DIETRICH BOSCHUNG AND JAN N. BREMMER (EDS.) THE MATERIALITY OF MAGIC MORPHOMATA The Materiality of Magic is an exciting new book about an aspect of magic that is usually neglected. In the last two decades we have had many books and proceedings of conferences on the concept of magic itself as well as its history, formulas and incantations in antiquity, both in East and West. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the material that was used by the magicians for their conjuring activities. This is the first book of its kind that focuses on the material aspects of magic, such as amulets, drawings, figurines, gems, grimoires, rings, and voodoo dolls. The practice of magic required a specialist expertise that knew how to handle material such as lead, gold, stones, papyrus and terra cotta—material that sometimes was used for specific genres of magic. That is why we present in this well illustrated collection of studies new insights on the materiality of magic in antiquity by studying both the materials used for magic as well as the books in which the expertise was preserved. The main focus of the book is on antiquity, but we complement and contrast our material with examples ranging from the Ancient Near East, via early modern Europe, to the present time. BOSCHUNG, BREMMER (EDS.) – THE MATERIALITY OF MAGIC MORPHOMATA EDITED BY GÜNTER BLAMBERGER AND DIETRICH BOSCHUNG VOLUME 20 EDITED BY DIETRICH BOSCHUNG AND JAN N. BREMMER THE MATERIALITY OF MAGIC WILHELM FINK unter dem Förderkennzeichen 01UK0905. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt der Veröffentlichung liegt bei den Autoren. Bibliografische Informationen der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbi- bliografie; detaillierte Daten sind im Internet über www.dnb.d-nb.de abruf bar. Alle Rechte, auch die des auszugweisen Nachdrucks, der fotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der Übersetzung vorbehalten. Dies betrifft auch die Verviel- fältigung und Übertragung einzelner Textabschnitte, Zeichnungen oder Bilder durch alle Verfahren wie Speicherung und Übertragung auf Papier, Transparen- te, Filme, Bänder, Platten und andere Medien, soweit es nicht § 53 und 54 UrhG ausdrücklich gestatten. © 2015 Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co. Verlags-KG, Jühenplatz 1, D-33098 Paderborn Internet: www.fink.de Lektorat: Jan N. Bremmer, Torsten Zimmer, Thierry Greub Umschlaggestaltung und Entwurf Innenseiten: Kathrin Roussel Satz: Andreas Langensiepen, textkommasatz Printed in Germany Herstellung: Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn ISBN 978-3-7705-5725-7 CONTENT JAN N. BREMMER Preface: The Materiality of Magic 7 Abbreviations 21 JACCO DIELEMAN The Materiality of Textual Amulets in Ancient Egypt 23 LAURA FELDT Monstrous Figurines from Mesopotamia. Textuality, Spatiality and Materiality in Rituals and Incantations for the Protection of Houses in First-Millennium Aššur 59 JAIME CURBERA From the Magician’s Workshop: Notes on the Materiality of Greek Curse Tablets 97 JAIME CURBERA AND SERGIO GIANNOBILE A ‘Voodoo Doll’ from Keos in Berlin’s Antikensammlung 123 Appendix by JOCHEN VOGL and MARTIN ROSNER: Lead Isotope Analysis of an Ancient Voodoo Doll 127 RICHARD L. GORDON From Substances to Texts: Three Materialities of ‘Magic’ in the Roman Imperial Period 133 VÉRONIQUE DASEN Probaskania: Amulets and Magic in Antiquity 177 ÁRPÁD M. NAGY Engineering Ancient Amulets: Magical Gems of the Roman Imperial Period 205 JAN N. BREMMER From Books with Magic to Magical Books in Ancient Greece and Rome? 241 JITSE DIJKSTRA The Interplay between Image and Text. On Greek Amulets Containing Christian Elements from Late Antique Egypt 271 JÜRGEN BLÄNSDORF The Curse Inscriptions and the Materia Magica of the Anna-Perenna-Nymphaeum at Rome 293 ANNEWIES VAN DEN HOEK, DENIS FEISSEL, JOHN J. HERRMANN, JR. More Lucky Wearers: The Magic of Portable Inscriptions 309 PETER J. FORSHAW Magical Material & Material Survivals: Amulets, Talismans, and Mirrors in Early Modern Europe 357 OWEN DAVIES The Material Culture of Post-Medieval Domestic Magic in Europe: Evidence, Comparisons and Interpretations 379 Notes on Contributors 419 Plates 427 JAN N. BREMMER PREFACE: THE MATERIALITY OF MAGIC The modern study of ancient magic started, arguably, around 1900 with the publications of several corpora of magical texts by Richard Wünsch (1869–1915) and Auguste Audollent (1864–1943).1 Although in the inter- vening period some interesting and still useful studies appeared, such as the edition of the magical papyri,2 it seems fair to say that a second wave of interest began only in the middle of the 1980s, when David Jordan published a new survey of Greek defixiones, and an équipe around Hans-Dieter Betz issued a translation of the Greek magical papyri.3 It would not last long before a real tsunami of monographs, translations and proceedings of conferences on magic appeared,4 the first of them 1 R. Wünsch, Defixionum Tabellae = IG III.3: Appendix (Berlin 1897), re- printed by A. L. Oikonomides, IG I2, II/III2 Paraleipomena et Addenda: In­ scriptiones Atticae. Supplementum Inscriptionum Atticarum I (Chicago, 1976) 1–250, Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom (Leipzig, 1898) and ‘Neue Fluchtafeln’, Rhein. Mus. 55 (1900) 62–85, 232–71; A. Audollent, Defixionum tabellae (Paris, 1904, repr. Frankfurt, 1967); R. Wünsch, Antike Fluchtafeln (Bonn, 1907, 19122). For Wünsch, see H. Hepding, ‘Richard Wünsch’, Hessi­ sche Blätter für Volkskunde 14 (1915) 136–43; W. Kroll, ‘Richard Wünsch’, Bio­ graphisches Jahrbuch für die Altertumswissenschaft 38 (1916/1918) 1–11 (with bibliography). For Audollent, see G. Németh, Supplementum Audollentianum (Saragoza et al., 2013) 15–22. 2 K. Preisendanz, Papyri graecae magicae, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1928–31, re-ed. A. Henrichs, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1973–742). 3 . D R. Jordan, ‘A Survey of Greek Defixiones not included in the Special Corpora’, GRBS 26 (1985) 151–97; H.-D. Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Pa­ pyri in Translation (Chicago and London, 19861, 19922), to be read with the still useful review by W. Brashear, ‘“Botokudenphilologie” Vindicated’, Intern. J. Classical Tradition 5 (1998) 66–79. 4 For good bibliographies, see P. Brillet and A. Moreau, ‘Bibliographie 8 being the 1991 volume Magika Hiera, edited by Chris Faraone and Dirk Obbink. Although the editors tell us in their Preface that they set out to ‘establish the study of magic as an area to be ignored by students of ancient religion and society only at their peril’, their Preface only makes a few observations on the problem of the relationship between magic and religion (below), although not defining either of these terms, and pays no attention to other aspects of magic; in fact, the Preface leaves no impression that the editors realised the innovative character of their collection at the time.5 Given the available corpora, it is not surprising that most of the subsequent publications concentrated on the Greek world rather than on the Latin one. It would even last to 2010 before a collective volume appeared that concentrated exclusively on the Latin West.6 Consequently, the Greek world is clearly overrepresented in the best general studies of ancient magic, those by Fritz Graf and Matthew Dickie, which appeared in the initial wake of the renewed interest.7 The earlier studies concentrated much more on the edition of texts and their categorisations, on the person of the magician himself and on the social practices connected with magic than on the material side of magic. This can also be easily demonstrated from the indices of the books by Graf and Dickie. When we look at the objects discussed in the present volume, we note that neither index contains the lemmata ‘book’, ‘charaktêres’, ‘gem’, ‘phylactery’, ‘plants’, ‘ring’, ‘stones’, and ‘voo- doo doll’. ‘Figurines’ are mentioned by Graf but not by Dickie who, in turn, gives much more attention to amulets than Graf. It is clear from these omissions, which are not compensated by other studies, that there is room for a volume that looks at the artifacts used in magic. In other words, instead of looking at the social, intellectual or philological side of magic, the time is ripe for a volume that primarily concentrates on the materiality of magic. générale’, in A. Moreau and J.-C. Turpin (eds), La magie, 4 vols (Montpel- lier, 2000) 4. 7–159; J. L. Calvo Martínez, ‘Cien años de investigación sobre la magia antigua’, MHNH 1 (2001) 7–60; P. Fabrini, Magica antiqua. Indice e guida a una bibliografía informatica (Pisa, 2006); R. Gordon and F. Marco Simón (eds), Magical Practice in the Latin West (Leiden, 2010) 1–4. 5 C. Faraone and D. Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera (New York and Oxford, 1991) vii (quotation). 6 Gordon and Marco Simón, Magical Practice in the Latin West. 7 F. Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge MA and London, 1997); M. W. Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco­Roman World (London, 2001). JAN N. BREMMER: PREFACE: THE Materiality OF MAGIC 9 Interest in the material side of magic well fits the recent phenome- non of what has been called ‘the material turn’, which in turn derived from the so-called ‘cultural turn’. A proper genealogy of these ‘turns’ still has to be written, although we can observe that they started to take off in the 1980s and 1990s.8 The emergence of the material turn is a complicat- ed process, but it can hardly be separated from the rise of the consumer society. As things became more important in our lives, sooner or later, the scholars followed. One need not necessarily accept the vocabulary of ‘the agency of things’ in order to understand that things have an increas- ing impact on our lives. It is therefore not surprising that this growing interest in the material side of our existence has also led to an increasing attention to the material side of religion, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.