Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition ed. by Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari, and Shaul Shaked (review)

Over the past forty years, the study of ancient, late antique, and medieval "magic" has become a burgeoning field. Scholars have benefited from the (revised) publication of substantial corpora of ancient grimoires and applied magical devices (especially amulets, curse tablets, and magic bowls),¹ translations of magical materials,² and a host of monographs, edited volumes, and essays on ancient magic and magicians.³ These studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of the nature and scope of premodern magic and its practitioners in diverse times (antiquity, late antiquity, and the medieval world), spaces (especially Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome), languages (for instance, Akkadian, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin), and religions (particularly, indigenous Egyptian religion, Greco-Roman religion[s], Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Yet most of these studies provide either a general or synthetic analysis of magical texts and practices, or confine themselves to the manifestation of "magic" at a single historical instance or in one particular religious or cultural setting. As a result, there has been little focused and sustained reflection on the ways ancient magical texts and practices have remained consistent or have developed within and across temporal, spatial, linguistic, and religious boundaries.

Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari, and Shaul Shaked respond to this scholarly need in their Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition. The thirteen essays (together with an introduction) in this edited volume are versions of papers originally presented at a three-day conference held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem between 17 and 19 July 2006. What gives the collection its unity is that the papers coalesce around the complex interaction of the old and the new in magical rituals—the "continuity" and "innovation." Moreover, they all pay particular attention to the scribal milieu in which these rites were composed and transmitted. Although there are chapters that address the Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Arabic magical traditions, the balance of the volume is concerned with magic in Hebrew and Aramaic scribal communities.

After the editors' brief introductory essay, the book opens with Tzvi Abusch's "The Revision of Babylonian Anti-witchcraft Incantations," which traces the redactional activity evident in the Akkadian magical series Maqlû ("Burning"), the longest and arguably most important extant Mesopotamian collection of incantations against "witchcraft." Focusing his attention on two incantations, Abusch contends that the form of both incantations as they have come down to us is the result of multiple expansions and interpolations. For Abusch, this redactional activity is signaled primarily by syntactical and conceptual shifts in the text, and secondarily by the presence of similar or identical phrases that bracket likely interpolations (i.e., "repetitive resumption" [Wiederaufnahme]). Abusch argues that, in contrast to the limited powers of the witch in the "original" form of the incantations, the incantations in their present, expanded form demonstrate that the conception of "witch" has evolved to become "an almost universally powerful being" (38). Abusch appends a transcription of Maqlû II:19-75 and a partial transcription of Maqlû IV:1-79 in an excursus.

In "From Ritual to Magic," the first of two chapters treating magical traditions in Egypt, Joachim Friedrich Quack examines the cultural background of the charitesion (i.e., a charm for favor). In contradistinction to Christopher Faraone, who has hypothesized a Greek origin for the charitesion based on certain Mesopotamian precedents, Quack (following Roy Kotansky) stresses the priority of an Egyptian context for this type of charm. Quack supports this view by relating the charitesion to the numerous requests for divine and royal favor in magical and non-magical contexts in Egypt (from the Pharaonic period through the Roman era).

In "Scribal Practices in the Production of Magic Handbooks in Egypt," Jacco Dieleman engages directly with the volume's central theme of continuity and innovation in his analysis of hieratic and demotic magic formularies. Situating both within the Egyptian temple scriptoria, Dieleman draws attention to the...