229.‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’, in John Middleton (ed.), Magic, Witchcraft and Curing, New York, 1967, 23–41.
230.The official title of the panel was the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murder in the Northern Province. A copy of its report is available at http://policyresearch.limpopo.gov.za/handle/123456789/406, accessed 15 March 2014. The resulting debate is well summed up by the essays collected in Hund (ed.), Witchcraft, Violence and the Law in South Africa.
231.Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, 261–8.
232.I have already committed myself to this stance during my own minor intervention in the recent debates in South Africa, when its Pagan Federation called me in as an advisor for the development of a common policy that the country’s modern Pagans and Pagan witches could adopt in response to the issues. I am especially grateful to the Federation’s president at the time, Donna Voss, for the gift of John Hund’s edited collection, which was hard to obtain in Britain.
233.For example, Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951, Manchester, 1999; and A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-century Somerset, Bruton, 1999; Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, Manchester, 2004; and Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe, Manchester, 2004; Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words; Witchcraft in the Bocage, Cambridge, 1980. The last case personally known to me in England of a persecution of people by their neighbours, among an indigenous community and solely because the latter suspected them of witchcraft in a wholly traditional way, occurred in the Cornish village of Four Lanes in 1984.
234.Nick Britten and Victoria Ward, ‘Witchcraft Threat to Children’, Daily Telegraph (2 March 2012), 1, and Nick Britten, ‘Witchcraft Murder that Exposed Hidden Wave of Faith-Based Child Abuse’, on p. 6. For helpful historical context, see Thomas Waters, ‘Maleficent Witchcraft in Britain since 1900’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2015), 99–122.
235.James T. Richardson et al. (eds), The Satanism Scare, New York, 1991; David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History, Princeton, 2006; La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil.
236.Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religion and the Media, Lexington, 2000; Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, New Haven, 2013, 240–53.
237.Smith, Bewitching Development; Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’.
2 The Ancient Context
1.The citations are indeed too numerous for page references: ‘passim’ is the best one to be attributed to any edition. The Malleus maleficarum cited Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Ptolemy and Seneca; Boguet cited Plutarch, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny and Philostratus; and del Rio cited Ammianus Marcellinus, Proclus, Apuleius, Antoninus Liberalis, Diodorus Siculus, Aristotle, Cicero, Herodotus, Hesiod, Pomponius Mela, Heliodorus, Virgil, Pliny, Epicurus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Julian the Apostate, Ovid, Lucan, Tibullus, Plutarch, Seneca, Lucretius, Martial, Hippocrates, Petronius, Plato and Suetonius.
2.The best brief summary of the development of the Macbeth legend seems to be Kenneth D. Farrow, ‘The Historiographical Evolution of the Macbeth Narrative’, Scottish Literary Journal, 21 (1994), 5–23 (I thank Julian Goodare for this reference): the ‘Weird Sisters’ appear in Andrew of Wyntoun’s chronicle c. 1420, and become witches in John Bellenden’s English translation of Hector Boece’s history, in 1536.
3.Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queenes, London, 1609 edition, lines 1–357.
4.Thus, Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe, Basingstoke, 2001, give two pages (11–12) to show that the Greeks and Romans believed in harmful magic and had a concept of the night-flying witch. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, allots three (47–50) to demonstrate that the persecution of alleged witches was known in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Rome. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010, has passages on four (9, 14, 30 and 47) which argue that the ‘nuts and bolts’ of witchcraft were already present in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Palestine. Again, he emphasizes uniformity, as in comments like ‘We know a lot about ancient Mesopotamian religion, enough to see how closely it resembles all religions’, on p. 9. Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016, is the main author to draw attention to difference, on three pages (31–3).
5.Fritz Graf, ‘Excluding the Charming: The Development of the Greek Concept of Magic’, in Marvin Meyer and Paul Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, Leiden, 1995, 29.
6.These are the words of the strongest exponent of such a course, Kimberly B. Stratton, in Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology and Stereotype in the Ancient World, Columbia, 2007, ix. She herself makes a comparison of definitions of magic among the ancient Hebrews, the pagan Greeks and Romans, and the early Christians.
7.The main recent exponent of this view of Egyptian magic has been Robert Kriech Ritner, in The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, Chicago, 1993; and ‘The Religious, Social and Legal Parameters of Traditional Egyptian Magic’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 43–60. It has been endorsed by Geraldine Pinch, Ancient Egyptian Magic, London, 1994; Jan Assman, ‘Magic and Theology in Ancient Egypt’, in Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg (eds), Envisioning Magic, Leiden, 1997, 1–18; David Frankfurter, ‘Ritual Expertise in Roman Egypt and the Problem of the Category “Magician”’, in ibid., 115–35; Dominic Montserrat, Ancient Egypt, Glasgow, 2000, 22–3; David Frankfurter, ‘Curses, Blessings and Ritual Authority: Egyptian Magic in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 6 (2005), 157–85; Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, 2009; and Friedhelm Hoffmann, ‘Ancient Egypt’, in David J. Collins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, Cambridge, 2015, 52–82. It was, however, stated in outline at the very beginning of the sustained study of the subject, by E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, London, 1899. The whole of the following section of this chapter draws on these authorities, and also on Raymond O. Faulkner’s editions of key primary sources: The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Oxford, 1969; The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, Warminster, 3 vols, 1973–6; and The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Plymouth, 1985.
8.The text is translated in Budge, Egyptian Magic, 173–7.
9.For what follows here, see Pinch, Ancient Egyptian Magic, 33–46; and Panagiotis Kousoulis (ed.), Ancient Egyptian Demonology, Leuven, 2011.
10.Homer, The Odyssey, Book 4, lines 216–48.
11.Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book 8, lines 42–5. For a bibliography of recent scholarly references to the trope of Egypt as the land of magic par excellence, see Jan Bremmer’s list in Dietrich Boschung and Jan Bremmer (eds), The Materiality of Magic, Paderborn, 2015, p. 254, no. 53.
12.Budge, Egyptian Magic, viii.
13.The sources for this paragraph are the sum of those in the notes below.
14.Marie-Louise Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Marie-Louise Thomsen and Frederick H. Cryer (eds), The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume One, London, 2001, 93.
15.Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, 88–92; Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture, Cambridge, 2004; A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, Chicago, 1964, 206–27; Erica Reiner, Astral Magic in Babylonia, Philadelphia, 1995. A key set of primary texts in translation is R. Campbell Thompson (ed.), The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, 2 vols, London, 1900.
16.Tzvi Abusch, ‘The Demonic Image of the Witch in Standard Babylonian Literature’, in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Religion, Science and Magic, Oxford, 1989, 27–31. Anthony Green, ‘Beneficent Spirits and Malevolent Demons’, Visible Religion, 3 (1984), 80–105; O. R. Gurney, ‘Babylonian Prophylactic Figures and t
heir Rituals’, Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, 22 (1935), 31–96; Daniel Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’, in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, Oxford, 2011, 418–42; and ‘The Ancient Near East’, in Collins (ed.), Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, 17–51. Primary texts of rites are found translated in Gurney, above; Erica Reiner (ed.), Ŝurpu: A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations, Graz, 1958; and R. Campbell Thompson (ed.), The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, 2 vols, London, 1903.
17.G. R. Driver and John C. Miles (eds), The Babylonian Laws, Oxford, 1952, vol. 1, 13–14, 58–9. The use of such a river ordeal was common for settling both criminal charges and civil suits throughout ancient Mesopotamian history: the sources are summarized by Peter Tóth, ‘River Ordeal’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, Budapest, 2008, 131. Russell Zguta, ‘The Ordeal by Water (Swimming of Witches) in the East Slavic World’, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 220–30, was seemingly the first to suggest that this could be the origin of the notorious medieval and early modern popular European custom of detecting witches by putting suspects into deep water and declaring guilty those who floated. I accepted this idea myself in ‘Witchcraft and Modernity’, in Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds), Writing Witch-hunt Histories, Leiden, 2014, 199, but now have doubts. The test of innocence in the Babylonian ordeal was precisely the opposite of that in the later European one, and the latter may have been an independent development after all, based on the Christian rite of baptism. Peter Tóth, in ‘River Ordeal’, expresses a similar possibility, while still holding out hope for Zguta’s suggestion.
18.The essential femininity of the ancient Mesopotamian witch is stressed by almost all the secondary sources cited here, but there is possibly room for some qualification of it. The Code of Hammurabi, cited above, assumed that witches were male, which may mean that the gender stereotype changed between the second and first millennia. Also, Daniel Schwemer, in ‘Magic Rituals’, 432–4, has noted that there are references to a kind of evil male magician, the bēl dabābi, who is mentioned more often than his female equivalent, the bēlet dabābi, and also seems equivalent to a witch. The balance of gendering may therefore be to some extent a linguistic illusion.
19.Thomsen, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Ancient Mesopotamia’, 23–56; Tzvi Abusch, Mesopotamian Witchcraft, Leiden, 2002; H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon, London, 1962; Sue Rollin, ‘Women and Witchcraft in Ancient Assyria’, in Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt (eds), Images of Women in Antiquity, London, 1983, 34–46; Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’. The editions of primary texts referenced above remain very relevant here, and to them should be added Tzvi Abusch (ed.), Babylonian Witchcraft Literature, Atlanta, 1987; Tzvi Abusch and Daniel Schwemer (eds), Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals, Leiden, 2011; and Stephen Langdon (ed.), Babylonian Liturgies, Paris, 1913.
20.There is one recent substantial study: Satnan Mendoza Forrest, Witches, Whores and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran, Austin, TX, 2011.
21.Gabriella Frantz-Szabó, ‘Hittite Witchcraft, Magic and Divination’, in Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, New York, 1995, vol. 3, 2007–19. For other works on Hittite magic, see Richard H. Beal, ‘Hittite Military Rituals’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 63–76; O. R. Gurney, Some Aspects of Hittite Religion, Oxford, 1977, 44–63; and Alice Mouton, ‘Hittite Witchcraft’, in VII Uluslarasi Hititoloji Kongresi Bildirileri, Ankara, 2010 (no editors named), vol. 2, 515–28. I am grateful to Jan Bremmer for drawing my attention to the last piece.
22.This is based primarily on Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, Cambridge, 2008, 8–19, which confirms ideas and evidence found in Stephen D. Ricks, ‘The Magician as Outsider in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 131–43. Ann Jeffries, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria, Leiden, 1996; Frederick H. Cryer, ‘Magic in Ancient Syria-Palestine and in the Old Testament’, in Thomsen and Cryer, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume One, 102–44; and Yitschak Sefati and Jacob Klein, ‘The Law of the Sorceress’, in Chaim Cohen et al. (eds), Sefer Moshe, Winona Lake, IN, 2004, 171–90; and is supplemented by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 34–7.
23.Again, Bohak is my main authority: Ancient Jewish Magic, 70–142, supplemented by Florentino Garcia Martinez, ‘Magic in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Leuven, 2002, 13–33; and Brian B. Schmidt, ‘Canaanite Magic vs Israelite Religion’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, Leiden, 2002, 242–59.
24.Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 351–434; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 143–64; Simcha Fishbane, ‘“Most Women Engage in Sorcery”: An Analysis of Sorceresses in the Babylonian Talmud’, Jewish History, 7 (1993), 27–42; Meir Bar-Ilan, ‘Witches in the Bible and in the Talmud’, in H. W. Basser and Simcha Fishbane (eds), Approaches to Ancient Judaism, Atlanta, 1993, 7–32; Jonathan Seidel, ‘Charming Criminals: Classification of Magic in the Babylonian Talmud’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 145–66; Leo Mock, ‘Were the Rabbis Troubled by Witches?’, Zutot, 1 (2001), 33–43; Rebecca Lesses, ‘Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69 (2001), 342–75; M. J. Geller, ‘Deconstructing Talmudic Magic’, in Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition, London, 2006, 1–18; Michael D. Swartz, ‘Jewish Magic in Late Antiquity’, in Steven T. Katz (ed.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 4, 706–7; Michele Murray, ‘The Magical Female in Graeco-Roman Rabbinical Literature’, Religion and Theology, 14 (2007), 284–309; Daniel Breslaver, ‘Secrecy and Magic, Publicity and Torah’, in Mirecki and Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, 263–82.
25.This was noted by H. S. Versnel, ‘Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-Religion’, Numen, 38 (1991), 177–97; and (more fully) by Graf, ‘Excluding the Charming’, but seems to have been largely forgotten in the debate reviewed by me (with my own contribution) in Witches, Druids and King Arthur, London, 2003, 98–117. The key ancient texts are printed in Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Ancient World, 2nd edition, Oxford, 2009, 1–50.
26.‘Hippocrates’, On the Sacred Disease, 1.10–46: quotation at 1.31.
27.Plato, Laws, 909B.
28.This change over time was valuably emphasized by Jan Bremmer, ‘Appendix’, in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic, 267–71.
29.Primary sources include Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 380–403; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen, c. 10; Euripides, Suppliants, line 1110; Iphigenia in Tauris, line 1338; and Orestes, line 1497; Plato, Republic, 364B–E and Laws, 10.909A–D; Aristophanes, The Clouds, lines 749–51; and the Derveni Papyrus (printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 23). Important discussions are in Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, Cambridge, MA, 1994, 21–31; Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, London, 2001, 28–36; Georg Luck, ‘Witches and Sorcerers in Classical Literature’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Three: Ancient Greece and Rome, London, 1999, 98–107; Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Songs for the Ghosts’, in David R. Jordan et al. (eds), The World of Ancient Magic, Bergen, 1999, 83–102; and Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley, 1999), 82–123; Jan Bremmer, ‘The Birth of the Term “Magic”’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 126 (1999), 1–12; Esther Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk among the Ancient Greeks, Oxford, 2007, 26–41; Michael Attyah Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, Berkeley, 2008; and Stratton, Naming the Witch, 39–69.
30.Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 27–9; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the
Greco-Roman World, 22–33; Richard Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, in Ankarloo and Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume Two, 178–80; Johnston, ‘Songs for the Ghosts’; and Restless Dead, 82–123; Bremmer, ‘The Birth of the Term “Magic”’; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 39–47.
31.The probable influence of Mesopotamian models on Greek ideas of magic, and practitioners, has been emphasized by Walter Burkert, ‘Itinerant Diviners and Magicians’, in Robin Hägg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century, Stockholm, 1983, 115–19; and M. L West, The East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 1997, 46–51.
32.Heraclitus, writing around 500 BC, might be interpreted as providing one. However, this passage of his work is only preserved in a much later text, Clement of Alexandria’s, Protrepticus, c. 22, and may be distorted. Moreover, he condemns magoi not as magicians, but in their original role as Persian priests, as part of a warning against novel and exotic forms of religion.
33.Plato, Laws, 909A–D.
34.The main sources for the case, and for those of accidental poisoning, are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 106–7; in addition there is Plutarch, Demosthenes, 14.4. They are discussed in Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk, 145–55; and ‘Patterns of Persecution: “Witchcraft” Trials in Classical Athens’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 9–35; Derek Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, Oxford, 2008, 133–6; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 51–4; and Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, 251. Another woman, called Ninon, was tried and executed for impiety in introducing unfamiliar religious rites, but this had no obvious relevance to magic.
The Witch Page 46