The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts. Judika Illes

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СКАЧАТЬ Earth’s weakest link, then I guess you’d better lump magic in there with the rest of these moral dilemmas.

      If magic cannot be entirely divorced from religion, even less can it be separated from herbalism, the root of all traditional medicinal systems, systems that for millennia have investigated botanical impact on health and (above all) on reproduction. Magic is the primordial human art and science. It stems from awe inspired by all Earthly creation, but especially the mysteries of human creation. Every new human life is the ultimate act of magic. Conscious attempts at conception probably constitute the first magic spells, especially if you consider that our remote ancestors didn’t understand pregnancy in the detached, technical manner that we do today. Primordial religions venerated the divine in the form of human genitalia with joy, awe, and respect, not prurience, recognizing their capacity for sacred generation and creation.

      Although these symbols still survive in isolated pockets of official religion, magic remains suffused with sexual imagery, in ways that may surprise us today, in efforts to maximize the blessings inherent in the powers of anatomy, both male and female. However, magic stems from fascination, on the part of both women and men, with women’s mysteries: the capacity to produce life where it didn’t exist before, magic blood that flows on schedule from no wound and then is mysteriously retained, the links between that blood, fertility, women, the moon, and the sea. These were and remain conduits to the sacred for primordial magic and spirituality alike.

      Where Do Magic Spells Come From?

      According to the author, folklorist, and scholar of magic, Zora Neale Hurston, “magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.” Very true, but what we do know is that magic comes from all over the globe. There is neither a people nor a culture on Earth that did not at one time possess a magical tradition, whether they recall it today, or whether or not they still use it. Some cultures and religions revel in their magical traditions. Others are ashamed of them or deny that the traditions ever existed. Some ethnic groups like to point the finger and suggest that magic comes from other people, not them, oh no, never—any practices of their own are only isolated bad habits picked up from disreputable magical wanderers or neighbors.

      When a large cache of papyri from Alexandria in Egypt was found to be largely devoted to magic spells, anthropologists, Egyptologists, and other scholars exulted. Not because they were necessarily so interested in magic, although some were, but because magic spells reveal a tremendous amount about a culture and its circumstances. Read between the lines of a spell and you will discover important details about people’s expectations of life and death, their daily problems, the materials that they cherish, their spiritual outlook. For example, recently published books intended for the urban magical practitioner attempt to minimize or even eliminate the need for botanicals. Beyond their value to their intended audience, these books also transmit a crucial message to all of us regarding the state of our environment. As another example, only cultures that possess a belief in the possibility of legal justice, however remote, produce court case spells. Love spells reveal cultural sexual dynamics. So you see, magic spells have tremendous value as history, anthropology, and sociology way beyond their practical value to the spell-caster.

      Translations of these Alexandrian papyri, now known as the Magical Papyri, were eagerly awaited. Stemming mainly from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, they span a crucial, fascinating period of history: the times of Cleopatra, Jesus, the rise of Rome, the fall of Jerusalem, and the emergence of Christianity as a cohesive faith and world power.

      Alexandria, although it became Egypt’s capital, is not an ancient pharaonic city. It was founded by the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great, one of several cities he named in his own honor. Its orientation is the Mediterranean, not the Nile, like other older Egyptian cities. At various periods, indigenous Egyptians were not even permitted to live within Alexandria’s boundaries. It was a Greek outpost in Egypt, with Greeks as the elite citizenry. Cleopatra, descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals and the last of her dynasty, was the only one of her lineage who troubled to learn the Egyptian language.

      The city achieved a reputation as a world capital of magic. Alexandria supported a sizeable population of magic practitioners of all kinds—diviners, dream interpreters, professional spell-casters—all presumably serving the needs of their specific communities rather than Alexandria as a whole, because Alexandria was a rigidly divided city. Although Alexandria, like many cities of its time, was divided into quarters, true divisions, like many a modern city, were cast along ethnic lines. Two of Alexandria’s quarters were Greek, one was Egyptian (the only area in which they were permitted to reside), and the fourth housed a sizeable Jewish community.

      Divisions between the quarters were distinct, reflecting hostility between these communities, which periodically bubbled over into rioting and violence. It was a turbulent, volatile city, demonstrating ethnic tensions only too familiar today. This may be ancient history but it’s a familiar landscape to many contemporary urban dwellers or anyone who reads a current newspaper. It was precisely the city’s divisions, its multi-ethnic population, and varied religious and spiritual traditions (Alexandria was also the birthplace of Gnosticism) that so excited the archeologists and scholars—it provided the potential for something like historical “control groups.”

      Expectation was that the orientation of the papyri would be largely Greek. In Athens, there was a tendency to associate magic with out-of-towners—Thracians or Thessalians. Would this practice continue? Would there be completely Greek magic, or would the Alexandrians transfer the outsider role to the native Egyptians? Would the Greeks, traditionally impressed by Egyptian mysticism (Pythagoras studied in Egypt) adopt some of their host country’s practices? Would it be possible to clearly trace the emergence of Gnosticism as well as Pagan reactions to Christianity? Answers to these crucial questions were anticipated with bated breath as translation of the papyri progressed.

      What was uncovered is a mess. The spells, on the whole, are neither clearly nor even mostly Greek, or Egyptian, or that third ethnic group, Judaic, but a scrambled jumble of all three, with a healthy dose of Pagan and Christian Gnosticism, together with a sprinkling of influences from other parts of the Greek and Roman empires. Any individual spell may incorporate the God of Israel, assorted angels, Egyptian gods, Mesopotamian gods, Greek gods, Nubian gods, Jesus Christ and Christian spirituality, botanical magic, divination, names of mysterious things we have no way of presently identifying, some or all of the above, and definitely not necessarily in that order.

      What was a poor scholar to do? How to interpret and sort this material, determine who wrote it, and to whom it truly belongs and applies?

      None of the information in the papyri is mundane everyday material that you might say any individual on the street was bound to know. The spells and incantations are the height of occult knowledge. The Magical Papyri are the descendants of highly guarded spiritual secrets, the ancestors of high ritual magic. Alexandria was an intensely urban community. These spells don’t reflect the knowledge common to any village wise-woman or cunning man but are highly detailed and specialized, occult in every sense, the stuff of initiates and adepts. Who wrote them? The information contained in them defies all attempts to pigeonhole these spells.

      They derive from over centuries and so can’t be attributed to one person, not even the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. Nothing in Alexandria’s history indicates a mingling of cultures that would provide a general intercultural exchange like this—quite the opposite. Furthermore, although Greek was Alexandria’s lingua franca and many Jews, for instance, spoke that language rather than their own, spiritual secrets were still recorded in each community’s distinct tongue. Sacred, secret, spiritual texts in each possible tradition were maintained in the most obscure version possible specifically so that profane eyes could not access them. Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew aren’t even written with the same alphabets. Who had access to all this vast information? How was it transmitted?

      Intense СКАЧАТЬ