The Late Antique synthesis
The Greek Magical Papyri
Greco-Egyptian magical manuscripts: invocations, hymns, recipes, divination, dream procedures, curses, love magic, consecrations and rites seeking divine encounter.
- Dates
- c. 100 BCE – 400s CE
- Dating
- tradition or corpus
The life
They freely combine Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and other divine names, and they show real ancient ritual practice rather than the sanitised philosophical Hermeticism sometimes imagined by modern writers.
Place in the tradition
This is what ancient magic actually looked like on the page, as distinct from what later centuries wanted it to have looked like.
a note on the record
History and later legend
The authors are numerous and largely anonymous.
the written record
Principal works
-
copied II BCE - IV CE
The Greek Magical Papyri
Working handbooks rather than a book: invocations, hymns, recipes, divination and dream procedures, curses, love spells and rites of divine encounter, copied and added to by many hands over some five centuries. The current edition is free to read.
held in the source catalogue Read at escholarship.org ↗