It will soon be 100 years since K. Preisendanz and his collaborators published the Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM [1928–1931]), yet there is still no comprehensive study of this corpus. The best overview remains perhaps T. Hopfner's monumental Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber (1974–19902), despite its focus on the divinatory rituals of the corpus. The ever-growing body of books and collected volumes over the last 40 years (including D. Frankfurter [ed.], Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic [2019]) offers some helpful orientation, yet is far from providing a full historical or theoretical overview. N.'s monograph, an attempt to provide a typology of the rituals of the magical papyri, along with a framework for understanding them, thus addresses an important lacuna in current scholarship.
N. understands the rituals of the magical papyri through the linguistic metaphor of ritual, as communicative acts whose ‘grammar’ can be deciphered. He proposes to reveal the specific ‘magical koine’ to which the PGM belong and, in doing so, to demonstrate their coherence as a corpus, an important methodological step at a time when the concept of magic and, by extension, the designation of papyri as ‘magical’, has been under attack for several decades. N. takes the PGM as the core corpus – specifically, the Betz PGM (1986), which includes Demotic as well as Greek and Old Coptic texts, but excludes the ‘Christian’ documents of Preisendanz's second volume. He nonetheless broadens his horizons beyond the PGM to include a number of other manuscripts, published either individually or in collections such as Supplementum Magicum (R.W. Daniel/F. Maltomini [1990–1992]).
It is difficult to encounter the magical papyri as a modern reader without asking if the rituals worked and, if so, how. After briefly offering his definitions of ‘magic’ and ‘ritual’, N. confronts this problem by setting up a range of means by which the rituals construct power (pp. 52–135) – through speech acts (threats, accusations, the narratives known as historiolae), purity, analogy, the use of magical figures, liminality and so on. The remainder of the book lays out his classificatory scheme for the rituals of the corpus: sexual magic, divination, healing, protection, favour, curses and varia. Each of these groups is further divided into sub-categories and then discussed in terms of their religious, ritual and social dimensions. N. chooses a single ritual to represent each of the sub-categories, an ingenious decision, which allows him to balance the need to generalise with the possibility of demonstrating deeper ritual analysis. The classificatory scheme chosen by N. is generally uncontroversial, although some of his decisions might have warranted greater justification. I would not have included contraceptives and potency prescriptions in the category of sexual magic; these are closer in practice and conception to healing practices than the love spells (a term N. rejects) that make up the bulk of this category, lacking the often-violent language of these latter, which involve subverting the will of a target rather than acting directly on the body of a willing patient (cf. his comments at p. 183). His decision to class rituals to acquire familiar spirits and the ascent ritual of the Mithras Liturgy (PGM IV.475–829) along with favour spells is likewise problematic, since in practice and conception these are closer to the complex divination spells that likewise result in encounters with deities.
The final chapter is a discussion of the Sefer Ha-Razim (SHR) or ‘Book of Secrets’, a Hebrew magical collection preserved in medieval fragments, but probably dating to late antiquity. N. uses this work as a comparandum to the PGM in order to demonstrate that both belong to a larger magical koine, but represent different ‘dialects’. Once again, this is an innovative approach, but contrasting the PGM with the SHR, with the latter as a representative of ‘Jewish’ magic, raises problems that merit greater consideration. The PGM seem largely to represent unique, opportunistic collections of texts brought together by practitioners, preserved through the chance survival of individual papyri, while the SHR is a coherent literary work, structured around the concept of successive angelic stations; while its early redactional history is presumably contemporary with some of the later magical papyri, it is preserved in multiple copies from a later manuscript tradition. The SHR is thus more closely comparable in certain regards to other, more literary and more structured formularies, such as the Cyranides (D. Kaimakis [1976]), while the PGM find more direct parallels in other collections of miscellaneous recipes preserved in other Genizah manuscripts (see e.g. G. Bohak, Jewish Magic [2008], pp. 215–21, 281–5).
Overall, this work's value is in proposing a theoretical structure for analysing the PGM, a complex and controversial set of documents. In aiming for a synthetic overview, it avoids the trap of ignoring some of the rarer ritual types, which often attract less attention in the literature. The synoptic approach to the corpus likewise brings out features that might be less obvious in analyses of individual rituals – the tendency of the texts to approach solar deities with respect, while coercing chthonic beings, for example. This approach allows N. to respond to his research question in the affirmative – the PGM are, for the most part, a coherent corpus, demonstrating a consistent ritual grammar.
Yet the central tension of the work lies in its attempt to analyse the PGM as a corpus in detail while simultaneously going beyond it to reveal a larger social and religious context, an approach hampered by an over-reliance on secondary literature and a lack of sustained attention to interesting ideas. N. proposes, for example, that love potions (potêria) were used at festivals (pp. 150, 192), but readers are left wanting for supporting literary or documentary sources. Another recurrent theme is the cost of rituals and ingredients – were they expensive, and what class of client do they imply (e.g. pp. 231–3, 255–6, 332–4)? These are questions of considerable interest, yet the analysis does not go beyond general and insufficiently defined oppositions of rich/poor and expensive/cheap. The more complex analyses of L. LiDonnici (Kernos 14 [2001]) and E. Chronopolou (in: E. Suárez et al., Magikè Téchne [2017]), from which N. draws inspiration, use the extensive documentary sources that exist for Roman Egypt to explore this problem more concretely, and with attention to the substantial literature on the economy of Roman Egypt their work could have been taken further. It is likewise regrettable that, despite his thorough use of the Demotic magical papyri, N. is entirely reliant on their English translations; his primary source, PGM XIV, is readily accessible in transliteration through the online Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, and the use of its integrated dictionary would at times have strengthened his arguments. Alerted to the ambiguity of the Demotic mt.t by a footnote in the Betz PGM, for example, he expresses a preference for the translation ‘semen’ over ‘urine’ (p. 115 n. 501), but on a later occasion uses the latter translation (p. 180), apparently unaware that it is the same word in both instances (PGM XIV.431, 642).
While N.'s creative approach will be of great interest to specialists of magic, there are numerous minor errors of fact and interpretation. To give a few examples: N.'s case study for the ‘slander’ (diabolé) subtype of sexual spell (PGM III.1–164; 152–4) is in fact a curse against charioteers, to which a number of additional optional uses, including as a love spell, have been added by a later redactor; ‘slander’ should in fact be understood as a type of speech act, not of ritual, and the other examples reclassified as other ritual types (PGM IV.2441–621, for example, is an agogé, as the title tells us); the use of seven lamps in the same ritual probably draws upon the significance of that number rather than being a reference to the menorah – an instance of a pattern in the work of overemphasising Jewish elements in the PGM, which are generally marginal and/or superficial (p. 153 n. 125; cf. Bohak, op. cit., pp. 194–202); drowning in late Egyptian religion represents sacralisation through assimilation with Osiris, not defilement through lack of burial (pp. 87, 115; cf. Betz, PGM, 3 n. 3); and while N. suggests that statues of Hekate would not have been welcome in homes (p. 126), they were already popular household amulets in fifth-century bce Greece (cf. C. Faraone, Greek Amulets [2018], pp. 136–41). While these points do not detract from the considerable value of this stimulating and innovative work of scholarship, they make me hesitant to recommend it to non-specialists, who will be required to carefully check each claim.
