This book presents thought-provoking perspectives on magic for a wide audience. Hoping to encourage scholars to apply magical artefacts to larger questions, Sanzo offers a book ‘not about magic’ (2, his emphasis) but closely reading amulets to investigate ‘boundaries’, religious and medial. He retains ‘magic’ despite its problems, relying on taxonomy — modern scholars consistently identify certain artefacts as magical — and sidesteps debates on how to define magic.
An introductory chapter opens with Augustine, who rails against amulet-makers and their deception of unsuspecting clients. For S. it is a question of perspective: Augustine, and the Christian amulet-makers, viewed religious boundaries differently from the clients, who were unaware of the problem. A highlight of S.’s discussion of definitions is a call to rethink binary classifications of artefacts as amuletic or not (13–14). The remaining book has four chapters in two overarching parts: ‘Discursive Boundaries of Rituals and Groups’ and ‘Discursive Boundaries of Texts and Traditions’. S. critiques scholarly opposition of ancient elites and non-elites — a false boundary, for him — in how they tolerated religious difference, less and more respectively. Still less for him do amulets exemplify religious ‘blending’: participating in contemporary trends, they draw difference and denigrate the resulting others.
Ch. 1, on boundaries between licit and illicit ritual, adapts a journal article that S. published in 2019. Central is a Coptic prayer in a papyrus codex (Leiden AMS 9), which he situates between magic and religion: it marks, and wards off, improper ritual as the work of a magos. Similarly, internal boundaries divide Christian magic from Jewish religion, according to S.’s second chapter, and these views, against modern perceptions of disinterest, transcend social hierarchies. Such differentiation, by claiming correct belief, could support ritual efficacy, on the analogy of purity requirements. S. resists neat divisions by religion, and undifferentiated analysis as syncretism. Rather than intentionally crossing such boundaries as they did recognise, practitioners may have defined Christianity differently, accommodating diverse elements through assimilation. By contrast, S. cites Christian amulets that align themselves with anti-Jewish invective as positive evidence for differentiation.
Ch. 3 begins the book’s second part, on boundaries in media and gesture. A parchment amulet from Oxyrhynchus (POxy. VIII 1077) exemplifies combinations: ‘performative’ folding of a sheet, arraying text and image in significant shapes. Psalm 90(91) served amulets across media and Christian and Jewish traditions. S. finds cultural implications, including a preference for text over image in the Jewish amuletic tradition. An argument connecting crosses in amulets to gestures of crossing remains speculative; that the Oxyrhynchite parchment ‘required the (human or divine) reader to gesture the cross with his or her head when reading’ (85) does not follow from the cruciform shape of its columns, which follow the normal order (top-bottom, left-right). Consideration of haptic aspects, which S. encourages, is welcome, but amulets’ weight, which he emphasises, may disappoint. Lightweight papyrus, for example, could be worn in a container of another, heavier material.
Ch. 4 develops Philippe Derchain’s interpretation of a much-discussed gem, now in the British Museum (1986,0501.1), to argue that it presents Jesus among the ‘violently deceased’ (bi(ai)othanatoi), restless and potentially harmful spirits. For S. it is one of two ‘diametrically opposed’ presentations of the crucifixion, against the familiar depiction as triumph over death. If the unprovenanced gem is authentic, a question relegated to an endnote (139 n. 61), one may agree that it represents a more human, less ‘triumphal’ Jesus, but hesitate to concede a link to restless dead. There are theological problems — would the ‘follower of Jesus’ who, S. considers, may have created the gem, or other inquisitive viewers have ignored Christian tenets of resurrection and ascension? — and no convincing proposal for how the gem worked: restless dead were usually invoked in late ancient magic to cause harm, and gems were usually amuletic. The debased figure, rather than ‘a soul particularly susceptible to manipulation’ (107), seems to me the essence of a no less venerated Jesus who promised protection by exemplifying redemption.
S. emphasises magic because it promises a view of ‘masses’ (5), if not non-elites. The material, however, retains problems of representation. S. is drawn to big questions about Late Antiquity but considers a small number of texts. (The index has entries for six artefacts by publication or inventory number.) The selection is limited in geography — papyrological materials from Egypt, metal amulets from the eastern Mediterranean — and genre. The title might have replaced ‘magic’ with ‘amulets’, as aggressive magic is scarcely discussed.
The selection suffices to raise clarifying problems, as with ‘idealized notions of Judaism and Christianity’ (109). I have reservations about positive applications for ‘masses’. A ‘Prayer of Saint Gregory’ exemplifies, for S., ancient attention to how improper ritual was demarcated, but the pseudonymous work does not give direct access to the views of the ‘monk’ who, he believes, created the Leiden manuscript (AMS 9) central to his discussion. Even if it did, the monkish perspective has only limited applicability for wider society. The prayer, for which S. acknowledges ‘later Greek exemplars’, was probably translated into Coptic from Greek. It is one of eight texts in the codex, and the codex is one of several hundred magical manuscripts in Coptic. S. presents valuable evidence for Christian self-definition against Jewishness, centred on Christ-killing libel, but how representative is this vitriolic handful of texts? Two Coptic texts with which Ch. 4 opens, for example, describe the crucifixion in graphic detail without stooping to blame Jews for it.
