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Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, Volume

1, Number 1, 2012, pp. 152-156 (Review)

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 152 preternature

Collins, Derek. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Pp.207.
isbn 978-1405132398.

Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe
kings college london

Ancient magic has long been a popular and fruitful subject of historical study,
and understanding of it has been variously deepened, finessed, and problema-
tized by scholars in recent decades. As the study of classical languages has waned
in the Anglophone academy, so the publication of translated magical texts has
broadened the audience for work on ancient magic far beyond the philologi-
cally adept. These translations include Hans Dieter Betzs magisterial The
Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (University of Chicago Press, 1986), John
Gagers Curse Tablets and Binding Spells (Oxford University Press, 1992), and
Roy Kotanskys Greek Magical Amulets (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994). These
are complemented by more general sourcebooks that collate a broad range of
magical texts and texts about magic, such as Georg Lucks Arcana Mundi ( Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Daniel Ogdens Magic, Witchcraft and
Ghosts (Oxford University Press, 2009).
There have also been plenty of historical commentaries to choose from, of
which Fritz Graf s Magie dans lantiquit grco-romaine: Idologie et pratique (Les
Belles Lettres, 1994), translated as Magic in the Ancient World in 1997, is a par-
ticularly influential single-author work that both explores a range of magical
practices over a long antiquity and sets them and their practitioners in a broad
social context. For one writer to approach such an enormous field offers obvious
benefits in a singular controlling intelligence sustaining the address of particular
problems and approaches. But in such a broad and complex field, multiauthor
volumes also have much to offer in command of detail and expertise. In this
respect, Christopher Faraone and Dirk Obbinks Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek
Magic and Religion (Oxford University Press, 1991) collects valuable expert-
witness introductions to subjects ranging from different kinds of curses to per-
ceptions of plants properties and the place of dreams in magic ritual. Their
title declares clearly an interest in addressing the long-running debate about
the nature and validity of labels of magic and religion and the relationship
between them, and the contributors address this problematic dichotomy from
different angles.

preternature, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012

Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.

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 b o ok reviews 1 53

A number of other edited books have been crucial in shaping thought about
ancient magic. Ancient Magic and Ritual Power (Brill, 1995), coedited by Martin
Meyer and Paul Mirecki, suggests that ritual power is a more helpful and
less loaded term than magic. The individual chapters in this volume all seek
to challenge received approaches to and definitions of magic. It also extends
the geographical and cultural reach of the study of magic, both with the inclu-
sion of essays on the ancient Near East, Judaism, and Christianity, and also,
crucially, in the willingness shown by its contributors to examine the cross-
cultural influences exerted on and by Greco-Roman magicfor example, in
Kotanskys study of Greek and Jewish exorcisms, and in Faraones examination
of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources of a Greek spell. A second coedited
volume by Meyer and Mirecki, Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Brill,
2000), further broadened cultural and geographical horizons with chapters on
Coptic and Islamic Egypt, and also included a dedicated section of essays on
theoretical matters of definition and description. Even more recently, Noegel,
Walker, and Wheelers Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late
Antique World (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) collects essays that
range similarly widely in space and time, and explicitly relates itself to the new
wave of scholarship on Greco-Roman magic that addresses the cross-cultural
and i nternational dimensions of magic in the Mediterranean world (2).
Besides the interdisciplinary advances of recent historical scholarship, any
scholar of ancient magic must also understand how a long history of anthro-
pological inquiry has shaped both the very questions we ask of magic, and the
ways of explaining how it worked and what its functions were. The academic
study of magic in any period and any place is fraught with problems of defini-
tion, approach, and perspective. The geographical and chronological distances
between the observing anthropologist or historian and his chosen society may
vary, but both are confronted with comparable difficulties in gathering data on
magical beliefs and practices, and then, indeed especially, in interpreting such
data. Examining magic can provoke a hermeneutical crisis: which interpretative
frameworks to apply to which phenomena?
Derek Collins, in his stimulating introduction to magic in the ancient Greek
world, manifests just such doubts about producing a single, overarching expla-
nation of his material, but capitalizes on this uncertainty to rich effect by taking
a multiplicity of angles on a complex and elusive subject. Collins foregrounds
the vexed question of approach and methodology in his opening chapter by
surveying some of the most influential approaches of social anthropology, deftly
moving between Frazer, Tylor, Malinowski, Lvy-Bruhl, Evans-Pritchard,

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 154 preternature

andTambiah. His depiction of this marketplace of competing methodologies

and hermeneutics will undoubtedly be novel and valuable for the beginning
undergraduate, although the reading list could of course be infinitely expanded,
and the reader misses a strong sense of the influence of important thinkers and
their schools and approaches, beyond Collinss necessarily select pick.
In Chapter 2, Collins moves on to provide an intellectual framework for Greek
magic, covering matters mythological-theological, philosophical, medical, and
psychological. He relates hostile descriptions of magic in On the Sacred Disease
and by Plato to their authors resistance to the apparent claims of practitioners
to control the gods, while also showing that this implied errant theology was
a misunderstanding. Collins provides taxonomies of magical practitioners and
practices, but properly warns of a disjuncture between the apparent clarity of
terminology and the messy realities of actual ritual practices.
Chapters 3 and 4 contain the most dense and sophisticated material of this
volume. Binding magic, a hoary but important topic, is addressed in Chapter3,
and Collins here both acknowledges the boundaries of his own and others
scholarly endeavors, and points out numerous instances where more work is
to be done, such as exploring further the relationship between binding magic,
disability, and votives in the increasingly lengthy and specific enumeration over
time of body parts in curses. He uses Alfred Gells work fruitfully to show how
kharaktres in magical texts might be seen as social agents. In his conclusion to
this chapter, he makes a bold argument for the move away from a symbolic to a
more literal use of metaphor in magic, which resonates with the material in this
chapter as a whole.
In Chapter 4, on Homeric incantations, Collins demonstrates his literary
credentials as he explores the magical deployment and resonance of Homeric
verses, demonstrating the increasing tendency over time to deploy such verses
irrespective of their narrative context. His judgment of scholarly register and
presentation is, here as elsewhere, acute. He analyzes texts in translation with
just enough transliterated Greek that the Greekless might appreciate the
complexity and ambiguity of particular philological points, from the different
resonances of agonos and agamos in Homeric and magical contexts, to the explo-
ration of punning and scrambled wordplay between podagra and dagor hupo.
His is not merely an eye for detail, however, for he also expounds the cumula-
tive significance of the combination of Homeric verses in spells with particular
panache.
Collins moves in his fifth chapter to Greek and Roman law and beyond,
gesturing to what he sees as the long afterlife of Greek magic in the Roman

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 b o ok reviews 155

Empire, Christian late antiquity, and the European Middle Ages. This chapter is
probably the most ambitious and the least satisfactory. The argument for going
so far into Roman territory and history is made forcefully but skates over rup-
ture and difference, something to which Collins is in general very alert, particu-
larly that produced by the increasing Christianization of Roman law and politics
from the fourth century onward. In this context, Augustine, though undeni-
ably important, cannot be the sole or summary spokesman for the Christian
demonization of magic. Although individual sections on Athenian law, Plato,
the twelve tables, Lex Cornelia, Apuleius, and third-century Roman jurists are
individually well done, they hang together uneasily, and the envoi of the last few
pages of this chapter is positively sketchy. By going so far, Collins also makes
one wish he had gone further, for his discussion of new attitudes to divination
in the third century begs some kind of follow-up study of the well-documented
magic and treason trials in Rome in the 370s, in which we see worked out many
of the implications of developing political and legal attitudes toward magic.
Collinss book is part of the Blackwell Ancient Religions series, and markets
itself primarily as an introduction rather than an exhaustive compendium.
Indeed, as the body of the text (excluding notes and back matter) weighs in at a
modest 169 pages, it is perhaps best approached as a selective introductory essay
of the kind now enshrined by the Oxford Very Short Introduction series, in
which the authors take on the subject reflects his own prevailing interests and
expertise. Collins himself admits that this study is not comprehensive, acknowl-
edging for instance the omission of amulets and literary depictions of magical
activity. It might, then, seem unfair to cavil about omissions in a consciously
and necessarily selective introduction, but Collinss stated aim is to produce a
discussion that is both accessible to non-specialists and challenging to special-
ists and covers the high points of scholarly consensus and to offer new inter-
pretive frameworks for understanding select Greek magical practices (xi). As
such, there is an important aspect of Greek, and indeed ancient, magic that both
types of reader would miss in this book.
An important development in recent scholarship, as epitomized by the
two volumes edited by Mirecki and Meyer, is the understanding of the eclec-
tic nature of ancient magic. Thus many of the Greek magical papyri include
appeals to powerful angels and archetypal magicians like Solomon, both drawn
from Jewish tradition; exorcism in Greco-Roman antiquity drew on Jewish and
eventually Christian practices; and late antique Coptic Christian texts use both
Greek and Coptic alphabets and blend near Eastern, Egyptian, Jewish, and
Christian formulae, as powerfully demonstrated in Meyer and Smiths Ancient

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 156 preternature

Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Collinss Greco-Roman focus in this book thus marginalizes the rich variety
of cultures one finds blended or accumulated in Greek texts like the magical
papyri. This would not matter so much if Collins had not extended his work
to the Roman Empire and late antiquity, appealing in Chapter 5 for a read-
ing of Roman magical practices as essentially an absorption and adaptation of
Greek onesthat is, arguing for just the kind of contiguities and borrowings
that characterized ancient magic of earlier periods. Further, his suggestion that
the stereotype among Romans was that the Greeks were adept at magic could
usefully be refined by considering how far the suspicion of Greek magic was in
fact of Hellenistic Jewish, or other, magic.
This quibble aside, there is much to be commended and enjoyed in this book.
Collins is alert to the manifold problems of approaching a subject whose mean-
ing has all but been exploded by scholars. Despite tantalizingly titling his first
chapter Magic: What Is It and How Does It Work?, Collins sensibly refuses to
offer a single comprehensive and crude answer to the first question and focuses
on the second. He also avoids being sucked into the ongoing debate over the
distinction between magic and religion, which he characterizes damningly as
largely effete, by commandingly relegating it to a different historiography alto-
gether. In offering an array of perspectives on, and ways of reading, magical texts
and objects, he goes a long way to fulfilling an ambitious twofold claim to offer
something to beginners and periti alike.

Gutierrez, Cathy. Platos Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. NewYork:

Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 232. isbn 978-0195388350.

Kristy L. Slominski
university of california, santa barbara

Cathy Gutierrezs Platos Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance

is an important addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century American
Spiritualism. While several studies have emphasized the practices of popular
Spiritualism, including sances, trance performances, and various notorious
cases of fraud, Gutierrez focuses her attention on the common intellectual

preternature, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012

Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.

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