Isidore of Seville's Taxonomy of Magicians and Diviners

ISIDORE OF SEVILLE'S TAXONOMY OF MAGICIANS AND DIVINERS By WILLIAM E. KLINGSHIRN In Etymologies 8.9, Isidore presents a detailed classification of the diverse group of ritual experts he calls magi. Well organized, erudite, flexible enough to include a wide range of specialists, and, as its record of influence demonstrates, enormously useful as a template for later medieval classifications , the "De Magis" offers what can rightly be called the first definitive western Christian taxonomy of unauthorized practitioners. Although Isidore relied heavily on a wide range of pagan and Christian sources for the contents of the chapter, their selection, revision, and arrangement — the elements of his taxonomy — were all his own.1 Yet, for all its importance, Isidore's chapter has received little critical attention in recent years. Unlike, for instance, its neighbor "De diis gentium" (Etym. 8. II),2 it has not been the subject of a published commentary or an exhaustive investigation of its sources.3 It has of course been used and summarized in studies of magic,4 excerpted in various 1 "Les sources des Etymologies sont multiples. . . . Elles se répartissent, sans distinction apparente, entre auteurs païens et auteurs chrétiens. Mais l'important est ici de souligner que, ni par leur conception d'ensemble, ni par la méthode d'investigation et la démarche intellectuelle, les Etymologies ne paraissent pourvoir remonter à un modèle précis: les matériaux sont tous empruntés, l'architecture est originale" (Marc Reydellet, "Sacré et profane dans l'encyclopédisme d'Isidore de Seville," in Le Divin: discours encyclopédiques, éd. Denis Hüe [Caen, 1994], 313-25, at 318-19). This article is based on a paper delivered in May 2000 at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in Chicago. For advice in revising it for publication, I am grateful to members of the audience, to my colleague, Professor F. A. C. Mantello, and to Professor J. N. Hillgarth and the other editors of Traditio. I should also like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellowship supporting my work on diviners in late antiquity during the 2000-2001 academic year. 2 Katherine Nell Macfarlane, Isidore of Seville on the Pagan Gods (Origines VIILlI), Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 70:3 (Philadelphia, 1980). 3 Sophie de Clauzade's edition, French translation, and commentary on book 8, scheduled to be published by Belles Lettres in the series Auteurs latins du Moyen Age, remains forthcoming. It will be based on Sophie de Clauzade de Mazieux, "Isidori Hispalensis Etymologiarum liber octavus de ecclesia et sectis: Edition critique et commentaire" (master's thesis , École nationale des Chartes, 1977). An abstract can be found in Positions des theses soutenues par les élèves de la promotion de 1977 pour obtenir le diplôme d'archiviste paléographe (Paris, 1977), 49-54. 4 Most recently by Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton , 1991), esp. 51-53. 60TRADITIO forms,5 and fully translated into (and thereby interpreted in) Spanish,1' Italian ,7 and German.8 And a new Spanish study of the sources of book 8 of the Etymologies9 now supplements the notes in the editions of Juan de Grial (1599)10 and Faustino Arévalo (1798),11 which Jacques-Paul Migne reprinted in 1850.12 But despite this scholarly progress, basic questions about the "De Magis" still persist: what it is actually a taxonomy of, how Isidore constructed it, and how his account matches the perceptions and practices of magic and divination in his own day. This paper explores the structure, sources, and contents of Isidore's "De Magis" with a view toward advancing the discussion of these problems. It begins by arguing that Isidore's chapter is not simply about "magic," as is often said, but rather about the many kinds of ritual practitioners that could be grouped under the capacious term magi.n It continues by showing 0 E.g., as an illustration of "the intellectual condition of the dark ages," by Ernest Brehaut (An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville [New York, 1912], 7), who translates portions of the chapter at 200-203. 6 San...