Magic in Christian Egypt (2012–2022)
p. 325-348
Texte intégral
1The present plenary paper is the first ever devoted to magic in the history of the Coptic congresses. By its initiative, the Board of the International Association for Coptic Studies duly acknowledged that the study of magic has become a vigorous branch of research in its own right. Yet the subject may not be to everybody’s liking. Quite apart from the conceptual fuzziness of the term, magic is still often considered a blot on the white dress of religion, a disreputable form of obscurantism, if not a way of worshiping the devil outright. In the following pages, I hope to show that the decision of the conveners of the congress to put magic on the agenda was a felicitous one. Magic writes an important chapter in the history of Egyptian Christianity, and this is reflected in the present state of Coptic studies. In order to substantiate my claim, I will first briefly define my subject against the background of past and current scholarly achievement and then focus on two critical issues that, in my view, were central to the debate of the last ten or so years.
Delimiting the field
2The term magic has a long and problematic history in the study of religion, and discussions of its meaning, scope and validity abound.1 For the purpose of this paper, I will not enter into this debate, but instead use “magic” as a heuristic category. My approach is text and discipline oriented, which means that I will focus on a corpus of texts and textual artifacts that are commonly recognized as “magical” within the tradition in which students of Egyptian Christianity are working, to wit, that of Coptic studies, understood in a broad sense. The texts in question are basically ritual texts, conceived and copied with a clear aim in mind. As artifacts, they share a number of characteristics that somehow distinguish them from other kinds of texts, for instance liturgical ones. Such distinctive elements may be textual in nature (adjurations, “I am” statements, abundant use of angelic names), paratextual (certain types of illustrations, framing formats or even types of script) or material (for instance, papyrus folded to be worn on the body).2 Within this corpus, various genres may be distinguished, such as charms, prayers, or amulets. Divinatory practices generated their own textual formats.3 Magical gems, which are usually of unclear date and provenance, are not taken into account here.4
3Magical texts from Christian Egypt, in the sense roughly outlined above, make up a sizeable and diversified corpus of hundreds of longer and briefer items, varying from one-line amulets to lengthy manuals in codex-form.5 This corpus is conventionally designated as “Coptic magic,” which is an infelicitous term, however. It obfuscates the fact that part of the material is linguistically Greek and falsely suggests a connection with the present-day Coptic Orthodox Church, which condemns practices deemed magical.6 The texts date from the 4th to about the 12th century and are, in variable degrees, marked by Christianity. Earlier texts in Demotic, Greek and so-called Old Coptic are still basically pre-Christian in nature.7 Later texts often show a predominant influence of Islamic practices, in addition to remarkably traditional elements.8 The corpus is quite heterogeneous, but magical artifacts are as a rule fairly easy to identify. As was observed above, in addition to their specific formal features, they nearly always serve a precise purpose. They represent a ritualized form of problem solving.
4This magical corpus started to attract the attention of scholars in the second half of the 19th century.9 In the early years of the 20th century, a growing number of text editions appeared, culminating in 1930–1931 with the publication of the three volumes of A. Kropp’s Ausgewählte koptische Zaubertexte, which still today are a reference in the field. Interest waned after the Second World War and revived only in the 1990s.
5In 1986, H.D. Betz’s English translation of the Greek magical papyri appeared, which deliberately excluded Christian papyri. Yet there was no lack of Christian material even in Greek, as the Supplementum magicum, published a few years later by R. Daniel and F. Maltomini, made abundantly clear.10 The rehabilitation of this material, in both Greek and Coptic, is for a great deal the merit of the late M. Meyer, who directed a “Coptic Magical Texts Project” at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of Claremont Graduate School in California, at the time a vibrant centre for the study of Gnosticism. In 1994, M. Meyer and R. Smith edited a volume of English translations under the title Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, reprinted in 1999. This landmark publication is still widely used today. At the same time, M. Meyer initiated a series of inspiring conferences, exclusively devoted to “ancient magic” from a cross-cultural perspective. One such meeting took place in Lawrence, Kansas, immediately following the Coptic congress held at Washington DC in August 1992.11
6As a result, scholarly interest in Christian Egyptian magic boomed. The Coptic congresses of 2008 in Cairo and 2016 in Claremont dedicated special sessions to magic, which attracted considerable attention. In 2014, a beautiful book on Coptic Civilization: Two Thousand Years of Christianity in Egypt, edited by G. Gabra, highlighted virtually all aspects of traditional Coptic culture, including late antique and early medieval magic.12 The publication of this book, so to say, naturalized magic as part of the rich and varied cultural heritage of Christian Egypt.
The Macquarie codex
7So far for history, but where are we now? The lengthy bibliography appended to this paper spans the full decade that has passed since the Coptic congress in Rome, from 2012 to 2022. The main reason for choosing this otherwise somewhat arbitrary period was that it allowed me to include what must count as the main single event of recent years, the publication of the so-called Macquarie Codex (P.Macq. Inv. 375) by M. Choat and I. Gardner in 2013. This codex of unknown provenance, now housed at Macquarie University in Sydney, is a twenty-page booklet dedicated to a single, previously unknown, ritual text in Sahidic Coptic. The copyist’s hand may be dated to about the 7th or 8th century.13
8It is not easy to do justice to the extraordinary character of the Macquarie Codex in a few words. To begin with, the text preserves clear echoes of Gnostic, in particular so-called Sethian Gnostic, mythologoumena. Thus, it is the first text beyond the corpus of recognized Gnostic texts to mention the female divine figure of Barbelo in a meaningful context that immediately recalls, for instance, the Gospel of Judas.14 Besides, it refers to such familiar figures from Gnostic mythology, such as the Four Luminaries and Ialdabaoth, and contains the characteristic motif of the laughing Christ. These elements, familiar from Gnostic literature, are integrated in an absolutely amazing text of liturgical dimensions that consist of long series of adjurations of angelic powers and evocations of celestial topography. Finally, a nice drawing and a numbered series of recipes for everyday situations, which each require the recitation of the main text, ensured the performance of the accompanying ritual. Regrettably, only few reviews of the excellent edition by M. Choat and I. Gardner have appeared and, in my opinion, the critical potential of the Macquarie Codex is as yet far from exhausted.15
9Naturally, in their commentary and in a number of articles, the editors of the codex sought to account for the remarkable Sethian elements in the text.16 They did so by postulating the substrate of a Sethian Gnostic ritual. In a way, they thereby returned to the position of A. Kropp who, in his standard work published almost a century ago, also tried to explain the sometimes bizarre world of many Coptic magical texts by claiming the influence of Gnosticism.17 A. Kropp’s claim has met with little approval in more recent literature about the texts. Also, the thesis of M. Choat and I. Gardner, however carefully argued, has —as far as I can see— found little positive response. Their publication has rather worked in an inverse direction. Instead of offering an illustration of Sethian Gnostic influence on later magical ritual, it tended to draw the attention to the ritual (or, if one wishes, magical) aspects of much of so-called Gnostic literature. It thereby came to fit into a broader trend.
10The study of Gnosticism in the last few decades went through a wholesale paradigmatic shift. As Gnosticism is not the subject of this paper, it may suffice to say that Gnostic studies turned away from obsolete Bultmannian paradigms and the debate on Christian origins, in order to find a broader and more congenial embedding in the study of late antique esoterism. As a result, more attention is being paid to the performative and ritual aspects of Gnostic texts, which are no longer considered a later aberration but an essential part of their message.18 Even more importantly, these aspects are now situated within a wider horizon of late antique ritual and textual practices, including so-called magic.
11This paradigmatic shift has consequences for the interpretation of the Macquarie Codex. Both the Macquarie ritual (and similar magical texts, mainly in Coptic) and the rituals of the Hermetic or Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi hoard appear to connect to the extremely varied world of late antique Egyptian esoterism, a world in which mageia played a discursive role in the debate between the various currents, witness for instance the polemics of Origen, Plotinus or the anonymous author of the Pistis-Sophia.19 One might even wish to go one step further and claim that the presumed Sethian elements in the Macquarie Codex, instead of stray survivals from a long obsolete theological doctrine, are witnesses to a primordial “magical cosmological system” that underlies also Sethian Gnosticism, as has been postulated by R. van den Broek.20
12Considered in the perspective of these and similar questions, the Macquarie Codex highlights, in my perception, the two critical currents that stood out in the study of Egyptian Christian magic in the past decade. The first is that of crossing (and, by the same token, defining) boundaries between discursive traditions and cultural domains. The second is that of the transmission of tradition. How and by which channels was traditional material passed on to inform Christian Egyptian magical manuals of the 7th and 8th century or even far later?
13The remainder of this paper will focus on these two intertwined strands of research and the way in which they are reflected in the literature of the last decade. It will try to show, on the one hand, how the study of the subject has opened up to new horizons and, on the other, how the search for channels of transmission has not only paved the way for a history of Christian Egyptian magic as such, but also for a better understanding of its role in the broader history of Egyptian Christianity. On both accounts, immense progress has been made, marked by crucially important publications.
Crossing boundaries
14Crossing boundaries concerns linguistic and cultural domains as well as literary traditions. Different from the earlier work by A. Kropp, the volume Ancient Christian Magic by M. Meyer and R. Smith included not only Coptic texts, but also a number of Greek ones.21 In the past decades, it has become increasingly clear that, as far as Christian material is concerned, divorcing Greek and Coptic is artificial. As in other domains, here too the linguistic divide does not reflect major cultural differences and there is little justification in sticking to a dichotomy that mainly reflects obsolete academic habits. Individual texts may be bilingual. Thus, the by now famous 4th-century Kellis separation spell, a text copied in a letter sent by one Manichaean to another, switches from Greek to Coptic within the same text.22 The bilingual, mixed Greek and Coptic, collection from the codex Michigan copt. 136 has been re-edited in 2022 by M. Zellmann-Rohrer and E. Love and re-dated by them to the 4th century.23 In the latter case, the bilingualism of the codex is clearly a function of distinct discursive traditions, pairing Egyptian charms in Coptic with Homeric verses in Greek. These are nonetheless kept together by a single scribal culture and a single medical focus.
15Even beyond these instances of bilingualism, there is considerable overlap between Greek and Coptic. Greek texts on papyrus may have close analogies with Coptic ones, such as the Greek invocation of the sun published by M. Cohn in 2012. Some of the longer Greek texts published by F. Maltomini in volume 82 of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, in 2016, may not have literal parallels in Coptic, but cannot be discarded from the study of magic surviving in the latter language. One is a 4th-century amulet that quotes a prayer of Adam as a phylactery against illness;24 another, a 6th-century charitesion, that is a spell for obtaining beauty and success, consists of a long series of angel invocations.25 In 2017, M. Zellmann-Rohrer published an important papyrus from Lisht, now in New York, that contains a Coptic version of a possibly originally Jewish prayer that is best known in its Greek form from the collection of the Papyri graecae magicae (PGM XXIIb, the Prayer of Jacob).
16Similar cases take us beyond the frontiers of Egypt. A prayer attributed to the Virgin Mary, conventionally called Prayer of Mary at Bartos, an unknown city, has been deemed typically Coptic.26 Recently, however, the same prayer was discovered in its probably original Greek form in a medieval tomb in Dongola, in Nubia, and published by A. Łajtar and myself in 2017. The earliest version of a Prayer of Saint Gregory the Wonderworker, known from several medieval manuscripts from the Byzantine world, is found in a 6th- or 7th-century manual in Sahidic Coptic, from the collection of the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, now newly studied by J. Sanzo.27
17These latter examples are not only important as evidence of an essentially bilingual tradition, but also because they connect the world of Egypt’s Christian magic to the wider worlds of Christian North-East Africa, comprising medieval Nubia and Ethiopia in the south, as well as the wider Byzantine and post-Byzantine Mediterranean. For the latter connection, the “Vienna Euchologia-project,” which studies the Greek prayer-book tradition, and the work of M. Zellmann-Rohrer, who graduated with a PhD on Byzantine magic, hold a clear promise.28
18As for the southern connection, the relevance, in particular, of the Ethiopian material goes far beyond the transmission of individual prayers, such as the Prayer of Mary at Bartos. It is the merit of D. Frankfurter to have introduced the Ethiopian däbtära into the debate about Egyptian magic, already in his book Religion in Roman Egypt of 1998.29 The däbtära typically combines a modest clerical status as a Church cantor with a magical practice. In combining these roles, he may offer an explanatory model for the social status and modus operandi of his medieval Egyptian counterparts who, in a number of cases, can be shown to have been monks and deacons.30 Cross-cultural comparison with Ethiopia seems particularly rewarding, since we are dealing here with closely related Orthodox Christianities.
19Cross-cultural comparison, and thereby the opening-up of boundaries, is also at the core of another major publication, the Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, edited by D. Frankfurter, in 2019. The very informative handbook not only studies various magical traditions, including the Christian Egyptian one, from systematically distinguished insider (emic) and outsider (etic) points of view, but it also offers a wealth of conceptual approaches to the study of ancient magic in general.
Transmitting tradition
20This brings us to the second main theme of this paper. Tradition and its transmission are a predominant concern of the recent literature, often focused on one single aspect, to wit, the permanence of pre-Christian, primarily pharaonic motifs in Coptic spells. Undeniably, the tenacity with which motifs from the Isis-Horus mythology remained salient in an otherwise Christianized Egypt is quite spectacular. Even in texts that date as late as the 7th or 8th century, Horus and Isis can be found in their traditional roles, with Horus in some kind of trouble and appealing to his mother Isis, the great sorcerer. And these are not the only ancient gods found in such spells. The 4th-century codex Michigan Ms. 136, already mentioned, contains a famous spell for parturition that stages Amun and Isis in a completely traditional context, with Amun heading for This and Abydos, the traditional cult places of Osiris, with “the books of Thoth” in his hand.31
21The occurrence of traditional mythologoumena long after the demise of pagan cults and framed by Christian symbols and formulae obviously demands an explanation. The producers and audiences of these spells were no crypto-pagans, but Christians who somehow still valued the power of ancient stories. The discussion about these ancient motifs was greatly stimulated by D. Frankfurter’s 2009 article with the telling title “The Laments of Horus in Coptic: Myth, Folklore, and Syncretism in Late Antique Egypt,” where he proposed a model of oral transmission, quoting lullabies and pastoral songs as examples of how such a transmission might have looked like. One may doubt whether sex spells make suitable lullabies, while postulating a purely oral transmission for what is clearly a written tradition that can be traced back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, about 2000 BC, raises further questions about the relationship between oral and written traditions. Yet there can be little doubt that D. Frankfurter’s thesis hits the mark. The traditional deities occur primarily in verbal charms that, even though circulating in a written form, are an oral genre, the power of which is fully realized precisely in singing.32
22Following up on D. Frankfurter’s stimulating essay, the persistence of pharaonic motifs remained high on the agenda and generated an already impressive, but still growing bibliography.33 This tends to obscure the fact the ancient Egyptian deities occur only in a small percentage of the available material and were apparently a rather marginal phenomenon.34 Another fact, often ignored, is that they are not the only traditional elements transmitted in a Christian context. Also, for instance, the various invocations of the sun or the so-called Prayer of Jacob, both mentioned before, are found in pre-Christian collections. Longer spells and rituals of purely Christian and often even liturgical inspiration simultaneously draw on a variety of traditional motifs and techniques that can be traced to the earlier Greek and Demotic magical papyri. They lend their hybrid character to texts such as the Prayer of Mary at Bartos or the ritual of the Macquarie Codex. Such traditional devices include the use of nomina barbara, magical names such as Ablanathanalba, charakteres (magical pseudo-script) or wing-figures. Egypt’s Christian magic derives much of its techniques and forms from earlier magical traditions.35 As these latter borrowings appeal less to a kind of pharaonistic antiquarianism, they receive less attention. Yet they are of considerable importance for two crucial questions: how should our corpus of magical texts and the related practices be situated vis-à-vis the earlier magical tradition of Egypt —and what were the channels by which tradition was transmitted into a Christian world?
23Tradition becomes tradition by virtue of change. Tradition and innovation are merely two sides of the same coin.36 And Late Antiquity, in Egypt perhaps more than anywhere, was highly innovative. Egypt’s Christian magic perpetuates certain elements from the earlier Greek and Demotic corpora, but at the same time is much different both in spirit and in substance. Church rituals and Christian institutions largely catered to needs that were formerly satisfied by the Greek and Demotic magical handbooks with their wide array of dream oracles and divinatory rituals. Coptic magical ritual may claim to give access to celestial worlds, but in doing so generally remains within the parameters set by Christian liturgy and Scriptures. In spite of its notable links to earlier traditions, it drastically innovates.
24Christianity introduced new sources of supernatural power and developed new story-worlds. The amuletic use of passages from Holy Scripture, in particular Gospel incipits, was the subject of a monograph by J. Sanzo that already within a few years time has gained the status of a classic.37 The new and growing body of Christian or Christianized apocrypha clearly served as another source of inspiration, and authors of magical texts can be shown to be conversant with such texts as the Book of Bartholomew or the Apocalypse of Paul.38 Hagiography is famously represented by the figure of the martyr Cyprian, a converted magician, but also quite “modern” saints, such as Severus of Antioch, who died in 538, were invoked.39
25The most pervasive model, however, is that of Christian liturgy.40 To cite just one well-known example, already A. Kropp in the 1930s had pointed out the important place of the epiclesis, the liturgical invocation of the Holy Spirit over material substances, such as oil, in texts that definitely fall outside of the orbit of ecclesiastical liturgy.41 The problem of the relationship between normative liturgy and magical ritual is posed with particular force by what is possibly the most challenging genre in the domain of Christian Egyptian magic, the lengthy rituals that are often part of manuals composed for very mundane purposes. The ritual of the Macquarie Codex offers an important and representative example of this genre; the Prayer of Mary at Bartos, another one, much more widely attested. These large-scale compositions are —as far as I am able to judge— typical of Christian North-East Africa, the region comprising Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia in medieval times.
26The texts evoke complex celestial hierarchies and landscapes, displaying a variety of rhetorical means that lend them a liturgical character, even though their relationship with canonical liturgy is not always obvious. Their interpretation is considerably hampered by the wealth of obscure details and their apparent lack of structure. Within a loosely organized frame, they are able to absorb very diverse material from a variety of sources, including —as I argued earlier— pre-Christian ones. They are clearly the product of a major scholarly endeavor, but how they fit into the ecclesiastical landscape of late antique and early medieval Egypt is still obscure. It is even difficult to imagine how and under what circumstances they were performed and who were their producers and audiences. As the late J.F. Borghouts, a leading expert in the idiom of Egyptian magic, once exclaimed: “Who on earth was able to understand these texts?”
27Christianization as innovation of sometimes quite ancient ritual and scribal practices is the subject of two important books that were published in the last five years. The first is T. de Bruyn’s major monograph on the Christianization of magical procedure, of 2017. In this fine and well-researched book, the author painstakingly describes how the production of amulets and incantations came to draw upon the normative discourse of the consolidating Christianity of Late Antiquity. The book’s slight bias towards Greek language sources may be regretted, but this is nonetheless a very rich and detailed presentation of texts and artifacts, paying attention to all their aspects, including material ones. Among its assets, is certainly also its title: Making Amulets Christian, definitely not, therefore: How Amulets Became Christian! Indeed, what T. de Bruyn describes is not a kind of natural development or the result of blind influences, but the outcome of deliberate choices made by literate agents.
28The upshot of all this is that Egypt’s Christian magic is not at all about preserving tradition and even less a privileged domain of so-called pagan survivals, but about creating new idioms for ritual problem solving. These idioms are partly different from ecclesiastical ways of crisis management, recommended by Church authors, such as Holy Unction for healing the sick.42 The main difference is that they developed in a dialogue not only with the relatively new institutions of Christianity, but also with the broader spectrum of religious expertise that was on offer in late antique Egypt, including ancient charms about Horus and Isis.
29The Prayer of Mary at Bartos, mentioned several times before, undoubtedly derives its authority as a prayer from the exceptional status of the Virgin Mary. She is the Mother of God, as was confirmed by the Council of Ephesus in 431, and, on the authority of the highly influential accounts of her Dormition and subsequent Assumption, widely venerated as the patroness of a blessed death. At the same time, the undoubtedly Christian Prayer of Mary at Bartos is a long and rambling text that incorporates material from a tradition of ritual expertise that was already productive centuries before the Council of Ephesus.43
30This process of adaptation and re-attribution of traditional religious expertise is for late antique Egypt eminently described in a second important book, D. Frankfurter’s monograph Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, of 2018. The book has a far wider scope but pays considerable attention to magic and cites magical texts on crucial points in the argument. As the title suggests, it is basically about the processes of change that turned Egypt into a Christian country. Not on the level of imperial decrees, but on the level of the landscape and that of every-day religious practices that deal with situations of crisis in the social and medical spheres, in other words precisely the kinds of situations that are addressed by so-called magical texts.
31As D. Frankfurter’s book shows, we can take the argument one step further than T. de Bruyn does. The magic of Christian Egypt does not merely reflect a process of Christianization but is itself a motor of this process. Rather than a perpetuation of paganism, it represents a way of integrating age-old rituals into new religious forms and as such is itself a powerful means of religious change on the very basic level of every-day needs and anxieties. Tradition in this sense is, perhaps paradoxically, an instrument of innovation.
32In order to describe this innovation process, D. Frankfurter proposes to revive the concept of syncretism.44 This revival can be judged differently. In my view, the term syncretism is something of a Trojan horse, fraught with obsolete ideas about an arbitrary concretion of heterogeneous elements that we may consider irreconcilable, but somehow made sense to the ancient scribes and their audiences. If we re-admit the concept of syncretism to explain complex phenomena, it can only be done by sticking to D. Frankfurter’s very strict definition of syncretism, in terms of C. Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, as an ongoing creative process of reformulation and reshaping religious traditions by self-conscious subjects.
33Late antique Egypt offered an ideal scene for such processes. It was a giant market-place for religious expertise, where many different agents were vying for the favor of an audience. These must have included local holy men, bishops, temple priests, client scholars and perhaps even itinerant charlatans: people with widely different intellectual and religious backgrounds. As was argued in a fascinating study by O. Dufault about Zosimus, the 4th-century alchemist from Panopolis, variety itself was an important source of innovation.45 Coptic sources, not only magical ones, but also for instance the Gnostic and Hermetic texts surviving in Coptic, are testimony to this variety. Magical texts, too, when they are read not as a collection of weird and obscure survivals of paganism, but as witnesses to religious agency and ongoing innovation, suddenly become far more interesting.
Looking ahead
34It is customary to end a plenary paper by looking into the future, so I will try to do my own bit of divination here. Fortunately, no second sight is needed to see that the future of the study of late antique Egyptian magic looks extremely promising. Gifted young scholars have initiated important new projects in the domain. Among these, I may be excused to highlight two. The first is the project Early Jewish and Christian Magical Traditions in Comparison and Contact, directed by J. Sanzo and based in Venice. It explores magic primarily as a boundary and identity marker, and has a strong conceptual basis. The second is the more practically oriented project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt, directed by K. Dosoo at Würzburg. It maintains an extremely useful database, named after Cyprian the magician, thus providing a new empirical basis for the study of the hundreds of magical texts that we have in Coptic.46
35In the domain of collections of magical artifacts in museums and libraries, many of which were acquired in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a need for re-contextualization is ever more urgently felt. An excellent example of a project that answers this need, focused on the Hay collection of leather manuscripts from the British Museum (the so-called Hay cookbook), was extensively presented during one of the congress days and has resulted in a beautiful volume published soon afterwards.47 Similar projects for the important collections in Berlin and Heidelberg will hopefully follow. There is, in any case, no lack of well-trained young scholars to undertake the job. The future of magic looks bright.
Bibliographie
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*A. van den Hoek, D. Feissel & J. Hermann, “More Lucky Wearers: The Magic of Portable Inscriptions,” in D. Boschung & J.N. Bremmer (ed.), The Materiality of Magic, 2015, p. 309–356.
*A. Van den Kerchove, “Le Livre du grand traité initiatique (Deux livres de Ieou) : dessins et rites,” in M. de Haro Sanchez (ed.), Écrire la magie, 2015, p. 109–120.
*A. Van den Kerchove, “De quelques énoncés barbares dans des écrits gnostiques,” in P. Buzi et al. (ed.), Coptic Society, Literature and Religion, 2016a, p. 1245–1255.
A. Van den Kerchove, Review of “M. Choat & I. Gardner, A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power (P. Macq. I 1) (The Macquarie Papyri I), Turnhout, 2013,” Apocrypha 27 (2016b), p. 248–250.
J. van der Vliet, “Magic in Late Antique and Early Medieval Egypt,” in G. Gabra (ed.), Coptic Civilization: Two Thousand Years of Christianity in Egypt, Cairo, 2014, p. 145–152.
J. van der Vliet, “Terug naar het Leidse toverboekje (RMO AMS 9),” in N. van de Beek, L. Delpeut & M. Kersten (ed.), 40 jaar Dispuut Pleyte (1975-2015), Leiden, 2015, p. 12–21.
J. van der Vliet, “Gnostiek en magie: Barbelo en de vier hemelse lichten,” in A.P. Bos & G.P. Luttikhuizen (ed.), Waar haalden de gnostici hun wijsheid vandaan? Over de bronnen, de doelgroep en de tegenstanders van de gnostische beweging, Budel, 2016, p. 179–193.
J. van der Vliet, “Charming a Clogged Nose: A Late Coptic Magical Spell from Saqqara,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 18 (2018), p. 145–166.
*J. van der Vliet, “Christian Spells and Manuals from Egypt,” in D. Frankfurter (ed.), Guide, 2019a, p. 322–350.
*J. van der Vliet, “Roman and Byzantine Egypt,” in D. Frankfurter (ed.), Guide, 2019b, p. 240–276.
J. van der Vliet, “Magic, Egypt,” in D.T. Potts et al. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History: Asia and Africa, 13 October 2021a, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119399919.eahaa00442.
J. van der Vliet, “Tradition and Innovation: Writing Magic in Christian Egypt,” in N.M. Vos & A.C. Geljon (ed.), Rituals in Early Christianity: New Perspectives on Tradition and Transformation (Supplements to Vigiliae christianae 164), Leiden, 2021b, p. 259–281.
N. Vanthieghem, “Magie arabe dans l’ermitage d’un prêtre copte du viiie siècle,” JCoptS 18 (2016), p. 181–184.
D. Vaucher, “Cyprian im Bund mit dem Teufel: Grundlegende Unterschiede in den Quellenschriften der Cyprianlegende,” Vigiliae christianae 76 (2022), p. 324–346.
H. Vela, “8. Magical Text Concerning the Eyes and Face,” in A. Boud’hors et al. (ed.), Coptica Argentoratensia, Paris, 2014, p. 129–130 [= P.Stras.Copt. 8].
G. Viaud, Magie et coutumes populaires chez les Coptes d’Égypte, Sisteron, 1978.
*L. Willer, “Iatromagie: Magie und Medizin im griechisch-römischen Ägypten,” in A. Jördens (ed.), Ägyptische Magie, 2015, p. 281–301.
R. Wiśniewski, Christian Divination in Late Antiquity, Amsterdam, 2020.
A. Zdiarsky (ed.), Orakelsprüche, Magie und Horoskope: Wie Ägypten in die Zukunft sah (Nilus 22), Vienna, 2015.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Three Magical Papyri from the Michigan Collection,” ZPE 194 (2015), p. 176–192.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, The Tradition of Greek and Latin Incantations and Related Ritual Texts from Antiquity through the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, unpublished PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6926c8cs.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Seth on Mount Sinai: A Coptic Magical Formulary with a Prayer and Theophany of the Biblical Seth,” ZÄS 144 (2017), p. 240–254.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “‘Psalms Useful for Everything’: Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Manuals for the Amuletic Use of the Psalter,” DOP 72 (2018a), p. 113–168.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Two Greek Amulets,” ZPE 207 (2018b), p. 105–114.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Incantations in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Greek: Change and Continuity,” in L.M. Bartolani, W. Furley, S. Nagel & J.F. Quack (ed.), Cultural Plurality in Ancient Magical Texts and Practices. Graeco-Egyptian Handbooks and Related Traditions (Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 32), Tübingen, 2019, p. 276–296.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif,” ARG 21–22 (2020a), p. 51–83.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “Notes on Magical Handbooks,” ZPE 215 (2020b), p. 27–50.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “The Text and Traditional Context of the ‘Hay Cookbook’ and Associated Magical Texts on Leather,” in C. Graves (ed.), BEC 4: Proceedings of the Fourth British Egyptology Congress, University of Manchester, 7–9 September 2018, London, 2020, p. 169–179.
*M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer, “An Assemblage of Coptic Magical Texts on Leather and Their Traditional Context (P.Brit.Mus. inv. no. EA 10122, 10376, 10391, 10434, 10414),” in M. Capasso et al. (ed.), Proceedings of the 29th International Congress of Papyrology, 2022, p. 1049–1064.
M.W. Zellmann-Rohrer & E.O.D. Love, Traditions in Transmission: The Medical and Magical Texts of a Fourth-Century Greek and Coptic Codex (Michigan Ms. 136) in Context (APf Beiheft 47), Berlin, 2022.
Webography
K. Dosoo, The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt, https://www.coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de [2018–2023; one of the major outputs was the database by K. Dosoo, E.O.D. Love & M. Preininger, Kyprianos: Database of Ancient Ritual Texts].
C. Faraone, S. Torallas Tovar & A. Nodar Domínguez, Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity: The Papyrus Magical Handbooks in Context, Part II, https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/transmission-of-magical-knowledge-in-antiquity-the-papyrus-magical-handbooks-in-context-part-ii# [2020–2022].
F. Naether & M. Depauw, TM Magic. An Online Metadata Database, https://www.trismegistos.org/magic/.
C. Rapp, Euchologia-project, https://www.oeaw.ac.at/byzanz/gesellschaft-und-landschaft/euchologia-projekt [2015-2024].
J.E. Sanzo, Early Jewish and Christian Magical Traditions in Comparison and Contact, https://pric.unive.it/projects/ejcm [2020–2025].
Notes de bas de page
1Relevant for our discipline are Frankfurter 2019a; Sanzo 2020a.
2Drawings: Dosoo 2022a; script: Richter 2015b.
3For which, see e.g. Luijendijk 2014a; Frankfurter 2019b; Wiśniewski 2020.
4A useful orientation: Dasen & Nagy 2019. Also, strictly medical texts fall outside of the scope of the present paper; see de Haro Sanchez 2015; Willer 2015. Similarly, technical disciplines like astrology or alchemy are left aside.
5For a brief characterization of the corpus, see van der Vliet 2019a, p. 328-332; printed catalogues of published items are, for Christian Greek, de Bruyn & Dijkstra 2011; for Coptic, Bélanger Sarrazin 2017a; for electronic databases, see the web addresses printed at the end of the bibliography.
6Note that in contemporary Egypt anti-Christian rhetoric’s frequently employ accusations of magic.
7For Old Coptic, see in particular the various publications by E. Love in the bibliography.
8See e.g. Viaud 1978; Budelli 2014.
9Somewhat fuller reviews of past research: van der Vliet 2019a, p. 323–328; Dosoo, Love & Preininger 2022, p. 44–48.
10Daniel & Maltomini 1990–1992.
11Published in Meyer & Mirecki (ed.) 1995. Another major contribution was M. Meyer’s beautiful edition of the Heidelberg “Book of Mary” (Meyer 1996).
12Van der Vliet 2014.
13Two partial parallels of somewhat earlier date (London Or. 5987; Berlin P. 5527) were re-edited in the appendices, Choat & Gardner 2013, p. 107–117.
14Van der Vliet 2019a, p. 342.
15Reviews: Adamson 2015; Van den Kerchove 2016b; a brief announcement: The Washington Post, 24 November 2014.
16See Choat & Gardner 2013, p. 31–35; see also Gardner 2016; Choat 2019.
17E.g. Kropp 1930–1931, vol. 3, p. 19–39: “Reste aus der Gnosis.”
18See in the bibliography e.g. Bull 2017, Burns 2018, Piwowarczyk 2021, Thomassen 2013 and Van den Kerchove 2015; 2016a.
19See van der Vliet 2019b, p. 244–247, 262–269.
20See van der Vliet 2021b, p. 274–275, quoting van den Broek 2013, p. 26–28.
21Meyer & Smith (ed.) 1994, nos. 4–37.
22Gardner, Alcock & Funk 1999, p. 224–228, with pl. 27; see e.g. van der Vliet 2021b, p. 263–265.
23Zellmann-Rohrer & Love 2022; on the same manuscript also Dosoo 2021c.
24Maltomini & Tagliapietra 2016, no. 5306.
25Maltomini & Tagliapietra 2016, no. 5312.
26De Bruyn 2012, p. 60–61.
27Van der Vliet 2019a, p. 329; on the Leiden manual: Sanzo 2019.
28“Vienna Euchologia-project”: see the web address cited below. Zellmann-Rohrer 2016 and e.g. 2019, 2020a, 2020b.
29Frankfurter 1998, p. 212–213; again in Frankfurter 2018, p. 196–197.
30Van der Vliet 2021, p. 275–278.
31Zellmann-Rohrer & Love 2022, p. 88–93, with the extensive commentary at 184–264; see also van der Vliet 2018, p. 154–157; Dosoo 2021, p. 220–226.
32Van der Vliet 2018, p. 160-162.
33See e.g. Blumell & Dosoo 2018; Hevesi 2019; a full monograph: Bélanger Sarrazin 2020b (with a commercial edition forthcoming).
34Dosoo 2021a, p. 687.
35These are now being charted by the Chicago magical project, directed by C. Faraone and S. Torallas Tovar (see the bibliography), a project that rightly focuses on the forms and means of transmitting magical knowledge.
36In addition to the two important monographs cited below, de Bruyn 2017 and Frankfurter 2018a, the interplay of tradition and innovation is also the theme of Dosoo 2021a and van der Vliet 2021b.
37Sanzo 2014.
38Book of Bartholomew: Dosoo 2021b; Apocalypse of Paul: Roig Lanzillotta & van der Vliet 2023, p. 149–150. Also see de Bruyn 2015c.
39De Bruyn 2017, p. 212–220; Dosoo 2021a, p. 687–688; van der Vliet 2021b, p. 269–270.
40Kropp 1930–1931, vol. 3, p. 167–244; de Bruyn 2017, p. 184–234; see also Dosoo 2021a, p. 689–690; van der Vliet 2021b, p. 267–269. The fairly rare use of liturgical manuscripts as material amulets represents a somewhat different case; see Mihálykó 2019, p. 191–199.
41Kropp 1930–1931, vol. 3, p. 183–207.
42For properly liturgical healing strategies, see Mihálykó 2021; magical ones: Dosoo 2021b.
43For a commentary and a comparative analysis of the various witnesses, see Łajtar & van der Vliet 2017, p. 128–177; de Bruyn 2017, p. 214–218; Dosoo 2021a, p. 692–696; van der Vliet 2021b, p. 270–271.
44Frankfurter 2018, p. 15–20, and several earlier publications.
45Dufault 2019.
46See Dosoo, Love & Preininger 2022.
47O’Connell (ed.) 2022.
Auteur
-
Jacques van der Vliet
Introduction Jacques van der Vliet is professor emeritus of Ancient Egyptian religions at Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, and a former president of the International Association for Coptic Studies. He is currently guest researcher at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies and visiting research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East, also in Leiden. His research focuses on Coptic literature, magic and Gnosticism, epigraphy of Egypt and Nubia and Coptic papyrology. He is the author of Empowering the Dead in Christian Nubia. The Texts from a Medieval Funerary Complex in Dongola (2017, with Adam Łajtar), The Coptic Life of Aaron: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary (2020, with Jitse Dijkstra) and The Apocalypse of Paul (Visio Pauli) in Sahidic Coptic: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary (2023, with Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta).
Jacques van der Vliet est professeur émérite de religions égyptiennes anciennes à Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen et ancien président de l’International Association for Coptic Studies. Il est actuellement chercheur invité au Leiden Institute for Area Studies et au Netherlands Institute for the Near East, aussi à Leyde. Ses recherches portent sur la littérature copte, la magie et le gnosticisme, l’épigraphie de l’Égypte et de la Nubie ainsi que sur la papyrologie copte. Il est l’auteur de Empowering the Dead in Christian Nubia. The Texts from a Medieval Funerary Complex in Dongola (2017, avec Adam Łajtar), de The Coptic Life of Aaron: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary (2020, avec Jitse Dijkstra) et de The Apocalypse of Paul (Visio Pauli) in Sahidic Coptic: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary (2023, avec Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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