Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic ed. by David Frankfurter (review)

Why is it so difficult to write about magic? The term is inevitably slippery in most contexts, and it can sometimes be misleading if not downright deceptive. Almost every academic study of the subject must at some point parse what it means by "magic" or whatever other related terminology it is going to employ, and scholars are endlessly disagreeing with each other's definitions and applications of the term. Is there even any utility in its continued use as an analytical category? This is the fundamental question that this Guide addresses. Thus, although its stated focus is the ancient Western world, it will be of interest to all readers of this journal, irrespective of their chronological or geographical expertise.

David Frankfurter has been grappling with the meaning and utility of the category of magic for much of his career. He has, needless to say, never found an entirely workable solution, but he has continually sharpened the questions we need to ask and the ways we need to think about this problem. In this weighty volume, he has marshalled other scholars to his cause. The result is a collection rather different in character from many of the other guides, handbooks, and "companions to" that now proliferate in the field of magical studies. In his preface, Frankfurter asserts that such volumes "rarely do more than replicate their fields' traditional nomenclature and assumptions" (xi), whereas this collection seeks to disrupt the basic parameters of the field it will ostensibly summarize. This is achieved through collective effort, of course, but also very much through strong editorial framing. My review, therefore, will focus mainly on how the volume has been structured, and how its structure drives its main argument.

Part 1 of the Guide consists of just two chapters, both by Frankfurter. The first serves as an overall conceptual introduction, setting "Ancient Magic in a New Key." The second, at just five pages, is a straightforward "Plan of This Volume." It is worthwhile declaring just these two pieces to be a full "part" of the Guide, however, because framing the underlying problem that all the subsequent chapters will address is crucial. Readers who pick up this volume and dip into it the way one might with a more standard guide to some field of study might well wonder what exactly is going on. This is not because the chapters are not eminently worthwhile on their own, or even because all the authors adhere stringently to Frankfurter's editorial prescripts all the time. Rather, it is because each of the authors addresses and adheres to those prescripts in their own way. Only by knowing what each chapter is supposed to be doing within the overall structure of the volume can we fully understand why they approach the material as they do.

The fundamental problem established by Frankfurter is that magic is both an emic and an etic category. So are lots of things, of course, but the valences are particularly difficult to untangle in the realm of magic. Moreover, outside of very constrained circumstances there is no possibility and no point in taking a "resolutely emic" approach, as ancient studies once tried to do (3). Native terms for magical practices constantly shifted in meaning or connotation, and many encoded some inherent ambiguity anyway. Mageia itself provides an excellent example. Derived from the Greek term for Persian priests, some of its earliest usages nevertheless applied to native Greek practitioners, presumably meant to convey a sense of inappropriate exoticism about their practices. Whatever mageia entailed for the Greeks, it was not a broad, catchall category, but by the time the Romans were bandying it about, and certainly by the time the early Christian fathers picked it up, it had clearly moved in that direction.

Beyond such terminological traps, there lurks a more fundamental...