In our first post on Christianity in magic, we discussed AMS 9, a large book filled with amuletic texts. Among these were the first verses (incipits) of five texts from the Bible – the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Psalm 90 (Western Psalm 91). As we noted then, these were intended to be copied onto smaller objects and worn as a way to protect the body from sickness, demonic attacks, and misfortune. This week, we’ll discuss the use of the Bible in “magical” practice in a little more detail. This discussion will draw extensively upon a recently published study of such practices, Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from…
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Religion in the Magical Papyri VI: Christianity and Magic
In our previous posts we have discussed “pagan” and “gnostic” influences in Coptic language magic, so readers would be forgiven for thinking that all such texts are full of Greek, Egyptian and Sethian deities. The bulk of our manuscripts, however, date to between the fifth and eleventh centuries CE, a period for most of which the majority of Egyptians were, at least nominally, adherents to some form of orthodox Christianity. Christianity was the dominant worldview, and the magical texts therefore reflect this, and seem to adhere to some kind of Christianity, even if they are not always strictly orthodox. But what does this “Christian magic” look like? AMS 9 is…
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Religion in the Coptic Magical Papyri II: Greek Gods in Coptic Magic
In the fifth century – the period when Christianity was settling in as the dominant religion of Egypt – Shenoute of Atripe (ca. 347-465 CE), head of a monastic federation in Upper Egypt, gave a sermon in which he attacked heretics, pagans and the orthodox Christians who fraternised with them. The sermon is known as The Lord Thundered, and it lives up to its name. Shenoute speaks of the wrath of God which will descend upon the pagans, and asks rhetorically how their false gods will save them: Where is Zeus, or his son Ares: the one who took the form of a wild boar to show his impurity? And…