Drawing Down the Moon

Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World

Radcliffe G. Edmonds, III

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780691230214, 9780691156934
• eBook ISBN: 9780691186092
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

An unparalleled exploration of magic in the Greco-Roman world

What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? In Drawing Down the Moon, Radcliffe Edmonds, one of the foremost experts on magic, religion, and the occult in the ancient world, provides the most comprehensive account of the varieties of phenomena labeled as magic in classical antiquity. Exploring why certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as “magic” and set apart from “normal” kinds of practices, Edmonds gives insight into the shifting ideas of religion and the divine in the ancient past and later Western tradition.

Using fresh approaches to the history of religions and the social contexts in which magic was exercised, Edmonds delves into the archaeological record and classical literary traditions to examine images of witches, ghosts, and demons as well as the fantastic powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, and reversals of nature, such as the famous trick of drawing down the moon. From prayer and divination to astrology and alchemy, Edmonds journeys through all manner of ancient magical rituals and paraphernalia—ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, and amulets and talismans. He considers the ways in which the Greco-Roman discourse of magic was formed amid the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the Near East.

An investigation of the mystical and marvelous, Drawing Down the Moon offers an unparalleled record of the origins, nature, and functions of ancient magic.

1

Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World

She strives with the reluctant moon, to bring it down from its course in the skies, and makes hide away in shadows the steeds of the sun; she reins the waters in, and stays the down-winding stream; she charms life into trees and rocks, and moves them from their place. Among sepulchres she stalks, ungirded, with hair flowing loose, and gathers from the yet warm funeral pyre the appointed bones. She vows to their doom the absent, fashions the waxen image, and into its wretched heart drives the slender needle—and other deeds ’twere better not to know.

(Ovid, Heroides 6.84–93)¹

INTRODUCTION

Magic—the word evokes the mysterious and the marvelous, the forbidden and the hidden, the ancient and the arcane—deeds that it is better not to know. Drawing down the moon and reversing the rivers’ flow, like sticking pins into wax images and stealing bones from funeral pyres, are typical examples of magic, and Ovid’s Hypsipyle accuses Medea, her rival for her lover, Jason, of doing such terrible things. Drawing down the moon from the sky is a familiar trope in discussions of the weird and extra-ordinary activity that is often labeled ‘magic,’ and it appears, either as part of a list of magical acts or as a single act representative of the whole scope of magical possibilities, in sources throughout the ancient Greco-Roman world, by which I mean the peoples of the Mediterranean region who expressed themselves in Greek or Latin between the eighth century BCE and the fifth century CE.

So what did ‘magic’ mean to the people who first coined the term, the people of ancient Greece and Rome? In this study, which takes its title of Drawing Down the Moon from the most famous of the magical tricks known from the ancient world, I survey the varieties of phenomena labeled ‘magic’ in the ancient Greco-Roman world, seeking ways to form a definition of magic to understand the uses of the label. I discuss ancient tablets and spell books as well as literary descriptions of magic in the light of theories relating to the religious, political, and social contexts in which magic was used. I also examine the magicians of the ancient world and the techniques and devices they used to serve their clientele. Bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, amulets and talismans—from the simple spells designed to meet the needs of the poor and desperate to the complex theurgies of the philosophers, the people of the Greco-Roman world did not only imagine what magic could do, they also made use of magic to try to influence the world around them.

The study of magic in the Greco-Roman world is not merely an exploration into the weird and wonderful, an antiquarian search for the colorful corners of the ancient world. Understanding why certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as ‘magic’ and set apart from the normal kinds of practices provides insight into the shifting ideas of normal religion in the Greco-Roman world. Normative religion is that which both follows the model of socially accepted religious activity and expresses that model for the community, and, from our own contemporary cultural context, we tend by default to think of normative religion in terms of institutionally sanctioned correct ways of believing (orthodoxy) and of practicing religion (orthopraxy). However, in societies with no notion of orthodoxy and even limited modes of orthopraxy, normative religion could only be defined by this kind of practice of labeling, and ‘magic’ was one of the more important labels that was used, in different ways by different people at different times. The study of ancient magic therefore provides a crucial perspective on normative practices of religion in the ancient Greco-Roman world—on ritual practices such as sacrifice, purification, and prayer, on theological elaborations of the hierarchies of divinities, and on the underlying cosmologies that structured human interactions with both the material world and the divine.

The evidence for magic comes not only from the familiar literary traditions of the classical world, the spectacular and memorable images of witches, ghosts, and demons and the fantastic powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, or reversals of nature such as the famous trick of drawing down the moon. The archaeological record provides evidence that attests to the ideas of people in the ancient world who never had a chance to contribute to the literary tradition, the non-elites or marginal figures whose expressions were never preserved and recopied throughout the millennia of reception of classical materials. In the curses scrawled on sheets of lead, seeking to restrain rivals in business, law courts, athletics, or erotic affairs, we can see the hopes and fears of a group of people whose voices have been lost in the intervening centuries. In the elaborate formulations of the spell books or alchemical recipes, we can see the complex workings of intellectuals who remained at the margins of society, engaging in complex speculations about the nature of the world and the gods. In the jumbled lists of powers invoked, we can see the dynamics of cultural fusion that occurred in the rich multicultural environment of the ancient Mediterranean world, where an ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ereškigal might be invoked alongside the Greek Persephone and the Egyptian Isis, right next to a prayer to the supreme deity Iaō, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Jehovah.

Understanding the category of magic in its ancient Greco-Roman context is important for understanding not only the ancient world itself, but also the ways in which the ideas and controversies have influenced later periods. The ways in which things and ideas are labeled ‘magic’ in the ancient world are replicated in religious controversies throughout the later Western tradition. Most famous of these is perhaps the critique of Catholic ritualism that plays a central role in the Protestant Reformation, but even in the witch hunts that are used to reinforce (or invent) orthodoxy, we can see the reuse of ancient categories for normative and non-normative religion in the accusations of magic. On the more positive side, the esoteric traditions of ancient wisdom that manifested in the astrological, pharmacological, and alchemical practices of ancient magic play an important part in the history of science from antiquity through the Enlightenment and beyond. A deeper understanding of the category of magic in its ancient contexts provides a richer understanding of its reception.

Drawing down the moon provides an illustrative example of the issues involved with understanding magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world and its later receptions. This act, which appears in the contemporary world as an important ritual in certain Wiccan and Neopagan traditions, appears first in the evidence from the ancient world as a joke. In Aristophanes’s Clouds, the scoundrel Strepsiades explains his cunning plan for getting out of his debts. He’ll hire a Thessalian witch to draw down the moon and keep it in a box so that the new moon day, on which debt payments are due, will never come.²

STREPSIADES: I have an idea for cheating them of the interest.

SOCRATES: Explain it.

STREPSIADES: Tell me now, then. . . .

SOCRATES: What?

STREPSIADES: If I should hire a Thessalian witch woman and draw down the moon at night, and then I lock it up in a round case, like a mirror, and then I keep it guarded . . .

SOCRATES: And what would you gain from that?

STREPSIADES: Why, if the moon should never rise anywhere, then I would not pay interest.

SOCRATES: And why is that?

STREPSIADES: Because the money is lent month by month.

This joke reveals several things about the idea of drawing down the moon in Aristophanes’s Athens. First, the procedure was familiar enough to his audience that it could be mentioned without explanation: everyone knows that Thessalian witches draw down the moon. Secondly, Strepsiades proposes this idea as an extra-ordinary solution to his debt problem; drawing down the moon is a dramatic reversal of the natural order that will get him out of an otherwise insoluble crisis. Thirdly, however, Strepsiades is a comic idiot, which means that his plan won’t work, even within the fiction of the comedy; the extra-ordinary feat of drawing down the moon is actually a worthless sham, good only for a laugh at Strepsiades’s expense.

This same constellation of familiarity within the tradition coupled with either extra-ordinary power or worthless superstition appears repeatedly in evidence for magic throughout the ancient Greco-Roman world. It is worth probing, however, how exactly this extra-ordinary nature of magic appears throughout the evidence—what is magic? To answer this question, we must start with a definition of magic that can help us make sense of the evidence. I therefore propose that:

Magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer.

Each piece of this definition needs unpacking, and its usefulness can be demonstrated through a closer examination of some of the evidence for drawing down the moon.

DEFINING MAGIC IN THE ANCIENT GRECO-ROMAN WORLD

Magic and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

In her review of several scholarly works on magic in the ancient world, Sarah Iles Johnston refers to Marvin Meyers’s comparison of the scholarship on magic to riding a rather rickety bicycle; we continue to make progress in understanding ancient magic as we pedal forward working with the evidence, but every once in a while, we need to stop and do some maintenance on the bicycle itself, our definition of the category of magic. The definition will always be a bit rickety, but if we spend all our time and energy in trying to fix it up, we will never make any progress.³ Nearly fifteen years after her reflection, however, it may be time for some more work on the definition of magic.

Defining magic is notoriously problematic, and the comparison is often made to Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous comment on pornography: he couldn’t quite define it, but he knew it when he saw it.⁴ When people see an example of drawing down the moon, most would know it as magic, even if they can’t articulate why. This sort of intuitive definition is the starting point for any kind of classification, but if it remains the end point as well, the definition will be full of tacit and unexamined presuppositions that do more or less violence to the subject under investigation. We can move, however, from an intuitive to an analytic definition by making explicit and examining the presuppositions we bring to it—why does it feel like magic, smell like magic, look like magic? What distinguishes the things that we know as magic when we see them from the things that we don’t classify as magic?

If we are looking at magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world, we face the further problem that our categories and classifications do not necessarily align with the classifications made in those cultures during those times. What did those people define as magic, and by what criteria did they make their distinctions? Anthropologists distinguish between emic and etic perspectives on a culture, between the cultural insider’s perspective and the outside, scholarly perspective.⁵ An account from a member of the community, using the terms and categories of the culture, provides an emic perspective, while someone examining the culture from the outside, using the terms and categories of his or her own culture, takes an etic perspective. Ideally, to understand another culture, we must understand the way that the people in that culture think, but, as anthropologists have shown, an outsider can never fully adopt an insider perspective. In the case of the ancient Greco-Roman world, we are separated too far in time (and, for many of us, in space as well) to merge seamlessly into the world of those we study; the gaps in the evidence are too enormous, and the cultural shifts over the centuries are too great and too complex.

Thus, we must start with etic definitions, since those are the presuppositions we bring to any inquiry from our own culture and upbringing. Ultimately, we must end up with etic definitions as well, since we cannot analyze another culture as though we were part of it. So, for the modern scholar, ‘magic’ will always be an etic category, formulated for the purposes of analyzing and understanding the ancient Greco-Roman world.⁶ If we want to make sense of the evidence for ourselves, we cannot do without definitions altogether; any attempt to do so just ends up bringing back in implicit—and therefore unexamined—etic definitions.⁷ However, we can come up with better etic definitions if we look to the way the ancient Greeks and Romans made their own emic definitions and drew their own categories.⁸ If we refine our intuitive modern etic definitions with reference to the evidence for the ancient emic classifications, the bicycle may still end up a bit wobbly, but we will be able to make better progress.

Magic as a Discourse

One of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited: Titles And Abbreviations
• 1. Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World
• 2. The World of Ancient Greco-Roman Magic
• 3. Curses for All Occasions: Malefic and Binding Magic
• 4. Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered: Love Charms and Erotic Curses
• 5. Healing and Protective Magic: Defense against the Dark Arts
• 6. Relationships With the Divine: Prayer and Magic
• 7. Through a Glass Darkly: Divination and Magic
• 8. Mysteries of the Heavenly Spheres: Astrology and Magic
• 9. Transmutations of Quality: Alchemy and Magic
• 10. The Illuminations of Theurgy: Philosophy and Magic
• 11. The Label of ‘Magic’ In the Ancient Greco-Roman World
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• Subject Index