Material Approaches to Roman Magic

Occult Objects and Supernatural Substances

Adam Parker, Stuart McKie, Adam Parker, Stuart McKie

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785708824
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der römischen Antike

This second volume in the new TRAC Themes in Roman Archaeology series seeks to push the research agendas of materiality and lived experience further into the study of Roman magic, a field that has, until recently, lacked object-focused analysis. Building on the pioneering studies in Boschung and Bremmer's (2015) Materiality of Magic, the editors of the present volume have collected contributions that showcase the value of richly-detailed, context-specific explorations of the magical practices of the Roman world. By concentrating primarily on the Imperial period and the western provinces, the various contributions demonstrate very clearly the exceptional range of influences and possibilities open to individuals who sought to use magical rituals to affect their lives in these specific contexts – something that would have been largely impossible in earlier periods of antiquity. Contributions are presented from a range of museum professionals, commercial archaeologists, university academics and postgraduate students, making a compelling case for strengthening lines of communication between these related areas of expertise.

1

Introduction: Materials, Approaches, Substances, and Objects

Stuart McKie and Adam Parker

The core of this book comes from a panel held at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) 2015 entitled Charmed I’m Sure: Roman Magic – Old Theory, New Approaches, which was organised by Adam Parker. One of the most exciting features of that panel was the coming together of university academics, postgraduate students, professional archaeologists and museum curators in the pooling of ideas and approaches to Roman magic. This volume has maintained that variety and energy, with papers from five of the original contributors plus further articles from authors working in the same wide range of professions. Our aim with this collection of papers is to further develop some of the ideas presented at TRAC 2015, particularly the focus on materiality and embodied experience of magic in the Roman world. At the core of this volume is the contention that fine-grained artefact analysis has great potential to offer new ways to understand ancient magic practices.

In this introduction we will set out the aims of the present volume, and the problems and gaps in existing scholarship that it intends to address. The study of ancient magic is a dynamic, growing field, and there are considerable opportunities to drive the agenda in new directions. In particular the material, embodied experiences of particularly Roman magical practices have been relatively neglected, and thus a volume of this nature is sorely needed. With TRAC’s long pedigree of being a forum for exciting new approaches to established scholarship, it seems appropriate that this collection of papers should be published under its aegis. The editors would like to take this opportunity to thank past and present members of the TRAC Standing Committee, especially Darrell Rohl, Sergio González Sánchez and Matthew Mandich, for their tireless efforts in helping them to prepare this volume for publication. Special thanks also go to Véronique Dasen, not just for her paper but also for her thoughtful comments on the text of the whole volume.

Lie of the Land

There are two main issues that this volume seeks to address: (1) the relative lack of attention paid to the material evidence for magical beliefs and practice in the Roman world and (2) the relatively poor penetration of recent theoretical discussions into the study of Roman magic, especially around ideas of materiality and embodied experience.

The theoretical study of magic in the ancient world, certainly since its re-emergence on the scene in the 1980s, includes both conceptualist ideas, which have outlined, defined and engaged with broad areas of Greek, Hellenistic and Egyptian magic (Luck 1985 and 2000; Graf 1997; Janowitz 2001; Styers 2004) as well as attempts to outline the functional aspects of magic and the methodologies through which it may be used (Versnel 1991; Flint et al. 1999; Thomassen 1999). The focus of most of these works has predominantly been on the more abundant Greek and Graeco-Egyptian material. The emergence of studies into Roman magic contributing towards these grand ideas is a relatively recent phenomenon, certainly until very recently with the emergence of specific works on Roman magic (Kropp 2008; Gordon and Marco Simón 2010).

The study of Roman magical theory and thought has become entrenched in the study of Classics and literature (Otto 2013: 308ff), with artefactual studies often given only a cursory or secondary role in the interpretation of Roman magic. Andrew Wilburn’s (2012) Materia Magica is the only modern monograph that has attempted to tackle contextualised material culture studies of Roman magic as a standalone phenomenon. The narrow range of chronological focus to which his book explicitly applies deliberately excludes, at least in part, the wider study of magic in historical archaeology with the aim of delving deeper into the concerns of the Roman world. Whilst there are certainly important connections with Ancient Greek and Egyptian material culture, as well as that of the Post-Roman periods, Roman magic is much underrepresented amongst the excellent range of scholarship into ancient magic, as noted by Bremmer (2015: 8) in the introduction to the edited volume Materiality of Magic (the most recent volume to attempt an analysis of ancient magic from the perspective of material culture). Roman magic is not completely absent from scholarship, especially given the recent surge of work into this particular field in the wake of the seminal Magical Practice in the Latin West (Gordon and Marco Simón 2010). Recent work includes Bailliot and Symmons 2012; Chadwick 2012 and 2015; Wilburn 2012 and 2015; Bailliot 2015; Boschung and Bremmer 2015 (itself including at least four papers explicitly approaching the material evidence for magic in the Roman world); McKie 2016; Parker 2016; Quercia and Cazzulo 2016 to name but a few. However, the range remains sufficiently small to provide a clear justification for further promoting the investigation of Roman magic on its own merit.

Within the wider field of historical archaeology there has been a recent upsurge in interest in the materiality of magic, best exemplified by the recent publication of edited volumes on the topic. The Historical Archaeology volume on Manifestations of Magic: The Archaeology and Material Culture of Folk Religion (Fennell and Manning 2014) and the collection of papers from the 2012 Theoretical Archaeology Group session entitled The Materiality of Magic: An Artefactual Investigation into Ritual Practices and Popular Belief (Houlbrook and Armitage 2015) both seek to demonstrate the range and potential of the material culture of magic within historical archaeology. The issue with these, in relation to the study of Roman archaeology at least, is the minimal use of Roman small finds within their research areas. Frequently we are forced to retroject the interpretations made for Medieval, Post-Medieval, Early Modern and even Contemporary social and cultural groups in order to begin to understand the material manifestations of magic in the Roman world. There is a wide-ranging uniqueness in the material culture of Roman magic which needs further attention. Both of the above volumes represent important modern contributions to a research agenda set out by Ralph Merrifield in his ground-breaking 1987 publication The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic: a monograph to which the Fennel and Manning volume is rightly dedicated. Merrifield worried that the study of magic and ritual in archaeology would become associated with a ‘loony fringe’ of post-processual thought (Merrifield 1987: 3). The recent magical revival, heralding new investigations into material culture as part of ‘the material turn’ of magic (Bremmer 2015: 9) is working to re-appropriate this study.

Defining an Issue

The elephant in the room, for both the veteran and uninitiated of this subject, is the question ‘what is magic?’ The short answer is that, as a scholarly community, we have not agreed on a single answer to that question. Indeed, there are multiple answers depending upon a particular reading of previous works in the subjects of religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. There are multiple definitions about what magic is and is not, how it functions, how it relates to religion, and what practices may or may not be defined as magical.

Explicitly, for the purposes of this collection of papers on the subject of magic we have opted not to provide a single, rigid definition for our contributors to use and adhere to; this is because of the multi-disciplinary nature of this volume and the unique backgrounds and knowledge of our contributors. If we, as a community, cannot decide upon a single definition (for examples of modern definitions see: Merrifield 1987: 6; Tambiah 1990: 7; Faraone 2001: 16; Manning 2014: 1; Chadwick 2015: 37; Stein and Stein 2016: 140) it would be socially crass and intellectually limiting to force our contributors to conform to a boundary that we have arbitrarily supplied. Rather than failing to answer the question, we see this approach as the only logical way to provide the necessary space for this range of material approaches to Roman magic to be brought into world.

However, we do not use the word ‘magic’ lightly and without the due care and attention that it deserves. Thus, a short historiography of magic, both in the ancient world and in scholarship is necessary, if only to signpost the development of the study of magic and how it relates to this volume. Etymologically, ‘magic’ has its roots in the Old Persian magus (Graf 1997: 20; Pasi 2006: 1134) coming into Greek in the late sixth to the early fifth century B.C., where it refers to a group of people: the Magians. The meaning of the word morphed throughout the following centuries but continues to be related to a group of ritual specialists, closely associated with religious practices (Hdt. 1.132.1–3; Xen. Cyr. 8.3.11; Pseudo-Plato, Alc. 122; Strabo, Geog. 15.3.14; Polybius, Hist. Fishing Near Scylla; App. B Civ. 2.21.151). By the time the word entered the Latin language and was used by the writers of the early centuries A.D., ‘magic’ had come to refer to a wide range of ritual practices (Vitr. De arch. 7.1; Plin. HN 18.90) but was frequently used pejoratively in connection with practices related to human sacrifice, divination, and necromancy (Pliny. HN 30.3; 30.5). As a fluid, catch-all term for a huge range of illicit practices, ‘magic’ became the paradigm of dangerous un-Roman behaviour in the imperial period, especially associated with foreigners (Tac. Ann. 2.23) and old witches (Luc. 6.577). However, in contemporary and later Greek texts, the term could still be used positively, even by practitioners as a marker of identity (for example PGM:1.127; 1.331; 4.210; 4.243; 4.2082; 4.2290; 4.2319; 4.2450; 4.2454; 63.5). Although important for the scholarly understanding and usage of the term, this emic Roman discussion of magic is not the same as the modern discourse on the subject, which has understandably taken a very different line (for further discussion on the ancient usages of the term see Dickie 2001 and Rives 2010).

The works of Tylor (1867; 1881), Frazer (1900), Evans-Pritchard (1933), and Malinowski (1948) remain hugely influential on the study of ancient magic, and provided the foundation upon which modern studies are based, but they have proved unsuccessful in creating a united front. In material terms, whatever it is that modern scholarship considers to be either ‘magical’ or ‘religious’ is categorised as such because of our interpretations of intrinsic differences in how these ancient social practices are considered to have functioned, both practically and supernaturally (Versnel 1991; Luck 2000: 209) and whether or not aspects of this complex relationship are visible in the literary evidence or the archaeological record. Alternatives to such attempts at categorisation include the complete removal of this debate from the academic discussion in which it is taking place. To take one very recent example, Quercia and Cazzulo (2016: 33, 40) consider the non-normative ritual elements of ‘deviant’ burials in Roman Northern Italy as ‘magical’ but do not enter into an etymological discussion on the nature of the term or into the theoretical implications of using it. For them, magic remains undefined and it is left to the reader to interpret the consequences of this definition.

Addressing where the boundaries of magic and religion might lie, Luck (1985: 4) characterised four different scholarly positions on the relationship of magic to religion: that magic becomes religion; that religion attempts to reconcile personal power once magic has failed; that religion and magic have common roots; that magic is a degenerate form of religion. Three of the four place religion ‘higher’ than magic, implying that religion is something to be aspired to and magic is somehow unsophisticated or underdeveloped in an evolutionary sense. These positions do provide a sense of conceptual difference between magic and religion. In the entry for ‘magic’ in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Versnel refines these distinctions between religion and magic down to their most basic, arguing that the essential difference between the two is magic’s ‘manipulative, coercive or performative strategy, as compared with the pursuit of concrete goals’ (2012: 884). Both Versnel’s distilled definition and Luck’s more extensive characterisation accept that both religion and magic could exist within the same conceptual framework. Both are closely related and available, in a functional way, for use by those who wished to partake. The co-existence of magic and religion in the Roman world, by its very nature, suggests that there were appropriate times to choose one over the other, or that they may have been accessed by different social groups reacting to different stimuli. Several pieces of modern academic discourse reject these direct relational interpretations of the relationship between magic and religion and instead promote a general, yet complex, relationship between the two; one that is not easily codified and is much more ephemeral than previously considered (Merrifield 1987: 6–9; Johns 1982; Bailliot 2015: 94; Bremmer 2015: 11; Chadwick 2015: 37–8). Amongst these latter positions, the subject of magic may be defined, but is done so with broad brushstrokes and with a central concern for the specific contexts in which magical beliefs and practices might be found. Indeed, the editors of this volume currently sit on different sides of this theoretical argument: McKie has previously approached curse tablets from the position that magic is complex and uncodified (2016: 23), whereas Parker has approached jet gorgoneia from the position that magic can be functionally defined (2016: 109–10). We see value in both approaches. Defining the concept of magic is, by the effort of doing so, inherently restricting to the range of material culture which might be regarded as such. Importantly, the uncritical use of such a definition may be dangerously anachronistic to the material study of the ancient world.

Aims of the Volume

Turning to the present volume, there are two main aims with which we have set out. Firstly, there is a conscious intent to continue the investigation of magical beliefs and practices as they were specifically manifested in the Roman world. In terms of chronology and geography, the majority of papers are ...