This volume presents a compendium of articles that explore and, in some cases, reinvestigate various materials associated with magic and religion in the ancient world. This publication is a Festschrift for C.A. Faraone, and so the contents reflect some of Faraone's areas of expertise, such as the interpretation and transmission of spells from Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF) and Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM), magical amulets and gemstones and their iconographies, and cross-cultural contexts of magical rituals. The book is divided into two sections: ‘Materials’ and ‘Cross-Cultural Contexts’. As the editors state in the introduction, the volume addresses the concept of magic from the ‘material turn’ (p. xviii), a more modern and interdisciplinary approach investigating the materiality of the objects of study as well as the discursive relationship between materials and the people who use them.
The first section, ‘Materials’, analyses various magical materials, namely texts and spells. Several of the articles, such as R. Gordon's ‘Mustering Knowledge in the Longer Greco-Egyptian Formularies’ and K. Dosoo's ‘He Means “Rose”: Marginal Notes in the Greek Papyri of the Theban Magical Library’ (to name a few), address a much-discussed question in the study of ancient magic: the manner(s) of transmission of magical formularies. Gordon discusses the organisation and presentation of some of the lengthier formulae in GEMF as determined by the scribe, and some of the scribe's reasons for choosing such a format. Dosoo analyses the corrections and notes written as marginalia to certain formulae by scribes and the implications on how these formulae were copied and transmitted. For this reason, these two articles, and the others in the section, will be invaluable to any scholar interested in the composition and transmission of magical texts in the ancient world. There are some articles studying magical texts beyond GEMF and PGM, such as the Oneirocritica (see K.W. Yu's ‘The Limits of Textuality in Artemidoros’ Oneirocritica’, which examines Artemidoros’ scribal techniques). Overall, the first few chapters of the book engage with questions of a highly technical nature, which will be most valuable for scholars already acquainted with the complex subject matter.
The second section, ‘Cross-Cultural Contexts’, presents a variety of magical materials arising from different contexts, regions and intercultural exchanges. The majority of articles in this section analyse ‘magical’ texts and inscriptions. Some, however, investigate other items of material culture, such as amulets and gems, and their cross-cultural trajectories through time and space (see e.g. R.D. Kotansky's ‘A Bronze Medallion in Madrid: Cross-Cultural and Material Transmission of an Amuletic Tradition from Syria to Sicily’ and M.S. Nutzman's ‘“Bind Them as a Sign on Your Hand”: Amulets and Tefellin in Rabbinic Texts’).
An ongoing question that plagues many scholars studying ancient magic is what qualifies a given material or practice as ‘magical’, and the editors of this volume allow the authors to address this question in their own ways. The complexity of the concept of magic is evident when investigating materials that have been labelled ‘magical’, although they have been derived from mainstream religious practices or were taken from other religious groups or societies and were reimagined for magical purposes. Some articles exemplifying these multilayered origins of magic include M.R. Bachvarova's ‘Uncovering an Earlier Version of the Demeter-Persephone Story: The Anatolian Background of Hekate's Appearance in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ and B. Lincoln's ‘The Problem of the Magi’. Both articles discuss the origins of Hecate and of the Magi respectively, figures associated with magic in the Graeco-Roman world, although their earlier iterations in other cultures had different associations and symbolism.
Because of the diversity of approaches, readers might initially be confused regarding the qualifications of what constitutes magic, but the variety of approaches to answering this question highlighted throughout the volume demonstrates the complexity of this issue. Moreover, the title of the book includes both ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ in the ancient Mediterranean world, which seems to suggest that there is an implied interrelationship or distinction made between magic and religion. Therefore, some articles engage directly with the theme of magic, how each author conceptualises magic, and how it relates to the material which they study. Meanwhile, others do not address the issue of magic directly, which is an approach in itself, or their articles simply fall under the ‘religious’ angle of the book, separate from magic.
Overall, the Festschrift builds significantly on the vast contributions of Faraone to the field of ancient magic. The contributors to the volume represent a who's who of some of the leading names in the subject of ancient magic from a newer and more modern perspective and from the ‘material turn’ approach. Furthermore, all the authors are either mentees or collaborators of Faraone and have credited Faraone with inspiring their work. For this reason, the editors state at the end of the introduction that they hope that this compendium can inspire other new work and attract scholars to the field. Overall, the second section seems more suitable to those starting out in the study of the concept of ancient magic than the first section. Ideally, I would recommend the volume to a more experienced ancient magic scholar, as it provides some of the most up-to-date research from some of the leading names in the field. I might not, on the other hand, recommend it to a scholar who is unfamiliar with ancient magic or who is simply looking for a more general understanding of the concept, as some of the essays are of a technical nature and build on important contributions made elsewhere. For readers with a more thorough knowledge of the works and approaches of at least several of the authors in the volume, the volume can provide a complementary and, dare I say, enchanting, read.
