Coptic Magical Papyri: Christian Ritual, Healing, Amulets, and Lived Religion in Medieval Egypt
A small sheet of papyrus can preserve a world that official histories barely mention. In late antique and early Islamic Egypt, people did not experience…
Maqlû: Burning, Witchcraft, and Ritual Justice in Ancient Mesopotamia
In the libraries of first-millennium Mesopotamia, magic was not a marginal curiosity kept apart from learned religion. It belonged to the technical knowledge of trained…
The Atharvaveda Beyond “Magic”: Healing Charms, Sacred Speech, Amulets, and Vedic Ritual Power
The Atharvaveda is often introduced with a deceptively simple label: the “Veda of spells.” That description captures something real, but it can also distort the…
Defixiones: How Ancient Curse Tablets Bound Rivals, Thieves, Lovers, and Lawsuits
A thin sheet of lead, scratched with names and commands, folded until the writing disappeared, then dropped into a grave, a well, a sanctuary, or…
The Merseburg Charms: Pagan Gods, Healing Words, and the Survival of Old High German Magic
Among the surviving texts of early medieval Europe, few documents are as compact and as provocative as the two Old High German formulas now known…
The Brethren of Purity and the Architecture of Magic: Number, Music, Stars, Talismans, and the Ordered Cosmos
The Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, are easy to describe badly. They are sometimes reduced to a medieval encyclopedia, sometimes…
Sefer ha-Razim: Seven Heavens, Angelic Hierarchies, and the Ritual World of Late Antique Jewish Magic
Among the surviving books of late antique Jewish magic, few are as revealing as Sefer ha-Razim, the “Book of Mysteries.” It is not a modern…
Aramaic Incantation Bowls: Magic Under the Floorboards of Late Antique Mesopotamia
In the houses of late antique Mesopotamia, protection could be written onto an object so ordinary that it might otherwise have served at a meal….
Heka Before the Greek Magical Papyri: How Ancient Egyptian Magic Joined Speech, Image, Medicine, and Protection
Ancient Egyptian magic is often approached through a modern vocabulary that divides religion, medicine, ritual, and magic into separate compartments. The surviving Egyptian evidence resists…
The Yijing Before Fortune-Telling: How Hexagrams Became a Philosophy of Change
The Yijing—better known in English as the I Ching or Book of Changes—is often introduced today as an ancient Chinese fortune-telling manual. That description is…
The Magical Calendar: How Großschedel Mapped Renaissance Magic into One Esoteric Cosmos
The Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum is one of those objects that can change the way the history of Western esotericism looks. At first glance it…
Ethiopian Healing Scrolls: How Geʿez Prayers, Sacred Images, and Däbtära Healers Turned Parchment into Protec tion
A traditional Ethiopian healing scroll can be almost as tall as the person for whom it was made. Its narrow strip of parchment may carry…