Podcast episode
November 28, 2019
Episode 77: Korshi Dosoo on the Papyri Græcæ Magicæ and Western Esotericism
[Apologies for poor sound quality on this one. The technology was not on our side, but the ideas are worth the effort of listening!]
We are delighted to interview Korshi Dosoo, a papyrologist who not only knows what’s in the Greek Magical Papyri (all manner of texts of ritual power from various parts of Egypt, dating from the first to the fourth centuries CE), but knows the history of the texts before they became the PGM corpus, the history surrounding Preisendantz and the formation of the corpus, and even the history of the corpus itself within western esotericism.
We discuss how the corpus was first put together, and the various textual iterations since. We then move on to what we mean when we talk about ‘magic’ in our Græco-Egyptian context. Genre is discussed, along with the several types of document collected under the heading of ‘magical papyri’, including:
- recipe books,
- καταδεσμοί or ‘bindings’,
- amulets and instructions for making amulets,
- healing practices of various types,
- technical divination texts,
- ‘revelational’ divination texts (where a god appears to you, either in propria persona, in a dream, or in a material medium, and answers questions; be sure to cross-reference this material with the visionary and epiphanic material from the Chaldæan Oracles discussed in the previous episode),
- spells for acquiring a paredros, a familiar spirit, to aid you in your magical operations (also relevant to the Oracles),
- the ascent-magic of the Mithrasliturgie,
- general spells for acquiring good fortune,
- texts devoted to sending dreams to other people (usually to make them fall in love with you),
- exorcism instructions,
- and paignia, ‘party tricks’, an interesting genre where the lines between stage-magic and real magic blur.
Other topics covered include a quick primer on the complex linguistic landscape of Græco-Roman Egypt (how to tell your Demotic from your Coptic), the question of how Egyptian the PGM are, and how Greek, speculations about other, now-lost literate magical traditions from elsewhere in the Empire, and to what degree Græco-Egyptian magic might have been a cultural export like astrology.
We then turn to the extraordinary influence of the PGM on modern thought and esotericism. The work of Preisendantz and co. gave us ‘the ouroboros’, and had a major influence on modern sociology of magic, particularly through the work of Mauss and Hubert. One text which was published earlier than the corpus as a whole, the codex now known as PGM 5, gave the magicians of the Golden Dawn a very important ritual which, through Aleister Crowley’s (mis)handling of the text, has become forevermore known as ‘the bornless ritual’. And last but not least, the Mormons come into it. Class.
Works Discussed in this Episode:
- Betz, Hans Dieter. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986 [1992].
- Bull, Christian. The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: the Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom. Leiden: Brill 2018.
- Celsus on invoking spirits: Origen Cels. 1.68.
- Crowley, Aleister. “The Temple of Solomon the King.” The Equinox 1, no. 3 (1910): 133-280. This contains Crowley’s possible reworking of the spell originally devised by Alan Bennett; see King, Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism. Bridport: Prism Press, 1970 [1989], p.52.
- Kyranides: D.V. Kaimakes, Die Kyraniden. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain 1976.
- Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915.
- Gee, John. “Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri.” In The Disciple As Witness: Essays on Latter-Day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, edited by Richard Lloyd Anderson, Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry and Andrew H. Hedges: Maxwell Institute, 2000.
- Goodwin, Charles Wycliffe. Fragment of a Græco-Egyptian Work upon Magic. From a Papyrus in the British Museum. Edited for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, with a Translation and Notes. Cambridge, 1852.
- Hubert, H. “Magia.” In Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines. Volume 3 Part 1, edited by Ch. Daremberg, Edm. Saglio and Edm. Pottier. Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1900.
- Richard Gordon. “Reporting the Marvellous: Private Divination in the Greek Magical Papyri.” In Envisioning Magic, edited by Peter Schäfer and Hans G Kippenberg. Leiden: Brill, 1997: 65-92.
- Mauss, Marcel, and Henri Hubert. A General Theory of Magic [Esquisse d’une théorie génerale de la magie]. Translated by Robert Brain. London: Routledge, 1902 [1950/1972/2001].
- Preisendanz, Karl, and Albert Henrichs. Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri (vol. I). Stuttgart: Teubner, 1928 [1973].
- ——— Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri (Vol. II). Stuttgart: Teubner, 1931 [1974].
- Regardie, Israel. Ceremonial Magic. Bramley: Lowe & Brydone, 1980.
- Ritner, Robert K. “The Religious, Social, and Legal Parameters of Traditional Egyptian Magic.” In Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, edited by Paul Mirecki and Marvin Meyer. Leiden: Brill, 1995: 43-60.
Recommended Reading:
- Hans Dieter Betz. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, volume 1. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1996.
- W.M. Brashear. ‘The Greek Magical Papyri: an Introduction and Survey, Annotated Bibliography (1928–1994)’. ANRW II, 18(5):3380–3684, 1995b. Indices in vol. II 18.6.
- Jacco Dieleman. Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE). Brill, Leiden, 2005.
- Korshi Dosoo. Rituals of Apparition in the Theban Magical Library. PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2014 (available on Korshi’s Academia page!).
- Christopher A. Faraone. ‘Handbooks and Anthologies: The Collection of Greek and Egyptian Incantations in Late Hellenistic Egypt’. Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 2:195–214, 2000.
- Christopher A. Faraone and Sofia Torallas Tovar, editors. Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies, vol. I: Text and Translation, volume 9. California Classical Studies, Berkeley, CA, 2022.
- D. Frankfurter. ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt and the Problem of the Category of Magician’. In Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg, editors, Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, Studies in the History of Religions, pages 115–36. Brill, Leiden, 1997.
- Richard Gordon. ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’. In Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, editors, Magic and Witchcraft in Europe: Greece and Rome, pages 159–276. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999.
- Richard Gordon. ‘Shaping the Text: Innovation and Authority in Graeco-Egyptian Malign Magic’. In H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, editor, Kykeon: Studies in Honour of H. S. Versnel, pages 69–112. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2002.
- F. Graf. Magic in the Ancient World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
- Hans G. Kippenberg. ‘Magic in Roman Civil Discourse: Why Rituals Could be Illegal’. In Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg, editors, Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, pages 137–165. Brill, Leiden, 1997.
- Lynn R. LiDonnici. ‘The Disappearing Magician: Literary and Practical Questions about the Greek Magical Papyri’. In Benjamin G. Wright, ed. A Multiform Heritage: Studies on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Robert A. Kraft, pages 227–244. Scholars, Atlanta, GA, 1999.
- Z. Mazur. ‘Unio Magica: Part Two: Plotinus, Theurgy, and the Question of Ritual’. Dionysius, New Series, 22:29–55, 2004.
- Ian S. Moyer. ‘Thessalos of Tralles and Cultural Exchange’. In Joel Walker, Scott Noegel, and Brannon Wheeler, editors, Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, pages 39–56. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2003.
- C. Pharr. ‘The Interdiction of Magic in Roman Law’. TAPA, 63:269–95, 1932.
- Karl Preisendanz. Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. Teubner, Stuttgart, 2 edition, 1973.
- R. K. Ritner. ‘Egyptian magical practice under the Roman Empire: The Demotic Spells and their Religious Context’. In ANRW 2, volume 18.5, pages 3333–3379. de Gruyter, Berlin, 1995.
- J. Z. Smith. ‘Trading Places’. In Marvin W. Meyer and Paul A. Mirecki, editors, Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, pages 13–27. Brill, Leiden, 1995a.
Themes
Aleister Crowley, characteres, Cosmic Ascent, Curses, Epiphany, Greek Magical Papyri, Illusion, Interview, Magic, Mormonism, Summoning, voces magicæ
James Lomas
November 28, 2019
Oh, that intro was fantastic! Thanks for sharing color behind the physical collection of these texts — I’ve never heard anything like it.
Any sense of how often new papyri are discovered today? E.g., roughly how many were discovered in the past 10 years…? 0, 5, 100?
Korshi Dosoo
November 29, 2019
Hi James, I’m very glad you found the interview interesting. Your question is very difficult to answer, but I’ll do my best.
A lot of papyri are still being found in Egypt, but there are two problems with putting a number to them – first, many of them are found in illegal excavations and sold privately, and second, we only know about those found in formal excavations by academic institutions once the excavation reports are published. Even then, these usually contain only short descriptions, so we don’t necessarily have a good idea of their contents until they are published, which can take a long time – about a quarter of a million papyri were excavated in Oxyrhynchus in the late 19th century, but only ca. 5000 of these have been published so far, and even in the best case scenario, it usually takes several months to properly edit a papyrus.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of papyri are very fragmentary (some may contain only a few surviving letters), and that magical papyri only constitute a small percentage of those found – there are about 100,000 published Greek papyri from Egypt, and only about 500 of these (counting generously) are “magical”. The rest are largely documentary (letters, receipts, census records etc.), literary, or paraliterary (medical, astrological etc.). (I should also point out that, alongside Greek papyri, there are also papyri in other languages from Egypt – the different forms of Egyptian, as well as Latin, Aramaic – and texts on other writing supports – parchment, ostraca, etc.)
So, with these caveats, I would (very loosely) estimate that the number of Greek papyri, including fragments, found in Egypt each year is in the dozens to low hundreds, and I’d guess that, on average, a few hundred papyri are published a year, of which something like 1-10 would be magical.
If you’re interested in these kinds of technical/material details, you might enjoy our project blog, in particular the series “Looking at the Coptic Magical Papyri”, which, despite its name, often touches on magical material in Greek: http://www.coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/index.php/blog/
James Lomas
November 30, 2019
> on average, a few hundred papyri are published a year, of which something like 1-10 would be magical.
Wow. Ok. Mind blown. Assuming that the rate of finding new papyri is within an order of magnitude, that’s still a lot! Makes me wish the Tech bazillionaires would support this somehow… You know, AI for Ancient Intelligence, or vice versa.
>about a quarter of a million papyri were excavated in Oxyrhynchus in the late 19th century, but only ca. 5000 of these have been published so far
So… I guess this means there isn’t an arxive.org for papyri to support rapid dissemination. In other fields, one model is to publish datasets (e.g., images of papyri) in a manner allowing the originators to be cited, even prior to their own paper.
Where do new papyri tend to get published, anyway?
I really enjoyed reading several articles on your website! That impotence curse was a real treat.
Korshi Dosoo
November 30, 2019
Glad you enjoyed the website – I agree, the impotence curse is very fun to read (maybe less fun for the intended victim)!
Institutions with papyrus collections (usually museums and universities) are very uneven in the way they treat them. In some cases they will make high-quality digital images available online; the John Rylands Library in Manchester is a good example of this: https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/ManchesterDev~93~3
Some collections have everything online; some have only published material, or only a selection.
In other cases, if they don’t have the money, staff or impetus to put their papyri online, we have to visit the collection, perhaps pay for an image to work on, or else produce the picture ourselves. Obviously examining the papyrus “in the flesh” is the ideal, but this is often impractical, so we tend to perform what we call an “autopsy” when we first start working on it, and then make notes of particular parts to inspect in person when we have the chance again later on.
In terms of publication venues, there are journals, where you tend to publish individual papyri or small groups (you can see a list of some of them here: https://www.lincolnhblumell.com/papyrological-journals/), volumes in series like P. Oxy. (this is where most of the Oxyrhynchus material is published: https://www.ees.ac.uk/graeco-roman-memoirs), and one-off collections (usually organised thematically, or by collection or provenance), like the Papyri Graecae Magicae (https://archive.org/details/PapyriGraecaeMagicae) and Supplementum Magicum (https://books.google.fr/books/about/Supplementum_magicum.html?id=X1klAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y).
Online databases are also becoming increasingly important; the main one for documentary papyri is papyri.info, which contains a very large proportion of the published Greek texts in digital form (you can see the ones with English translations here: http://papyri.info/search?DATE_MODE=LOOSE&DOCS_PER_PAGE=15&TRANSL=en). In theory, the magical papyri will one day be made fully available on litpap.info, the equivalent for literary and paraliterary texts. The interface is a bit low-fi by 2019 standards, but it’s a very useful tool for us.
James Lomas
December 2, 2019
Another fabulous post. I shared out on hackernews today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669159
Fingers crossed for another Korsho Dosoo podcast — maybe Isis themed? Fascinating to hear about her presence and absence.
I finally had the time to listen to the last 1/3. I’m glad this one went long, don’t get me wrong! But for the total podcast count, you know this one episode counted for 2. The bits on Crowley’ invocation magic (in the great pyramid??) through to Mormon origins. Fantastic!
Alan Lee
June 10, 2020
Are the Greek Magical Papyri the oldest surviving magical “texts”? I have a friend that says so. However, the Hekhalot Rabbati seems to be dated earlier. Are there any complete or semi-complete magical writings (in the Western Esoteric Tradition) extant from Before the Common Era?
Earl Fontainelle
June 10, 2020
The PGM are nowhere near the oldest surviving magical texts in the western tradition — always depending, of course, on how we define ‘magical’ and ‘western’. But we have, for example, curses and such from Mesopotamia from the bronze age, tons of ancient Egyptian material (religion or magic? You decide!), and so on.
What the PGM offer, I think, is most importantly a large corpus of texts from a pretty narrow, and pretty recent window of time — say 100-400 CE, super-roughly — which also happens to be the same time when a load of other stuff we are interested in — Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, the Hermetic path, Theurgy, etc. etc. — was also taking shape, and so the PGM help us round out our picture of the thought-worlds of people in this era of the Græco-Roman world in ways which would otherwise be lost to us.