The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts. Judika Illes
magical practitioner attempt to minimize or even eliminate the need for botanicals. Beyond their value to their intended audience, these books also transmit a crucial message to all of us regarding the state of our environment. As another example, only cultures that possess a belief in the possibility of legal justice, however remote, produce court case spells. Love spells reveal cultural sexual dynamics. So you see, magic spells have tremendous value as history, anthropology, and sociology way beyond their practical value to the spell-caster.
Translations of these Alexandrian papyri, now known as the Magical Papyri, were eagerly awaited. Stemming mainly from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, they span a crucial, fascinating period of history: the times of Cleopatra, Jesus, the rise of Rome, the fall of Jerusalem, and the emergence of Christianity as a cohesive faith and world power.
Alexandria, although it became Egypt’s capital, is not an ancient pharaonic city. It was founded by the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great, one of several cities he named in his own honor. Its orientation is the Mediterranean, not the Nile, like other older Egyptian cities. At various periods, indigenous Egyptians were not even permitted to live within Alexandria’s boundaries. It was a Greek outpost in Egypt, with Greeks as the elite citizenry. Cleopatra, descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals and the last of her dynasty, was the only one of her lineage who troubled to learn the Egyptian language.
The city achieved a reputation as a world capital of magic. Alexandria supported a sizeable population of magic practitioners of all kinds—diviners, dream interpreters, professional spell-casters—all presumably serving the needs of their specific communities rather than Alexandria as a whole, because Alexandria was a rigidly divided city. Although Alexandria, like many cities of its time, was divided into quarters, true divisions, like many a modern city, were cast along ethnic lines. Two of Alexandria’s quarters were Greek, one was Egyptian (the only area in which they were permitted to reside), and the fourth housed a sizeable Jewish community.
Divisions between the quarters were distinct, reflecting hostility between these communities, which periodically bubbled over into rioting and violence. It was a turbulent, volatile city, demonstrating ethnic tensions only too familiar today. This may be ancient history but it’s a familiar landscape to many contemporary urban dwellers or anyone who reads a current newspaper. It was precisely the city’s divisions, its multi-ethnic population, and varied religious and spiritual traditions (Alexandria was also the birthplace of Gnosticism) that so excited the archeologists and scholars—it provided the potential for something like historical “control groups.”
Expectation was that the orientation of the papyri would be largely Greek. In Athens, there was a tendency to associate magic with out-of-towners—Thracians or Thessalians. Would this practice continue? Would there be completely Greek magic, or would the Alexandrians transfer the outsider role to the native Egyptians? Would the Greeks, traditionally impressed by Egyptian mysticism (Pythagoras studied in Egypt) adopt some of their host country’s practices? Would it be possible to clearly trace the emergence of Gnosticism as well as Pagan reactions to Christianity? Answers to these crucial questions were anticipated with bated breath as translation of the papyri progressed.
What was uncovered is a mess. The spells, on the whole, are neither clearly nor even mostly Greek, or Egyptian, or that third ethnic group, Judaic, but a scrambled jumble of all three, with a healthy dose of Pagan and Christian Gnosticism, together with a sprinkling of influences from other parts of the Greek and Roman empires. Any individual spell may incorporate the God of Israel, assorted angels, Egyptian gods, Mesopotamian gods, Greek gods, Nubian gods, Jesus Christ and Christian spirituality, botanical magic, divination, names of mysterious things we have no way of presently identifying, some or all of the above, and definitely not necessarily in that order.
What was a poor scholar to do? How to interpret and sort this material, determine who wrote it, and to whom it truly belongs and applies?
None of the information in the papyri is mundane everyday material that you might say any individual on the street was bound to know. The spells and incantations are the height of occult knowledge. The Magical Papyri are the descendants of highly guarded spiritual secrets, the ancestors of high ritual magic. Alexandria was an intensely urban community. These spells don’t reflect the knowledge common to any village wise-woman or cunning man but are highly detailed and specialized, occult in every sense, the stuff of initiates and adepts. Who wrote them? The information contained in them defies all attempts to pigeonhole these spells.
They derive from over centuries and so can’t be attributed to one person, not even the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. Nothing in Alexandria’s history indicates a mingling of cultures that would provide a general intercultural exchange like this—quite the opposite. Furthermore, although Greek was Alexandria’s lingua franca and many Jews, for instance, spoke that language rather than their own, spiritual secrets were still recorded in each community’s distinct tongue. Sacred, secret, spiritual texts in each possible tradition were maintained in the most obscure version possible specifically so that profane eyes could not access them. Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew aren’t even written with the same alphabets. Who had access to all this vast information? How was it transmitted?
Intense debate ensued regarding who compiled these spells and who actually cast them. Were they Greeks, as had originally been anticipated, or were they Egyptians? Were they Greeks gone native? Controlled attempts had been made to combine aspects of Greek and Egyptian religion, culminating in the cult of Serapis. But then, why the Jewish references? Were they Egyptians striving to Hellenize? But then, why the Christian references? Maybe the spells were compiled by unemployed wizard-priests trying to find a new professional niche market, but then why don’t they hew more faithfully to centuries of conservative Egyptian tradition? They couldn’t be Jews, because, of course, Jews are monotheistic and don’t participate in this kind of thing, but then, if not, how did the spell-casters learn all those obscure Hebrew names of power, names extremely difficult to access even within the Jewish community? But if they were Jews, what were they doing invoking Hecate, Hathor, and Hermes? They couldn’t be Christians because Christians forbade magic in general, because Alexandria was home to a particularly militant branch of Christianity and because the rift between Christians and Pagans was especially violent and bitter in Alexandria. But if they were not Christians, why all the references to Jesus Christ? These mysteries were not the ones that scholars had so eagerly anticipated investigating and debating.
Translation of the Magical Papyri occurred only recently. Perhaps more information will be uncovered. Volume one of The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells was first published in 1986. Egyptologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and other scholars continue to discuss their origin and broad scope. The only experts, I suspect, who have not been consulted are contemporary urban magical practitioners, for whom the entangled ethnic and spiritual roots of the Magical Papyri’s spells would come as no surprise.
When historians counted Alexandria’s four quarters, they neglected a fifth community, who quite obviously rejected, transcended, and ignored those boundaries: Alexandria’s vast community of magical practitioners, a quarter unto themselves. Where other residents of Alexandria found divisions, these magical practitioners discovered a crossroads. Magic thrives where roads meet. What the Magical Papyri manifest is the birth of modern magic.
If you were an up-and-coming metaphysical seeker or magical practitioner back then, Alexandria was the place to go. Why? Not just to make money; you’d retain more of a monopoly by staying home as a big fish in a small pond. No, you’d go to Alexandria to meet other practitioners, learn what they had to teach and share some secrets of your own. The spells of the Magical Papyri demonstrate what happens at those crossroads.
Where others obeyed the rules and kept to their own kind, magical practitioners went wandering, with magic as the lingua franca, the common tongue, exploring each other’s secrets, deconstructing them and putting them back together in whole new confabulations. This mixing is not necessarily about improvement; spells that hew faithfully to one tradition work just as powerfully as blended spells. Instead it’s about experimentation and the desire (common to all practitioners), to adapt something of power to one’s own needs. (This process is not always a happy