The Magical Animal: An Introduction

1History begins with a magical animal, a magical animal who was not there.

2The first story of the Histories of Herodotus is the account of Io, the daughter of the king of Argos, kidnapped and taken to Egypt by Phoenician traders, the first wrong in the vendetta between Europe and Asia that culminated, according to the proto-historian, in the Persian Wars.¹ But Herodotus’ version suppresses the magic of the traditional telling of the myth, in which Io is not kidnapped, but transformed into a white cow, and, stung by a maddening gadfly flees to Egypt, where she becomes mother to Epaphos, founder of Memphis and alter-ego of the divine Apis bull.

3While Herodotus’ motives for this narrative legerdemain are unclear,² they might be taken for a particular tendency of which he provides an early example, of the desire of many historians to strip the past of both animals and magic, replacing them with a fully rationalised and fully human version of history. In evolutionist models, animals and magic both represent the dark pre-history from which human history develops; in the history of ideas this could be cast as the development of magic and totemism – the worship of the divine in plant or animal form – into the worship of anthropomorphic and then abstract gods, before the replacement of religion by science.

4This tendency of rationalist historians – to consign the magical animal to the pre-historic past – has never been unopposed, and, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century has seemed increasingly untenable in a world in which the irrational and the non-human have reasserted their power. In academia, this recent attention to animals and magic is an instantiation of a more general trend of interest in the marginal, which has been the subject of critique as a drive towards wilful esotericism and irrelevance. But a focus on the marginal in history allows us to appreciate the past in all its rich strangeness, and in turn, to recognise the specificities of our own time.

5There is a well-known story in the Lives of the Philosophers in which Plato is said to have defined man as a featherless biped, prompting Diogenes of Sinope to release a plucked chicken into the academy, announcing “Here is Plato’s Man”.³

6Definitions always pose problems. Monothetic definitions, such as that used by the fictionalised Plato – all X have Y, and all that have Y are X – are prone to be inadequate in describing the realities of our social experience, while polythetic definitions – X may have Y, or Z… – run the risk of collapsing under the weight of their own generosity.

7Defining magic has become a particular problem in recent years, at least in certain fields.⁴ Within both Egyptology and Assyriology some authors have defined “magical” texts as those which display certain formal and functional characteristics,⁵ and can therefore be (in principle) distinguished from proto-scientific or medical texts, while Greco-Roman and later Jewish, Christian and Muslim medieval authors produced normative discourses defining magic and its different forms which researchers may draw upon.

8But the modern study of magic has increasingly struggled to disentangle itself from the popular conceptions which are the descendants of these medieval normative discourses. The first scholars of Greek and Latin magic, writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had to fight an uphill battle for respectability, arguing for the usefulness of the study of magical material while openly expressing their distaste for what was often identified as an Oriental infiltration, repeating the discursive gambit of Classical authors who derived the word magic from the magi, the hereditary Persian priests.

9At the same time, the earliest works on magic in the Islamicate world at the beginning of the twentieth century, products of the colonial project of their time, saw magic as a primitive survival.⁶ For these authors, Islamic civilisation reached its apogee with the translation of classical works into Arabic in the eighth to tenth centuries, and the intellectual development to which these led. They considered Islam itself as a religion impregnated with magic and irrationality, so that the theological developments which began in the twelfth century inhibited the development of science and rationality. Yet, at the same time, Lynn Thorndike was arguing that it was magic itself which had served as the origin of modern European science.⁷ Magic thus became a field of study of considerable ideological importance in constructions of medieval and early modern history.

10While the study of magic in these different periods of history has seen huge growth in the last decades, it has continued to face epistemic problems. In the field of Greco-Roman magic, to take one example, the term “magic” itself has become suspect, although it has not ceased to be employed.⁸ If European languages have inherited the word caked with the accretions of Classical, Christian and Enlightenment attempts to define the Other, how can we apply it in a neutral way to phenomena of the past, or to other societies? But if we attempt to replace it with an emic term, are we simply accepting the values of specific authors, and a class of elite writers more generally? These, and other questions, have generated many fruitful, if inconclusive, discussions over the past two decades.⁹

11Rather than attempting to pluck the chicken of magic in a search for the Platonic Man hidden beneath its feathers, this volume embraces the ambiguity of the term, and the productivity of this ambiguity. If the shifting definitions of magic have a common term, it is the intellectual and religious Other – the foreign (Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, or merely “Oriental”), the pagan, the irrational, the forbidden. Modern and ancient discourses of magic define what is strange or other – the religious practices furthest from the ideals of Protestant deism, (proto-)scientific and medical practices which draw upon apparently strange and discredited logics – love charms and curses, divination and animal cults.¹⁰ And yet the fact that these practices do have their own logics should act for us as a warning against simplistic projections of our own world-views onto actors in the past, of falling for that Enlightenment concept of human universality that projects the Ideal Man as “a subject that is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in empty sameness throughout the course of history”.¹¹ To study history in all its weirdness, its alienness – much of which falls under “magic”, broadly understood – is to accept the contingency of even our own conceptions of reality, and to broaden the spectrum of possibilities of what it might mean to be human.

12If the human is defined as the subject of history, it is the animal which has defined the limits of the human. “Human and animal,” Carol J. Adams tells us, “are definitions that exist in tandem, each drawing its power from the other in a drama of circumscribing”.¹² The animal, is, of course, not the only object in relation to which the human has been constructed, but it does seem to possess an almost unparalleled durability,¹³ both temporally and cross-culturally, matched perhaps only by that slippery collection of super-human beings which we might inadequately refer to as the divine and the demonic. This volume will spend a great deal of time with this triplicity – animal, human, and divine – a group that are not only good to think with, but whose material configurations play a crucial role in history.¹⁴ If it seems natural to see humans as the middle term – between ape and angel, according to the old formulation – other configurations are certainly possible; we should remember that in Numbers it is the donkey who sees the angel, while the man is none the wiser.¹⁵

13While the constant presence of the animal in human history has never gone unnoticed, the humanities and social sciences have seen a shift over the last four decades which has made studies which centre on animals and their relationships with humans more respectable. This has been labelled by some an “animal turn”,¹⁶ by analogy with the linguistic turn, whose attention to the construction of reality through language provoked the kind of questioning which can be seen in the continual deconstruction and reconstruction of the term “magic”. The Animal Turn can be seen as part of a refocusing on the physical, on bodies and on vibrant materialities, a search for tangible ways of being beyond the “prison-house of language”.¹⁷

14More concretely, it can be seen as a response to changes in the relationship between humans and animals in the post-industrial West. On the one hand, there may be no time in history when animals have played such a diminished role in our overwhelmingly urban lives. On the other, the massively increased demand for animal products has resulted in an accordingly astronomical increase in the industrial exploitation of animal bodies. And yet it seems that “being-with-the-animal” is a fundamental part of being human;¹⁸ as Margo DeMello simply puts it “Americans [and we might ask if this might not also apply to other modern populations] crave animals in their lives”.¹⁹ This craving finds expression in the wildlife documentaries and cute cat videos which continue to multiply online. And while our exploitation of animals has reached unparalleled heights, knowledge of this exploitation has also become widely diffused and of keen interest, not only to those who care about the animals themselves, but to those sensitised to the climatic dangers of the Anthropocene, to which animal agriculture is a major contributor, and those interested in new forms of bodily health and self-fashioning. The craving for animals in the modern West has given birth to new cultural forms – the scientific zoo, the marine animal park, the animal sanctuary, the universality of the pet or companion animal – the last in particular bringing its own attendant religious and magical beliefs and practices, the Rainbow Bridge and the pet-psychic.

15Reflection on the relationship between humans and other animals may be almost as old as language, but as for many things, the writings of Charles Darwin can be seen as a key moment in the intellectual history of animal studies, not only confirming that humans are animals (a paradox – the human is the animal who not an animal), but also describing the richness of the emotional, sensory and social lives of other animals.²⁰ The implications of Darwin’s work reached full force in the writings of ethical philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s, principally, in the anglophone world, Peter Singer and Tom Regan,²¹ who made the case for animal liberation and animal rights in utilitarian and deontological terms respectively.

16It is here that we can see a key feature of the animal turn – a concern for animals not simply as objects of discourse, but as physical beings entangled in human society. Both authors describe in measured detail the horrors of modern Western society, for which the language of magic and demonology might give us adequate vocabulary – from the “hell” of the “battery farm” to the “sacrifice” of laboratory animals. These works were accompanied by research which was both scientifically unprecedented and which captured (with the help of new forms of media) the attention of the public – we might think here of the work of the primatologists Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birutė Galdikas, who demonstrated the complexity and richness of the hidden nations of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, and earned considerable celebrity in doing so.²²

17These foundations in philosophy and the harder sciences may have given the humanities the permission they needed to take the animal – and the real and infinitely varied animal species and individuals which lie behind this construct – seriously as a subject. A very inadequate list of key figures might include the feminist thinkers Carol J. Adams²³ and Donna Haraway,²⁴ the philosophers Jacques Derrida,²⁵ Florence Burgat,²⁶ and Martha Nussbaum,²⁷ and the literary scholars Julia Kristeva²⁸ and Cary Wolfe.²⁹ Historians have not been absent here; Keith Thomas, well-known for his 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic, turned his attention to Man and the Natural World in 1983, while Robert Darnton’s 1984 The Great Cat Massacre used the eponymous event as one window into the social fractures of pre-revolutionary France. The past decade in particular has seen a precipitous rise in the number of conferences, collections, and special issues of journals in the Egyptology,³⁰ Assyriology,³¹ and Classical,³² Early Christian,³³ and Medieval Studies,³⁴ dedicated to questions of animals, and of the animal and the human.³⁵

18What does the history of magic have to contribute to this discussion? As the essays here will demonstrate, magical discourses have a particular ability to complicate and even ignore boundaries of the type which define the figures of the human and the animal. The practice of animalising humans is an important example – the status of animals as beings against which violence is ethically permissible allows humans identified as animals – those who are women, who are constructed as disabled, or as members of ethnic, sexual, or gender minorities – to be subject to similar violence, and even to “non-criminal putting to death”,³⁶ that is, slaughter or extermination. The worst horrors of the modern period have begun with the definition of categories of human others as animals – as rats, as cockroaches, as lice, as vermin.

19Magic is a particular site for concerns surrounding this practice, which, as we know, is not in itself particularly magical. In T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone centuries of anxiety about cannibalism and human sacrifice find darkly comedic instantiation as a black goat (normatively edible) helps Europe’s most famous magician, Merlyn, save the young Arthur (normatively inedible) from being eaten alive by a devil-worshipping witch.³⁷ If the association between human sacrifice or cannibalism and magical practice is a revealing fantasy, the ritual practices discussed in this volume show an extensive use of the animal body, often associated with, or indistinguishable from, that of the human. The use of disgusting substances in magic – animal or human secretions or excrement – and the revelation of the human being as an animal body threatens to breach that “abyssal rupture” that separates the two,³⁸ revealing the “horror [of] the ordinariness of flesh”,³⁹ that fear of the other which Kristeva called the abject, founded in large part on the rejection of the animal other.⁴⁰

20This site of anxiety, perhaps one of the engines of current environmental and political crises, is one which animal studies, with its promise of creating new configurations of the human and animal, may be well-placed to understand. In this project, Animal Studies scholars often draw upon the foundational texts of Western civilisation – classical authors and the Bible – to demonstrate how ideas of humanity and animality are inscribed into our intellectual imagination, as we have indeed done in this introduction. But these are not the only voices in which our past may speak to our present, and the texts discussed here – the magical Others of antiquity and the middle ages – may provide glimpses of perspectives outside of the confines of the canon.

21This collection of essays grew out of a two-day conference organised by LabEx ResMed, the Laboratoire d’Excellence Religions et Sociétés dans le Monde Méditerranéen, in Paris on the sixth and seventh of June, 2016. Nineteen participants, whose expertise ranged from the earliest periods of written history in the Mediterranean to the late medieval period, were invited to reflect (again) on the themes of the animal and magic, for many a recurrent thread in their work. In conformity with the developing practice of animal studies conferences, the conference lunches and breaks were free of animal sacrifice and entirely vegan, promoting a collegiality at meals shared by all regardless of their ethical or religious dietary requirements.

22Our definition of magic for the conference was broad, taking in not only what anthropologists might classify as “magic” (ritual practices) and “witchcraft” (superhuman powers attributed to others),⁴¹ but also related areas such as pre-modern medicine, and divination, and while we took the “animal” as the centre of our discussion, we allowed participants to incorporate it into their work as seemed appropriate to them. Three major themes may be identified – ‘magic’ which uses animals, ‘magic’ for animals, and the magic of animals. As the discussions in this volume show, there is considerable overlap between each of these themes, and we believe that studying them together allows each to be understood more deeply than focus on a single one would allow.

23Here we have divided our studies chronologically into three loose and overlapping groups: the First States, covering the civilisations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Egypt from the third millennium BCE into the early centuries of our era; the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine World, covering papers whose focus is on the Mediterranean civilisations of the fourth century BCE to the sixth century CE; and Medieval Worlds, which focuses on the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions of Europe and the Near East from the fifth to fifteenth centuries CE. While we attempted to cover as wide a range of geographical and cultural areas as possible, we are well aware that much is missing, and we hope that future work will fill in many of these gaps. Likewise, this volume demonstrates a focus on Egypt and its traditions – the particularly long and well-preserved textual tradition of this country makes it especially valuable in demonstrating change and continuity over the longue durée.

24The collection begins with the work of JoAnn Scurlock, whose wide-ranging summary of the practices found in the cuneiform texts of Assyria and Babylonia introduces many of the themes which recur in later papers. She reveals the diverse body of practices which related to and manipulated animals: the construction of superhuman powers, such as the constellations, as theriomorphic demons; the ritual assimilation of humans and animals through the transfer of pain and diseases from more important animals (humans, horses) to less (donkeys, goats); and the practice of reading omens from the behaviour of animals, in which negative predictions might be averted by hostility and violence towards the animal.

25Scurlock’s second theme – that of the assimilation of the human and animal – is taken up in the following paper by Alice Mouton, who interrogates the use of animal substitutes within the Hittite culture of the second millennium BCE, intended to ward off sickness, infertility, curses, and the wrath of the gods. Animal substitutes, she notes, are only one kind of ritual substitute, employed alongside those constituted by inanimate objects, and even humans. She carefully catalogues the techniques employed to identify animal and human – matching the sex of the victim to that of the patient, the transfer of clothing from the human to the animal, the use of ritualised, performative speech which catalogues and thereby highlights the bodily features common to animal and human. This fully embodied identification draws upon rich, corporeal metaphors, with spells calling upon plague-bringing gods to leave the flesh of the human patient to devour that of the animal victim.

26Returning to the eastern heartlands of Mesopotamian culture, Nicla De Zorzi takes up a different thread, the centrality of these same animal bodies in omina. Her reading focuses on the figures of the pig and the dog, whose status as domestic animals places them in a liminal position – caught halfway between the animal and human worlds. The mapping of human relations onto animals reveals a worldview centred on a male, human elite. Dogs and pigs are cast as promiscuous and dirty within this scheme, and their identification with low-status humans – labourers, women, foreigners – serves to devalue both terms. This animalisation, De Zorzi suggests, may even lie at the roots of Mesopotamian civilisation.

27Frédéric Rouffet turns our focus to Egypt, and in particular the role of animals in the invocations central to Egyptian magical practice. As we might expect in the civilisation whose most stereotypical productions are animal-headed statues and theriomorphic hieroglyphs, we find animals everywhere – from the demonic animals who must be rebuffed in healings and exorcisms, to those representing the magician, and those invoked in persuasive analogies of desire. In the proto-scientific texts which straddle the boundary of magic and medicine we find careful diagnostic descriptions, in which the similarity of the human to the animal – for example, a man whose breath stinks like the venom of a serpent – offers a vivid description of a body out of balance.

28His discussion ends with an overview of the use of real animal parts in magical recipes, a theme taken up at greater length in the following essay, provided by Julie Masquelier-Loorius. Masquelier-Loorius’ work draws out the function of animal bodies in protective and iatromagical texts in which sickness is understood as a symptom of a hostile intrusion into the human body. Her discussion looks both at practicalities – how to acquire and deal with such difficult-to-obtain materials as hippopotamus fat and lion excrement – and the criteria which lie behind the selection of particular body parts and particular species. She argues for the necessity of examining the interaction between human and animal worlds through a perspective stripped of modern categories – Egyptians of the New Kingdom did not share our categorisations of bodily organs and systems, nor our classifications of animals – and from this pared-back basis she attempts to reconstruct the logic of Egyptian magical pharmacology.

29The final paper on Pharaonic Egypt is that of Franziska Naether, who provides the first case study of a single animal – the crocodile. In a close reading of Egyptian literary texts, Naether reveals how the Egyptian conception of this creature was drawn from observation and experience of its material and biological qualities, a beast to whom fish, fowl, livestock and humans are equally prey. The crocodile is an ambiguous figure in Egypt, at once the divine Sobek and the demonic Khenty, both singular and multiple, a symbol of the fertility of the marshes of Egypt and an embodiment of sudden and brutal death. But, as she reveals, the danger posed by the crocodile to those who live and work along the river Nile is not merely physical, but also symbolic, with the attributes of the noisome reptile being transferred in polemic texts to the washermen, sailors, and foreigners at the margins of Egyptian society.

30The second part of this volume begins with an overview by Korshi Dosoo and Thomas Galoppin of the rich texts from Roman Egypt known collectively as the Greek Magical Papyri. In their examination of the underlying ritual logics of these texts, Dosoo and Galoppin find several intersecting, and even contradictory, ideas. We find the use of the natural forces which animals may possess – from the paradoxical power of electric fishes to the magical abilities attributed to the hyena, and even the bare fact of life, which may be manipulated in practices which innovate upon traditional sacrificial rituals. More important, perhaps, is the religious value of animals in the system of Graeco-Egyptian thought, in which they might be the manifestations or symbols of its inter-cultural pantheon. If their study points towards a magical cuisine, alimented by a magical butcher-shop, it equally highlights the way in which inter-species and inter-cultural dynamics are manipulated in the construction of ritual power.

31This theme continues in Galoppin’s solo contribution to the volume, in which he takes up Claude Lévi Strauss’s characterisation of animals as “good to think with” to investigate the way in which Graeco-Roman (and even modern) thinkers construct conceptions of magic by reference to animals, drawing upon ideas of excess, transgression, and the marvellous. If Lucan’s vision of the degradation of the witch Erichtho draws upon her prodigious witch’s brew of animal body-parts, authors such as Pliny the Elder and Galen attempt to delimit magic by reference to the marvellous – the use of strange and incredible animals with foreign names, and by contrasting ritual and natural power. Galoppin demonstrates how the marvellous may be used to construct magic, and is itself constructed by discourses at the interface of divine and natural potencies. Through his reading of both texts and animals, Galoppin examines multiple ways of thinking to reveal the identity of the magical animal.

32The next study, that of Christopher Faraone, takes as its theme an animal which also attracts the attention of Galoppin, the strange little fish known to Greeks as the echenēis, which, living, had the power to stop ships from sailing, and dead could be used to restrain court cases and wayward lovers. Faraone’s study examines different ways in which the fish might have been used in rituals, exploring the vocabulary of love and binding magic, and tracing the way in which knowledge of natural history relates to ideas about magical forces and rituals, and exploring more deeply the crucial theme of the use of the animal body as a stand-in for the human.

33Sydney Aufrère returns our gaze to Egypt, with a study on the late deity Tutu, and the complexity of Egyptian thought to which he testifies. Worshipped from the sixth century BCE until the third century of our era, he is usually depicted as a sphinx whose tail is in the form of an erect cobra. It is this serpentine appendage which catches Aufrère’s attention, as he excavates the logics which lie behind it – the observation of the snake-like lashing of the tail of an enraged lion, the symbolic importance of omnipresent and ever-dangerous snakes in Egypt, the artistic tendency to transform any long, twisting form into a serpent. Aufrère presents the snakes to us as magico-biological weapons, venom-spitting symbols of the destructive and apotropaic power of the god.

34Remaining within the rich soil of Egyptian thought, Korshi Dosoo offers us a discussion of the practice of ritual drowning in Graeco-Egyptian magic, a method of producing divine assistants and efficacious ingredients from the bodies of animals. Dosoo traces this practice to three intersecting sources – the interest in Roman-period magic for creating familiar spirits; the Egyptian cults of sacred animals, which at their heights killed and mummified animals at industrial scales; and the concept of the hasye, a belief in the divinising effect of drowning, first developed to cope with the threat of human death posed by the Nile. From their reconfiguration in magical texts, Dosoo investigates how differing treatment in life, death and afterlife demarcated the lines between animal, god, and human.

35The contribution of Patricia Gaillard-Seux turns to Book X of Galen’s On the Temperaments, which deals with the medical use of the “biological liquids, secretions, and excretions” of animals, both human and non-human. In a careful reading, she identifies the criteria used by Galen to distinguish between the techniques of legitimate medicine and those of superstition and magic, the revealing but unsystematic use of reason (logos), experience (peira), as well as ethical and religious norms – rejecting ingredients which seem revolting, morbid, and exotic. His explorations of licit and illicit materia complicate the human-animal boundary: the use of human excretions and body parts might be disgusting, and often illegal, but they may also be medically effective, raising disquieting questions both about the discovery of their application and human nature: if humans and pigs are close enough that the blood of the one can be replaced by that of the other, what does this imply about the permeability of the species boundary?

36Valérie Gitton-Ripoll’s essay begins with a similar question: how are horses different from humans? As she demonstrates, humans and horses could share the same diseases, and be cured by similar, or even identical, magical charms. She gives us a vivid picture of their use in the Roman world, murmured (so that the efficacious words cannot be overheard) into the horse’s right ear, the human healer often speaking in the person of the horse, once again confusing animal and human, ritualist and patient. Did these early horse-whisperers believe that their patients could in some way understand the charms, or are the words intended only for the sickness or divine being addressed? And what of the causes of the disease – physical or mental illnesses personified or animalised as demons to be chased away?

37Our exploration of the medieval worlds begins with Emma Abate. In her contribution, she first highlights the importance of animals, especially the snake, in the terminology designating magical and divinatory practices in the Hebrew tradition. After demonstrating the link between animals and magic in sacred and normative texts, Abate analyses mentions of animals in amulets and talismans. They may be the targets of spells (repelling scorpions, for example), used as apotropaic images (as in the case of the salamander and fish), or sacrificed (as is the case with dogs, goats, and roosters). Finally, animals can also be manifestations of demons, such as the śeʿirim (satyrs), the mazziqin (evil spirits), the mamzerim (hybrid beings with one demonic parent), or the famous demoness Lilith.

38In his second solo essay, Korshi Dosoo provides an overview of animals in the magical practice of Christian Egypt, spells written in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. This material demonstrates a clear shift from the earlier (Graeco-)Egyptian conception of the animal as a sacrificial mediator with or potential manifestation of the divine, to a vision of the cosmos centred on the human body, in which animals become symbols disconnected from their material referents. But the unique nature of the papyrological documentation of Egypt allows another reality to be seen underneath this image, of daily life in which the health of livestock could be the difference between success and ruin, and the venomous creatures of the desert represented a threat that could infiltrate homes, and in which magic could manage these problems, protecting both livestock and people. Through a reading of the incantations which accompany magical spells, he reveals another instance of the recurrent theme of animalisation in attempts by men to seduce women which draw upon animals – at once free of the norms of human society, and beyond their protection – as a model for sexual subjection.

39Anna Caiozzo offers the first essay on animals in Islamic thought, in which they represent an aspect of creation older than man, but younger than the natural elements, and the often theriomorphic angels and djinn. In both the Islamic and the older Zoroastrian conceptions of the world, animal hybrids represented marvels: the ambivalent djinn, the celestial angels, and the monstrous divs. Humans might acquire hybrid form through their sins – Dhaḥḥāk, the evil king whose shoulders sprouted serpents hungering for human flesh, and who bled frogs, insects and rats. But more positively, in the system of Hermetic magic inherited from Late Antique Hellenic culture, animals formed part of a system of correspondences, linking the upper and lower worlds, and in legends, individual animals might acquire important roles as the companions of heroes: Barmāya the cow, who nourishes the hero Farīdūn, and Zāl, raised, protected and taught occult secrets by the great bird of prey known as the simurgh.

40Jean-Charles Coulon then deals with the question of animals in Arabic magical texts. He first shows how the Arabic tradition integrated and developed the “science of properties” which it inherited from ancient Greek philososphy. The use of certain disgusting substances of animal origin, such as urine or excrement, might seem contrary to religious norms, but their use was justified by their beneficial therapeutic properties. Likewise, animals might also be used in accordance with their astral correspondences. Finally, he discusses the developments of the magical tradition from the thirteenth century, contemporary with the rise of the Sufi fraternities, which saw subtle changes to its relationship with substances of animal origin.

41Sophie Page’s discussion of animals in medieval Europe shifts our perspective further west, describing a worldview in which animals served as a part of “God’s good creation”, under threat by a weakening of the boundary between the animal and the demonic, creating a growing sense that animals might allow demons a means by which to interfere in creation. This change in perspective can be seen in the shift from viewing magical procedures – such as the “lamp experiment”, in which humans were given animal heads – as miraculous illusions, to the fifteenth-century idea that demons might be able to give witches real powers of metamorphosis, allowing them to transform into or project animal forms to harm their enemies. But if humans could be the victims of demonic animals, animals could also be the victims of humans: from spells for staunching blood whose instructions suggest that they be tried out on pigs, to texts which describe “new creations” – magically altered animals whose slaughtered bodies can give their creators superhuman powers.

42Edward Love offers two contributions, editing and interpreting hitherto unpublished Coptic magical texts containing intriguing images of animals. In the first of these, he explores an amulet depicting the battle between the holy man Apa Baula and his bestial opponent, Saratalē the Destroyer, an alter-ego of the Devil. Love explores the ways in which the culture of Christian Egypt used the signifiers of the animal other to represent the powers of evil and damnation, and the textual and visual realisations of this idea. He highlights the ways in which images inscribe not only ideas, but also magical authority and efficacy, and even invoke sensory and behavioural associations.

43He continues this theme in his second contribution, exploring the chicken-like figure identified in its text as Arpakh, a demon known from other texts, whose power seems to be invoked in a curse. Love explores the materiality of such curse texts in Egypt – their creation, activation and deposition – and the ways in which Arpakh’s iconography draws upon that of a much older figure, the donkey-headed Seth-Typhon, whose armed, therianthropomorphic image appears in texts from the Graeco-Egyptian magical tradition. Examining the history of such depictions, Love traces the transmission of his iconography into the Christian period, demonstrating how its form and meaning may have been subject to reinterpretation and misinterpretation, transforming the image of a donkey-god into that of a bird-demon.

44In the final contribution, Marion Charpier follows the trail of the basilisk, that creature which started as paradoxically tiny yet utterly deadly serpent, and grew into a huge, hybrid monster, part snake, part rooster. This dual form is mirrored in its dual origin – at once part of the Graeco-Roman heritage of the early bestiaries, and of the texts of the Old Testament, in which the Greek basiliskos was used to translate the Hebrew names of various serpents. An image of evil, or even the Devil himself, its vulnerability to the weasel offered proof that everything in nature had its remedy, and yet the creature’s deathly stare – a development of its earlier venom – offered an instance of spooky action at a distance which contradicted the laws of nature as medieval Aristotelianism knew them, while its existence, the product of two male creatures of different species (laid by a rooster, incubated by a toad) was similarly against nature. Charpier traces the fascinating, and bifurcated, imagery of this creature, a monster whose defeat requires not courage (like the dragon), but wisdom.

45In each of these discussions we see both surprising particularities and recurrent themes, and despite the breadth and depth of these contributions the theme is far from exhausted; the intersections of magic and animals will, we hope, continue to engage the interest of researchers in both these fields.

46The editors would like to offer their sincere thanks to Magali de Haro Sanchez and Béatrice Caseau, two co-organisers of the original conference, without whom this volume would not have been possible, as well as to Walton Ford, Marie Guerin, Attilio Mastrocinque, Stefanie Schmidt, Karima Pedemas, and Stella Quérol, each of whom contributed to this collection in various ways. We would also like to thank the organisations who provided funding for the original conference, LabEx Resmed, the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT-CNRS), Université Paris-Sorbonne, and the groups “Monde byzantin” and “Islam médiéval” of UMR 8167 “Orient & Méditerranée”.