‘Take an eye of an ape or of a corpse that has died a violent death and a plant of peony.’
Tested spell for invisibility,
Greek Magical Papyri, I.247–50
The manuscripts were remarkable. Crumbling at the corners, ravaged by time, filled with odd drawings, these texts were like little that had been seen before. They were authorless and almost impossible to categorize. They were clearly ancient – they would later be dated to between the second century BC and the fifth century AD – but they were not like any ancient texts that were then known.1 They were not history or philosophy, nor comedy or tragedy, nor poetry, nor medicine, nor indeed anything that classicists felt comfortable with.
On their frayed pages, words had been written into odd shapes and into patterns: into the forms of triangles, and inverted triangles, and circles; some had been written within sketches of headless humans; elsewhere, words had been written next to drawings of beetles.2 The pages were peppered with strange shapes and symbols, and filled with words that looked like utter nonsense, eerie gibberish that went on for line after line, making no sense at all: ‘IAO AOI OAI . . . OOOOOO AAAAAA . . . OAI . . .’ ran one text. ‘IAO AYO IOAI / PIPI OOO OO III AYO . . .’ it continued.3 The texts babbled meaninglessly, recording ancient chants that ring in your ear as you read them: ‘EUPHORBA PHORBA PHORBOREOU PHORBA PHORBOR . . .’4
These texts were so ancient and so interesting that, when they were auctioned, the great museums and libraries of Europe – the Louvre and the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin – bought them swiftly. And they were so odd that, for a long time, these institutions more or less ignored them. They were categorized as mere ‘curiosities’, stored carefully in the collections and, for a time, forgotten about.
When scholars started to study them, tentatively at first and then with increased enthusiasm, what they found was astonishing. For, beneath the eyes of the translators, these odd texts conjured up a world that had been assumed lost: the world of the ancient magicians. Here, at last, were texts that spoke of magic, but not with scorn or satire, as Pliny had done, nor with fury, as Roman and Christian laws had done, but with reverence, belief – and a great deal of practical instruction. These works had been written for ancient magicians, and almost certainly by ancient magicians. They were, in short, spell books.
And what a world these spells created: a place in which the laws of nature could be bent and broken; in which diseases could be cured or caused at a word; in which the dead might sit up and speak. These papyri spoke of a world in which you could still the wind and solidify streams; where banquets might be summoned with a word; demons could disappear like smoke and men could become invisible at will. Theirs was a world in which you could – or so their spells promised – be carried into the air like a feather to ride on the curled clouds, or turn the waves of the sea solid so that ‘you can run over them firmly’.5
Ancient spell manuscripts are eerily atmospheric. Some are stained with drops of wax – perhaps, it has been suggested, from the candles which were used with them in ceremonies.6 Most of those that were found in that nineteenth-century cache probably once belonged to a single library – it has been suggested that they may have even belonged to a single, now long-forgotten, ancient ‘magician’. Even today, they make for striking reading. The spells that these texts contain were described by the great classical scholar A. D. Nock as ‘recipes for magical processes’ – and they read like recipes, too, advising their readers, with the recipe book’s usual certitude, how to take the unformed world and chop it up into measured and manageable amounts, adding a pinch of this and a dash of that, to ensure miraculous results.7
Take, advises one of these magical recipes, ‘an eye of a night owl and a ball of dung rolled by a beetle.’8 Take ‘frankincense [and] old wine’, advises another.9 Take frankincense and myrrh, and more frankincense, says a third.10 The ingredients go on, spell after spell, a blend of the homely and the holy, the exotic and the impossibly unattainable. Take cumin and cardamom, nightshade and bayberries; take cinnabar ink and a drowned cat; take serpent’s blood and the soot of a goldsmith; take the plant of a peony and an eye of an ape.11 Like many a modern cookery book, the ingredients lists are often unforgivingly esoteric, their exoticism adding to their mystique. Rarely do they demand only the stuff of the store-cupboard; instead, they ask for a bewildering mix of the common and the downright impossible: for storax and sage; for asphodel and opium; for myrrh, garlic and gall of gazelle. Blend it all in fragrant wine and begin . . .12
At times, like recipe books, the spells offer tacit acknowledgement that these ingredients might not be the easiest to source, and so – just as a modern recipe will demand za’atar, but allow thyme in extremis – they too offer alternatives. Though the substitutions are perhaps more trouble than the original. If one can’t find the eye of an ape then, as one particular spell (a ‘tested spell for invisibility’) explains, it is also possible to use the eye of ‘a corpse that has died a violent death.’13 Another demands the ‘material of a dog and a dappled goat’, but adds, as a concession, that one might instead use matter ‘of a virgin untimely dead’.14 Ancient magicians must have been relieved.
Yet, what things could be achieved if the spells were done correctly. Many of them promise good health, some claiming to cure epileptic seizures, or to be for ‘those possessed by daimons’;* others promise to stop blood from a woman, or act as a failsafe pregnancy test, or cure swollen testicles; while another is simply ‘for an erection’.15 Some are mutedly modest in their aims, promising that they will restrain anger, or ‘keep bugs out of the house’, or allow you to win at dice.16 Others are more ambitious. There are invisibility spells and spells for foreknowledge; there are spells to meet one’s own daimon, guard against daimons and drive out daimons; there are spells that speak of lords and holy spirits, of angels and gods rising into heaven; and spells that allow you to meet a god and make a god obey your command and descend from heaven all in white.17
A strong vein of ancient religion runs throughout – but these texts do not abase themselves before the divine. Far from it. Instead, ancient deities are treated in their pages with a brusque practicality, and mixed and added and blended to this spell or that one, in much the same way as the spices are. There are spells that call upon Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Zeus, Hermes, Helios and the god of the Hebrews; there are spells that blend Babylonian religion with Egyptian mysticism; or Greek religion with Jewish; there are even, as their modern translator puts it, ‘a few sprinkles of Christianity.’18 One spell promises that it will allow its practitioner to summon ‘Apollonius of Tyana’s old serving woman.’19 Another (an ‘excellent rite for driving out daimons’) hails not only the God of Abraham, but also ‘Jesus Chrestos’.20 Another instructs its user to take the oil of unripe olives and the fruit pulp of the lotus and then to announce, ‘I conjure you by the God of the Hebrews/Jesus’.21 The most popular god is the Jewish God – for, as their translator, Betz, points out, ‘Jewish magic was famous in antiquity.’22
These strange documents manage to be at once both other-worldly and almost painfully mundane. They speak, as so many ancient texts do, of physical misery and fear, of pain and illness, of sorrows and of death and of drowned children, of women unable to conceive, of men who have gone blind. They speak of sorrows that hope to be stayed by the hand of heaven – for they are unlikely to be stayed by anything else. In certain Christian writings, magic was demonized and it was demonic; it was outlawed and insulted. But, more truthfully, its greatest sin was that it was competition. The magician acted, for most, not as a dangerous summoner of demons, but as a miracle healer, writes Betz, as an ‘all-purpose therapist and agent of worried, troubled, and troublesome souls.’23 Magic had its dark moments, but – far more often, to judge by these spells – it was used to lighten the at times intolerable burdens of life. ‘Magic’, writes Betz, ‘is the art that makes people who practice it feel better rather than worse, that provides the illusion of security to the insecure, the feeling of help to the helpless and the comfort of hope to the hopeless.’24
These books were not a total revelation. Ancient magical texts had been known before. Magical texts from other cultures, and particularly from Egypt, had been extensively studied and written about. In 1899, an Egyptologist named E. A. Wallis Budge published a book, titled Egyptian Magic, which dealt with magical works from Egypt. His conclusions in this work feel familiar. It is clear, Budge wrote, that the power of priests and magicians, in those days, ‘was believed to be almost boundless’.25 Such a man could do almost anything, and even command the weather itself. ‘The powers of nature acknowledged his might, and wind and rain, storm and tempest, river and sea, and disease and death worked evil and ruin upon his foes.’26 The sun in the sky and the waters on land changed at his command: ‘waters forsaking their nature could be piled up in a heap, and even the sun’s course in the heavens could be stayed by a word.’27 An Egyptian magician was able, by saying the right words in the right tones, to ‘heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life.’28 He could even, Budge wrote, change the fate of the dead and ‘transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity.’29
Budge was able to write about Egyptian magic relatively early, and with relative ease. Egyptian magic, written in an ‘oriental’ language and in hieroglyphs, was reassuringly foreign: crudely speaking, odd magical practices recorded in exotic-looking scripts were more or less what the Victorian mind expected of what they considered to be irrational oriental nations. The study of ancient Greek magical texts was rather more fraught. In those newly discovered papyri were spells about casting out demons and healing the blind and turning oneself into a god, but not in any oriental language – but in Greek, the language of Pericles and of Aeschylus – and, even more uncomfortably, the language of the gospels. When a seminar was begun in the University of Heidelberg, in 1905, to teach students about the Greek Magical Papyri, it was therefore both a ‘daring enterprise’ and slightly covert. ‘Magic’, writes Betz, ‘was so utterly despised by historians and philologists that the announcement of the seminar did not mention the word “magic” but was simply phrased as “Selected Pieces from the Greek Papyri.”’30
Such awkwardness has ancient precedents. When Christianity had appeared in this world full of magic, and started to tell tales of its miraculous saviour, Greeks and Romans had instantly recognized precisely what they were dealing with: magic and sorcery. The works of Jesus, Celsus wrote, were on a level with ‘the works of sorcerers.’ And, Celsus wryly added, given ‘these men do these wonders, ought we to think them sons of God?’31 This accusation didn’t just appear in Roman writings. In Jewish traditions, Jesus was remembered as many things (most of them unflattering), but a common accusation was that he was no more than a ‘potent magician’ possessed of great ‘magical power’.32 The fact that Jesus was supposed, as a child, to have spent some time in Egypt – a noted centre of ancient magic – only added to ancient suspicions about him. Celsus, for example, assumed that it was while Jesus was in Egypt that he ‘tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves; he returned full of conceit because of these powers, and on account of them gave himself the title of God.’33 In some texts of Mandaeism, another ancient religion that shares many beliefs with Christianity (it reveres Adam, and John the Baptist), Jesus was simply dismissed as ‘the wizard Messiah, son of the spirit of the Lie’.34
Almost from the first moments of its existence, Christianity became engaged in a ferocious war about whether it was a religion – or whether it was merely magic, with pretensions. Ancient Christians fought back – though not perhaps in the way that modern minds might expect. They tended not to deny that other people in the ancient world performed miracles or exorcised demons – few Christians had any interest in denying that this was a world that thrilled to the supernatural. Instead, they merely claimed a competitive edge over these other wonder-workers: those who performed exorcisms in the name of Christ, they argued, were better than the other exorcists, who were frauds.
As the Christian author Justin bragged, Christians could be seen ‘driving the possessing devils out of the men, though they could not be cured by all the other exorcists, and those who used incantations and drugs’.35 One Christian text features a Jesus who argues, with an accountant’s precision, that other magicians have been weakened by his arrival because ‘I took from all of them a third of their power.’36 In a similar vein of competitive quality-control, Augustine later argued that bad miracles were performed ‘by practitioners of the art of wicked curiosity: the art which they call magic.’37 Such wicked miracles depended on ‘the fraudulent rites of demons.’38 Christ’s miracles, he argued, were better as they were ‘performed through simple faith and pious trust, and not by means of incantations and charms.’39
This line of argument disgusted non-Christian observers with its inconsistency. ‘Is it not a miserable argument to infer from the same works that [Jesus] is a god while they are sorcerers?’ scoffed Celsus. ‘Why should we conclude from these works that the others were any more wicked than [their] fellow?’40 Other classical authors chipped in to agree. Christians, they argued, were ‘benighted fools’, guilty of ‘superficiality and gullibility’ since they were ‘led by a few illusions to declare Jesus a god’.41
Modern scholars have tended to be far more wary about comparing Jesus to magicians than the ancient world was. Or rather, for a time they were. Then, in the late seventies, the provocative and prodigiously talented scholar Morton Smith, then a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, wrote a book titled Jesus the Magician. In it, Smith made a simple argument: in the modern world, Jesus is remembered as the son of God, but that was not a widely held view in antiquity. Only Jesus’ followers saw him that way; to the majority of other ancient observers, he was a magician – or, more precisely, to many, he was a charlatan.
As Smith put it: ‘“Jesus the magician” was the figure seen by most ancient opponents of Jesus, while “Jesus the son of God” was the figure seen by that party of his followers which eventually triumphed.’42 Smith argued that it was merely a quirk of fate and of history that had led to the latter view becoming dominant and the former being forgotten. The ‘triumph of Christianity’ was so total, so profound, so long-lasting, that the original and more widespread view of Jesus – that he was a magician and a charlatan – had not merely been forgotten, but, for centuries, actively suppressed. Ancient fragments in which Jesus is derided as a magician still do survive. But, as Smith observed in a typically arch aside, ‘by some amazing oversight, New Testament scholarship says almost nothing about them.’43 Instead, Smith wrote, ‘modern scholars, trying to discover the historical Jesus behind the gospel legends, have generally paid no attention to the evidence for Jesus the magician and have taken only the gospels as their sources.’44
Smith argued that, given their natural prejudices, this was understandable – but it was poor history. A historical picture of Jesus based solely on uncritical texts written by his followers and ignoring those by his opponents has, Smith wrote, ‘about as much historical value as a portrait of Charles de Gaulle or Mao Tse Tung drawn exclusively from Gaullist or Maoist publications. We must try to hear the other side too.’45 And so, that is precisely what Smith did, laying out those texts that had called Jesus a magician – and comparing his miracles to those that the magicians had performed.
Christians said that Jesus was the son of God, and indeed a god himself? Well, just look at the magical papyri, argued Smith. Such claims were clearly absolutely standard practice in that period among magicians. ‘I am thee and thou art I,’ runs the incantation in one ancient magic spell, addressed to a god. ‘Thy name is mine, my name is thine, for I am thy image.’46 Jesus created magical meals almost from thin air? Well, making food appear from nothing was a staple of ancient magic – moreover, there were spells in the Greek Magical Papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed. One ancient spell promises that it will, via a magical assistant, not only provide fish and bread and wine, but also whatever ‘you wish in the way of foods: olive oil, vinegar . . . and he will bring plenty of vegetables, whatever kind you wish.’47 Not merely loaves and fishes, but side orders too.
Jesus walked on water? According to the papyri, this was a standard trick. A magical assistant can, one spell claims, ‘quickly freeze rivers and seas’, making it possible to run across the surface.48 How about turning the water into wine, as Jesus did? This magical assistant can do that too – though, once again, he can go one better and not merely offer table wine but the vintage stuff, summoning ‘costly wine, as is meet to cap a dinner splendidly.’49 That such things were common is corroborated not merely by these texts, and by Celsus’ scoffing at magical meals, but also by Lucian, who wrote a story in the second century about a magician who was believed to be able to ‘soar through the air in broad daylight and walk on the water and go through fire slowly on foot’. Lucian’s narrator went on to add a whole list of miraculous wonders that this supposed mystic performed: he was able to make people fall in love, he explained, and even call ‘mouldy corpses to life’.50 The usual things.
Curing people of demonic possession was another magical favourite. The gospels offer several accounts of Jesus driving out demons. In one of the most famous, Jesus comes across a man who lives in a graveyard and spends his days ‘crying out and cutting himself with stones’. Jesus first commands the demon to ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ before asking, ‘What is your name?’ The demon replies with the supremely eerie line: ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ After a little to-and-fro discussion between Jesus and the man, the demons are sent into a great herd of pigs, ‘and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned’.51
Such spectacles were, however, hardly unique. Both the texts of the magical papyri (which are rich in spells that claim to be able to send daimons hither and thither) and the writings of ancient satirists support the idea that ‘healing’ through exorcism was a common trick in these years. The ever-cynical Lucian (whose writing, unsurprisingly, would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books) provides a typically sceptical account of one such ‘healing’.
In his story, a magician stands over the prone and demon-possessed body of a patient, then asks him – or, more precisely, asks the demon possessing him – ‘Whence came you into his body?’ The patient, Lucian writes, ‘is silent, but the spirit answers in Greek or in the language of whatever foreign country he comes from, telling how and whence he entered into the man.’ At which moment, ‘by adjuring the spirit and if he does not obey, threatening him, [the exorcist] drives him out.’52 As Lucian records, the onlookers are impressed by such a feat. ‘Indeed,’ one says, ‘I actually saw one [demon] coming out, black and smoky in colour’.53 What keen eyes you must have, retorts his companion, dryly. You can see many things that ‘make a very faint impression on the dull optics of us ordinary men.’54
Both ancient magic and ancient religion were atmospheric events: smoke, candles, wax drippings and a good dose of gibberish appear to have been as essential to the recipe as frankincense and myrrh. Lucian had as little patience with the enunciation of magical men as he did with their exorcisms. He records an account of one magician who promised to take some followers (or perhaps ‘customers’ is a better word, given his fat fee) on a trip to the underworld. As Lucian sardonically observes, this particular magician had all the essentials of a powerful magical man, namely ‘grey hair and a very majestic beard’ – and almost entirely inaudible speech.55 When the magician started to perform the ceremony, it was hard to hear what he was saying because, as Lucian observed, ‘like an incompetent announcer at the games, he spoke rapidly and indistinctly.’56
That particular mumbling incantation was followed by other magical rites – including a baptism (at midnight), the sprinkling of blood and the invoking of this god and that one – all seasoned, for extra drama, with ‘a number of foreign-sounding, meaningless words of many syllables.’57 When, well over a millennium later, critics of Catholicism would scorn Catholic rites as magical mumbo jumbo and accuse them of having inspired the patter of magicians (it was said that the Catholic phrase ‘hoc est . . . corpus meum’ – ‘this is my body’ – had been transubstantiated into the ‘hocus pocus’ of magicians), they were merely following a long tradition of elocutionary argument.*58
Often such criticisms of magical rites were accompanied by the slur that this was all being done for money. Ancient critics frequently accused magicians and healers of being after nothing but profit. The biography of Apollonius contains a section in which he attacks those prophets who trick their spectators with ‘sham learning’. This trade, Apollonius says, ‘consists entirely of money-grubbers. All their boasted devices they have invented for the sake of gain, and they hunt piles of money by inducing others, whatever they desire, to think them omnipotent.’59 According to the Porphyry, many Christians were motivated less by love of God than love of money, for they converted ‘rich little women’ to their religion, then enjoyed their donations. Religion was, he implied, little more than a money-making ruse: ‘Rustic and poor people’, he wrote, ‘performed miracles by magical arts since they possessed nothing whatsoever.’60
Satirists and critics might poke fun at the similarities between religion and magic, but for Christians the closeness between the two was far less comfortable. Look carefully at modern translations of ancient biblical texts and the long-standing Christian discomfort with the idea of magic can still be seen. For centuries, a certain Christian embarrassment lingered over all words to do with magic, and particularly over the translation of the vexed word magus or, in its plural, magi.61 This is odd as, in one sense, it is not a hard word to translate. Perfectly good equivalent English words exist, for in most contexts it simply means ‘sorcerer’ or ‘magician’ – indeed, in many places in the Bible, it is translated as precisely those words.
However, when it comes to the tale of the men who arrive at the birth of Jesus, the words ‘magicians’ or ‘sorcerers’ are almost never used by English biblical translators. Instead, the King James Version and many others prefer the more august – but frankly tendentious – translation of ‘wise men’. Behold, runs the famous line, ‘there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem.’62 Other versions leave the word untranslated, as the appealingly mysterious ‘Magi’. But a much more accurate translation – and one that mirrors translations of this word elsewhere in the Bible – would be: ‘Behold, there came sorcerers from the East’ – or at the very least ‘Behold, there came diviners’. That, however, was not the version that was finally settled on.*
However, to see Christianity and magic as existing merely in conflict is not quite correct, for it wasn’t just in hostile texts that glimpses of magic could be seen. In ancient images, figures were often shown holding objects that were associated with them, to help identify them to the viewer. Jesus is often, for example, shown holding a scroll – because that attribute denotes his teaching. He is also – far less comfortably, for modern Christians – often shown holding a wand, which implied then precisely what it implied now. In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe had held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’ men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. The Greek Magical Papyri also make reference to staffs and wands: one spell instructs its user to ‘shift the aforementioned ebony staff, which you are holding in your left hand, to your right hand’, in order for the magician to release a god.63
And, in early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the tomb. These are not unusual images. On the contrary: while the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen. After the scroll, as the art historian Thomas Mathews has pointed out, ‘the wand is the most constant attribute of Christ in early Christian art.’64
Such images have caused considerable discomfort. Some Christian scholars have argued passionately that these early images of Jesus do not show a ‘wand’, but instead a ‘staff’, perhaps a staff of authority. The debate is heated – and largely irresolvable, since it is an argument over what modern term to apply to an ancient object. But, whichever modern English word is used to describe what is seen, it is clear that, when Jesus carries out wonders, he is shown doing so with the aid of a long thin stick. As Mathews puts it, the wand (a word Mathews doesn’t hesitate to use) ‘is not incidental but a standard and necessary feature in Early Christian art . . . By carrying a wand, Jesus, too, has been made a magician. The implications of this are enormous.’65
Early Christian authorities might beg to differ. Augustine himself warned against people who looked for Christ and his apostles not in books but in pictures on the walls. And yet, in Arles and in Ravenna and in Rome, Christians worshipped before images of a Jesus who holds a long, thin staff in his hand as he causes bread to appear, wine to flow and Lazarus to rise from his tomb.