Ancient Greece and Rome

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Jacqueline Simpson

Vol. 2: Ancient Greece and Rome, 394 pp. ISBN 0-485-89002-X (hbk), 0-485-89102-6 (pbk)

In recent years, there has been a remarkable outpouring of academic witchcraft studies, of which these finely researched and judiciously balanced volumes provide an excellent example. There are three more to come; when the series is complete, it will cover the magical beliefs of Europeans from their roots in ancient Biblical and pagan cultures to the present day, with contributions from almost two dozen authoritative scholars.

Daniel Ogden opens the volume on Ancient Greece and Rome with an analysis of lead tablets bearing curses or sexual spells, and of voodoo dolls from the classical world. Their wording shows that the aim was to "bind" the victim, i.e. to make him powerless, not to harm him physically; twisting the tablets and dolls, or driving nails through them, symbolised this "binding." The objects drew their power from the dead, or from unintelligible words and names of demons; word patterns, unusual alphabets, and drawn symbols were fairly common.

In the second chapter, Georg Luck summarises the literary accounts of various mythical, historical, or fictional figures credited with magic power, from Homer to Lucan, Apuleius and Lucian; he includes some Jewish and early Christian material about Moses, Solomon and Simon Magus. Esoteric wisdom and public displays of wonder-working feature strongly in this material.

Next, Richard Gordon's "Imagining Greek and Roman Magic" is a long, closely-argued study, showing that there was no single ancient "view of magic," but instead, an ongoing debate between competing ideologies, in which "everybody [was] talking at once" (p. 163). There was a politically motivated distrust of anything outside the norms of civic religion, and a fear of harmful spells and potions. On the other hand, many sceptics mocked all magic as fraud; but there was also a widespread fascination with marvels. Some believers explained the efficacy of magic by the activity of daemones, others by subtle physical forces in Nature, such as the "effluences" supposedly emanating from all objects, or the curious properties of plants, stones and animals. Some saw malign magic as a deliberate reversal and profanation of the rituals of socially approved religion, an attitude which seems to have gained ground towards the end of the period. Dr Gordon's painstaking exploration of the social and intellectual contexts for these varied views is deeply illuminating.

The last contributor to this volume is Valerie Flint, describing how Greek daimones (which had been more often helpful than evil) became identified in Christian thought with Jewish devils, while their benevolent functions were transferred to angels. Magicians were then said to draw their powers from demons/devils; interestingly, since the Christian cure for this was exorcism and penance, those who accepted it were protected by the Church from the harsh prosecutions of imperial law. Dr Flint then examines which elements of classical magic carried over into early Christian ritual. Here her argument is sometimes flawed by disregard of Biblical precedents, although these were the essential criteria whereby Christians distinguished permissible dealings with the supernatural from forbidden ones. Monks who remove their shoes in the presence of the Eucharist, for instance, are surely recalling Moses and the Burning Bush, not magic ritual (p. 343); the angel who purifies baptismal waters is not "an old daimon reclothed as an angel," but a direct allusion to the angel at the healing pool of Bethesda (p. 336). In the interplay between paganism and Christianity, Judaism is a crucial factor which should receive more emphasis than it does here.

Volume 5, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, has a twofold theme: how and why trials for witchcraft ceased, but also how strongly belief in witchcraft persisted in European culture, especially at the popular level. The first section, by Brian Levack, examines legal history to show why prosecutions declined and eventually stopped; this was not due to general intellectual "enlightenment" (a process which had not yet begun), but to a specific anxiety among lawyers that innocent people were being condemned on unsound evidence. Supporting his argument by records from France, England, Scotland, Wurttemburg and Hungary, he shows that the type of judicial system was the chief factor affecting the pace of change: the more firmly procedure was controlled by central state authority and inquisitorial processes, the sooner witch trials ceased, whereas local courts and jury systems went on prosecuting and convicting.

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra examines the continuing role of "witchcraft" as an explanation for misfortunes in daily life, and the practice of counter-magic to cope with it, from the second half of the seventeenth century to about 1900. She summarises work recently done in this field from many parts of Europe; however, any general conclusions can only be tentative, for other regions remain unstudied. Broadly speaking, the frequency of supposed bewitchments diminished; their scope was restricted to personal, not communal, misfortunes; socially, a narrower range of persons was involved. Nevertheless, the persistence is as striking as the changes, and some forms of magical activity (love charms, treasure-seeking) seem in some areas to have become more prominent than in earlier periods. Unofficial violence against suspects was quite common in several countries, and consultation of "unwitchers" even more so. In some areas, it is possible to find evidence bearing upon gender roles, but more research is needed on the social reasons for accusations. All this material is of prime value to folklorists; not only is it fascinating in itself, but it provides a firm historical context for anecdotal memories of individual witches and unwitchers, such as our own Cunning Murrell or the Danish practitioners vividly described in H. P. Hansen's Kloge Folk (1961).