The same game can be played with other relics of the ancient Mediterranean in northern texts, such as the use of an olive oil lamp in a spell copied in England in 1622.59 A case study of this effect is that of the magical reputation of the hoopoe, one of the most striking birds of the Mediterranean region, with its prominent crest and colourful plumage. Its body parts, and especially its heart, were already regarded as efficacious in magical rites during ancient times, and feature as such in both the Greek and the Demotic magical papyri.60 This belief passed into Coptic magic, and into that of the Arabs who conquered Egypt in the seventh century, where it became the most prominent bird to be used in spells.61 This association crossed subsequently into European magic, a fifteenth-century German manual of which could recommend it as ‘possessed of great virtue for necromancers and invokers of demons’.62 The hoopoe does breed in Germany, but it is a rare summer visitor to England, and was probably still rarer in the colder climate of the late medieval and early modern periods. When manuscripts copied in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries also recommend the use of a hoopoe’s heart in spells, therefore, we are looking at another living fossil of ancient Levantine tradition.63 Another scholar has noted that a formula used in love (or lust) spells of the magical papyri, ‘let the woman not eat or drink’ (until she succumbs), is then found in late Roman tablets, late medieval Dutch and German books of magic, seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish magical recipes, and those in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Slavonic texts.64
These details establish a continuous transmission of lore from the ancient eastern Mediterranean, and sometimes specifically from ancient Egypt, to early modern Europe. It is also significant that the same basic techniques recur in ceremonial magic all the way from the magical papyri in which they first appear until the modern period: complex rites which unify actions, materials and words; an emphasis on the power of special names and of voces magicae; a stress on the purification of the magician and the working space before the rite; a use of particular equipment, often specially made; care to find a special time at which to work; measures to protect the magician against the forces raised; the quest for a servitor spirit to carry out the magician’s will; and an eclectic and multicultural range of source material. It should be made clear that all of these characteristics were by no means present in all works of ceremonial magic compiled between the fourth and nineteenth centuries; rather, they were a list of actions and artefacts from which magicians could choose according to will and tradition to make up their own assemblages. Nor is there a steady succession of relevant material across that period, as the survival of texts becomes much greater in the late Middle Ages. Nor is there any suggestion of steady progression towards greater sophistication over time. On the contrary, for example, the operations in the Coptic magical papyri are generally less elaborate and cosmopolitan than those in their pagan predecessors, and the handbooks of magicians in Renaissance Europe were only as ornate and ambitious as those of late antique Egypt. None the less, those Renaissance handbooks were compiled using the collection of techniques listed above, which had descended to them from the ancient world, and which appears there now only in the Egyptian texts.
It is striking also that, just as the complex magic in the late antique papyri was developed in clear opposition to the values (and the law) articulated by Roman imperial rulers, so it survived as an often self-conscious and explicit counter-culture. One of the most famous, or notorious, handbooks of the later Middle Ages, the Sworn Book of Honorius, was intended as a direct response to a papal campaign against ceremonial magic as demonic, probably that of John XXII in the 1310s and 1320s. Its introduction audaciously asserted that the pope and his cardinals were themselves possessed by demons, and that it was the magicians who served the cause of truth, under the inspiration of the Christian God, and were exemplars of piety and offered a sure means to salvation.65 The introduction to an equally famous grimoire from the early modern period, the Key of Solomon, claimed that its contents had been explained to the author by an angel sent deliberately by the true God for the education of humanity.66 A treatise On the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Animals, known from the early fourteenth century and popular until the seventeenth, asserted that although magic could be used for evil ends, it was not inherently bad, ‘since through knowledge of it evil can be avoided and good obtained’.67 As early as the thirteenth century, its greatest Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, noted (with disgust) the argument used by practitioners of ceremonial magic that it was no sin to achieve good ends by using (captive) demons, because the true God had made scientific truths subject to human knowledge, and demons understood more of those than humans.68
Generally, as said, late medieval and early modern European magicians drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, and presented themselves as exemplars of pious and learned masculinity.69 As one aspect of this attitude, Roman Catholic magicians rapidly enlisted religious forms in the service of magical goals in a manner that would have been wholly intelligible to the authors of some of the magical papyri. By the early thirteenth century, soon after ceremonial magic had established itself in the world of Roman Christianity, some of them had developed the ars notoria, or ‘notary art’, named after the images and diagrams – a form of aid to magic, once again, found in the Egyptian papyri – which were a feature of it. Its aim was to achieve intellectual skills, and comprehensive knowledge, by prayers to the Christian God and the company of heaven, usually accompanied by purifications and rites that included voces magicae and had to be enacted at propitious times. It emphasized its descent from the ancient Levantine magical tradition by including passages in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, a language of ancient Mesopotamia.70 Its texts continued to be copied until the seventeenth century, and by the fourteenth it had produced two spin-off traditions. A French monk called John de Morigny composed a version that removed the images and voces magicae and so purged it of those aspects most readily associated with magic, emphasizing instead the appeal to heavenly powers.71 The Sworn Book of Honorius employed some of its techniques for the ambition of obtaining one of the greatest desires of pious Christians, the beatific vision of their God in his glory. This duplicated the ambition of the Neoplatonists, of using magical rites to achieve religious aims, and the rites prescribed not only demanded a fervent Christianity and a life of monastic austerity but incorporated some of the established liturgies of the Roman Church. Some versions at least of the book, however, accompanied this devout aim with promises that the successful operator would also learn how to command angels and demons, and so acquire superhuman powers that could accomplish every worldly wish.72
Thus far the enduring and general characteristics of the European tradition of ceremonial magic have been emphasized, as derived from ancient roots most apparent in the Egyptian papyri. It is worth asking now whether particular ethnic and cultural groups might have contributed special features to it since the end of antiquity; and the answer seems to be that there have been three such contributions, associated with each of the three great religions of the book. Though they overlapped in time, each one was also broadly consecutive. The Jewish element has been identified, from the work of Joshua Trachtenburg in the 1930s onwards, as taking the form of a stress on the employment of angels as magical helpers, and the efficacy of the hidden name or names of the one true God.73 Both were rooted in ancient magic, the magical papyri having already fully embodied a sense of the importance both of enlisting spiritual assistants and allies and of knowledge of their true names to effect this process. Both were also associated with major features of Judaism, its interest in angelic beings, its preoccupation with the sanctity of language rather than of visual imagery, and its intense monotheism. Neither of them accorded well with orthodox Christianity. Church Fathers and ecclesiastical councils condemned the invocation of angels, and recognized only the archangels mentioned in the Bible as possessing individual names, while the idea that the speaki
ng of special names galvanized or even controlled heavenly powers did not accord with the concept of divine majesty.74 None the less, Christian magic eventually assimilated both, and especially communion with angels, as major themes.75 The distinctive Islamic contribution to the European magical tradition, probably most emphasized among scholars by David Pingree, was astral magic, rites designed to harness the powers of heavenly bodies to influence earthly affairs and above all to draw them into material objects, known as talismans.76 This tradition seems to have developed in Mesopotamia, then the heart of the Arab Empire with its capital at Baghdad, in the ninth century, though such a conclusion must be drawn from possibly misattributed later copies of texts and this kind of magic was known throughout the Islamic world, including seemingly its major western outlier in Spain, by the eleventh century.77 If it did develop in Mesopotamia, it is tempting to suggest that this was a natural outgrowth from the ancient preoccupation of the region with celestial powers and the movements of the heavens, and indeed this is exactly what may have happened. On the other hand it is difficult to trace a direct development for astral magic from the Babylonian and Assyrian texts through the intervening millennium to the Islamic period. The Arab Empire itself functioned for a few centuries as an information superhighway extending from the Pyrenees to India, and its core territories embraced most of the old Hellenistic cultural zone including Egypt, in which Mesopotamian ideas might have mutated into astral magic outside their homeland, as a parallel case to that of astrology. If the earliest texts of that magic were said to have been produced at Baghdad, this may simply reflect the fact that it was the imperial and cultural capital by the date concerned.
Astral magic depended heavily on the idea of concealed correspondences which linked different parts of the cosmos and meant that the right combination of words, animal, vegetable and mineral matter, and times, could work magical effects. Such correspondences informed the handbook by Bolus of Mendes, and underlie most of the operations in the magical papyri, and the contents of the Kyranides and Neoplatonist theurgy. The papyri contain several recipes for charging material objects, above all rings, with magical power. They also include a love spell consisting of an invocation to the planet Venus, involving a special incense and a charm worn on the person, and, elsewhere, a set address to an angel thought to animate the sun, using laurel leaves inscribed with zodiacal signs, to gain a prophetic dream.78 The Hermetic texts, produced in Egypt at around the same time, accord a major role to the planets, as immediate agents of an all-powerful creator god.79 Late antique Egypt therefore already had all the raw material for the system which subsequently appeared in the Islamic world, whether or not it proved directly influential in its development. What is not in doubt is the means of its transmission to Christian Europe, by the mass translation of Arabic texts into Latin during the twelfth century. There it caught the imagination of intellectuals, and became part of the medieval Christian tradition of ceremonial magic.80
The distinctive contribution made by Christian Europe itself to that tradition seems to have been geometric: the use of the consecrated circle as the normal venue for a magical operation, with special significance often given to its four cardinal directions (east, south, west and north), and the identification of the pentagram as the most potent symbol of magic. All of these figures undoubtedly had ancient roots. One ancient Mesopotamian rite of exorcism had the āshipu sprinkle an usurtu, usually translated as a ring, of lime around the images of the deities on whose power he intended to call.81 Another had one fumigate ‘the circle of your great deity’ into which two protector gods were to be invited.82 A genuine – though occasional – practice may therefore have lain behind the description of the rites of a Mesopotamian magos by the Greek satirist Lucian, to prepare a client for a journey to the underworld. One consisted of the magician ‘walking all around’ the client to protect him from the dead during the journey.83 Circumambulation, the ritual processing around a sacred space before use of it, was a feature of native Egyptian religion from the earliest times, though it did not have the same significance in the magical papyri.84 Instead those occasionally included a circle as one of the figures drawn as part of a rite, to have signs inscribed inside it, and just once, the magician stands inside one.85 It features in (legendary) ancient Jewish magic in one story from the Roman period, of ‘Onias the circle-maker’, who ended a drought in Palestine by drawing the figure and then standing inside it to pray to Yahweh for rain.86 In Anglo-Saxon magic it was sometimes drawn round injured or diseased parts of the body to contain an infection, or dug round plants before gathering them, to concentrate their power.87
The significance of the cardinal points of the compass had been known since ancient Mesopotamia, where as far back as the third millennium BC kings of the Sumerian city states had styled themselves rulers ‘of the four quarters’.88 One Muslim writer claimed (at second hand and with unknown accuracy) that the people of Harran in northern Syria, who were believed in the early Middle Ages to practise a religion which represented a continuation or a development of Hellenistic paganism, prayed to the cardinal points.89 Those points feature in a few operations in the magical papyri, but – like the circle – not regularly.90 Some Anglo-Saxon charms were designed to be hung around the four sides of a byre or sty to protect the animals inside, or cut into the four sides of a wound, or onto a stick to charge it with power.91 As for the pentagram, five-pointed stars are found in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman art or on coins, and also in the Christian early Middle Ages, but without any single tradition concerning their meaning and use: in many contexts they seem simply to have been decorative.92 The satirist Lucian said that the followers of the philosopher Pythagoras used the sign as a password, indicating the wishing of health; which would make sense if it acted (as it did in part later) as a symbol of the human body, though a satire is not perhaps the best place in which to seek solid information about a private belief system.93 There is no real evidence that the pentagram had any special association with magic in the ancient world. It appears once on a warrior’s shield painted on a Greek cup, which may have reflected a belief in its protective qualities, or it may just have been a decorative star. The most careful study of its ancient significance, to date, concludes (reluctantly) that its wide distribution in ancient times may have been ‘simply a question of the taking over of a motif, say a decorative motif, with or without any particular meaning, together with numerous others’, and ‘the magic meaning of the pentagram . . . was not yet apparent’ (before the later Middle Ages).94
As soon as Western Europeans acquired complex ceremonial magic in the twelfth century, seemingly as the result of their translation of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts, they showed their own preference for the quartered circle and the pentagram. In the course of his condemnation of that magic, in the early thirteenth century, William of Auvergne, archbishop of Paris, described an operation called ‘The Major Circle’ which involved summoning spirits from the four quarters. He also denounced the belief that the pentagram had an active magical power, and was especially associated with Solomon, the wisest of biblical kings, who had been reimagined in the late antique period as a mighty magician.95 The Sworn Book of Honorius, from its earliest surviving manuscripts, of the fourteenth century, put the figure at the centre of the ‘Seal of God’, which was the most important work in the achievement of the beatific vision. Consecrated circles also feature in it.96 In that same century one of the most famous pieces of medieval English chivalric literature, produced by one of its most devout authors, the poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, placed the image on the shield of its hero.97 An Italian scholar from that century, Antonio de Montolmo, called the circle the most perfect figure for magical operations, and gave his own instructions for consecrating it.98 A contemporary of both the Gawain poet and Antonio, the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric, included in his celebrated manual for heresy-hunters a description of an operation involving the use of a set text to invoke a spirit into a boy, thro
ugh whom it would then answer questions. This is a practice familiar from the magical papyri, with the difference that now the boy had to stand in a ring drawn on the earth.99 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from which books of ritual magic survive in relative abundance, the circle, often with its cardinal points marked, and the pentagram, are the standard figures of magical operations.100 The pentagram had also penetrated popular culture, as it appears in many parts of Western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages, on houses, cradles, bedsteads and church porches, as a protective symbol.101 The reasons for the new importance of the design are easy to propose. One of the prime concerns of the considerable intellectual ferment of Western Europe in the twelfth century, often called the ‘Twelfth-century Renaissance’, was the reconciliation of ancient learning with creative literature, Christian beliefs and knowledge of the natural world, to bring humans into harmony with the divine plan for the universe. As part of it both Honorius of Autun and Hildegard of Bingen asserted that the human body is constructed on a base formed by the number five, having five senses, five limbs (including the head as one) and five digits on hands and feet. This made the pentagram an obvious symbol of the microcosm that the human form represented of the divine image in which it had been shaped.102 The fourteenth-century author of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ repeated its association with Solomon and the divine form, and added one with the five wounds of Christ, an increasingly important symbol in the Western Christianity of the period. As such, he added, it was especially potent in repelling evil. As for the circle, the Italian scholar Antonio da Montolmo, working around the same time, declared that it was the essential symbol of the true God, as the prime mover of the universe (presumably referring to the circuits of the sun, moon and seasons and the spheres of the universe).103 The special interest in those spheres in later medieval cosmology might account in itself for the circle’s new arcane importance. Neither the moralists who condemned ceremonial magic in the medieval and Renaissance periods, nor the authors of the books of it, could agree on its actual function in operations. To some it was a fortress for the magician, which protected him from the demons (and sometimes from irritable angels) whom he conjured; to others it was a focus of power in itself, which could be radiated outwards from it.104 How much the importance of these figures may be called a general hallmark of later medieval Christian magic, and how much one of Western Christianity in particular, is debatable. They appear abundantly in the different versions of the Magical Treatise of Solomon, which, as it is written in Greek, is generally presumed to be a Byzantine work and so would make them characteristic of magic in both the great halves of medieval European Christianity. They do not seem to feature, however, in the actual records of Byzantine magic and nor are there references to the Magical Treatise there, while none of its copies can be proved to come from the Byzantine Empire; where the origin of the medieval examples can be located, it is Italian.105 It is possible that it was composed in a Greek-speaking area of the Latin Christian world, such as Sicily, and that the importance of the circle, quarters and pentagrams was a feature of that world alone.
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