Priests, Tongues, and Rites

Priests, Tongues, and Rites PDF Author: Jacco Dieleman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This study of two related Demotic-Greek magical handbooks provides new information about the interaction between native Egyptian priests and the Hellenized elite of Roman-period Egypt through a careful analysis language interference, textual layout, religious imagery and ritual techniques.

Priests, Tongues, and Rites

Priests, Tongues, and Rites PDF Author: Jacco Dieleman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This study of two related Demotic-Greek magical handbooks provides new information about the interaction between native Egyptian priests and the Hellenized elite of Roman-period Egypt through a careful analysis language interference, textual layout, religious imagery and ritual techniques.

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority PDF Author: Heidi Marx-Wolf
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority recounts how philosophers of the late third century C.E. organized the spirit world into hierarchies, positioning themselves as high priests in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred matters, they fortified their authority, prestige, and reputation.

Making Amulets Christian

Making Amulets Christian PDF Author: Theodore de Bruyn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191075906
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice—the writing of incantations on amulets—changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians. This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.

Materia Magica

Materia Magica PDF Author: Andrew Wilburn
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Approaches ancient magical practice through archaeology and social history

Civilizations of the Supernatural

Civilizations of the Supernatural PDF Author: Fabrizio Conti
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 615816898X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti's visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus

The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus PDF Author: Christian H. Bull
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004370846
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus , Christian H. Bull argues that the actual authors behind the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were Hellenized Egyptian priests in charge of small groups practicing spiritual exercises, initiatory rituals, and devotional hymns.

Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition

Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition PDF Author: Gideon Bohak
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004203516
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This volume brings together thirteen studies by as many experts in the study of one or more ancient or medieval magical traditions, from ancient Mesopotamia and Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt to the Greek world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It lays special emphasis on the recurrence of similar phenomena in magical texts as far apart as the Akkadian cuneiform tablets and an Arabic manuscript bought in Egypt in the late-twentieth century. Such similarities demonstrate to what extent many different cultures share a “magical logic” which is strikingly identical, and in particular they show the recurrence of certain phenomena when magical practices are transmitted in written form and often preserve, adopt and adapt much older textual units.

The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West

The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West PDF Author: David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.

Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic

Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic PDF Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004390758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
This volume seeks to advance the study of ancient magic through separate discussions of ancient terms for ambiguous or illicit ritual, the ancient texts commonly designated magical, and contexts in which the term magic may be used descriptively.

Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing in Modern and Ancient Greece

Women, Pilgrimage, and Rituals of Healing in Modern and Ancient Greece PDF Author: Evy Johanne Håland
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527593185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
This book investigates religious rituals and gender in modern and ancient Greece, with a specific focus on women’s role in connection with healing. How can we come to understand such mainstays of ancient culture as its healing rituals, when the male recorders did not, and could not, know or say much about what occurred, since the rituals were carried out by women? The book proposes that one way of tackling this dilemma is to attend similar healing rituals in modern Greece, carried out by women, and compare the information with ancient sources, thus providing new ways of interpreting the ancient material we possess. Carrying out fieldwork—being present during, often, enduring rituals within cultures, despite other changes—teaches one whole new ways of looking at written and pictorial records of such events. By bringing ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination, this text also has relevance beyond the Greek context both in time and space.