Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity
THE PAPYRUS MAGICAL HANDBOOKS IN CONTEXT
Christopher A. Faraone – Sofía Torallas Tovar
Thanks to the climatic conditions and scribal practices of Greco-Roman Egypt, a number of handbooks from that region (and from no other in the ancient Greco-Roman world) have reached us. These handbooks are precious witnesses to practices and processes of cultural transmission: i.e. the creation, communication, transformation, and preservation of knowledge (both in text and images) across history. One of the largest subgroups of these handbooks concerns magical knowledge, a field of extraordinary diffusion and interest from Mesopotamia to the present. These ancient magical handbooks provide a unique point of entry into a corpus of knowledge at a particular period in a very long history that is otherwise lightly documented, and to the practices by which that field of knowledge was taught and transmitted.
Under the aegis of the “Transmission of Magical Knowledge,” we have published the first volume of The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF) (Berkeley 2022), containing 54 formularies. Upcoming volumes will contain the remaining formularies. A companion monograph with essays entitled The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books and Individual Recipes (Ann Arbor 2022), was in 2023 awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society of Classical Studies (USA).
The first edition of the magical handbooks was the two-volume Papyri Graecae magicae (PGM), edited by Karl Preisendanz between the World Wars, in the years 1928-31. PGM has been used ever since as one of the most important sources for the study of Greek magic. Without a doubt, the Preisendanz edition was a monumental achievement for its time, but in many cases it depended on photographs, often of poor quality, rather than autopsy, and, even though the text was lightly edited and expanded in the 1970s, the enormous increase in our knowledge of ancient magic in the last forty years has made even this second edition obsolete. Moreover, Preisendanz ignored many aspects of the manuscripts, including all non-Greek text, all lectional signs, and all drawings. New fragments have also come to light in the last decades, which need to be added to the corpus and which affect the reading of the other texts. The time is right, then, for a new edition of the corpus, a new English translation and eventually translations into other languages as well.
This project generated many new thoughts about these formularies, especially with regard to how they differ from one another and how the scribes developed different ways of presenting their recipes. Our multiyear project has therefore also included bibliological studies of each of these “handbooks” focusing on their idiosyncrasies, attending to details of palaeography, codicology, and lectional marks, which will help individuate them and also establish typologies for different kinds of magical codices.
Ongoing activities of our project have over time forged a network of collaborations with various groups of scholars in a number of independently funded projects, which can be viewed on the “Collaborations” page.