Britta Ager
PhD, Classical Studies, University of Michigan
B.A., Classics, Kenyon college
I’m a classical philologist interested in ancient agriculture; sensory studies; and ancient magic, religion, and ritual, with much of my work examining the intersection of these areas. My forthcoming book, The Scent of Ancient Magic, deals with the complex relationship between scent and magic in the ancient Mediterranean. Magicians and other ritual practitioners used smells to create the right ambience for spells and initiations, while scents acted as a gut-level model for how magic—something which was, like scent, intangible but powerful—was supposed to operate. My next book project will examine ancient farming and how Romans used agriculture as part of their public image. I’m also interested in the modern reception of classical antiquity, especially in perfumes and video games.
B.A., Classics, Kenyon college
I’m a classical philologist interested in ancient agriculture; sensory studies; and ancient magic, religion, and ritual, with much of my work examining the intersection of these areas. My forthcoming book, The Scent of Ancient Magic, deals with the complex relationship between scent and magic in the ancient Mediterranean. Magicians and other ritual practitioners used smells to create the right ambience for spells and initiations, while scents acted as a gut-level model for how magic—something which was, like scent, intangible but powerful—was supposed to operate. My next book project will examine ancient farming and how Romans used agriculture as part of their public image. I’m also interested in the modern reception of classical antiquity, especially in perfumes and video games.
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While adopting Gordon’s observation that there is no central theory of magic in antiquity, I intend to approach the subject by looking not at the broad literary tradition, but at one author and his engagement with magic across genres, and particularly the ways in which genre influences but does not control how he discusses and evaluates magic. Columella provides a useful case study in the ways in which one writer’s construction of magic can change in different contexts, even within the same work, and even when discussing the same spell. In his farming manual De re rustica, Columella describes a procedure—a charm to kill caterpillars—twice: once in prose, and a second time in self-consciously Vergilian hexameters. Although both versions describe the same procedure, Columella invokes a different theoretical understanding of magic in prose than he does in poetry, while his poetic version of the spell includes details which are slightly, but tellingly, different than in the prose version. Columella engages with both a poetic tradition, in which descriptions of a few types of magic have become standardized, and a scientific/technical tradition, in which a wider variety of spells are considered and magic as a whole is conceptualized more naturalistically.
In this paper, I argue that while many of the sounds of the papyri originate in Egyptian symbolism and Egyptian conceptions of the relationship between words, objects, and sounds, these utterances appealed to Greek-speaking magicians and entered the Greco-Roman magical lexicon because of pre-existing classical notions of the noises which accompanied supernatural encounters. Greco-Roman gods were less likely to make animal sounds themselves than to be accompanied by animals, whose barks, shrieks, and twitters are often reminiscent of the noises which accompany the appearance of supernatural beings in the magical papyri (e.g., appearances of Hecate accompanied by dogs; c.f. the barking in PGM VII.756-94). Nor were the Greek gods themselves silent, and the papyri refer to, among other things, Zeus’s thunderclaps and the “shrill-screaming” voice and doglike howling of Selene/Hecate (PGM IV.2241-2358). Their worshippers and those possessed or touched by them may also make animal sounds; thus the author of On the Sacred Disease complains about attempts to diagnose epilepsy patients as possessed by various deities according to whether they make goat, bird, or horse-like noises, in a potentially interesting parallel for initiation texts in the PGM. The Greek idea that the gods have a language of their own which humans do not share (found repeatedly in Homer; e.g., Il. 1.403-404) parallels the “falconic”, “baboonic”, and “sacred” languages which supernatural beings speak in the papyri. The dead are sometimes thought to make wordless noises of distress; thus the souls of Penelope’s suitors shriek like bats (Od. 24.6-10) and the untimely dead “hiss wildly” in a magical hymn to Hecate (PGM IV.2708-84). In short, Greek magicians were a receptive audience for the variety of wails, grunts, bangs, tweets, and so forth found in Egyptian spells, and the ways in which strange noises are deployed in the papyri shows a richly creative and syncretic tradition. Lastly, silence itself may be best regarded as a special kind of noise in both the papyri and Greco-Roman religious contexts.
Bibliography:
Tardieu, M., A. Van den Kerchove, M. Zago. 2014. Noms barbares I. Formes et contextes d'une pratique magique. Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 162.
Tardieu, M. 2014. “ ‘Ceux qui font la voix des oiseaux’: les denominations de langues,” in Tardieu, Van den Karchove and Zago 2014: 143-153.
While adopting Gordon’s observation that there is no central theory of magic in antiquity, I intend to approach the subject by looking not at the broad literary tradition, but at one author and his engagement with magic across genres, and particularly the ways in which genre influences but does not control how he discusses and evaluates magic. Columella provides a useful case study in the ways in which one writer’s construction of magic can change in different contexts, even within the same work, and even when discussing the same spell. In his farming manual De re rustica, Columella describes a procedure—a charm to kill caterpillars—twice: once in prose, and a second time in self-consciously Vergilian hexameters. Although both versions describe the same procedure, Columella invokes a different theoretical understanding of magic in prose than he does in poetry, while his poetic version of the spell includes details which are slightly, but tellingly, different than in the prose version. Columella engages with both a poetic tradition, in which descriptions of a few types of magic have become standardized, and a scientific/technical tradition, in which a wider variety of spells are considered and magic as a whole is conceptualized more naturalistically.
In this paper, I argue that while many of the sounds of the papyri originate in Egyptian symbolism and Egyptian conceptions of the relationship between words, objects, and sounds, these utterances appealed to Greek-speaking magicians and entered the Greco-Roman magical lexicon because of pre-existing classical notions of the noises which accompanied supernatural encounters. Greco-Roman gods were less likely to make animal sounds themselves than to be accompanied by animals, whose barks, shrieks, and twitters are often reminiscent of the noises which accompany the appearance of supernatural beings in the magical papyri (e.g., appearances of Hecate accompanied by dogs; c.f. the barking in PGM VII.756-94). Nor were the Greek gods themselves silent, and the papyri refer to, among other things, Zeus’s thunderclaps and the “shrill-screaming” voice and doglike howling of Selene/Hecate (PGM IV.2241-2358). Their worshippers and those possessed or touched by them may also make animal sounds; thus the author of On the Sacred Disease complains about attempts to diagnose epilepsy patients as possessed by various deities according to whether they make goat, bird, or horse-like noises, in a potentially interesting parallel for initiation texts in the PGM. The Greek idea that the gods have a language of their own which humans do not share (found repeatedly in Homer; e.g., Il. 1.403-404) parallels the “falconic”, “baboonic”, and “sacred” languages which supernatural beings speak in the papyri. The dead are sometimes thought to make wordless noises of distress; thus the souls of Penelope’s suitors shriek like bats (Od. 24.6-10) and the untimely dead “hiss wildly” in a magical hymn to Hecate (PGM IV.2708-84). In short, Greek magicians were a receptive audience for the variety of wails, grunts, bangs, tweets, and so forth found in Egyptian spells, and the ways in which strange noises are deployed in the papyri shows a richly creative and syncretic tradition. Lastly, silence itself may be best regarded as a special kind of noise in both the papyri and Greco-Roman religious contexts.
Bibliography:
Tardieu, M., A. Van den Kerchove, M. Zago. 2014. Noms barbares I. Formes et contextes d'une pratique magique. Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 162.
Tardieu, M. 2014. “ ‘Ceux qui font la voix des oiseaux’: les denominations de langues,” in Tardieu, Van den Karchove and Zago 2014: 143-153.