Curse Tablets And Binding Spells From The Ancient World

For the first time text from tablets have been translated into English with substantial translator's introduction revealing the cultural, social and historical context for these spells and tablets of the ancient world.

The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers. Surveying and analyzing various texts and artifacts, the author reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells.

Ancient Greeks and Romans often turned to magic to achieve personal goals. Magical rites were seen as a route for direct access to the gods, for material gains as well as spiritual satisfaction. In this survey of magical beliefs and practices from the sixth century B.C.E. through late antiquity, Fritz Graf sheds new light on ancient religion. Graf explores the important types of magic in Greco-Roman antiquity, describing rites and explaining the theory behind them. And he characterizes the ancient magician: his training and initiation, social status, and presumed connections with the divine world. With trenchant analysis of underlying conceptions and vivid account of illustrative cases, Graf gives a full picture of the practice of magic and its implications. He concludes with an evaluation of the relation of magic to religion.

Original and comprehensive, Magic in the Ancient Greek World takes the reader inside both the social imagination and the ritual reality that made magic possible in ancient Greece. Explores the widespread use of spells, drugs, curse tablets, and figurines, and the practitioners of magic in the ancient world Uncovers how magic worked. Was it down to mere superstition? Did the subject need to believe in order for it to have an effect? Focuses on detailed case studies of individual types of magic Examines the central role of magic in Greek life

This volume seeks to advance the study of ancient magic through separate discussions of ancient terms for ambiguous or illicit ritual, the ancient texts commonly designated magical, and contexts in which the term magic may be used descriptively.

In a culture where the supernatural possessed an immediacy now strange to us, magic was of great importance both in the literary mythic tradition and in ritual practice. In this book, Daniel Ogden presents 300 texts in new translations, along with brief but explicit commentaries. Authors include the well known (Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny) and the less familiar, and extend across the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Parting company with the trend in recent scholarship to treat the subject in abstract, highly theoretical terms, Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome proposes that the magic-working of antiquity was in reality a highly pragmatic business, with very clearly formulated aims - often of an exceedingly malignant kind. In seven chapters, each addressed to an important arm of Greco-Roman magic, the volume discusses the history of the rediscovery and publication of the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a key source for our understanding of ancient magic; the startling violence of ancient erotic spells and the use of these by women as well as men; the alteration in the landscape of defixio (curse tablet) studies by major new finds and the confirmation these provide that the frequently lethal intent of such tablets must not be downplayed; the use of herbs in magic, considered from numerous perspectives but with an especial focus on the bizarre-seeming rituals and protocols attendant upon their collection; the employment of animals in magic, the factors determining the choice of animal, the uses to which they were put, and the procuring and storage of animal parts, conceivably in a sorcerer's workshop; the witch as a literary construct, the clear homologies between the magical procedures of fictional witches and those documented for real spells, the gendering of the witch-figure and the reductive presentation of sorceresses as old, risible and ineffectual; the issue of whether ancient magicians practised human sacrifice and the illuminating parallels between such accusations and late 20th century accounts of child-murder in the context of perverted Satanic rituals. By challenging a number of orthodoxies and opening up some underexamined aspects of the subject, this wide-ranging study stakes out important new territory in the field of magical studies.

Greek legends and historical accounts contain many references to special statues or images designed to preserve the safety or livelihood of a city, a business or a house. These images, which fall into two often overlapping categories (talismans and apotropaia), were erected according to special rituals and took on a variety of intriguing forms, including lions, locusts, and bound effigies of destructive deities like Ares. Looking closely at a wide variety of Greek texts and artifacts, Faraone provides a detailed description and survey of these images and then uses this information to provide new interpretations of early Greek myths about Pandora, the Trojan Horse, and the "living statues" created by Hephaestus. At each step he sets the Greek evidence in a wider eastern-Mediterranean context, with detailed discussions of Near Eastern and Egyptian practices that bear close resemblance to the Greek rituals. The study closes with a re-evaluation of the traditional scholarly approach to religious art as purely representational, suggesting that some images instead of simply illustrating the power of a god, were actually created to restrain and control the power of inimical supernatural forces such as plague-gods and ghosts. Focusing renewed attention on these often misinterpreted talismans and apotropaia, Talismans and Trojan Horses will be illuminating for scholars and students of classics, art and archaeology, religion, the Ancient Near East, the Bible, and mythology.