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Author: John G. Gager
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 9780195134827
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For the first time text from tablets have been translated into English with substantial translator's introduction revealing the cultural, social and historical context for these spells and tablets of the ancient world.
Author: Fritz Graf
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ancient Greeks and Romans often turned to magic to achieve personal goals. Magical rites were seen as a route for direct access to the gods, for material gains as well as spiritual satisfaction. In this survey of magical beliefs and practices from the sixth century B.C.E. through late antiquity, Fritz Graf sheds new light on ancient religion. Graf explores the important types of magic in Greco-Roman antiquity, describing rites and explaining the theory behind them. And he characterizes the ancient magician: his training and initiation, social status, and presumed connections with the divine world. With trenchant analysis of underlying conceptions and vivid account of illustrative cases, Graf gives a full picture of the practice of magic and its implications. He concludes with an evaluation of the relation of magic to religion.
Author: Christopher A. FARAONE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-06-30
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 0674036700
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers. Surveying and analyzing various texts and artifacts, the author reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells.
Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-03-19
Total Pages: 817
ISBN-13: 9004390758
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Christopher A. Faraone
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Greek legends and historical accounts contain many references to special statues or images designed to preserve the safety or livelihood of a city, a business or a house. These images, which fall into two often overlapping categories (talismans and apotropaia), were erected according to special rituals and took on a variety of intriguing forms, including lions, locusts, and bound effigies of destructive deities like Ares. Looking closely at a wide variety of Greek texts and artifacts, Faraone provides a detailed description and survey of these images and then uses this information to provide new interpretations of early Greek myths about Pandora, the Trojan Horse, and the "living statues" created by Hephaestus. At each step he sets the Greek evidence in a wider eastern-Mediterranean context, with detailed discussions of Near Eastern and Egyptian practices that bear close resemblance to the Greek rituals. The study closes with a re-evaluation of the traditional scholarly approach to religious art as purely representational, suggesting that some images instead of simply illustrating the power of a god, were actually created to restrain and control the power of inimical supernatural forces such as plague-gods and ghosts. Focusing renewed attention on these often misinterpreted talismans and apotropaia, Talismans and Trojan Horses will be illuminating for scholars and students of classics, art and archaeology, religion, the Ancient Near East, the Bible, and mythology.
Author: Daniel Ogden
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9780195151237
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a culture where the supernatural possessed an immediacy now strange to us, magic was of great importance both in the literary mythic tradition and in ritual practice. In this book, Daniel Ogden presents 300 texts in new translations, along with brief but explicit commentaries. Authors include the well known (Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny) and the less familiar, and extend across the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity.
Author: Derek Collins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2008-04-30
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 0470695722
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Original and comprehensive, Magic in the Ancient Greek World takes the reader inside both the social imagination and the ritual reality that made magic possible in ancient Greece. Explores the widespread use of spells, drugs, curse tablets, and figurines, and the practitioners of magic in the ancient world Uncovers how magic worked. Was it down to mere superstition? Did the subject need to believe in order for it to have an effect? Focuses on detailed case studies of individual types of magic Examines the central role of magic in Greek life
Author: Christopher A. Faraone
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0195111400
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Annotation This collection challenges the tendency among scholars of ancient Greece to see magical and religious ritual as mutually exclusive and to ignore "magical" practices in Greek religion. The contributors survey specific bodies of archaeological, epigraphical, and papyrological evidence formagical practices in the Greek world, and, in each case, determine whether the traditional dichotomy between magic and religion helps in any way to conceptualize the objective features of the evidence examined. Contributors include Christopher A. Faraone, J.H.M. Strubbe, H.S. Versnel, Roy Kotansky, John Scarborough, Samuel Eitrem, Fritz Graf, John J. Winkler, Hans Dieter Betz, and C.R. Phillips.
Author: Lindsay C. Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-05-02
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1350108952
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Parting company with the trend in recent scholarship to treat the subject in abstract, highly theoretical terms, Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome proposes that the magic-working of antiquity was in reality a highly pragmatic business, with very clearly formulated aims - often of an exceedingly malignant kind. In seven chapters, each addressed to an important arm of Greco-Roman magic, the volume discusses the history of the rediscovery and publication of the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a key source for our understanding of ancient magic; the startling violence of ancient erotic spells and the use of these by women as well as men; the alteration in the landscape of defixio (curse tablet) studies by major new finds and the confirmation these provide that the frequently lethal intent of such tablets must not be downplayed; the use of herbs in magic, considered from numerous perspectives but with an especial focus on the bizarre-seeming rituals and protocols attendant upon their collection; the employment of animals in magic, the factors determining the choice of animal, the uses to which they were put, and the procuring and storage of animal parts, conceivably in a sorcerer's workshop; the witch as a literary construct, the clear homologies between the magical procedures of fictional witches and those documented for real spells, the gendering of the witch-figure and the reductive presentation of sorceresses as old, risible and ineffectual; the issue of whether ancient magicians practised human sacrifice and the illuminating parallels between such accusations and late 20th century accounts of child-murder in the context of perverted Satanic rituals. By challenging a number of orthodoxies and opening up some underexamined aspects of the subject, this wide-ranging study stakes out important new territory in the field of magical studies.
Author: Jessica L. Lamont
Publisher:
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780197517796
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"In In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece, Jessica Lamont provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice in the ancient Greek world, alongside that of binding spells, incantations, and other private rites. Documenting the cultural pressures that drove the practice of ancient Greek magic, this book reveals the ways in which individuals worked to negotiate with the world (here in the literal sense) "underground"-conjuring the powers of the Underworld, and calling upon the dead to assist the living. The study of such rituals expands our understanding of daily life in ancient communities, providing rare insights into how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss. Curse tablets in particular document persons who often slip through the cracks of traditional histories, enabling us to approach antiquity through a broader lens: here are the cooks, tavern keepers, garland weavers, helmsmen, craftspersons, and barbers. Bringing together epigraphic, historical, literary, archaeological, and material evidence, Lamont reads between the traditional narratives of Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic Greece, drawing out new voices, and presenting new histories to consider. These texts and objects offer glimpses into the public and private lives of individuals from c.500 BCE through Late Antiquity, illuminating the interplay of ritual and conflict-management strategies among citizens and slaves, men and women, pagans and Christians. Filled with new material and insights, Lamont's volume offers a fresh perspective on ancient Greek social history and religion from c.750-250 BCE, one that highlights the role played by ritual in negotiating life's uncertainties"--
