The Roots of Magic podcast is a collaboration between the SHWEP and the project MagEIA – A Centre for the Study of Magical Text Traditions of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity at the University of Würzburg. MagEIA (short for ‘Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy’) is a Centre for Advanced Studies funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a funding format that combines the research of local teams with that of groups of visiting fellows who work at the MagEIA Centre for several months. While the local MagEIA teams are formed by Assyriologists, Egyptologists, and Linguists, the MagEIA fellows come from a wide range of disciplines.
At the heart of MagEIA’s research are texts labelled as ‘magical’ in modern scholarship, which figure prominently in the written legacy of all ancient cultures in West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. These multifaceted text traditions shed light on religious beliefs, early concepts of the world, scholarly traditions, and early forms of science. They provide insight into social and cultural norms but also conflicts and the precarious existence of the individual in pre-modern societies.
In the Roots of Magic podcasts, academics working at MagEIA discuss their individual research at the Centre, presenting a wide range of magical texts, some of them more than 4000 years old and only rediscovered by modern researchers, others still part of living social practices with roots reaching back into Late Antiquity.
We speak with Dan Levene, expert on the ancient Judæo-Aramaic incantation-bowls, on the bowls, the skulls, the Talmud, and what all of this tells us about late-ancient Judaism in the Sasanian empire and beyond.
In our fourth Roots of Magic interview, we speak with Jonathan Beltz, specialist on the scarier side of ancient Sumerian cultural life, the side occupied by demonic entities bringing disease and death. But one entity stands out from the crowd: Namtar, the divine psychopomp whose arrival means ineluctable mortality. Or does it? We explore the world of magical ways to send death packing in ancient Sumeria.
We discuss the dangerous, liminal space of childbirth and childhood in ancient Egypt. How might the gods, magic, and medicine interact to help make this a less perilous realm? Charlotte Rose has some ideas.
In our second Roots of Magic interview, we speak with Svenja Nagel on erotic magic in ancient Egypt. Ritual practices and potions, magical continuity and change, and cross-cultural pollination feature prominently in a conversation which tells us what Egyptian erotic magic was, and what dangerous-yet-sexy things you could do with it.
In the first interview of a new series, we discuss the academic project we have all been waiting for, MagEIA: Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy, with one of its principal investigators, Daniel Schwemer. MagEIA will host cross-disciplinary conversations across specialisms in the study of ancient (bronze-age to late antiquity) magic. Amazing work, with amazing things to come.
All text and podcast content is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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