Mini-Cluster The Magic of Transculturality (MC 10)

Coordinators: Joachim Friedrich Quack, William Furley
Project Members: Ljuba Merlina Bortolani, Svenja Nagel

There is a substantial body of manuscripts from late antiquity in Egypt (ca. 150-500 CE), written partially in the Egyptian language and script (Demotic), but to a larger extent in Greek, which collect ritual spells and techniques commonly classified as “magical” (Brashear, 1995). These have often been sidelined by classical scholars as they seem far from the literary mainstream and, conversely, they are too late to be of interest to most Egyptologists. They have even been referred to disparagingly as “Gnostic cheese”. Nevertheless, they are by now mostly available in reliable editions and translations (Preisendanz et al. (1973-1974); Daniel & Maltomini (1990-1992); Betz (1986); Quack (2008)), but still lack detailed commentaries on many aspects.
Up to now, research has often been hampered by the multitude of different competences needed, with Classicists as well as Egyptologists tending either to ascribe too much or too little of the background to the areas of their own competence, with discussion sometimes descending to disputes over “copyright”. Classicists trying on their own to comment on the connections to Late Egyptian religious practices tend to be superficial (e.g. Merkelbach & Totti (1990-2001)). Efforts to highlight connections to Greek philosophical thinking (e.g. Betz (2003)) have proven rather one-sided. There have been a number of conference volumes in recent times, but they have resulted in an assembly of individual studies rather than a unified and coherent overview. Global treatments of magic in the Graeco-Roman world (such as Graf (1996); Dickie (2003)) were, in general, unable to devote enough space and energy to the specific case of Graeco-Roman Egypt to advance our understanding substantially. One of the project leaders has tried to show in a more balanced way how in the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri there is both clear continuity with older Egyptian traditions as well as obvious innovations and foreign elements integrated into older structures (Quack 1998 and 2004). The other has contributed to the understanding of hymns, which are also an important part of magical incantations (Furley 1993 and 2001). Fruitful but somewhat restricted studies (only covering two of the manuscripts) have shown how they could be set within a bilingual milieu related to the Egyptian priesthood (Dielemann, 2005).
The project started from the idea that progress in the research can be achieved if we analyze some of the more prominent “magical” techniques involved in a way which goes beyond the simple sequence of the preserved manuscript (while at the same time paying close attention to the question whether the manuscripts themselves have meaningful structures and groupings of related techniques). Thus, we decided to conduct a synoptic examination of the various appearances of one single magical technique in order to give a clearer impression of the way individual traditions were either fused together or kept apart. The main aim of the project was a monograph on one of the most important subgroups of magical spells: divination rituals, i. e. all the different magical techniques that are employed for the purpose of gaining any kind of hidden knowledge (whether from a god or other supernatural beings). For this purpose, Ljuba Bortolani and Svenja Nagel classified all the Greek and Demotic divination spells according to different ritual techniques, such as dream oracles, lamp and bowl divination or divination with a medium etc. Each technique was analyzed in a separate chapter including an overview of the relevant spells, their common features and differences (e.g. incantations, ritual procedures, materia magica, etc.), a detailed discussion and some case studies which examine the most relevant examples through a line-by-line commentary. We focused on the cultural backgrounds of the single components of the rituals, in order to understand whether they originated in a Greek, Egyptian, Jewish or mixed cultural tradition. A second step was to assess which kind of cultural interactions (if any) underlie the rituals in each case, and how the final result, the mixture of different ingredients, functions within its own historical context: Roman Egypt. Is one justified in speaking of a culture of "hybridity"? We preferred the terms of fusion and plurality as being less loaded by previous models as well as being more to the point.