PGM III.591–611; PGM IV.475–829; PGM V.96–172; PGM XIIIThe standard English text of the corpus, cited by PGM number and line: the Prayer of Thanksgiving at III.591–611, the passage Dieterich called the Mithras Liturgy at IV.475–829, the Stele of Jeu at V.96–172, and the Leiden codex headed as a book of Moses. Also the formulary conventions — the NN blank left for the client's name, and the closing 'now, now, quickly, quickly' — which show those texts are handbooks copied for reuse, as against the applied amulets and curses in the same sequence that name the individuals they were made for.
  • Marvin Meyer (ed.) et al., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition (HarperOne), 2007, Nag Hammadi Codex VI,7The Coptic Prayer of Thanksgiving in Nag Hammadi Codex VI — the third witness to the prayer that also stands in a Greek magical handbook and in the Latin Asclepius.

Scholarship

  • Fritz Graf (trans. Franklin Philip), Magic in the Ancient World (Harvard University Press), 1997That 'magic' in Greece and Rome was a social, legal and rhetorical category — magos entered Greek as a word for a Persian priest and became an accusation, and the ancients distinguished goeteia from theourgia — so these texts are evidence of what people did, not of a religion the ancients called magic.
  • David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton University Press), 1998The reading of the formularies' compilers as Egyptian temple priests whose institutional support was failing, reinventing themselves as freelance ritual experts — an argument, widely adopted, not a documented biography of any named compiler.
  • Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard University Press), 1999The distinction between erōs-magic — the coercive attraction spells, used largely by men against named women — and philia-magic, the potions and amulets used largely by women to hold an existing bond. Faraone's gendered division is an argument and has been contested.
  • Hans Dieter Betz, The "Mithras Liturgy": Text, Translation, and Commentary (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 18, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen), 2003The century-long argument over Dieterich's title, including Franz Cumont's rejection of the Mithraic identification, and Betz's own conclusion that the ascent section belongs to early Hermetism rather than to the Roman cult of Mithras. The register's caution states flatly that the text is not evidence about Mithraism.
  • Korshi Dosoo, "A History of the Theban Magical Library", Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 53, 2016, pp. 251–274That the provenance of the Anastasi papyri is reconstructed from nineteenth-century sale catalogues rather than from excavation; Dosoo retains ten magical and alchemical papyri as probably from the Theban group and excludes nine others that earlier writers assigned to it — a handful of the largest codices, not the bulk of the corpus.

Where this claim originates

  • Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie (Teubner, Leipzig), 1903, titleThat 'Mithras Liturgy' is Dieterich's 1903 title for PGM IV.475–829, imposed by its first editor and translator, not a heading the papyrus carries.

Further reading

  • Christopher A. Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar (eds), Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, vol. I (California Classical Studies), 2022The edition now replacing Preisendanz: fifty-four formularies arranged by manuscript and chronologically from the second century BCE, with a new GEMF numbering — PGM IV becomes GEMF 57. Its formula for the corpus is 'late Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt', and it prints the formularies apart from the applied texts Preisendanz interleaved. Open access at eScholarship; reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2023.02.49.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Corpus HermeticumAttested

    Same country, same centuries: the Corpus is what Hermetic teachers wrote down, these are the handbooks ritualists kept on the shelf — and one Hermetic prayer is in both.

  • Set againstThe Egyptian Book of the DeadAttested

    Both titles are modern impositions on Egyptian ritual writing, but the funerary papyri equip the dead, while these handbooks served the living — fever, rivals, lawsuits, desire.

  • Set againstThe Nag Hammadi LibraryAttested

    A codex buried in Upper Egypt and a magician's formulary from the same country carry the same Hermetic prayer — Greek at PGM III.591–611, Coptic as Nag Hammadi Codex VI,7.

  • CorrectsThe KybalionAttested

    The Kybalion of 1908 offers seven Hermetic principles said to come from ancient Egypt and Greece; the papyri are what Graeco-Egyptian practice actually left behind, and hold nothing of the kind.

  • Set againstOpón IfáA modern connection

    The papyri survive because a working ritual text was written down and Egyptian sand kept it; the odù are written in dust and wiped, so the tray outlives every reading ever made on it.

  • Set againstThe AvestaAttested

    The magical papyri are the working handbooks of a practice that ended, preserved because Egypt's sand kept the paper. The Avesta is a late copy of a practice that never ended, preserved because priests kept the words.

  • Set againstThe DruidsAttested

    The Egyptian papyri are practitioners writing for themselves - recipes, voces magicae, spells copied out for use - which is exactly the class of evidence the druids do not leave. Everything ancient said about them was written by Greeks and Romans, and the fullest account is the one the general conquering Gaul wrote.

  • Set againstTheurgyAttested

    Iamblichus drew a hard line between theurgy and goeteia, common sorcery — but the papyri copied in the same centuries are full of the compelling formulae and unintelligible names he spends a section of the reply defending. The boundary was philosophical, not technical.

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