On the ninth of March 1932, a young Coptic woman living near el-Badari in Upper Egypt was stung on the chest by a scorpion. A healer named Butros Salib Girgis Bahum Biyush was called, and he copied an amulet onto a piece of paper for her, depicting an image of a huge black scorpion, surrounded by Arabic and Coptic text calling upon God to overcome the power of the scorpion sting, making reference to the Biblical promise in Psalm LXX 90 (Masoretic 91) that the Lord would tread upon scorpion and serpent and the power of the Adversary. Thanks, perhaps, to the amulet, the woman survived, and subsequently lived to…
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- Animals in Coptic Magic, Coptic Favour Spells, Coptic Love Spells, Coptic Magic, Greek Magic, History of Magic
Animals in Coptic Magic I: The Blood of a White Dove
In this new series of blog posts, we will be looking at the place of animals in Coptic magic, beginning with an introduction to the different roles that they play, and ending with a discussion of one strange substance. This series summarises and updates an article written by Korshi Dosoo, Suffering Doe and Sleeping Serpent: Animals in Christian Magical Texts from Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt, which is available to read online in open access. It is well known that ancient Egyptians often represented their gods in animal, or part-animal forms, reflecting the idea that the animal form, like the human form, was potentially divine. This idea continues in…
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2024 Review: The Beginning of the Coptic Magical Formularies Project
Looking forward… The Coptic Magical Papyri project ended last year, but we are happy to announce that it will continue in a new form. The Coptic Magical Formularies project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for three years, from 2024 to 2027, with the research to be carried out by Korshi Dosoo, former leader of the Coptic Magical Texts project, and Markéta Preininger, formerly doctoral and then postdoctoral researcher on the same project. This project will focus on the production of a second volume of the Papyri Copticae Magicae, the series whose first volume appeared last year. This new volume will contain dozens more magical texts written…
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Minor database update (8/3/2024)
We recently became aware of an error in the latest update which meant that the dates of manuscripts were not displaying properly. The latest update fixes this, and adds minor corrections made in the last month.
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Kyprianos Update (2 February 2024)
After a big year preparing the first volume of the Papyri Copticae Magicae (PCM), we’ve finally had time to post a new update to the Kyprianos Database of Ancient Ritual Texts and Objects. As well as the usual corrections and updates, the contents of this update include: For anyone who would like to access the raw data, remember that the Manuscripts and Texts tables may be downloaded from the Database Help page (“About the Kyprianos Database”) in the form of CSV files.
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Podcast #14: Looking Back at the Five Years of the Project & Presenting Papyri Copticae Magicae
In this episode, I discuss the results of the Coptic Magical Papyri project with Korshi Dosoo, the project leader. We also discuss our new book, Papyri Copticae Magicae volume 1, which is available for sale in printed and electronic format on the De Gruyter website. For more details on the book, click here. To purchase the book, click here.
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2023 Review: The End of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project and the Beginning of the Papyri Copticae Magicae
It’s hard to believe that a little over five years have now passed since the three original members of the Coptic Magical Papyri project sat in the Egyptology department in Würzburg and began to plan how we could contribute to the study of Coptic magical texts. In August of this year our project ended, and so in this blog post we will discuss what we achieved in the last five years, beginning with our exciting news, the publication of the first in a new series of Coptic magical texts, Papyri Copticae Magicae. Papyri Copticae Magicae. Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies From the beginning of our project we planned to…
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Podcast #13: Byzantine Magic with Michael Zellmann-Rohrer
In this episode, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer introduces us to Byzantine magic. Michael Zellmann-Rohrer has an undergraduate degree in classical philology from Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on late ancient and medieval Greek and Latin magical texts at the University of California. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a research associate on the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names at the University of Oxford. Currently, Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is part of the ERC project “Zodiac – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation”, in which he is dealing with a corpus of texts and practices related to his earlier interest in magic. Astrology is another form of easily transmissible folk knowledge with a foundation…
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Materiality and Liminality in Incantation Bowls
A guest post by Anne Sieberichs Introduction The Aramaic Incantation bowls, produced between the fifth and the eighth centuries CE, prove to be an interesting case study, demonstrating the importance of both the visual characteristics of ancient sources and their written content. In art history, archeology, and/or history, one tends to focus on either materiality or textual content. When considering a written object, one cannot understand its true nature if one ignores its materiality and use. As beautifully stated by Daniel Miller (2009: preface), “things make us as much as we make things”. Consequently, objects can have a social life on their own and influence the human subject (Ireland &…
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2022 Review: The Fourth Year of the Coptic Magical Papyri Project
Four years of the Coptic Magical Papyri project have passed, and just a little bit less than one remains. We’ve managed to achieve a lot, but we still have much more to do, and we hope to have some pleasant surprises for our followers in the next few months. The team once again underwent some changes this year – we said goodbye to Matouš Preininger, who since 2020 has been providing us with invaluable IT support. But we were able to welcome back Stella Türker, who has returned to continue helping us by compiling data on manuscripts in the database, and had a new member join the team – Selina…