Drawing Down the Moon is an ambitious survey of ancient Greek and Roman magical practices together with attitudes towards them. Its colorful title alludes to a common belief in ancient Greece that Thessalian witches could summon down the moon to themselves.
In the initial chapters (1-2), author Radcliffe G. Edmonds III offers a definition of magic, gives the scope of his investigation, and lists the principal kinds of evidence for ancient magic. Most of the ensuing chapters (3-10) focus individually upon specific varieties of magical practice, some of them obvious candidates for treatment (curse tablets, love charms, and talismans), and others less so (prayer, divination, astrology, alchemy, and theurgy). As the topics show, the materials range from the simple spells of ordinary folk to the complex systems of astrologers, alchemists, and philosophers. Edmonds devotes his final chapter (11) to “magician” and “magic” (and similar words) as labels.
Since, the author holds, outsiders can never adopt a fully emic perspective on ancient magic, what one classifies as magic must be etic, though informed by emic considerations. In some contexts there are emic cues such as the use of Greek or Latin terms that straightforwardly signify “magic” or “sorceress” or “incantation” or the like, but more often there are not. For Edmonds, magic was a kind of discourse in the sense that it was not a thing but a way of talking about things. When someone was called a magician, the labelers were usually persons other than the practitioner, and they tended to focus upon supposed efficacy, either negatively or positively: the magic was fakery, or it was real and powerful—but dangerous and impious. Magic was mostly non-normative in terms of content (for example, a high degree of weirdness) and practitioners (for example, socially marginal persons), though of course normativity was fluid. Overall, Edmonds treats magic as a label for various kinds of non-normative ritualized activity.
Edmonds’s investigation focuses on ancient peoples speaking Greek or Latin and dwelling around the Mediterranean basin, with an emphasis upon the fifth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. The principal kinds of evidence for ancient Greco-Roman magic during this period are (1) fictional literature, (2) historical literature, and (3) epigraphic and papyrological documents. The first group includes poems and novels such as The Golden Ass by Apuleius, a story of a man magically transformed into a donkey. Not surprisingly, such writers treated magic with considerable imagination. The second group includes different kinds of works such as histories and polemical treatises. Important epigraphic (that is, inscribed) evidence includes abundant curse tablets. Of papyrological documents the most significant are the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of ancient spell-books for the use of professional magicians, with recipes for magical rituals.
The author begins his survey with a detailed consideration of ancient curse tablets. Thousands of Greek and Roman curse tablets have been found, and the texts of over 1,700 have been published. They are small sheets of metal inscribed with malevolent wishes and sometimes also drawings of strange designs and images. Each tablet gives the name of an intended victim and an associated curse. The intent was, of course, to harm. Here is the text of a tablet found in Athens in which an anonymous person curses two legal opponents, Seuthes and Lamprias, hoping to make them tongue-tied in court (71):
"Seuthes, I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing, and his feet and hands and eyes and mouth. Lamprias, I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing, and his feet and hands and eyes and mouth. All these I bind, I hide, I bury, I nail down. If they lay any counterclaim before the arbitrator or the court, let them seem to be of no account, either in word or in deed."
Many magical texts feature strange, mostly nonsensical magic words, so-called voces magicae. The following is a sequence of voces magicae from a tablet that curses a particular group of race-horses and charioteers with the aim of disabling them: PHRIX PHOX BEIABOU STOKTA NEOTER (54). Some magic words, like our abracadabra, appear simply to be magical nonsense; others, like our hocus pocus (from hoc est corpus meum), are recognizable distortions of known words.
Greek curse tablets begin appearing around the fifth century B.C. and continued to be made for over a thousand years. Since they were fashioned usually of lead, tin, or other durable materials, they have survived the centuries. Individual tablets might be folded or rolled up or pierced with a nail. Their makers constructed them in secret and deposited them at night beneath the earth in graves, wells, sanctuaries of deities associated with the earth or underworld, and elsewhere. In some cases, as when several curse tablets use the same formulas and display the same handwriting, it is apparent that they were manufactured by a single person. Indeed, ancient authors mention magicians who went door to door offering their services. The Greek Magical Papyri preserve actual templates; the magician needed only to fill in the victim’s name. The papyri also reveal that the written text did not constitute the whole rite, which was accompanied by spoken or sung words and sometimes by animal sacrifice.
Edmonds moves on to love charms and erotic curses. He divides love magic into practices that dealt with “technical difficulties” (impotence, fertility, contraception, and so on) and “social problems,” and the latter in turn into “restraining spells” and “obtaining spells.” The aim of restraining spells was to preserve an existing erotic relationship. Usually the originator was a woman, and her goal was either to restrain a rival or to cool down the erotic feelings her own man had for another woman. In contrast, the goal of obtaining spells was to win someone over. They were directed mostly against females by males who hoped to drive the victim mad with an extreme erotic desire for him.
Healing and protective magic were defenses against hostile magic and natural dangers such as venomous animals and diseases. Several collections of traditional lore concerning the uses of plants and minerals survive from antiquity. They could be regarded either as occult knowledge or as magic, depending upon the stance of the labeler. The practice of protective and healing magic often took the material form of amulets such as engraved gems, of which thousands survive. For example, a gold amulet made for a Roman soldier invokes deities in Hebrew and Egyptian and lists magical words for the sake of general protection against dangers. More specific is a curative amulet with an image of Perseus holding the gorgon’s head, bearing the inscription: “Flee, gout, Perseus pursues you!”
After curse tablets, erotic magic, and prophylactic-curative magic, Edmonds moves on to practices that are, on the one hand, more complex but, on the other hand, less obviously magical.
Edmonds describes the typical forms and practices of ancient prayer, distinguishing between religious prayer and magical prayer. Since Greco-Roman religion viewed the relations between humans and gods, at least in part, as one of reciprocal exchanges of favors, in normative prayer supplicants asked for a favor after reminding the deity of what they had done for him or her in the past, and/or stated what they promised to do in the future. But in magical prayer, supplicants demonstrated to the god their knowledge of powerful words and their acquaintance with the deity’s secret names, as though an intimate connection to the god entitled them to the god’s favor.
Edmonds turns then to divination, the soliciting and receiving of messages from the gods. Since divination was an old, varied, and quite common activity in the ancient world, only divination that was extraordinary in some way might be labeled magic, such as when diviners’ claims of power were excessive. For example, to divine the future was normative; to divine the future with the aim of altering it, was magic.
His next topic is Greco-Roman astrology, a systematic and extremely complex form of divination that became very popular in ancient times. Astrologers believed that the celestial entities were divine and influenced matters on earth, or, if they were not themselves causes, they at least indicated what the gods were causing to happen on earth. Either way, astrological divination consisted in interpreting the messages encoded in celestial phenomena. It was not inherently magic but became so, Edmonds argues, when there was a disruption between claims to efficacy and the social location of the practitioner. At one extreme, astrology might be seen as a nearly omnipotent means to knowledge; at the other, as a useless superstition.
Astrology leads into alchemy, a similarly systematic and complex art, in this case the transmutation of the qualities of matter. Alchemists accepted the Empedoclean doctrine that matter consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), which can convert into one another; for example, metals melt because of the water in them. In theory, then, it was possible to transmute one material into another by changing its qualities. When alchemy was seen as arcane lore that derived from the knowledge of the Egyptians and the Persian magi, its practitioners could be labeled sorcerers.
Last in the parade of magics comes theurgy, a practice that sought through ritual performance to make a direct and immediate connection between the mortal and divine worlds. Texts in the Greek Magical Papyri illuminate the ritual aspect and show that theurgy was magic in the sense of extraordinary ritual practice. The theurgists’ aim was to consecrate matter in such a way as to make it a fit receptacle for the divine, and then to draw the divine down or transport the mortal up. In one procedure, a ritual of temporary immortalization, the practitioner breathed in sunlight, lightening his soul, ascended through the heavens, and finally met Helios, the sun-god himself. Communing with a god, theurgists could obtain information about fate and even alter it. Different theurgists were also credited with mundane powers such as being able to levitate, expel demons, walk on water, and so on.
Edmonds concludes his survey with a consideration of magic and magician as labels in Greco-Roman antiquity. As in other traditions, self-labeling was uncommon. When it occurred, the labeler tended to claim extraordinary efficacy, as do the authors of the Greek Magical Papyri. The more usual case was other-labeling, that is, accusations of magical practice. So far as is known, ancient Greece lacked laws against magic, and the same was initially the case in Rome, except in a few instances; for example, the Law of the Twelve Tables forbade a farmer from enchanting away his neighbor’s crops. But in time the focus shifted from harm done to the mere knowledge of magic, possession of magic books, and of course the practice of magic. Accusations of magic tended to be against socially marginal persons and could be resolved in court.
Edmonds’s Drawing Down the Moon is a wonderfully ambitious, learned, and generous book. I say generous, for although a treatment of curses, love charms, and amulets would be expected in a survey of Greco-Roman magic, an exposition of, say, ancient astrology and alchemy might not; yet Edmonds chooses to explain in helpful detail the intricate assumptions and workings of Greco-Roman astrology and alchemy in order to make clear how in some instances astrology and alchemy qualified as magic.
Probably not everyone will be satisfied with Edmonds’s operational definition of ancient magic and its various applications. Is magic always better understood as a form of discourse than as a thing? The author’s discussion of magic ritual via metaphor and metonymy might possibly benefit from insights of the dual-processing model of cognition, as employed by cognitive scientists of religion.
I wish to conclude with praise for the reader-friendliness of this work. Edmonds’s presentation is not only rich but also well organized, and his prose is accessible throughout. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if the book was channeling lectures from Edmonds’s course on Magic in the Greco-Roman World at Bryn Mawr College. Finally, I appreciate Princeton University Press’s choosing footnotes over endnotes as well as the inclusion of many illustrations in the volume, some of them high-quality color plates.
WORK CITED
Hans Dieter Betz, ed. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, including the Demotic Spells. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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[Review length: 2046 words • Review posted on February 6, 2020]