Numen 60 (2013) 308347

brill.com/nu

Towards Historicizing Magic in Antiquity1

Bernd-Christian Otto
Institut fr Religionswissenschaft, Universitt Erfurt
Nordhuserstr. 63, 99089 Erfurt, Germany
bernd.otto@uni-erfurt.de

Abstract
Even though the concept of magic has suffered severe criticism in academic discourse,
the category continues to be used in many disciplines. During the last two decades, classicists in particular have engaged in a lively discussion over magic and have produced
an impressive amount of written output. Given the impossibility of deining magic
in a consistent and widely accepted manner, one cannot help but wonder what these
scholars are actually talking about. Hence this paper purports (a) to critically review
the recent debate on magic in Classical Studies, (b) to advocate for abandoning an
abstract category of magic in favour of a proper analysis of ancient sources and (c) to
historicize the term magic in Antiquity, that is, to muse on its ancient semantics, functions, and contexts. This methodological approach does not only overcome the major
problems inherent in modern deinitions of magic, but will also yield new insights
into terminologies, modes of thought and speech strategies that underlie ancient religious discourses.
Keywords
magic, Classical Antiquity, Classical Studies, Religious Studies, conceptual history

Reviewing the Recent Debate in Classical Studies

Over the last two decades, an ongoing discourse on magic has left an
enduring imprint on the Study of Classical Antiquity. Classicists have
been highly conident in organizing international conferences on the

1)I would like to thank Richard Gordon, Michael Stausberg, and Marios Skempis for
their helpful comments on different drafts of this paper.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013

DOI: 10.1163/15685276-12341267

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topic2 and have published an impressive number of collections of

essays,3 articles,4 several source books,5 and numerous monographs
aiming at a systematic overview of the material presented while,
partly, proposing new theoretical, terminological, and methodological
approaches.6 To date, however, cardinal questions that have shaped the
academic controversy over magic since the late 19th century remain
to be answered: What is ancient magic? In what sense is it distinct
from ancient religion? How should Classicists proceed with ambiguous data whose general classiication regarding these categories have
unleashed an ongoing dispute?7 Is the concept of magic any good for
understanding ancient sources? Or should it, inally, be removed from
academic discourse altogether, given its judgmental, ethnocentric, and
semantically fuzzy notions?

2)The most representative among them are: Magic in the Ancient World (August
1992, University of Kansas); Magic and Divination in the Ancient World (February
1994, Berkeley); Envisioning Magic (March 1995, Princeton); The World of Ancient
Magic (May 1997, Norwegian Institute Athens); Magic in the Ancient World (August
1998, Chapman University California), Prayers, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient
and late Antique World (March 2002, Washington), Magical Practice in the Latin
West (September/October 2005, Zaragoza); Contextualizing Magic (November 2009,
Rome).
3)Cf. Faraone & Obbink 1991; Meyer & Mirecki 1995; Kippenberg & Schfer 1997; Jordan, Montgomery & Thomassen 1999; Ciraolo & Seidel 2002; Mirecki & Meyer 2002;
Noegel & Walker 2003; Bremmer & Veenstra 2003; Brodersen & Kropp 2004; Shaked
2005; Gordon & Marco Simn 2010; Bohak, Harari & Shaked 2011.
4)Apart from the essays in the collections mentioned above, the following articles are
important: Segal 1981; Versnel 1991; Phillips III 1994; Becker 2002; Stratton 2013.
5)Luck 1985 & 2006; Ogden 2002.
6)Cf. Fgen 1993; Graf 1996; Dickie 2001; Janowitz 2001; Lotz 2005; Carastro 2006; Busch
2006; Stratton 2007; Kropp 2008.
7)See, e.g., the discussions about neoplatonic theurgy, about the so-called prayers for
justice or texts like the Corpus Hermeticum or the Papyri Graecae Magicae. For neoplatonic theurgy see, among others, Copenhaver 1987; in fact, the controversy started
already in late Antiquity with Iamblichus, who opted for a clear distinction (e.g. de mysteriis 3.25.160f.; 3.31.176f.), and Augustine, who deliberately equated magic with theurgy (e.g. de ciuitate dei 10.9). For the discussion about prayers for justice, see especially
Versnel 2010. For the discussion about the Corpus Hermeticum see, e.g., Copenhaver
1988. Also the Papyri Graecae Magicae have been subject to an ongoing dispute on its
magical and/or religious properties see, e.g., Segal 1981; Smith 1995; Remus 1999.

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Apparently, the vast majority of the works alluded to above do not

take up a radical position regarding these questions (that is, they do not
opt for abandoning the term) but rather continue to perceive magic as
an adequate, albeit disputed, category.8 Thus, to date, the term magic
still serves as a concept widely used to signify and classify speciic
source material in the Study of Classical Antiquity. Substantive applications of the concept of magic appear so regularly even in works aiming
at a critical discussion or deconstruction of modern deinitions9 that
an implicit conviction of (at least the majority of) Classicists becomes
apparent: it might be problematic or even impossible to deine magic
in a coherent way, but, nevertheless, magical rites were indeed performed in Classical Antiquity. Beyond the words and independent of
academic controversies, ancient magic is (and was, respectively) real
and, as such, needs to be properly investigated.

8)See, all with explicit justiication, Versnel 1991; Thomassen 1999; Hoffman 2002.
9)Some examples may serve to illustrate this point: Fritz Graf (1996:1423), who convincingly deconstructs the classical set of deinitions put forward by Frazer, Durkheim,
Malinowski, and others, begins his monograph with the following words of conidence:
Magie ist ein fester Bestandteil der antiken Religionen Griechenlands, Roms, des alten
Italien (Graf 1996: 9); as he rejects all substantive deinitions throughout his book, the
introductory sentence (and many others) therefore remains mysterious. In a similar
vein, Matthew Dickie (2001:1ff.) criticizes all established deinitions in the introductory
chapter of his Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, but frequently surprises
with phrases such as The overarching category so formed is surely to be identiied with
a concept that denotes much the same set of activities as does our concept of magic
(p. 34), the concept of magea was at irst very far from being coextensive with the
notion of magic with which we operate (p. 21) or The concept of magic, present in
the Greek world of the ifth century BC and particularly in Athens, [...] tallies in large
measure but not entirely with the concept of magic with which the Western world is
familiar (p. 40). Dickie apparently suggests a pragmatic, everyday understanding here;
yet, as he rejects all established deinitions it remains unclear what he actually means
by our concept of magic. Likewise, Peter Busch (2006:15) dismisses substantive deinitions at the beginning of his Magie in neutestamentlicher Zeit, but nevertheless classiies
magic as being part of religion throughout his book. Similar patterns of argumentation can be found in many of the aforementioned works. Some twenty years ago, Henk
Versnel (1991:181) described this problem with pertinence: Practically no one escapes
moments of reduced concentration when they suddenly fall into unsophisticated common sense concepts, though they sometimes betray their awareness of the lapse by
putting the term magic between inverted commas or adding so-called.

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The ongoing belief of Classicists in the term magic as a feasible or

unavoidable academic category may partly be explained by the fact that
the very same term appears within the ancient sources. As is known, the
former denomination of a Persian priest caste, magu,10 entered into
the ancient Greek language in the 5th century BCE,11 underwent some
signiicant semantic transformations during its Greek adaptation,12 and
from then on served as an important concept in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian literature throughout all Antiquity. Unsurprisingly,
a number of ancient authors were already discussing the concept and,
in part, proposed theories about the possible mechanisms underlying
the beliefs and rituals subsumed under /magia.13 Since the early
Roman Empire, people had even been prosecuted under the formalized term crimen magiae14 the Apologia sive pro se de magia of the
2nd century philosopher Apuleius Madaurensis is both a dazzling and
highly entertaining textual proof.15 Finally, more than two thousand
10)Cf. de Jong 1997:387: These words derive from the Old Persian appellative for a
priest magu- (nom. Magu), etymologically related to Av. mogu- which appears to have
meant (member of a) tribe. For the early etymology see also Nock 1933; Bremmer
1999/2002.
11) Cf., among other texts, Aeschylus, Persae 318; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 387f.; Euripides, Orestes 1493f.; Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris 1327f.; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen
910; Hippocrates, De morbo sacro 1.1f.; Plato, Alcibiades 1 122a.
12)In all likelihood, the Persian magicians described by Herodotus in his Histories (e.g.
1.101f.; 3.30f.; 7.19f., 37f., 113f., 191f.) and documented in the Persepolis Fortiication Tablets (see Hallock 1969) did not apply an etymological derivate of their self-appellation
to their practices and beliefs; indeed, they seem to have been responsible for central
aspects of Persian temple and deity cults, that is, for Persian religion. In contrast, the
adaptation of the Greek term implied the conviction that magic is not religion but
sacrilege and blasphemy (in Greek terms: ); see, e.g., Hippocrates, de morbo
sacro 1.1f., esp. 28f., and below.
13)Cf., among others, Plato, Laws 932e933e (Plato uses the Greek synonym ;
for synonyms see below, footnote 62); Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, esp. the beginning of book 30; Plotinus, Enneads, esp. 4.4.4044; Augustine, e.g. de doctrina christiana
2.XX.30.74f. However, a closer look at these sources reveals signiicant conceptual differences between these authors that will be analyzed in more detail in the second part
of this paper.
14)Cf. in more detail Fgen 1993; Lotz 2005.
15)See the splendid edition of Hammerstaedt et al. 2002; see also Winter 2006, the classic Abt 1908, and the discussion in Graf 1996:61f. Apuleius explicitly refers to the concept of crimen magiae (e.g. Apologia 25.5). Lamberti (2002: 344346) argues that there

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ancient curse tablets have been found and described by Classicists to

date. Given their often harmful aspirations and the fact that their production is described in the Papyri Graecae Magicae,16 a text corpus written by ritual specialists explicitly claiming the title ,17 what term
would be more suitable for their analysis than magic?
Unsurprisingly, in recent academic works on ancient magic, especially in the afore-mentioned monographs, there is a strong tendency
to leave modern deinitions behind and apply an emic approach
instead.18 Fritz Graf in particular has done considerable groundwork
on the ancient conceptual history of magic in his Gottesnhe und
Schadenzauber.19 Kimberly Stratton has recently offered substantial
new insights into the ancient discourse on magic (or, in her own
words, on magic as ancient discourse) in her study Naming the Witch.20
must have been a senatusconsultum for establishing the juridical concept of a crimen
magiae in the irst century CE, based on the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneicis.
16)Cf., e.g., PGM IV.296f.
17) See the title in PGM IV.243; IV.2082; IV.2290; LXIII.5.
18) See, for example, Segal 1981:36970: The most interesting question for scholarship,
as I see it, is not whether the charge of magic against Jesus is true or not. Since he
does not claim the title, there can be no possible demonstration or disproof of a charge
which is a matter of interpretation in the Hellenistic world. The most interesting question for scholarship is to deine the social and cultural conditions and presuppositions that allow such charges and counter-charges to be made; Dickie (2001:19) claims
to understand the Greeks and the Romans in their own terms; Graf 1996:23: Statt
also eine strenge, aber knstliche Terminologie zu schaffen, verfolgt man die antiken
Bedeutungen der Terminologie als Teil eines Diskurses ber die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und Gttern.; Busch 2006:17: Die Fragestellung, die wir in dieser
Studie an die antiken Texte richten, wird eine andere sein. Wir fragen nicht, ob die
Handlungen und Worte Jesu und der frhen Christen magisch sind. Wir fragen, inwieweit und warum diese als magisch verstanden wurden. Hierbei kommen die antiken
Texte selbst zu Wort. See also Stratton 2007, who has offered the most consistent study
of the ancient discourse on magic so far; see, e.g., p. 13: Consequently, I emphasize
attention to emic terminology in order to illuminate the ideological prejudices behind
representations of magic. By focusing on ancient terminology, one can discern when
and how magic was mobilized as a discourse in antiquity. This differs from approaches
that impose a universal second-order deinition of magic onto other cultures and concomitantly impose modern distinctions and categories as well.
19) Cf. Graf 1996:2457.
20)See Stratton 2007:12f. See also Stratton 2013. The approach in this paper differs
slightly from Strattons work as I do not speak of magic as ancient discourse (in the

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However, important questions remain unanswered: what did /

magia actually mean to Graeco-Roman authors? Can the ancient use
of the term justify the ongoing application of an abstract category of
magic in Classical Studies? Even in recent works claiming to focus
on ancient terminology, no clear or systematic answers to these questions have yet been given.21 So far, the predominant use of magic as a
substantive category in the very same studies has tended to downplay
attempts to reconstruct the historical semantics of the ancient term in a
systematic way and to relate them to possible differences regarding the
academic concept.
However, in a number of recent works the shift towards deeper reflection on ancient terminology has led to the thesis of deviance. In Antiquity, some authors claim, magic functioned only as a polemical term to
stigmatize and exclude others (named the religion of the other,22 the
dangerous other,23 the theological opposition),24 or, in other words,
to squelch, avenge, or discredit undesirable behavior.25 Harold Remus,
who investigated the 2nd and 3rd century controversy between Christian and Graeco-Roman authors on the miraculous abilities of Jesus of
Nazareth and, among others, Apollonius of Tyana, describes the conflict as a competition in naming: afirming miracle of the extraordinary
end, it is a term, not a discourse) but rather of /magia as terms within ancient
discourses.
21) Stratton (2007; 2013) may be regarded as an exception here; however, her book lacks
a inal discussion of the tension between her methodological approach and the extensive use of the concept of magic as a signiier of curse tablets or the Papyri Graecae
Magicae in Classical Studies. Maybe this is due to her own relatively minor attention
to these sources; in fact, her book almost completely lacks a discussion of the ancient
use of magic as a self-referential term, an aspect that is given more attention to in
this paper.
22)Cf. Zinser 1997:93f.; my translation.
23)Cf. Kippenberg & Stuckrad 2003:155f.; my translation.
24)Cf. Phillips III 1986:2711: A charge of magic represented a persuasive way to denigrate ones theological opposition: the opposition would have to prove that its alleged
powers derived from the right cosmic forces. Cf. also Gager 1994, 183: When looked
at from the perspective of the centre and its values, this negative use of magea usually
amounts to little more than the claim that what we do is religion and what they do is
magic. And so the term has been used pretty much ever since. See also Stratton 2007
and 2013.
25)Garrett 1989:5.

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phenomena of ones own group and denying the name to those of rival
groups.26 The ancient terminological dualism of /magia on the
one hand and /signum or /miraculum on the other can
functionally be reduced, Remus claims, to the conceptual creation
of discursive boundaries: between us and them, between inside
and outside, and between true and false.27 Charles R. Phillips III
adds that these arbitrary and highly judgmental ancient demarcations
of discursive boundaries ushered into academic discourse in the late
19th century and, thereby, decisively influenced the scholarly controversy on magic as a whole.28
In the ancient sources, there is no doubt a plethora of evidence for
the thesis of deviance. The vast majority of the texts that came down to
us and include the term magea/magia or one of its cognates or synonyms refer to persons, texts, ritual practices or beliefs from an outward
perspective and are usually accompanied by semantics of devaluation
and stigmatization. However, the polemical instrumentalization of
the ancient term magic is only part of the truth: in the Papyri Graecae Magicae the term appears ten times while clearly referring to the
authors themselves and their own ritual practice.29 Here, does
26)Remus 1983:182.
27)Remus 1983:5254, 182f.
28)Cf. Phillips III, 1994: 10910: These ancient distinctions have entered the scholarly traditions, the more so since empiricist-dominated classical studies were wont to
privilege ancient views of their own phenomena. A.A. Barb spoke of the syncretistic, rotting refuse-heap of the dead and dying religion in late antiquity, noting of the
resultant empty shell that the masses illed it with all the refuse of superstitions,
questionable white magic, and an apparently alarming amount of gotea, that is to
say unequivocal black sorcery. Peter Salway observed that ghosts, black magic and
curses were taken seriously in the Classical world, and are part of that darker side of
Classical religion..., while H.H. Scullard on Roman religion of the Republic noted
the dark forest surrounded the minds of their ancestors. And why did this occur? The
socio-economic elite of ancient authors speaking directly to the socio-economic elite
of modern scholars.
29)Cf. PGM I.127; PGM I.331; PGM IV.211; PGM IV.243; PGM IV.2082; PGM IV.2290;
PGM IV.2319; PGM IV.2450; PGM IV.2454; PGM LXIII.5. This inding corresponds to the
second edition of Preisendanz & Henrichs (197374), according to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. There might be further instances in the additional material presented
in Betz 1986 and Daniel & Maltomini 199092, which have not been checked by the
author.

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not imply a stigmatization but rather a positive evaluation, notions

of high religious expertise, of total effectiveness and legitimacy of the
rituals at issue.30 Thus, a general postulation of the thesis of deviance
seems misleading. However, it can add to a more complete picture of
the ancient use of the term magic: /magia were employed as
polemical concepts to exclude and stigmatize beliefs and ritual behavior
deviating from religious norms only in the literature of ancient, culturalreligious elites. At the same time, it was used as a self-referential term
by (at least Graeco-Egyptian) ritual specialists, which led to an identiication with the concept and, what is more, to a positive evaluation of
their (inevitably construed) religious identities. One would thus be right
to speak of a discourse of exclusion and a discourse of inclusion operating simultaneously in Antiquity, endowing the concept of magic with
variegated semantic and evaluative nuances. In the second part of this
paper, I shall deal with these nuances in greater depth.
To sum up: pervasive modern discussions about the concept of
magic in the study of classical antiquity as they are, they yet failed
to establish a thorough theoretical and methodological perspective as
far as their central concept is concerned. The majority of studies continue to perceive magic as an adequate category capable of classifying
ancient sources. Nowadays, deinitions are usually rejected; terminological alternatives to counteract the conceptual vacuum have rarely
been proposed.31 Due to the discomfort produced by modern deinitions
of magic and the frequent occurrence of the very same term in ancient
sources, recent works tend to vouch for an emic approach. However,
30)Cf. the evaluation of magea as being holy in PGM I.127 ( {}
) and as being divine/godly in PGM IV.2245 (
). Note that the lexeme appears (according to the Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae) no less than 191 times in the PGM (including all flections). See also formulations like PGM I.129 (The gods will agree in every respect [ {}
]), or the self-perception of the ritual practitioner as being in
PGM IV.6856.
31) However, one inds substitutive expressions like ritual power in more recent
works; see both Meyer & Smith 1994 and Meyer & Mirecki 1995. These attempts seem
to reflect the desire to reach a higher level of abstraction but need to be thought out
in a more consistent manner. In fact, they often go hand in hand with the substantive
use of the concept of magic and usually take up its notions. On this point see also
Johnston 2003.

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the simultaneous use of the concept of magic as an abstract category

seems to have disfavored the systematic reconstruction of its historical semantics.32 The increasing focus on ancient terminology led to the
thesis of deviance which reveals an important aspect of the conceptual
history of magic but should not be postulated for Antiquity altogether.
Indeed, deviance-theoretical positions appear somewhat isolated in the
discourse and are usually entirely neglected in the majority of works
dealing with ancient curse tablets.33 All in all, substantive applications
of the concept of magic still dominate the Study of Classical Antiquity;
therefore, the cardinal questions posed at the outset of this paper are
still in need of satisfying answers.
This inding is quite astonishing, granted that the discourse on magic
in Religious Studies has culminated, in the words of Hans G. Kippenberg,
in the collapse of the category.34 Due to its pejorative connotations,
fuzzy semantics and, not least, the cumulative falsiication of all major
deinitions,35 the urgent need for an unconditional abandonment of
the term has been registered already in the 1950s and culminated in the
1960s and 1970s by dint of the so-called rationality debate.36 Critics
claimed that the academic concept of magic does not operate as an
impartial, semantically sound and, thus, helpful concept, but rather as
an ethnocentric, semantically distorting, and highly polemical template
arising from 19th century idealistic yet arbitrary conceptions of (modern) science and (Christian) religion. Thus, when opposed to science, magic has been accused of being a mere residual category, [...]
created by the scientiic observer in order to explain incomprehensible
32)One might add here that the reconstruction of historical semantics is only possible
by systematically excluding modern semantics of a term under examination. In other
words: conceptual histories, especially those aiming at a reconstruction of onomasiological shifts, can only be accomplished by strictly discarding substantive applications
of the analyzed concept.
33)Apart from the splendid work by Gager 1992; see below.
34)Kippenberg 1998:86; my translation.
35)For this process see in more detail Kippenberg 1995. See also, among many
others, Lowie 1948:136151; Wax & Wax 1963; Hammond 1970; Hanegraaff 2005; Otto 2011,
ch. 25. Otto & Stausberg 2013, esp. 112.
36)Cf., among others, Radcliffe-Brown 1952:138; Pettersson 1957:119; Peel 1969:834;
Pocock 1972:2; Leach 1982:133; etc. The rationality debate can be studied in more
detail in Wilson 1970; Horton & Finnegan 1973; Kippenberg & Luchesi 1995.

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actions;37 when opposed to religion, magic was merely regarded as

a refuse-heap for the elements which are not suficiently valuable to
get a place within religion.38 Unsurprisingly, in some recent works on
general concepts in the Study of Religion the term magic has not been
taken into account.39 For Randall Styers, one of the most radical recent
authors, academic theorists of magic are themselves no more than
magicians: culling diverse forms of behavior, modes of knowledge,
social practices, and habits from an indiscriminate range of cultural
systems and historical epochs and transmogrifying them into a uniied
phenomenon.40
So far, the discourse on magic in the Study of Classical Antiquity
has tended to reject these rather critical, deconstructionist positions
brought forth in Religious Studies and adjacent disciplines. Jonathan Z.
Smith put them up for discussion among Classicists by publishing his
critical article Trading Places in Meyer & Mireckis Ancient Magic
and Ritual Power.41 However, his arguments were not well received
in the Study of Classical Antiquity but, instead, heavily criticized by
C. A. Hoffman in his article Fiat Magia,42 who claims to represent a
school of thought that sees in magic a useful category.43 In fact, one
37)Kippenberg 1998:95; my translation.
38)Pettersson 1957:119: Summing up, we may say that the scientiic debate over the
relation between magic and religion is a discussion of an artiicial problem created by
deining religion on the ideal pattern of Christianity. The elements of mans beliefs and
ceremonies concerning the supernatural powers which did not coincide with this ideal
type of religion was and is called magic. There is always a tendency to mock the
unfamiliar in other mans faith and worship. Magic became and still becomes a
refuse-heap for the elements which are not suficiently valuable to get a place within
religion. The study of comparative religion would win clearness, honesty and stringency, the aspects of valuation would be avoided etc. if the term magic were given a
decent burial to quote Doctor E. Smith in the scientiic debate of the nature of
religion.; italics Pettersson.
39)Cf. Taylor 1998; Braun & McCutcheon 2000.
40)Styers 2004:223. See also Styers 2013. Other recent critics of a substantive category
of magic are Pasi 2008; Otto 2011; Hanegraaff 2012, esp. 16477; Stuckrad forthcoming.
See for a potential solution of the problem (patterns of magicity) Otto & Stausberg
2013:10f.
41) Cf. Smith 1995.
42)See Hoffman 2002:188f., 193f.
43)Hoffman 2002:180.

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gets the impression that the flourishing scholarly discourse on ancient

magic has, up to this point, felt rather threatened by critical authors
like Smith and Styers, as if the latter wanted to take away its main category without offering any alternative. This tension led to rather crude
patterns of argumentation: Hoffman, in the aforementioned article, is
so focused on criticizing Smith and other critical authors that he completely omits to explain how the concept of magic could actually be
used coherently in Classical Studies. In this respect, his inal phrase let
there be magic remains mysterious.44
Due to these conceptual inconsistencies, this paper argues for a
methodological turn in the way the concept of magic is used in Classical Studies. It adds to other works claiming that the arguments against a
substantive application of the concept of magic in academic discourse
are, if well thought out, highly convincing, if not compelling (even so,
these do not need to be recapitulated here).45 Likewise, the paper follows the argument of Jonathan Z. Smith that abandoning magic as an
abstract category from scholarly discourse does not lead to a loss of analytic potential, but instead to an enhanced understanding of the source
material at stake.46 However, critical authors have, so far, neglected to
clarify the advantages that arise from abandoning a substantive category
of magic. In particular, they have failed to offer insights regarding the
immense impact and persistence of the historical concept of magic
that pervades no less than 2,500 years of textual sources. In fact, criticizing and abandoning modern deinitions of magic does not necessarily
contribute to understanding how ancient (or other premodern) authors
employed the term. The present paper aims at resolving these issues by
developing two strategies: irst, it tries to offer conceptual alternatives
to the habitual classiication of ancient sources like curse tablets or the
44)Hoffman 2002:194.
45)See in more detail the works mentioned in footnote 35. For a summary of critical
arguments see Otto & Stausberg 2013:110.
46)See Smith 1995:1617: I see little merit in continuing the use of the substantive term
magic in second-order, theoretical, academic discourse. We have better and more precise scholarly taxa for each of the phenomena commonly denotated by magic which,
among other beneits, create more useful categories for comparison. For any culture
I am familiar with, we can trade places between the corpus of materials conventionally
labeled magical and corpora designated by other generic terms (e.g., healing, divining,
execrative) with no cognitive loss.

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Papyri Graecae Magicae as magic; second, it opts for a systematic historicization of the ancient term that is, for a thorough reconstruction
of its meanings, functions, and contexts in ancient textual sources and
discourses.

A Methodological Turn: Historicizing the Concept of Magic

At irst sight, taking the initial step of abandoning the substantive use
of the concept of magic in academic language appears to be a simple
task. Having discarded the term, though, how should Classicists deal
with source material habitually tagged as magic in Classical discourse?
In this respect, the extensive use of an abstract category of magic in
Classical Studies may have led to the conviction that it is counterproductive (or even impossible) to abandon such an established concept.
In fact, it is quite simple to ind a convenient, if not much more
appropriate alternative concept: one of the irst academic deinitions of
religion, Edward B. Tylors belief in spiritual beings,47 covers most of
the material labeled as magic in Classical Studies (not to mention other
established deinitions of religion).48 The whole corpus of deixiones
could easily be identiied as a speciic, ritual form of belief in spiritual
beings and thus (at least according to Tylor) as a speciic form of ancient
religion. The fact that deixiones often imply morally reprehensible ritual intentions should not lead to their instinctive classiication as being
non-religious or magical: malicious ritual goals have always played a
signiicant role in the established religious traditions of Antiquity and
were, in fact, perceived as being legitimate under certain conditions
(that is: the intention to harm someone by ritual means cannot operate
as a criterion for differentiating magic from religion).49
47)Cf. Tylor 1994 (1871), e.g. p. 383.
48)Consider Spiros widely used deinition of religion as an institution consisting
of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings; cf.
Spiro 1966:96.
49)Apart from many Graeco-Roman textual examples (see e.g. Herodotus, Histories
7.188f., where he describes how the Athenians destroyed part of the Persian fleet by
praying to the northern wind Boreas) and the overwhelming evidence from old Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, even the biblical text gives strong evidence here; cf.,
for instance, Ex 7.1f. (the ten plagues of Egypt can, in fact, be interpreted as a ritually

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Tylors deinition can also be applied to curse tablets showing patterns

of ex opere operato:50 even when direct references to spiritual beings
are absent it seems fairly reasonable to assume that a belief in spiritual
beings always remains the underlying rationale in the ancient idea of
cursing (binding, in this case).51 John G. Gager has written a renowned
standard work on ancient curse tablets without using the term magic
as an analytical category and thereby shown that it actually is possible.52
A critical53 interpretation of the concept of religion, accompanied by
modern interpretations of the concept of ritual54 and subordinate
functional terms (describing ritual goals such as divination, healing,
evoked punishment of the Egyptians to counteract the stubbornness of their pharaoh;
however, moral reflections on killing all irst-borns in Egypt are omitted in the biblical text); 2. Kings 1.910 (Elia kills 50 soldiers by verbally evoking ire to fall from the
sky); 2. Kings 2.2325 (Elisha kills 42 children by means of a verbal curse); Jer. 19.115
(schismatic cities are punished by the ritual of the broken pots); Acts 13.1011 (Barjesus,
a pseudo-prophet and magos is blinded by a verbal curse of the Apostles); Acts 5.111
(Hananias and Saphira, two peasants, are killed by a verbal curse after holding back
money from the Apostles); etc.
50)On this aspect see Kropp 2004:947; Kropp 2010. Cf. also Faraones notion of the
direct binding formula (1991:10f.).
51) That is, instead of assuming ex opera operato mechanisms in curse tablets that omit
the transcendent addressee, other explanations could be brought forward with equal
validity such as writing pragmatics, autonomized reception processes, ritual dynamics, etc. See also Gager 1992:13: here it should be recalled, however, that gods may have
been invoked orally, when the tablet was either commissioned or deposited.
52)Cf. Gager 1992:25: The sentence X is/was a magician! tells us nothing about the
beliefs and practices of X; the only solid information that can be derived from it concerns the speakers attitude toward X and their relative social relationship that X is
viewed by the speaker as powerful, peripheral, and dangerous. [...] Thus our treatment
of ancient deixiones does not locate them in the category of magic, for in our view no
such category exists (italics Gager). Irritatingly, Gagers highly progressive approach
seems to have been swept under the table by the majority of scholars dealing with
curse tablets in the last two decades.
53)Critical terms imply according to Mark C. Taylor: Rather than positing a universal grid or seamless organism, critical reflection articulates an incomplete web of
open and flexible terms. This seamy network of constraint, which is riddled with gaps
that can be neither bridged nor closed, constitutes a constantly shifting cultural a priori
that renders critical knowledge possible while circumscribing its unavoidable limits.;
Taylor 1998:17.
54)See for recent approaches Kreinath, Snoek & Stausberg 200607.

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binding, etc.), would potentially sufice to deal with ancient source

material habitually tagged as magic in Classical Studies.55
Analyzing ancient curse tablets and similar sources (such as curse
statuettes or amulets) within the frame of religion has two major beneits. On the one hand, the habitual distinction between these sources
(magic) and established ancient cults (religion) can be questioned.
From an emic point of view, deixiones may, at least partly, not have
been perceived as a sectarian, curious, and potentially blasphemous ritual method but rather as a widely known tool to resolve conflicts with
the aid of the gods and, therefore, as a (morally reprehensible) aspect
of ancient deity devotion.56 Curse tablets found at oficial temple sites
or near altars the recent inds in Rome (Fountain of Anna Perenna)
and Mainz (sanctum of Isis and Mater Magna) serve as important new
evidence here57 even suggest that they may have been used within
oficial cults and operated as only one part of a variety of ritual offerings
to the gods.58 The fact that a signiicant amount of curse tablets were,
in all likelihood, produced by unlearned private persons59 or even by
55)Of course, one could argue that the concept of religion implies problems similar
to those of magic: likewise, religion is characterized by fuzzy semantics, implicit
judgments, and a long and diverse history; it provoked, similarly, an ongoing academic
dispute offering no inal answers. As a matter of fact, no academic term is able to survive the critical analysis of a postmodern deconstructionist; monolithic, well-deined
concepts have become (quite rightly) extinct alongside the burial of the phenomenological school and its grand narratives. However, one has to make choices: it seems
reasonable to argue that some terms are (in a quite pragmatic sense) better than others.
Religion, with a loose working deinition of belief in spiritual beings, is no doubt applicable in Classical Antiquity (and is, in fact, usually applied in this sense in Classical
Studies). Bringing in the concept of magic while analyzing ancient sources evokes
the well-known arsenal of theoretical problems implied in the terminological dualism
of magic and religion. Thus, instead of working with two problematic concepts the
distinction of which may forever remain unclear, it seems reasonable to stick to the
more established (and less disputed) term and discard the other. In the end, this is a
pragmatic decision which cannot be ultimately justiied; however, as this paper will
show, the methodological approach proposed here can actually help to make better
sense of the ancient sources and, thus, contribute to academic progress.
56)On this point see also Gager 1992:20f.
57)Cf. Blnsdorf 2010; Piranomonte 2010.
58)Cf. Graf 1996:144f.; Smith 1983:253 n.8.
59)Cf. Gager 1992:4f. and 123 n.11.

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oficial town writers60 (that is: not by ritual specialists who claimed the
title /magus) adds to this picture. Thus, from the viewpoint of ancient
producers or clients, the use of binding formulae on lead tablets might
not have been perceived as being ontologically distinct (magic) from
other aspects of ancient sacriicial cult (religion), even if these methods were considered illegitimate or immoral in elite religious discourses.
On the other hand, analyzing curse tablets within the conceptual
framework of religion can question idealized views of established
ancient religions. Do deixiones really bear substantial differences
from other forms of requests for divine aid conducted in Graeco-Roman
temples throughout all Antiquity? In his Apologia, Apuleius of Madaura
critically notes that the unconsidered application of the crimen magiae
may lead to the accusal of pious deity devotees who merely address a
petition (votum) to a statue.61 The philosopher points to the problem
of classifying ritual offerings here: obviously, the instrumental aspects
of ancient polytheisms (that is, foremost, the sacriice) operated on
the same conceptual grounds as curse tablets (belief in spiritual beings,
do ut des) and, in part, aimed at similar ritual goals. Who knows how
60)Cf. Jordan 1989.
61) Cf. Apuleius, Apologia, 54, 5f.: In fact, everything that he has ever done will be
used as a handle against any man who is charged with sorcery. Have you written a
petition on the thigh of some statue? You are a sorcerer! Else why did you write it?
Have you breathed silent prayers to heaven in some temple? You are a sorcerer! Else
tell us what you asked for? Or take the contrary line. You uttered no prayer in some
temple! You are a sorcerer! Else why did you not ask the gods for something? The same
argument will be used if you have made some votive dedication, or offered sacriice,
or carried sprigs of some sacred plant. The day will fail me if I attempt to go through
all the different circumstances of which, on these lines, the false accuser will demand
an explanation. Above all, whatever object he has kept concealed or stored under lock
and key at home will be asserted by the same argument to be of a magical nature,
or will be dragged from its cupboard into the light of the law-court before the seat of
judgment. [quippe omnibus sic, ut forte negotium magiae facessitur, quicquid omnino
egerint obicietur. Uotum in alicuius statuae femore signasti: igitur magus es; aut cur
signasti? Tacitas preces in templo deis allegasti: igitur magus es; aut quid optasti?` contra: nihil in templo precatus es: igitur magus es: aut cur deos non rogasti? Similiter, si
prosueris donum aliquod, si sacriicaueris, si uerbenam sumpseris. Dies me deiciet, si
omnia uelim persequi, quorum rationem similiter calumniator flagitabit. Praesertim
quod conditum cumque, quod absignatum, quod inclusum domi adseruatur, id omne
eodem argumento magicum dicetur aut e cella promptaria in forum atque in iudicium
proferetur.]; translation Butler 1909:95; Latin text: Hammerstaedt 2002:152.

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many ancient citizens actively cursed or were cursed in Graeco-Roman

temples using only prayer or materials, such as wax or papyrus, that did
not last over time, unlike lead? Thus, proposing a general difference
between pleas proposed on lead tablets (magic) and pleas proposed
alongside more ephemeral ritual offerings in ancient sacriicial cults
(religion) is certainly not justiied. Rather, the use of lead laminae
might be perceived as mirroring a more private and morally contested
aspect of ancient deity devotion (or, in more radical terms, deity instrumentalization) and, thus, of ancient religion.
This short discussion of the classiication of ancient curse tablets shall
sufice to show that the analysis of these sources without employing an
abstract concept of magic might produce clearer analytical results
and evoke research questions more adequate to the religious world in
Classical Antiquity. In particular, the judgmental notions implied in the
habitual opposition between magic and religion can be set aside,
thereby heightening the perceived religious value and signiicance of
deixiones and other ancient sources alike. Finally, ancient polemics surrounding these ritual practices (that is, their classiication as being illicit
or irreligious in ancient texts, employing, among other terms, /
magia) can be analyzed while, at the same time, excluding them
from scholarly terminology.
When it comes to taking the second step, the historicization of the
concept of magic, things are obviously more complicated. As the conceptual history of magic spans over more than 2,500 years and runs
through a large amount of textual sources drawn from various epochs,
cultural-religious settings and languages, it would be presumptuous
to assume that a few clear and homogenous semantic patterns could
be tracked down for its entire history. In fact, the ancient use of the
concept, covering Graeco-Hellenistic, Roman, and Judaeo-Christian
sources, already implies highly diverse conceptions of magic in these
corpora. Besides, one has to read between the lines in order to deduce
the ancient semantics of magic as classical authors usually lack deinitions. Even those ancient authors who tried to systematize things
e.g., Plato in the 11th book of his Nomoi (using the synonym ),62
62)The historicization of the ancient concept of magic proposed here implies,
of course, the simultaneous historicization of synonyms. But how can synonyms be
identiied when the actual meaning of /magia remains, at least in the begin-

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Pliny the elder in the 30th book of his Historia Naturalis, Apuleius in
his Apologia, Plotinus in his 4th Ennead, or, to name the most important Christian author, Augustine in his De doctrina christiana reveal
highly diverse modes of thought and, thus, general conceptions of the
term magic.
While Plato situates his general concept of (usually translated
as impiety, blasphemy; for Plato, asebea implies, among other things,
the belief that gods can be influenced by ritual offerings to intervene
in some earthly matter)63 within his law against pharmakea (
), Pliny rather opposes magia to (what he perceives as)
secular medicine, or, more implicitly and somewhat unjustiiably, to
established Roman cult.64 Apuleius is highly ironic in his entire speech
and proposes at least three different deinitions of the alleged crime of
which he is accused.65 In his Enneads (4.4.404), Plotinus tries to fuse
ning, unclear? The ancient texts themselves can operate as indicators here, as some
terms are regularly used equivalently; for and see, e.g., Philo of Alexandria, De specialibus legibus, 3.101f.; Plotinus, Enneads 4.4.40; Pseudo-Phocylides 149.
Synonymity can also be detected indirectly, as and are often correlated
in ancient texts (e.g., Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 910; Diodorus, Bibliotheca historica
5.55f.; Philostratus, Vita Apollonii; Cassius Dio 78.18.4; Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 1.8; Origen, Contra Celsum, e.g. 2.1; 6.39; Synesius, De insomniis 132), and, in
other texts, and (e.g. Plato, Meno 80a-b; Plato, Laws 909ac; Plato,
Symposion 203de). Stratton (2007, 2637) provides a nice overview of the ancient terminology associated with /magia.
63)For Plato, implies three false attitudes towards the gods: general disbelief
(that is, atheism); the belief that the gods do not care for human needs; the belief that
gods can be influenced by, e.g., ritual offerings; Cf. Plato, Laws 885b933e.
64)Cf. Pliny, Historia Naturalis 30.1f.; See the implicit opposition to Roman religious
institutions, such as the Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis, in HN 28.13; here, Pliny claims
that ritually spoken words can have an effect (a fact proven by 830 years of Roman history), while, in many other passages, he refutes the eficacy of words when spoken by
the magi.
65)Cf. Apuleius, Apologia, 25.9ff; irst, he quotes Platos statement in Alcibiades 1 (122a)
that refers to the worship of the gods ( ) among the Persians; thus,
Apuleius asks ironically, why is it regarded as a crime to know the laws of ceremony,
the order of sacriice, and the norms of religion (leges cerimoniarum, fas sacrorum, ius
religionum). Shortly later (26.6f.), he refers to the ordinary convention (more vulgari)
that refers to the magus as someone who has incredible powers through his communion with the gods (communione loquendi cum deis) and, especially, through powerful
invocations (incredibilia quadam ui cantaminum); however, he refutes the latter image

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the ancient understanding of rituals subsumed under /

with his idea of a coherent, interrelated, divine cosmos operating more
or less mechanically through patterns of symptheia.66 Finally, Augustine classiies magia as a pactum daemonum, implementing the idea of a
single, powerful opponent of God reigning over a regiment of daemones
(being for Augustine, in contrast to Plato or Apuleius, intrinsically evil)
who try to seduce and enslave humans.67
Given this variety of conceptual backgrounds and semantic patterns,
one obviously has to leave behind the idea of magic as a monolithic,
well-deined term and, instead, focus on the plurality and haziness of
historical semantics. In fact, reconstructing the conceptual history of
magic in Classical Antiquity means taking a range of approaches and
conceptions into account that depend on the author under examination and the respective cultural-religious context. Thus, there is no
room in this paper for a thorough discussion of ancient semantics of
magic. Apart from Strattons analysis of important functional aspects
of the ancient discourse,68 a more comprehensive reconstruction of the
historical reception of the term and its synonyms has been undertaken
in my Ph.D. thesis.69 However, there are terminological patterns, which
are easier to grasp and which shall be examined in this paper.
These terminological patterns correspond to the distinction proposed
above with respect to the functional use of the concept of magic in
Antiquity: does the term refer to out-group or to in-group persons, texts,
rituals or beliefs? Considering the ancient textual sources against the
backdrop of this question may lead to the analytical formation of a discourse of exclusion and a discourse of inclusion.70 These two discourses
by proving it to be absurd. Finally, Apuleius more than once suggests that the whole
court case against him is a compensatory farce (this implies Apuleius generally critical
evaluation of the crimen magiae), driven by nothing more than the envy and greed of
his accusers (e.g. Apologia 28.6f.; 54.5f.; 67.1f.; 99103). Here, the philosopher even outlines the main arguments of the thesis of deviance. See in more detail Otto 2011, ch. 7.
66)Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 4.4.4044.
67)Cf., among many other passages, Augustine, De civitate Dei 8.1619; 21.6; Augustinus, De doctrina christiana 2.XX.30.74f.
68)See Stratton 2007.
69)See Otto 2011.
70)Discourse is understood here as a sum of statements (i.e. texts) including the etymon or synonyms.

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can and should be reconstructed diachronically and interculturally. Furthermore, they reach beyond Classical Antiquity because they can also
be identiied in medieval, early modern, and modern textual sources.71
Crucial to the methodological approach proposed here is the independent analysis of the discourse of exclusion and inclusion as the perception
of magic may differ fundamentally among authors who refer to others
or to themselves while using the term. In particular, to understand what
ancient self-referential magicians really thought and did, it is crucial
to set aside the polemics of the discourse of exclusion and take extant
texts of the discourse of inclusion exclusively into account.
The discourse of exclusion pervades the huge majority of GraecoHellenistic, Roman, and Judaeo-Christian texts. While the culturalreligious and, thereby, the semantic backgrounds of important authors
on magic change, their functional use of the term (that is, in most cases:
a polemical devaluation and social exclusion of the people, rituals or
beliefs in question) remains the same. Thus, in spite of their major conceptual differences when talking about magic, Plato, Pliny, Apuleius,
Plotinus, and Augustine (to name only these few) can all be assigned
to the discourse of exclusion in Antiquity. While the discourse of exclusion hence emerges as the dominant terminological pattern throughout
Antiquity, there is only scarce evidence for the discourse of inclusion,
mostly limited to the Papyri Graecae Magicae and related GraecoEgyptian indings. This quantitative imbalance of ancient textual sources
between the discourse of exclusion and the discourse of inclusion is itself
an important irst insight arising from the historicization of the ancient
term magic proposed here. In fact, if the Papyri Graecae Magicae had
not been recovered in the early 19th century,72 there would have been
good reason to argue that the polemical instrumentalization of the term
magic had been the only way of actually using it in Antiquity that
is, that it had purely served as a polemical tool for social exclusion and
not as an identiicatory concept for the self-appellation of ancient ritual
practitioners.73 On the basis of the evidence of the PGM, this argument
71)For a wider time frame see Otto 2011.
72)Cf., in more detail, Brashear 1995:3401ff. See also Betz 1986, especially XLIIXLIV.
73)This argument does not imply that privately operating ritual entrepreneurs (for
example, producers of curse tablets) did not exist in Classical Antiquity (indeed, there
certainly were many of them); instead, the argument focuses on their names: due to

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(that is, a general postulation of the thesis of deviance for Antiquity altogether) can be iled away. However, the question of the representativeness of the PGM remains: are they only the tip of the iceberg of a much
greater textual discourse of self-referential magicians throughout the
Ancient Mediterranean? Or did only Graeco-Egyptian temple priests or
scribes in Late Antiquity, marginalized through the Roman, and, since
the 3rd and 4th century CE, the Christian occupation of their homeland,
sympathize with this former underdog title? As no other in-group
sources from ancient self-referential magicians have been found yet,
this question remains unanswered up to this moment.
However, there are other important research questions arising from
the analytical separation of an ancient discourse of exclusion and inclusion. Taking a closer look at the discourse of exclusion, it is, for example,
highly illuminating to reconstruct similarities and differences regarding
the religious patterns that are devaluated and stigmatized by the term
magic in different cultural-religious settings.74 Taking, for example,
Plato for the early Greek, Pliny for the Roman, and Augustine for the
Christian discourse into account, it is interesting to note that the demarcation line between the included and the excluded (that is, between the
accepted and permitted and the condemned and prohibited) signiicantly differs among these three authors. Plato not only aims at devaluating private ritual practitioners working outside the oficial temple
cults,75 but he also tries to delegitimize the all-too-human attempt to
expect favors from the gods by ritual donations. That is: he implicitly
attacks the well-established sacriicial cult in classical Greece, thereby
proposing the moralistic-philosophical ideal of a helping, yet not bribable, god.76 Indeed, a reading between the lines of his Laws reveals
that he actually aims to stigmatize the human individual who tends to
the negative connotations of the title /magus (including synonyms like or
maleicos) in ancient literature and the increasingly harsh prosecution of the crimen
magiae especially since the early Roman Empire, it is to be doubted that private ritual
practitioners used these stigmatized terms in public. Indeed, they may have used (at
least a little) more value-free terms such as , , haruspex, or augur.
74)Stratton (2007; 2012) has offered valuable insights into this scholarly desideratum;
in this paper, I will mainly discuss texts that are not, or are only marginally, dealt with
in Strattons works.
75)For this theme see Plato, Republic 363e364c; Plato, Laws 909a910d; 932e933e.
76)Cf. Plato, Laws 825bf, esp. 905907d; on this point see also Graf 1996:32.

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instrumentalize religion (in this case, igures of the Greek pantheon)

in order to procure personal beneits. Platos concept of pharmakea
thus marks the boundary of an egoistic misappropriation of the gods,
in contrast to his ideal of a more philosophical, respectful, and unselish
belief.77
By contrast, Pliny the Elder employs magia to summarize and
devalue an enormous amount of (primarily) healing practices circulating throughout the Roman Empire of the 1st century CE.78 While
Plato argues on religious grounds, Pliny focuses on the ostensible ineficacy of the described practices; thus, the term magia in the Historia
Naturalis primarily implies notions of ineffectiveness, charlatanry, and
superstitio.79 Unsurprisingly, a large amount of diverse cultural-religious
practices, beliefs, and persons ind their place in Plinys concept of
magia, including Homeric igures such as Circe, the Sirens, and Proteus,
Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus,
and ritual specialists from all ancient civilizations such as the Gallic
Druids.80 Magia thereby marks the boundary between Plinys upperclass secular Roman worldview and a plethora of ritual practices and
beliefs perceived as being fundamentally antithetical and external to
Roman Culture.81 Indeed, a closer look at his excursus on the power of
words in the 28th book reveals that Pliny cannot separate the eficacy of
words ritually used in established Roman cult from the ostensibly fraudulent formulae of the condemned magi.82 His famous history of magic
77)See in more detail Otto 2011:169f. and Otto & Stausberg 2013:19f.
78)Cf. especially books 2832 of the Historia Naturalis.
79)Cf. Historia Naturalis 30.1f.; see also, e.g., 22.20; 28.12,47,198; 29.67,81; 32.34; 37.155.
80)Cf. Historia Naturalis 30.513.
81) Ogden 2002:44: One of the most important aspects of this discussion is its explicit
uniication within the same category whatever that category is of igures of very
different varieties [...]. Compared, explicitly or implicitly, to the mages (of Persia,
Medea, Babylon, Assyria, and even Armenia, all closely identiied [...] are: Circe, the
Sirens, Proteus, Thessalian witches, Carian Telmessus (known for various forms of divination), Orpheus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus, as well as Jewish, Cypriot
(Cyprus is identiied as a particular home for magic in later sources), Latin, and Gallic
sorcerers. For all that magic spread over the entire world, it is presented as fundamentally external and antithetical to Roman Culture.
82)Cf. Historia Naturalis 28.929; the typological similarity of the powerful words used
in Roman cults and the rituals of the magi reveals that Plinys implicit opposition is
actually that of traditional, established Roman cult vs. all kinds of unauthorized and

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at the beginning of book 30 is, therefore, a rather perplexing attempt to

historically fortify a concept that actually lacks clear semantic grounds.83
Thus, the passage should (if this is not too trivial a point to add) not be
perceived as a textual window on ancient magic by Classicists.84
Augustine again relocates the demarcation line between the legitimate and the illegitimate in his De civitate Dei and, especially, his De
doctrina christiana. Augustine picks up the notions of and
superstitio from the Greek and Roman use of /magia. However,
he adds a complex demonology and theory of signs in order to explain
the communication between the magos and the daemon.85 In this way,
the whole Graeco-Roman sacriicial cult becomes magic as pagan
gods are (for Augustine) nothing more than demons.86 Accordingly, in
Augustines writing, core aspects of Graeco-Roman religion, including deity devotion, divination practice, and theatre play, are conceptually equated to magic, now representing nothing more than a cultum
mostly individualistic ritual activity labelled as magia. One might therefore also think
of individual religiosity as an alternative label here; on this perspective see Rpke
2011.
83)Mathew Dickie (1999) rightly claims that Pliny referred to earlier texts (which had
been for the most part lost) while compiling his work such as a book attributed to Bolos
of Mendes on sympathy and antipathy, a book of Zachalias on stones, a book of PseudoPythagoras on plants, and the cheiromecta of (Pseudo-) Democritus. My argument does
therefore not imply that the material presented by Pliny is based on pure fantasy or
creativity the fact is that he participated in an ongoing textual discourse in Antiquity. However, Dickies construction of a consistent magical lore fails at one central
point: did the authors of these earlier works really subsume under the ancient concept of magic the idea that stones, plants or animals have an effect on human affairs?
Although this question cannot be answered with certainty, it seems rather doubtful
that /magia operated as the general framework for this idea before Pliny. From
the viewpoint of ancient terminology, it is more likely that these books were tagged
(by their authors) as being scientiic (that is, philosophical/peripatetic) or medical. In
his Historia Naturalis, Pliny might have changed this pattern of classiication and subsumed a vast variety of strange or uncertain beliefs under the umbrella term magia,
thereby signiicantly broadening its semantic range.
84)See in more detail Otto 2011:225f. and Otto & Stausberg 2013:23f.
85)Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei, especially books 8 and 9; 21.6; Cf. also De divinatione
daemonum; De trinitate, e.g. 4.11; De doctrina christiana 2.XX.30.74f.
86)Cf., explicitly, De civitate dei 9.23 referring to Psalms 9596. See also De civitate Dei
1.29; 8.24; 19.23; etc. In a similar vein, De doctrina christiana 2.XX.30.74 reveals Augustines equation of idolatria (that is, Graeco-Roman deity cults) and magia.

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daemonum. Again, the semantic range of the term is considerably broadened: it is Augustine who systematically employs magia to signify and
classify everything that is not (Christian) religion, thereby not only
affecting the Christian discourse on magic as a whole, but also (yet
more implicitly) the academic discourse on magic since the late 19th
century.87
An important implication set forth while reconstructing the ancient
discourse of exclusion is the lack of trustworthiness of its magical claims.
Authors belonging to the discourse of exclusion tend to classify persons,
texts or ritual actions (even whole religions) as magic although this
classiication does in most cases not correspond to the respective ingroup perspective. To be more precise, many of those who are referred
to as magicians in ancient texts have, in all likelihood, not called themselves magicians. The 2nd and 3rd century controversy between Christian and Graeco-Roman authors on the miraculous abilities of Jesus of
Nazareth and Apollonius of Tyana has already been mentioned as an
important example for this discrepancy between the out-group and ingroup use of the title magician in ancient sources.88 There are many
other examples of this phenomenon within the ancient conceptual history of magic.89 Hence, Classical scholars should deal very carefully
87)See in more detail Otto 2011:309f. and Otto & Stausberg 2013:33f.
88)For Graeco-Roman texts claiming that Jesus was a magician see Celsus
(cf. Origines, Contra Celsum 1.6, 1.38, 1.68, 2.49, etc.), Porphyrius,
(cf. frr. 4 and 63) or Hierokles, (cf. Eusebius, Contra Hieroclem,
esp. chapter 2); for Christian counter-texts accusing Apollonius of Tyana and further
persons with Graeco-Roman background of being magicians see Origen, Contra
Celsum or Eusebius, Contra Hieroclem. In this respect, it is important to note that Apollonius biographer Philostratus emphasizes more than once that Apollonius was not a
magician but, instead, a wise and upright philosopher in direct contact with the gods
(see, e.g., Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 1.2; 5.12; 7.3839). On the controversy see, apart
from Remus 1983, also Smith 1978; Gallagher 1982.
89)Cf. the magicians mentioned in Hippocrates, De morbo sacro 1.10f. (does Hippocrates really refer to self-referential magicians wandering around in Greek poleis
maybe even Persians? or is his use of the title purely polemical? This cannot be
answered with certainty); Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 20.142 (did the
Cyprian Jew Atomus mentioned by Flavius Josephus really call himself a magician?
Again, there is no clear answer); Tacitus, Annales, e.g., 2.32 (Tacitus reflects the fuzzy
application of the title by the Roman legislative, which can also be grasped in Apuleius
Apologia); Cassius Dio 72.8.4 (that Arnuphis, a ritual practitioner accompanying the

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with the attributive use of the concept of magic in ancient sources; in

most cases, it will not give any substantial information on the subject,
but merely aim at its religious or moral devaluation.
Given this tendency and, especially, the immense impact of the discourse of exclusion on the ancient conceptual history of magic, it seems
obvious that /magia did not operate as sound, impartial signiiers, but rather as semantically fuzzy, highly polemical ciphers operating within or among ancient religious discourses. Thus, the fact that the
concept already pervades ancient literature cannot serve as a justiication of the concepts extensive application by Classical scholars. In fact,
the problems Classicists are facing when applying magic as an abstract
category might be comparable to those already inherent in the ancient
term except that Classical authors usually did not ponder its semantic value from a critical point of view and, thereby, realize its actual
haziness.90 There is even reason to argue that the polemical notions of
ancient /magia had an impact on James G. Frazer when he formulated his highly influential theory of magic in the Golden Bough.91 The
legions of Marcus Aurelius, called himself a magician is very unlikely); Pliny, Naturalis
Historia 30.1f. (Pliny uses the title to refer to all kinds of non-Roman igures); Apuleius,
Apologia 90.5f. (Apuleius gives an enhanced version of Plinys list); Apuleius himself
is classiied as a magician by Christian authors such as Augustine (e.g., De ciuitate
Dei 8.19); other Christian authorities created texts solely devoted to listing magicians,
such as Tertullian (De anima 57) and Arnobius (Adversus nationes 1.52.1); the Novum
Testamentum Graece refers to the Samaritan Simon (Acts 8.925) and the Jew Barjesus
(Acts 13.6f.) as mgoi (again, both cases are unlikely from an in-group perspective); the
positive use of the in Mt 2.1 does, however, deviate from the usually
polemical employment of the title magician in Antiquity.
90)However, apart from Apuleius critical reflections in his Apologia, Graeco-Roman
philosophers polemicizing against Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries also
showed an intensiied interest in the arbitrary character of the concept; Cf., for instance,
Celsus apud Origines, Contra Celsum 2.49: with his own voice he explicitly confesses,
as even you have recorded, that there will come among you others also who employ
similar miracles, wicked men and sorcerers [ ], and he names one Satan
as devising this; so that not even he denies that these wonders have nothing divine
about them, but are works of wicked men. Nevertheless, being compelled by the truth,
he both reveals the deeds of others and proves his own to be wrong. Is it not a miserable
argument to infer from the same works that he is a god [] while they are sorcerers
[]?; translation Chadwick 1965:104; Greek text Marcovich 2001:120.
91) When Frazer, in the second three-volumed edition of the Golden Bough (1900),
refers to the sorcerers of [...] Greece and Rome to justify his theory of magic, he

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ancient tendency to connect /magia with devaluation and social

exclusion thereby contributed to the academic instrumentalization of
the concept of magic for the very same purposes in the late 19th century, now aiming at an across-the-board classiication and devaluation
of so-called primitives in colonies of the British Empire.92
However, the question remains: what is to be done with the selfreferential magicians of the Papyri Graecae Magicae? Can at least
the ancient in-group use of the concept of magic justify its academic
application? Obviously, a thorough examination of the PGM cannot be undertaken here. Already a quick survey shows, however, that
the PGM subsume an irritatingly wide range of ritual practices under
: among the most common ritual goals are divination,93 evoking love between two persons,94 defence and protection,95 controlling
or damaging other people,96 healing97 or the achievement of wealth,
luck, and fame;98 if wealth has been stolen, a ritual may be conducted
to identify the thief;99 if a healing rite has been unsuccessful, a ritual for
reawakening the corpse may be useful;100 other miraculous abilities like

writes in the accompanying footnote: For the Greek and Roman practice, see Theocritus, Id. 2; Virgil, Ecl. 8.7582; Ovid, Heroides, 6.91 sq.; Amores, 3.7.29 sq. (cf. Frazer
1900:10 n. 2). The poets quoted by Frazer are an ambivalent selection but can nevertheless be assigned to the ancient discourse of exclusion (that is, they did not call themselves magicians; they probably did not know self-referential magicians personally
but rather assimilated ancient stereotypes; they usually aimed at a devaluation of the
described rituals and persons).
92)For this point see in more detail Styers 2004:63ff.
93)E.g. PGM II.1f.; III.196f.; III.257f.; III.283f.; III.424f.; III.479f.; IV.53f.; IV.88f.; IV.154f.;
IV.223f.; IV.850f.; IV.1275f.; IV.3088f.; IV.3173f.; IV.3210f.; V.1f.; V.55f.; V.370f.; VI.1f.; VII.1f.;
VII.222f.; VII.250f.; VIII.930f.; XIII.265f.; etc.
94)E.g. PGM IV.296f.; IV.1265f.; IV.1391f.; IV.1495f.; IV.1872f.; IV.2006f.; IV.2708f.;
IV.2891f.; IV.2943f.; VII.191f.; VII.215f.; XIII.237f.; XIII.320f.; etc.
95)E.g. PGM I.195f.; IV.78f.; IV.86f.; IV.468f.; IV.831f.; IV.1168f.; IV.1497f.; IV.3125f.;
IV.2241f.; VII.150f.; XIII.249f.; XIII.262f.; XIII.278f.; etc.
96)E.g. PGM IV.2126f.; IV.2623f.; V.305f.
97)E.g. PGM VII.193214; VII.218f.; XIII.344f.; XIII.253f.; etc.
98)E.g. PGM IV.2145f.; IV.2373f.; VII.187f.; VII.390f.; VII.423f.; etc.
99)Cf. PGM V.70.
100)Cf. PGM IV.1168f.; XIII.278f.

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333

interrogating a dead body,101 becoming invisible,102 controlling ones

own shadow,103 breaking up bonds,104 opening closed doors105 or extinguishing a ire (unsurprisingly, without water)106 are also described.
In order to ind a coherent semantic pattern that could cover these
diverse ritual goals and, thereby, clarify the in-group understanding of
Graeco-Egyptian as a whole, it is essential to recall the religious
background of the PGM. This background is well known: virtually all
rituals described are addressed to gods or, depending on the respective ritual goal, other transcendent or intermediary beings belonging
to Graeco-Roman, Egyptian or Judaeo-Christian theologies, thereby
reflecting the truly ecumenical religious syncretism of the Hellenistic
world culture.107 To quote once again Edward B. Tylor, a belief in spiritual beings is the core concept that unites all ritual and liturgical aspects
of the PGM. This is not trivial: all ritual goals, including the aforementioned miraculous abilities, imply the belief that it is the gods who are
exclusively responsible for evoking them. There are no ex opere operato
mechanisms underlying Graeco-Egyptian (that is, the authors
were apparently no followers of Plotinus);108 also, the Graeco-Egyptian
magicians did certainly not believe in possessing supernatural abilities as part of their personality, lineage or psycho-spiritual training
( la Harry Potter). They merely operated as mediators between their
clients and the gods while expecting the latter to fulill the requested
need. Thus, for the authors of the PGM, it is the gods who induce love
101) Cf. PGM IV.2140f.
102)Cf. PGM I.222f.; I.246f.; XIII.234f.; XIII.267.
103)Cf. PGM III.613f.
104)Cf. PGM XII.160f.; XIII.289f.
105)Cf. PGM XIII.127f.
106)Cf. PGM XIII.298f.
107)Betz 1986:XLVI: For these magicians, there was no longer any cultural difference
between the Egyptian and the Greek gods, or between them and the Jewish God and the
Jewish angels, and even Jesus was occasionally assimilated into this truly ecumenical
religious syncretism of the Hellenistic world culture.
108)Plotinus more or less rejects the idea that transcendent beings could be responsible for the effects of rituals subsumed under /, thereby favoring the rather
impersonal force of ; see explicitly Plotinus, Enneades 4.4.43, where he claims
that demons are themselves subject to . Further on this see Otto & Stausberg
2013:28f.

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among humans, it is the gods who heal, protect, hurt, and send luck, it is
the gods who are responsible for all aspects of human destiny. Accordingly, in order to deal with critical life situations, it is the gods who need
to be ritually addressed in order to request their aid.
Perceived from this point of view, Graeco-Egyptian is not
a unique, curious case in the history of ancient religions. Instead, it
is characterized by a set of common if not classical ideas widespread in the religious world of Classical Antiquity: that the gods are
responsible for human fate and can be ritually addressed, in one way
or the other, to influence the latter. In fact, the Graeco-Egyptian mgoi
could ind role models for almost everything they did in the majority of
religious texts circulating in the Ancient Mediterranean, including the
Judaeo-Christian tradition.109 Hence, it is only the highly syncretistic
approach of the PGM and, especially, certain ritual means used to gain
the favor of the gods that seem to differ from the major religious traditions of Antiquity. In this regard, the use of so-called voces magicae, of
powerful signs () and of material artifacts seem to be quite
unique aspects of the PGM. However, as the voces magicae have been
identiied as being nothing more than alternative, eficacious names for

109)This argument is supported by the fact, that not only a vast variety of gods, but also
important Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian igures found their way into the PGM.
For Jesus see PGM IV.3016; XII.192; for Moses see PGM V.108f.; VII.619f. and, esp. PGM
XIII.3f., the Monad, or the Eighth Book of Moses (
); for Abraham PGM I.219; V.480; VII.315; XIII.816; for Salomon PGM IV.851f.;
for Pythagoras see PGM VII.795; for Democritus see PGM VII.168f.; VII.795; for Apollonius of Tyana see PGM XIa.1; etc. In addition, the miraculous abilities attested in the
PGM may have been influenced by the many wondrous stories of both the Old and the
New Testament. In fact, miraculous abilities served as one of the most common religious ideas in the ancient Mediterranean and were usually attested independently (!)
of the ancient concept of magic. Apart from the Judaeo-Christian miracle discourse,
see the respective passages in Philostratus, Vita Apollonii; Iamblichus, Vita Pythagorae; Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae; Porphyrios, Vita Plotini; Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum;
Damascius, Vita Isidorii; Marinus, Vita Procli; See also a number of passages in Diogenes
Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum and the healings of Vespasian in Tacitus, Historiae 4.81
and Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum: Titus Flavius Vespasianus, 7. Against this backdrop, it
is incomprehensible that scholars tend to instinctively classify miraculous abilities as
magic; they lie at the very heart of Judaeo-Christian narratives and, thus, represent a
classic pattern in the Western history of religions.

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the invoked gods,110 one could again argue that the term in the
PGM refers to religion in its purest sense. This argument can also be
applied to charactres which, in many cases, accompany voces magicae within larger invocation patterns (either spoken or written) and,
likewise, seem to represent alternative god names or formalized prayer
patterns (of course, they also enabled the magician to impress his clients with mysterious and ostensibly eficacious symbols).111 Finally, the
use of material offerings described extensively in the PGM may be interpreted as mirroring one of the most common aspects of ancient deity
devotion, the sacriice.112
In the end, only conceptual nuances separate Graeco-Egyptian
from the instrumental aspects of institutionalized ancient cults (i.e.,
religions). To give a further example: the relationship between men
and gods demonstrated in the PGM seems to imply the possibility of
extraordinary proximity: the gods are perceived as being more or less
at the disposal of the magician113 (dependent on the proper conduct
of his rituals) and could even be forced114 to appear in physical shape.115
As a consequence, the Graeco-Egyptian magician may have believed
that he exerted a strong influence over the gods, and thereby, over his
110)On this point see already Festugire 1932, esp. pp. 281f. (whose perspective is, however, rather polemical); see also Betz 1986:XLVII, who calls the voces magicae simply
code words. For clear references to voces magicae as representing names see, e.g.,
PGM IV.278; IV.1000f.; IV.1183f.; XIII.149f.
111) Further on this see Otto 2011:403f.
112)See on this point also Johnston 2002.
113)See the respective formulations in, e.g., PGM I.129f.; I.274f.; III.494f.; IV.276f.; IV.776;
etc.
114)Note that the Frazerian notion of coercion cannot be consistently applied to the
PGM; indeed, respectful, submissive pleas and more aggressive threats seem to have
served as two equally valued forms of communication with gods within GraecoEgyptian magea. The latter form (i.e. the threat) may, furthermore, be traced back to
old Egyptian temple rituals and imply ideas of divine hierarchies and ritual identiication; see in more detail Otto 2011:399f.
115)See e.g. PGM I with the strikingly visual, even kissable (PGM I.77f.) appearance of
the parhedros. See also PGM XIII and this almost trivial description after a 41 day tour
de force of ritual conduct: When the god comes in, look down and write the things
he says and the name which he gives you for himself. And do not go out from under
your canopy until he tells you accurately, too, the things that concern you.; transl. Betz
1986:178.

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and his clients very destiny. It is precisely this notion that is contradictory to Platos aforementioned theology and other ancient normative
assertions of how gods and men ought to interrelate. Compared to the
established Graeco-Roman deity cults that may have demanded a certain amount of respect and submissiveness, the rituals described in the
PGM seem to imply a much more pragmatic interpretation of the ways
humans can interrelate with gods. From the perspective of the modern
Study of Religion, however, both these ancient theologies do not differ
in their conceptual foundation; accordingly, they can and should both
be classiied as religion in academic discourse.
To sum up, instead of labeling the contents of the Papyri Graecae
Magicae (and thereby, the ancient in-group understanding of GraecoEgyptian ) as magic in a modern, abstract sense, the methodological approach proposed here also involves a general reorientation
regarding the discourse of inclusion. On the one hand, the PGM are not
perceived as a weird or even rubbishy exceptional case in the history of
Antiquity, but rather as a variation, a shift of emphasis or, even, a mere
product of reception processes, thereby reflecting an actually common
set of religious ideas circulating in the Ancient Mediterranean. On the
other hand, the appearance of in the PGM is itself historicized
and, as such, prompts the question: what does this term actually mean
from an ancient practitioners perspective? Reflection on the aforementioned arguments may lead to the following response: the term in
the PGM refers to formalized ritual actions aiming at instrumentalizing
transcendent beings for individual human needs.
At this point, the reader may be bewildered: does this formulation
not correspond to certain modern deinitions of magic? From the
viewpoint of historical semantics, however, things are not that simple. In short, drawing attention to this semantic pattern in the PGM
has two important beneits. First, it can be compared to subsequent
self-referential uses of the concept of magic, for example regarding
the Early Modern magia naturalis discourse,116 or the late 19th century

116)Here, magia came to signify an impersonal, all-embracing, pantheistic natural

force; Cf. Marsilio Ficino, De vita libri tres, esp. book 3 and Apologia; Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, Oratio de hominis dignitate. On the Early Modern magia naturalis discourse
see also Goldammer 1991; Heinekamp & Mettler 1978; Otto 2011, ch. 10.

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British occultist discourse of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.117

Through this diachronic, intercultural comparison of texts written by
self-referential magicians, an important insight is revealed: there are
huge conceptual differences even within the in-group understanding of
magic throughout the last 2,000 years, again suggesting the abandonment of the idea of a sound, unambiguous academic category of magic.
Second, the formulation is not restricted to the ancient discourse of inclusion: that is, ritual instrumentalization of transcendent beings for individual human needs also played a central role in other religious contexts of
Antiquity. Indeed, there is reason to argue that it underlies the very core
the Graeco-Roman sacriicial cult (do ut des).118 Thus, the most important semantic aspect of Graeco-Egyptian is contemporaneously
vivid in established religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, here being
detached from the concept of magic and, thereby, of devaluation and
stigmatization. That said, the Graeco-Egyptian magician loses his aura
of uniqueness in Antiquity even more. Rather, he appears as being part
of a wide spectrum of ancient ritual practitioners sharing at least to
some extent similar ideas, partly working inside, partly outside temples, partly having oficial positions in established cults, partly regarding ritual relations with gods as a mere means of earning a living as a
private service provider.
The most important question remains to be discussed: Why did the
authors of the PGM employ the concept of magic as a self-referential
term? Obviously, this question cannot be answered with certainty.
Problems start with identifying these authors: were they, as speculated
above, marginalized Egyptian priests or scribes?119 In this respect, Robert K. Ritner, David Frankfurter, and Johannes Quack have stressed the
Egyptian background of the PGM and argued for interpreting these texts
in the context of old Egyptian temple rituals.120 Given this Egyptian
117)Here, magic came to signify nothing less than apotheosis make the divine man
out of the human man (Westcott 1892) achieved through a transformative union of
the human and the divine will. Further on this see Otto 2011, ch. 11.4.
118)See, e.g., Rpke 2007:149f.
119)Jacco Dieleman (2011) convincingly shows that at least the scribes of some of the
(Demotic) papyri must have been educated in a traditional Egyptian scriptorium,
thereby following classical rules of Egyptian scribal practices.
120)See Ritner 1995; Frankfurter 1998, esp. ch. 5; Quack 2011 with further references.

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context, one could even think of as a translation of old Egyptian

Heka; in fact, Ritner justiies the use of an abstract category of magic
in Egyptian studies with this argument.121 An exclusive translation process would, however, not explain the semantic similarities between
the concept of in the PGM and the stereotypes associated with
the term throughout Graeco-Roman Antiquity: in the end, the GraecoEgyptian mgoi did conduct rituals to, among other things, induce
love; they believed in being able to have (or ritually evoke) miraculous
abilities; and they, at least sometimes, threatened gods. Taking these
similarities into account, the Papyri Graecae Magicae do not seem to
represent a unique Egyptian case. Hence, it appears more reasonable
to assume a larger textual discourse among self-referential magicians
in the ancient Mediterranean in which the authors of the GraecoEgyptian PGM merely participated of course, in a somewhat speciic
Egyptian niche.
However, as the (Western) conceptual history of magic began in the
late 6th century BCE with Greeks assimilating a Persian term for the
Construction of the Other,122 it seems fairly reasonable to argue that
the discourse of inclusion emerged after the discourse of exclusion. That
is, ancient ritual practitioners must have picked up the concept of
magic as a term of self-reference only after it had already circulated
as a polemical term in popular discourses. These ritual practitioners
may have been encouraged by the fact that there were, in fact, positive
remarks on magic in a few texts associating the concept with wisdom,
ritual power, and religious authenticity.123 It can also be concluded from
other historical settings that polemical terms are sometimes picked up
deliberately by people who aim at separating themselves from popular

121) See Ritner 1993:14f.; for a critical discussion see Otto 2012.
122)In more detail see Stratton 2007, ch. 2. See also Otto 2011, ch. 6.
123)This positive tradition may have started with Plato, Alciabiades 1 122a, who claims
that refers to the worships of the gods ( ) among the Persians; Philo
of Alexandria in De specialibus legibus 3.100, Dion Chrysostomos in Borysthenes 40f.,
Apuleius in Apologia 25.9, or (Ps.-) Apollonios in his epistula 17 picked up this positive
notion. A positive use can also be found in Synesios, De Insomniis 132133, Thessalos 13,
and, to a certain degree, in the ancient Historia Alexandri Magni, 1f. Further see Otto
2011, ch. 9.1.

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culture.124 There is no better example for this than the modern Neopagan movement which, in all its diversity, tends to demarcate itself from
the Christian tradition and, at the same time, elevates the concept of
paganism. The fact that Neopagans (and, foremost, Wiccans) usually
have a particularly high opinion of the concept of magic indicates that
the process suggested here may not be limited to antiquity.

Conclusion
This paper proposes a methodological turn in the discourse on magic
in Classical Studies. It calls, on the one hand, for the abandonment of
an abstract category of magic and, on the other hand, for a systematic historicization of the ancient term, that is, for the reconstruction
of its ancient semantics, functions, and contexts. The insights yielded
by this methodological turn outweigh the ostensible loss of analytic
potential that might be perceived by classical scholars who habitually
employ the term as a substantive working tool. In fact, analyzing the
ancient use of /magia evokes new research questions that yield
important insights into socio-religious conflicts, into the construction
and legitimization of religious identities, or into the tension between
group and individual religiosity in Antiquity. Thus, investigating the
conceptual history of magic has more to offer than pursuing fruitless
discussions about modern deinitions of the term. Instead of implicitly
or explicitly sustaining the idea of an ideal-type, transcultural, and ahistorical category, classical scholars should begin to perceive magic as a
historical term that pervades their sources and bears in fact, contrary to
academic deinitions, a plethora of meanings, functions, and valuations
worth investigating.
The suggested methodological turn can, therefore, solve a terminological issue that has influenced the discussion since the early works of
Dieterich, Preisendanz, and others: what is ancient magic? The classical discourse lacks a satisfying answer to this question, despite the
impressive literary output covering the topic in the last decades. In fact,
the sheer number of scholarly works on ancient magic cannot justify
124)See the splendid discussion of this social phenomenon in Hanegraaff 2012, e.g.
pp. 374f.

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the extensive use of the concept or add to its trustworthiness as an analytical category. The present popularity of magic as a research topic
in Classical Studies rather reveals a scholarly trend, possibly inspired
by the immense success of the mythologized igure of the magician
in modern popular culture or by other dynamics within the academy,
such as the intention to produce books with a high print run.125 This
trend, however, is based on dubious conceptual grounds. In particular,
the aforementioned tendency to work without deinitions, observable
in almost all recent studies, results in a methodological aberration.
Instead of clearly deined semantic criteria (being falsiiable, at the very
least) implicit assumptions or inherent understandings of the concept
of magic now dominate the discourse in Classical Studies. It remains
mysterious that no one has complained so far about this ongoing procedure. Implicit assumptions of magic are by no means better than
classical deinitions but just as fuzzy, judgmental, and ethnocentric. The
strategy to work without deinitions has, in fact, made it even more dificult to understand what Classicists mean nowadays when talking about
ancient magic.
In contrast, the historicization of the term suggested here126 provides a satisfying answer to the aforementioned question: magic is
an emic term employed in ancient textual sources and characterized
125)On this point see the splendid review of Sarah Iles Johnston (2003:5354): Even
Meyer and his co-convener, Paul Mirecki, could not resist lauding the contributions
that participants had made to deining magic when they composed an introduction to
their volume of conference papers. Moreover, although the two had battled with their
publisher to keep the word magic out of the books title and instead use ritual power
(a phrase that had been suggested, debated, and provisionally accepted as preferable to
magic at the conference itself), and although they had won that battle at least insofar
as the book appeared under the name Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, when Mirecki
and Meyer published papers from a second conference, they called the book Magic and
Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2002). A subtle change, but worth noting: the
alternative that had enjoyed such reactionary favour at the irst conference had begun
to retreat; we were getting back to business as usual, which meant tilting once again at
the old enemy.
126)The sources discussed in the second part of this paper represent only a small part
of the ancient reception of the term and were analyzed in such a way as to clarify
important aspects and methodological steps implied in the historicization of the concept. Therefore, this paper should not be regarded as a suficient analysis, but rather
as a irst step towards a thick description of ancient semantics, functions, and modes

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341

by a complex semantic ield and a diversity of valuations and functions

depending, in principle, on the context of its use. It is frequently used
within ancient religious discourses and closely related to questions of
the marvelous, the eficacy of ritual actions, the (il)legitimacy of private
religiosity, and (il)licit ways of interrelating with transcendent beings. It
could both refer to the dangerous other, implying notions of irreligiosity, immorality, and charlatanry, and to the holy man (reflecting the
in-group perspective of ritual specialists), here implying notions of holiness, ritual eficacy, and religious authenticity. Hence, the methodological turn proposed here can not only overcome the wearisome debate on
substantial deinitions of magic in Classical Studies, but also contribute to understanding ancient authors (literally) on their own terms.

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