Finding Magic in the 1st Century CE
For this week’s post, I’m going to venture into the era of Coptic magic. For my information, I’m dipping into an excellent website, Coptic Magical Papyri. As the website’s logo shows, Coptic magical papyri span the late Roman and early Islamic periods in Egypt. Very roughly, that’s the 1st century CE.
“Coptic” is the language descended from ancient Egyptian, written in a mostly Greek alphabet. Arabic supplanted coptic in Egypt (around 630 CE), although the Christian Coptic church preserved it.
Analogy in Coptic Magic
So, this is far later magic than that of the Hittites I write about in my fiction (around 1180 BCE). However, interestingly, both Coptic and Hittite magic use the principle of analogy. As X happens, so let Y happen. Invoke the correct powerful spirits or super humans and make the magical signs to cause the wished for analogy to become real.
In the Hittite context, the magical signs take the form of a rite. For example, the Hittite tablets describe banishing disharmony between two opponents (family or rulers) by spitting out the conflict onto wax tongues and burning them. (That’s only 1 step among many, but it’s key.) Coptic practitioners drew magical signs on the papyri to accomplish a similar goal.
Defining Coptic Magic
I’ll quote the website’s criteria to define Coptic magical texts:
- They contain instructions for, or are the result of, private rituals intended to invoke superhuman beings in order to curse, to provoke love, to heal, to protect, or to perform divination.
- They contain characteristic verbal formulae, such as “I invoke you” or “I adjure you”.
- They contain genre markers such as kharaktêres (“magical symbols”), voces magicae (magical words, the ancient equivalent of “abracadabra”), or figurae magicae (magical drawings)
Take Fever Away!
In this time of pandemic, the website’s post about an amulet to banish a fever from Thōthphe, the son of Giorgia seems appropriate. The 10 cm by 8 cm rectangular papyrus opens with a list of magical names. Most notable are the names of the Hebrew youths thrown into a blazing furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, as told in chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel. Just as these youths withstood the burning furnace and survived, so may these powerful named “super humans” take away the fever from Thōthphe. Coptic magic is an intriguing blend of Christian, Greek, and Middle Eastern elements.
The website post about the amulet papyrus that Thōthphe wore or held is well worth a read. Exploring the website as a whole is also a very enjoyable mix of scholarly precision and highly approachable writing on all aspects of Coptic magic.