1 The tradition of Greek and Latin incantations and related ritual texts from antiquity through the

629 Pages·2016·17.73 MB·English

The tradition of Greek and Latin incantations and related ritual texts from antiquity
through the medieval and early modern periods

By

Michael Wesley Zellmann-Rohrer

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Classics and Medieval Studies

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Maria Mavroudi, Chair
Professor Todd M. Hickey
Professor Gary B. Holland
Professor Donald J. Mastronarde

Spring 2016

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© Michael Wesley Zellmann-Rohrer 2016
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Abstract

The tradition of Greek and Latin incantations and related ritual texts from antiquity
through the medieval and early modern periods

By

Michael Wesley Zellmann-Rohrer

Doctor of Philosophy in Classics and Medieval Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Maria Mavroudi, Chair

Based on a large corpus of texts, presented in catalogue form as an appendix, I analyze the
tradition of a set of Greek ritual utterances defined here as incantations from classical
antiquity through the early modern period. The foci are late antiquity and Byzantium,
with perspectives forwards into modern Greece and a consideration of the influence of
Greek material on Latin incantations in the medieval West. The textual evidence is
organized typologically, first by intended purpose (healing and apotropaic; erotic; cursing
and other aggressive functions), then by internal compositional motifs. This typology is
intended to facilitate the tracing of continuity and change. I argue that incantations, and
related ritual practices for erotic compulsion and cursing, represented precious traditional
knowledge for those who chose to make use of them. This knowledge in turn was not
passively received but rather selectively transmitted, augmented, and adapted for
maximum relevance and efficacy in the contemporary context of use. The backbone of the
tradition as a whole is a broad and diverse circulation of technical literature in the form of
practical recipes, intersecting with and reinforced by popular oral transmission, in which
learned practitioners of medicine, and some ecclesiastics, took an occasional interest.
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Introduction

For this study of tradition in incantations, it seems appropriate to begin with an author
who took some interest in them, or at least found them worthy of recording, at a crucial
period of transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages. The text is the De
medicamentis of Marcellus, a native of Bordeaux who wrote in Latin, and a source for
numerous incantations in that language, but also at least eight composed in Greek.1
Marcellus was a practicing physician active at the turn of the fifth century A.D., who is
probably to be identified with the Marcellus attached to the court of Theodosius I and
serving as magister officiorum around 400.2 He is responsible for a collection of medical
recipes compiled in part from literary sources, but also including practices observed by the
author in contemporary use. The epistolary prologue openly acknowledges collection of
proven remedies from rural and popular sources,3 that is, healers operating outside of the
elite, learned tradition of Galenic medicine.
I begin with one particularly noteworthy example of an incantation prescribed in
this collection. For sufferers of gout, Marcellus recommends spitting in the hands before
getting out of bed in the morning, then rubbing the liquid so produced over the skin from
feet to fingertips. That procedure is accompanied by an incantation exhorting the gout to
flee, phrased in Latin but belonging to a type with Greek roots and a long tradition in the
medieval and modern phases of the Greek language.4 Marcellus describes this particular
incantation as carmen idioticum, which, in light of the original Greek signification of the
latter loan-word, I am inclined to render with the neutral “personal incantation,”5 in

1 In total over 60 from this text are included in the present collection (see the chapter 1
cat.). On Marcellus and his work see most recently Blom 2010. Beyond Greek and Latin, a
variety of other languages have been detected in his writings (Grimm 1865a-b); Blom
shows that the term gallice means only a word current in local speech, not specifically
claimed to be from the ‘Gaulish’ language (contra Must 1960).
2 Marcellus mentions the Jewish patriarch of Constantinople, Gamaliel, as the source of a
remedy for the spleen (De medicamentis 23.77, ed. Niedermann 1916); the dates of
Gamaliel’s tenure in that office are c. 395-415.
3 Etiam ab agrestibus et plebeis remedia fortuita atque simplicia quae experimentis
probauerunt didici (§2). Marcellus further outlines a general program of comprehensive
inclusion of anything from any source provided that “fits with health and healing” (si quid
umquam congruum sanitati curationique hominum uel ab aliis comperi uel ipse usu
adprobaui uel legendo cognoui, id sparsum inconditumque collegi, §1).
4 It opens ‘fuge fuge podagra et omnis neruorum dolor de pedes meos et omnia membra
mea,’ “Flee, flee, gout and all pain of the sinews, from my feet and all my limbs”
(Marcellus 36.70; for the rest, and the encompassing recipe, see chapter 1 cat. 1.26.2). The
type is discussed further below.
5 For the Latin idioticus cf. TLL VII.1.222.31-44 s.v., i.q. ‘imperitus,’ ‘rudis,’ ‘simplex.’
The Greek ἰδιωτικός can suggest something ‘not done by the rules of art,’ or
unprofessional; but also personal, private, or further, commonplace, everyday (LSJ s.v.).
Thorndike, after remarking sarcastically that Marcellus “well calls one of these
[incantations] carmen idioticum,” is forced to admit this same conclusion in a footnote
(1923-1958, 1:592). Compare Graf 1997, esp. 228-230, who, drawing on Apuleius, says
of Graeco-Roman magic is a communio loquendi with the gods, acts that “do not refer to
group actions, but instead constitute small aids for the isolated individual.”
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preference to a pejorative on the relative merits of this kind of healing as opposed to
pharmacological or dietetic medicine.6
For it is my intention to excavate some of a vibrant landscape of Greek
incantations over the longue durée. These were particularly at home among the larger,
non-elite populace and the healers who served them, working outside of the system of
clinical medicine dominated by the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen, but they were not
entirely neglected by these elite practitioners themselves.7
Here I adopt a broad definition of incantation as an utterance intended to achieve
a direct practical effect, in particular an utterance marked by elevated language distinct
from normal speech. My primary concern throughout is with the Greek tradition, but I
include Latin material from antiquity, late antiquity, and the medieval West where it
elucidates some aspect of that tradition, either the passage of Greek material into Latin or
vice versa. Chapters 1-3 treat the textual tradition in detail, based on a corpus and
typology of texts. These are classified first according to intended use, in three broad
categories: healing and apotropaic (chapter 1), erotic (chapter 2), ritual cursing and
related aggressive tactics (chapter 3); and within each of those, further analysis is
attempted based on compositional motifs.

The focus on the practical workings of incantations as a component of popular
ritual practice is intended to supplement the large amount of scholarship on magic that
proceeds primarily from literary references to these practices.8 This imbalance between the
study of applied magic and literary discussion thereof seems particularly acute for
Byzantium. The best contribution to the former, a useful but necessarily cursory review of
textual sources for magic in later Byzantium, is Greenfield 1995 (cf. id. 1988, 247-297).
Good studies of intellectual attitudes about, and theoretical discussions of magic are Duffy
1995 and Dickie 1995. There are also various studies of references to magic in Byzantine
sources, particularly hagiography (Magoulias 1967, Abrahamse 1982, Calofonos 2008)
and legal texts (Troianos 1986 and 1990, Fögen 1995, Gribomont 2004, 17-18). The
ancient and late ancient Greek periods are better served by studies of primary texts: for the
magical papyri, for example, there is the useful survey of Brashear 1995, and the recent
detailed study of Wilburn 2012, unfortunately limited in scope to only a few sites, for
papyri and other magical artifacts.
Before proceeding to the evidence for applied magic in the form of incantations,
we must confront the problems inherent in the use of the term magic for classification.
Modern scholarship, following above all the anthropologist James Frazer, has often
opposed magic and religion, placing incantations on the side of magic; the ancient
terminology instead makes excessive, or superstitious, practices such as incantations a part,
albeit degraded, of the general complex of ritual practice.9 If incantations then are not to

6 Indeed another incantation is qualified quite positively as carmen mirum (ibid. 15.101,
chapter 1 cat. 1.1.3).
7 Galen in his surviving works rejected incantations, but the Byzantine physician
Alexander of Tralles alleges that he eventually accepted their efficacy in a treatise entitled
On Medical Treatment in Homer, after personally witnessing some successful applications
(Therapeutica ed. Puschmann 1878-1879, 2:475). See also Thorndike 1923-1958, 1:165-
174.
8 For the classical period the seminal work of Graf 1997 is sensitive to the potential
contributions of “applied” evidence (esp. p. 3) but remains preponderantly focused upon
second-hand contemporary references.
9 See recently Bremmer 2002.
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be divided from contemporary ritual means of interacting with the supernatural, a useful
analytical distinction between them and prayer can still be made. By such a distinction,
along lines developed by Stanley Tambiah (1968, 178), prayer is primarily a supplication
and invocation of a beneficent divinity in concrete terms, while incantations are primarily
commands, address a broader range of supernatural entities but also people, animals,
plants, and objects, and employ image and metaphor.
Incantations are mentioned already in the earliest surviving Greek literature,10 but
details of their content are almost never provided. Their earliest appearance is with the
ἐπαοιδή used to staunch the bleeding of the young Odysseus in Od. 19.457-458, but
without any description of the content. The use of healing incantations is also attributed to
Asklepios in Pindar (Pyth. 3.51), and Plato’s Socrates mentions an ἐπῳδή accompanying
the medicinal use of a plant leaf, to cure headache (Chrm. 155e-156e).11 None of these
authors take any interest in reporting the content of the incantations, however. The trend
continues in Latin literature for such authors as Vergil, Horace, the elegiac poets, and
Ammianus Marcellinus, as well as Byzantine hagiographers and historiographers; the
vigorous rejection of incantations by Christian theologians, especially the patristic authors,
is well documented (Dickie 1995). For the content, as we will see, we must in general turn
to technical literature and inscribed artifacts. (The noteworthy exceptions in Theocritus
and Vergil for the erotic incantations will be addressed in the second chapter.)
Indeed modern scholarship for a time replicated some of the same lack of interest
in the content of healing incantations as found in ancient and medieval authors. There was
an added stigma beginning with patristic authors of aberrance from proper Christian
practice. If the content was recorded at all, as in the case of the monumental Traité des
superstitions qui regardent les sacremens of Jean-Baptiste Thiers (Paris 1697), it was only
for the sake of full enumeration in condemnation. We owe to Richard Heim the first
systematic and analytical collection of Greek and Latin incantations from antiquity
(1892). The product of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn, it remains the
only published attempt at a comprehensive collection of Greek and Latin incantations and
is still the standard reference.12 It is in serious need of revision and supplement based on
newly published material in manuscripts and the archeological record, sources identified
by Heim but not fully exploited, and emendations to the original texts.13 Heim’s focus was

10 See further Kotansky 1991, 108-109.
11 Plato’s presentation indeed suggests that the whole matter of the ἐπῳδή is a fiction
contrived by Socrates for the sake of his disquisition with Charmides on the nature of
σωφροσύνη, or refers metaphorically to Socrates’ critical powers themselves, cf. 175a-
176b.
12 Önnerfors 1993 is in large part a recapitulation of Heim with exclusive focus on Latin
material, based primarily on Marcellus; he also offers numerous textual corrections along
with some new material, in particular 199-200, 206-219.
13 Heim draws primarily on encyclopedic and technical treatises, in both Greek and Latin,
those of Pliny the Elder, Alexander of Tralles, and the Hippiatrika and Geoponika. Some
medieval Latin material is published for the first time by Heim in an appendix but not
integrated into his analysis. In the present collection, lemmata collected by Heim have
been updated wherever possible with the most recent critical edition, and the section and
chapter numbering changed accordingly, though Heim’s numeration is also noted for
reference.
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antiquity, and he himself acknowledges a rather cursory treatment of the medieval
period.14
Scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity were slow to realize the analytical
potential of Heim’s collection. With the studies of Kotansky (1991), Furley (1993),
Versnel (1996), and Faraone (1995, 2009, 2011, 2012), however, attention has been
brought to the internal structure and poetic features of individual incantations, typological
groups among them, and the diachronic spread and development of these groups as an
indicator of broader patterns of the transmission of knowledge between Greece, the
Roman Empire, Egypt, and the Near East. Others in this same tradition of scholarship
have expanded the chronological scope to include Greek and Roman late antiquity
(Giannobili 2006) and the early medieval West (Gaide 2006, Önnerfors 1993). For
Byzantium, studies of the continued belief in the demon Gello or Gylou, of ancient
Mesopotamian origin, have made use of some incantations as evidence.15 For the medieval
West, we have a useful review of sources and an outline of a typology of incantations,
though it includes liturgical texts and material better classified as prayers to Christian
divinities,16 and several more general studies of incantations.17
Incantations have also been considered in a medical context in discussions of
approaches to healing in the Greek world (von Staden 2003). The most relevant here are
those that bring attention to popular remedies as opposed to learned medicine, for classical
Greece (Edelstein 1937), the Roman world (Draycott 2012), late antiquity (Nutton 1984),
Byzantium (Barb 1950a), and modern Greece (Stewart 1991).18 An important discussion
of textual sources for ancient and medieval medicine, many of the same sources that
transmit incantations, is that of Thorndike (1923-1958). In Thorndike’s analysis, however,
incantations, or more properly their absence in or rejection by a certain author, serve as an
index for scientific and experimental thought and its absence. Thorndike is tracing a
higher, more learned tradition than the one in which I am interested here, and his focus is
primarily on the medieval and Renaissance periods in the West, following developments

14 Heim may well have been kept from carrying his analysis further by lack of sympathy
for the material, which he terms nugae, and its users praestigiatores fallaces, in contrast to
his own professions of devotion to the Catholic faith (see the vita accompanying his
doctoral dissertation).
15 Sorlin 1991, Greenfield 1989, Oikonomides 1975-1976, Winkler 1931, Perdrizet 1922,
5-38.
16 Bozoky 2003, wherein incantations (“charmes”) are defined as verbal formulas for
healing and protection, separate from benedictions and exorcisms, “un ensemble de sons
ou de lettres, censé produire un effet physique ou matériel bénéfique” (31); though it is
also claimed that their power does not come from the words or sounds but from “une
médiation surnaturelle” (32) involving the Christian god, angels, and saints, even if these
figures are not specifically invoked.
17 Olsan 2003, Olsan 1989; Page 2004, particularly 18-35 on natural and amuletic magic,
with useful illustrations from manuscripts (the incantations discussed, however, are
essentially Christian prayers). Brief overview in Kieckhefer 1990, 57-68. On continuity in
magical practices in the Latin West, particularly in incantations, D’Alverny 1962.
18 Stewart 1991. Blum and Blum 1965 give limited consideration to incantations in the
context of “folk healing,” particularly 31-32, 167-175, and 184-187; idd. 1970 focus on
narratives about, not description of methods to combat or forestall “crisis,” and consider
continuity in “the occult estate” very broadly considered (286-296). There is mention of
xemetrima, “the magical-ritual words used in healing” (12n), in particular 12-13 and 143-
160; but no Greek text.
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there back to roots as early as the elder Pliny in the first century. Among previous studies
on amulets, specifically their inscribed text, the most important are the exemplary articles
by Alfons Barb (1948, 1950b, 1953a-b, 1963, 1964, 1966) tracing the textual tradition of
selected incantations and amuletic types in both Byzantium and the West, a model
followed also by Spier (1993) with rather less attention to inscribed texts for one type of
Byzantine amulet that will be considered here in detail. There is one recent, general study
of textual amulets for the Latin West, concentrating on the late medieval period in Skemer
2006. No study of the later Greek tradition has based itself on a systematic collection of
texts, however, a project that can also contribute to understanding of the earlier materials
and the western medieval tradition.
An expansion for Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greek incantations is thus long
overdue.19 Here I will use ‘Byzantine’ to refer to the period between the accession of
Justinian I and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (527-1453), and late antiquity to
refer to the preceding period beginning with the foundation of Constantinople. I also
consider Greek incantations from after 1453 that continue earlier traditions, which I term
‘post-Byzantine,’ and others that survived into modern Greece.
My primary intention has been to create a robust and diverse corpus of texts,
typologically organized and numbered and presented here in catalogue form (a separate
catalogue for each of the first three chapters), as large as possible given restrictions of time
and access, and it is my hope to expand it further in the future. Etymologically
‘incantation’ and the most common corresponding terms in the ancient Greek and Latin
texts connote song, and in fact meter or at least rhythmical speech does continue to figure
in Byzantine and later practice, but for the sake of a larger sample I have also included in
my discussion texts of similar construction which are to be written down in the making of
an amulet. The analysis can only focus on a small selection; there are far too many items to
discuss in detail, but their systematic collection may prove useful to future studies:
combination of future research and further finds may allow them to be brought into new
relations. Here the main text and footnotes cite loci, shelfmarks, inventory numbers, and
primary publications of inscribed artifacts and papyri, with reference to the catalogue
where fuller secondary bibliography and textual apparatus can be found, in an effort to
keep footnotes to a manageable size.
In the collection of the present corpus, I have collated the text of published editions
with facsimiles or readings from autopsy wherever possible, especially for those on
papyrus, metal, or stone. Publications of amulets, especially gems, are frequently given
only in unarticulated majuscules; to aid understanding and facilitate comparison with
other genres of text, I have added conventional articulation and converted these to
minuscule. Frequently too the mere comparison of published texts with newly identified
parallels has yielded improved readings. As a convention in reprinting of published texts,
and for all unpublished texts presented here, I follow the original orthography of all
ancient and late ancient applied texts, presenting normalized readings in the apparatus; for
medieval texts, I silently normalize instances of itacism, conflation of vowel quantity,
dittography and haplography of consonants, and aspiration.
I wish to stress that the catalogues to chapters 1-3 are provisional. The reader who
intends to cite them should bear in mind that the catalogue numbers have been provided
primarily for convenience in internal reference within this dissertation, and I recommend
citation by museum or other inventory number in the first instance. New material has not

19 A brief consideration is devoted to modern Greek incantations (“spells”) in a
geographically restricted area (the island of Naxos) and without attention to tradition, in
Stewart 1991, 222-241.
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ceased to come to my attention after the inevitable cut-off point for the writing of the
analytical portions of the first three chapters, and so over the course of writing I have
amassed ‘supplements’ to each of the catalogues, which cannot be included here but which
I plan to integrate into a publication of this study in revised form as a monograph. The
situation is especially acute in the case of the first chapter, where the supplement amounts
to nearly half the size of the catalogue proper. At present some material from this
‘supplement’ is cited where relevant as ‘addenda to the catalogue.’
Finally it is a pleasant duty to acknowledge my gratitude to my dissertation
committee, Maria Mavroudi, Todd Hickey, Gary Holland, and Donald Mastronarde, for
their patient and insightful guidance on this project. In addition to them, I thank Gideon
Bohak, Caroline Cheung, Emily Cole, Jacco Dieleman, Christopher Faraone, Richard
Gordon, Mark Griffith, Rita Lucarelli, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, Joachim Quack, Martin
Schwartz, and Andreas Winkler for advice on various points at various stages. The first
and second chapters were presented at meetings of the Berkeley Medieval Studies
colloquium series, from whose participants I received valuable suggestions. My
introduction to the so-called Greek magical papyri, which were in turn the starting point
for this dissertation, was the 2012 summer school in papyrology organized by the
American Society of Papyrologists at the University of Chicago, to whose directors, James
Keenan, David Martinez, and Maryline Parca, I am therefore much indebted. The Digital
Humanities at Berkeley program provided a grant to fund the acquisition of facsimiles of
manuscripts, which will feature in a future digital version of the corpus gathered here.
Finally it is impossible to conceive of my completion of this dissertation without the Center
for the Tebtunis Papyri, and its director, Todd Hickey, where I have found a home and
generous support throughout the process.

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Chapter 1

In favor of the personal aspect stressed by Marcellus in his rubric carmen idioticum, and
for the practical purpose of narrowing the scope of the investigation, I exclude
consideration of imprecations to divinities to grant health as a favor, essentially prayers,20
as well as liturgical exorcisms, Christian prayers for health and healing, invocations of
Christian holy figures,21 and with a few exceptions, addresses to medicinal herbs.22 I
further exclude the so-called Ephesia grammata, texts composed entirely of non-Greek (or
Latin) words or non-alphabetic signs, in favor of incantations that make sense as
syntactical Greek (or Latin). The latter are more likely to have made sense in turn to their
users within the tradition, and though rote copying of text without close comprehension
can never be fully excluded, it could occur much more easily for graphic signs or iconic
strings of letters. Incantation techniques are approached here from the practical side,
through examination of instructions for their use or artifacts activated in such use.
The sources for incantation practice during the period in question can be divided
into two broad categories, prescribed and applied. That is, recipes and formularies
recommending incantations, and various instances in which such texts are actually put
into practical use, orally or in writing.
On the prescribed side, we find material within, or as slightly later additions to, the
texts of classical and late ancient medical authors, Pliny, Marcellus, and others, as well as
anonymous collections of recipes in the Greek papyri from Egypt.23 This tradition also
informs the work of the early Byzantine physicians Aetios of Amida and Alexander of
Tralles; the latter practiced at the court of Justinian I and records numerous incantations,
for only some of which there is an editorial apology.24 The diffuse, popular iatro-magical
recipe genre,25 overlapping with larger gatherings known as ἰατροσόφια, “collections of
healing wisdom,” forms part of the inherited Fachliteratur of Byzantium, which would
continue to enjoy wide circulation centered on manuscript book production at
Constantinople itself. This long-neglected iatrosophion genre has recently begun to receive
scholarly attention, as integral to the regimen of care for the sick in hospitals at

20 Modern scholarship continues at times to include prayers in the category of ‘magic,’ as
for example a papyrus recently published as ‘magical,’ P.Mich. inv. 3404 recto, ZPE 182
(2012) 243-257, which consists primarily of a prayer to the personified Sun to grant
various favors.
21 On such texts see Klapper 1907, Goar 1730, Dölger 1909, Strittmatter 1932, Delatte
1957, Greenfield 1988, and for modern Greece, Stewart 1991, 213-221.
22 For their tradition in Byzantium see most recently Gribomont 2004, especially 31-34;
following the extensive study of Delatte 1961 tracing ritual practice in herbal lore from
Homer to the medieval Latin and Greek sources, with treatment of addresses to the herbs
at 118-147.
23 On Pliny in particular see Thorndike 1923-1958, 1:42-99. Besides including a selection
of healing incantations that he finds less objectionable, Pliny discusses at some length the
quaestio … polleatne aliquid uerba et incantamenta carminum (HN 28.10-29).
Thorndike’s account of Marcellus is useful but unsympathetic to the many incantations
and related ritual procedures, which are called “absurd rigamarole” (1923-1958, 1:587).
24 On Aetios and Alexander see Thorndike 1923-1958, 1:570-584.
25 On this genre in antiquity see De Haro Sanchez 2012.
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