Review — Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Volume 1
I have to admit the publishing strategy behind this particular volume has me confused. If you want to read the whole book for free online, you can do so at this site, which will make a PDF available in two years. Those who want a printed volume, as I did, may acquire a softcover edition from Lulu. At the same time, the forthcoming companion volume, which provides more information on history and paleography, is going to be released by University of Michigan Press. It had better, because the last time someone broke the texts and the analysis into separate books, the latter never got printed.
We’ll get to that concern. But first, what can we say about the “Greek Magical Papyri”?
In this case, that’s only partially true. What is called “Greek” is actually a mixture of material in both Greek and Demotic Egyptian script (among others), and the “papyri” include texts from ostraca, or potsherds, as well as magical gems and other sources. As for whether they’re “magical”…if you don’t know how incredibly problematic that term is, I’d suggest reading some more in the field.
These texts date from about the second century B.C./B.C.E. to the fourth century A.D./C.E., and are a marvelous corpus of material detailing written magical procedures, covering both formularies that collect spells and procedures as well as written amulets themselves. How this has survived and how it came down to us is a complicated process better left to others.
These texts were floating around in the nineteenth century, capturing the attention of both Egyptologists and occultists. Many of these texts came to the attention of Karl Preisendanz, who was a librarian (yay!) and a Nazi (ugh). He edited two volumes of these texts with German translations, with the third volume having been destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. In 1986, Hans Dieter Betz at the University of Chicago presented his own English translations of the material. As can be expected, since then scholars have found more texts and scholarship has improved, leaving both works incomplete. Four years after Betz, Daniel and Maltomini released another two-volume work, the Supplementum Magicum, with some of the texts discovered since. And we’ve had another thirty years since then, with more finds and more interpretations, making a new edition very welcome.
For those who haven’t encountered the papyri before, it’s a diverse collection of material of different lengths for a large number of purposes. Although overall many of the techniques echo those of Greece, mentions of Egyptian gods, beliefs, and materials are common, and some of the names of power seem to originate from Jewish contexts.
Faraone and Tovar have re-ordered the work chronologically, to portray the development of the genre over time and collate material from the same period. Each of the formularies, redesignated with a number starting with GEMF. (I’m not sure how well this is going to work with subsequent discoveries needing to be placed outside sequential order, but so it goes.) Each work is described in terms of discovery, publication and commentary, and repository. Next Faraone and Tovar provide a summary of the work’s physical characteristics, the script and handwriting what sort of work it is, and how much has survived, along with brief notes upon its contents. Following this is usually a two-page spread, with the left serving as a transcription of the original, and the right providing an English translation. All of this is extensively footnoted in terms with information of use to both specialists and more casual readers.
The book has an extensive bibliography. It does lack an index, which is somewhat mitigated by having an online document — except that one also is hard to search due to browsers apparently not being to load the whole thing at once. Maybe this will be mitigated when the PDF appears in two years.
Should you get this, if your library already has Preisendanz or Betz? Some famous operations from the PGM — such as the so-called “Mithras Liturgy” and the Headless (a.k.a. Bornless) Ritual — are not included in this volume. Even after both volumes are eventually published, the older works will have the texts for the shorter amulets. It does include additional formulary material that will supplement the previous works. (For example, even leaving through it I was able to find GEMF 46, which includes another procedure reminiscent of the “Eye of Abraham,” with the additional twist of rubbing the image with onions to make their eyes weep.) I suppose there’s a question here of how important including the latest and most comprehensive scholarship is for you.
If you’re just curious… I don’t know if you should buy the print version, a pretty expensive work detailing a tradition from two millennia ago based upon documents that are often fragmentary. Still, it’s in print and not partially destroyed from bombing, unlike Preisendanz’s edition. The Betz edition is marginally cheaper than this first of two volumes, so the price point is slightly in its favor. I’d suggest looking at the online edition and making a call from there. That alone will lead to good quality scholarship on these fascinating documents being propogated to a wider audience.
