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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:50]
B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with David Frankfurter, editor of the Braille Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic. David is professor of religion at Boston University. The idea of magic is one that has held sway in numerous cultures as far back as we know. Many historical and mythical figures were identified in the past as magicians, possessing abilities to perform miracles, curses, and all sorts of acts which defy the laws of physics. Magic, however, is an important part of our cultural heritage, and we learn about the values and belief systems of people by understanding how they incorporated various rituals in their lives. To help us understand how scholars today approach the study of magic and the promises for the field, I'm pleased today to speak with David Frankfurter. David, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
C
Absolutely, Caleb.
- [01:36]
B
Really glad to have you on. I just absolutely love these guides that Brill puts together. I feel like they're such a enormous resource for scholars and for people interested. Obviously, these are not the types of books where you're necessarily going to go and buy it as an individual, but you know, anyone who can access them at a library or online I think will really find that, that there's so much, so much here. And before even talking about how you put the guide together, what that work was like, because it was obviously it was a pretty major project, I was wondering if you just introduce yourself, tell us a little about yourself, your background and how you got into this line of work.
- [02:13]
C
Yeah, sure. I'm a scholar of ancient religions. My actual specialty now is the Christianization of Egypt, so early forms of Christianity in Egypt. But I started my religion major at Wesleyan University back in the early 80s and I've been kind of interested in magical texts and apocalyptic texts and popular religion, religion and violence for decades. And that's what My publications are on, and that's what I like to talk about. And I teach courses, actually I'm teaching a course right now on magical texts at Boston University. So those are my areas.
- [03:02]
B
And this guide features some of that, but it also features lots of other scholars works. How did the guide come together? What does it actually take to put together this sort of volume?
- [03:14]
C
Well, it takes two people in the beginning who had very strong ideas about whether we can use the word magic at all, and if so, what would it or should it mean. So the volume was really conceived as a corrective to people scholarship that just kind of went here and there, just talking about magic in Israel or magic in Greece or magic in medieval Christianity, as if everybody knew what that word meant. And it's a very, very vague word. It's a very polemical word. It's a word that's incredibly imprecise and always endows its subject with kind of exotic, dangerous overtones. And we wanted to correct for that. So we thought to ourselves, well, magic, it at one level is a general term for describing illegitimate or ambiguous rituals in any culture. On, on the perspective periphery of any culture, what those people do over there, or what we used to do but shouldn't do anymore, or what our witches and sorcerers do. And so every culture has some language for this kind of person. In history of the west, we have, I'm not going to use the original terms, but witch, sorcerer, warlock, shaman, things like that. And sometimes we think about these as being accurate words and sometimes we think of them as accusations. So that's one section of the book. Another section of the book is thinking about what our sources are for talking about magic in the first place. Like what are we reading? Well, half the time we're reading criticisms of what those people do in Christian or Jewish or ancient Roman legal codes. If you see somebody who is whispering to himself, be careful of that person. They might be a keshef in Hebrew or somebody dangerous. So sometimes we read those kinds of texts, the ones that are polemical, the ones that uphold a proper version of Christianity. And sometimes we find manuals, formularies, collections of spells. And sometimes they're written down by Christian monks, and sometimes they're written down by people who are outside Christianity or. Or they're just kind of collecting spells. And so that is another resource for making generalizations about magic. Do the people who are writing them down think they're doing magic? Probably not. They probably think that they're just collecting very effective stuff. Egypt has a lot of these. There Was no separate concept of magic as kind of a dangerous thing in Egypt. And then the. The third section of the book, I wrote a lot of it myself. It's tried to think of aspects of ritual that we might tentatively call magic. Forms of agency in objects, forms of agency in writing, forms of agency in, like. See what else? Yeah, incantations, that kind of thing. So the final part of the book is really trying to say, well, we're not going to define magic, but if we were going to talk about magic, what would we actually be talking about? So that's how the book was arranged. My co editor kind of gave up the project about halfway through. He was really important scholar of magic and how we think about magic. His name was Hank Versnell. He recently died, but he was a very important influence on many, many people. And we were very much kind of on the same page in thinking about how this guide would work. So that's how it came together. Right.
- [08:05]
B
And I imagine for you, you have your own areas of specialty, your own understanding that you're bringing to it. Was there anything that you found really surprising in the course of your research or things that really piqued your interest that you hadn't really considered for in the study of magic?
- [08:24]
C
I was fairly accustomed to these things when I was putting together this book. I think that I was very interested in the way one of our authors, Andrew Wilburn of Operland College put together, let's say, figured out how spaces could be protected in one of his essays, is interested in protect art, Architectural Protective magic, and then another one, how figurines work. And this is a very big topic right now. I'm writing on it as well. And he just brings a lot of kind of current philosophical ideas about the image, art historical ideas about the image into his. So I was very impressed with those particular articles. And then we have, I think, all of the sections in part four. I mean, not speaking of mine, but other authors like Esther Idenow and Sarah Iles Johnston, Naomi Janowitz, all of these authors really put a lot of thought into how they conceptualized dimensions of magic, like social tension, that kind of thing. Apart from that, it was all fairly familiar to me. That's how I was able to put it together this way.
- [09:57]
B
A big part of the project was, you know, looking at language, thinking about how different words were used in different contexts, and also ascribing, you know, what sort of connotation these words might have had for the people. Could you talk about, in particular, ancient Israel and Rome as examples for Trying to decode or understand some of the language that they might have used to talk about magic.
- [10:24]
C
Ancient Israel had, at least as we get from the Hebrew Bible, some very specific terms for illegitimate forms of divination, that is, try to figure out what the future would look like. Illegitimate forms of contact of the dead and illegitimate use of amulets and other types of rituals. One of the terms is keshef. And keshef is a kind of general term, kind of like our magic. It has a very strong, like outsider, impure valence. So what people call, even today, when they call something keshef, they mean it's on the other side, it's illegitimate. You can't do this kind of thing. So Israel, of course, the story of Israel as we read it in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible, is a story of creating a pure covenant with the true God who cannot be looked at and having no other forms of piety besides dedication to that God in his one shrine in Jerusalem. And so. And of course, we know that Israelite religion, I don't even have to call it folk religion, but Israelite religion was far more diverse and eclectic. And you find, oh, there's one reference to, I don't remember, there isn't a word that's used for this, but women on the roof, Israelite women on the roof who are living in Egypt, who are making images of the goddess a darte. It's very diverse religion with goddesses and demigods and all kinds of figures. But of course, any alternative practice is going to be called keshef. And so that's, you know, what we don't do. The use of this word does not reflect a greater or lesser series of, of popular practices. It simply means that there was a language of othering, a language of rejection. So in Rome, the main word is, there was one word, superstitio, which means overly emotional. Religion usually refers to religions that come from the outside, like the Dionysus cult or any other mystery cult, but also Christian Christianity, which of course came from Palestine. Magia. The word has an association with the magi of ancient Persia. So there already it has a sense of coming from the far periphery, especially from a culture that in the Roman Empire was absolutely antithetical to Rome. I mean, the Romans just hated Persians. So superstitio, magi or magi, what else? Were there various terms for witches as well? The Roman literature has a very kind of overheated image of female witches and their various rights, especially using the dead and controlling the dead and controlling young men. It was a very sexualized concept of magic. So really these are, this. These are series of stereotypes of caricatures, and they don't really have any reflection on what people were actually doing.
- [14:34]
B
Obviously there are many different written sources from these different regions and periods that are, that are looked at in the book. But could you share a little bit about some of the sources for ancient magic that scholars have today and, you know, just a little bit about what their materials were, what we know about their authorship and what the process is really like for, you know, someone like you who's going and looking at these sources to make it intelligible for us today?
- [15:08]
C
Yeah, it's a big diversity of different sources. So Egypt is probably the easiest to talk about because among the various texts in hieroglyphs or in demotic, Egyptian or in Greek that you get from Egypt are lengthy formularies, what we call formularies. These are collections of. Of ritual acts to gain a vision of a God or to find out what's going to happen in the future, or to see the truth, the true God, but also to curse somebody, to control somebody, especially sexually. So that is a. You find these. But also I should say that the earliest texts from earliest formularies in Egypt were very often for healing. So this is why I don't really call them texts of magic. I call them texts of ritual action or ritual formularies because they have everything from seeing a God to cursing somebody, to healing somebody. So that's Egypt. We have texts that go from the Pharaonic period, actually Pharaonic period all the way up to the 4th century in Greek. And then we have later texts that go all the way to the 10th century in Coptic, Egyptian. And so Egypt is very, very rich with, with ancient Israel and early Judaism. We have large collections of amulets. Especially there was an attic in a synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, which had a huge pile of texts that no one wanted to throw away because they could have sacred things on them. And many synagogues have what's called a geniza that where you put old texts that no one needs, but you can't burn them or throw them away because they have sacred writing on them. And in this geniza, there were just hundreds and hundreds of amulets and a few formularies in Hebrew. And these would be protecting people from various kinds of demons, especially. See what else Rome, ancient Rome and the Roman colonies, we have not formularies because the weather didn't allow them to kind of remain. But we have especially amulets in metal, wrapped up in little tubes, put in little tubes to protect people. And some of these are very elaborate, very full of names of gods. Some of them are Jewish amulets, as a matter of fact, from Roman colonies like Sicily. What else? We have small kind of what look like gingerbread men made out of lead. And these would accompany rituals to control somebody or to gain sexual favors from somebody else. What else do we have? Another thing that people have talked about is the magical elements in synagogue floors and in things that people put on the outside of their houses. So particular forms of mosaic floors, particular images of the Gorgon, particular images of Hercules. All of these would protect houses from the evil eye or from other types of nefarious beings. And I could. Each culture has different types of materials. Sometimes, as with Egypt, these are written by scribes who may even have some affiliation with a temple or royalty. And in other cases, they come from completely different areas of society, as in. Where else would I put it? Probably Rome and Greece. They come from other parts of society, from royalty and empire.
- [19:52]
B
You've mentioned a bit about, you know, amulets and papyri and other materials. Do you get a sense of, you know, the types of. Obviously these are the types of materials where the information has been transported, but even what's written about it, you know, sorts of materials that were used potentially in various magical practice. I imagine it very much differs from culture to culture. But, you know, what. What was. What was seemed seen to be imbued with magical powers.
- [20:24]
C
Well, what would. What would express what I call flexibly, magic would be a lot of power in the written word, which might include declarations and commands, but also might include names and words that we can't. That sound like a different language or sound like a heavenly language. And that kind of use of speech would convey to an audience or convey to the speaker that they are entering a different register of ritual activity. So that's in the area of writing and speech. I would say that we get this from some of the formularies, but also sometimes from archaeology. Sometimes when you want to do some kind of spell that is aggressive or binding of somebody else, you can't just say. You can't just use nice stuff like a little flower or something cute or something like that. You need to use something that seems to the receiver or to an audience or to yourself, like it's got some weird capacity to a kind of darkness to it. And so one of the. One of the objects that I've written about in a separate publication is a preterm fetus that somebody complained about being thrown at him in order to keep him from preventing a robbery. So it's a very strange letter. We don't know really what it looked like, Although a preterm fetus that probably served in magical functions was found out in one of the oases. So it's a good example of what we call the coefficient of weirdness in the creation of magical rights, that you can't just command. The command is the clear part, is the intelligible part. But in order to make something seem dark and dangerous and effective, you need something else. Today we would use something else. A black cat or the corpse of something. But then at least two people seem to have used preterm fetuses. So that is a good example of expecting power from unusual objects that I kind of include under a flexible definition of magic.
- [23:35]
B
Right? Yeah. There's obviously very, very many. I imagine the experience of reading some of these texts, it must feel like you're reading it wrong sometimes if you see certain things mentioned in it. For you and for other scholars that are looking at the study of ancient magic, what are the biggest questions that people have right now? Where do you feel sort of, that people are most interested in either, you know, mysteries that they're trying to answer still, or other questions that have cropped up recently, especially for you since doing this project?
- [24:16]
C
Well, I think the biggest questions or the most important questions have to do with what exactly we're talking about. Why we need to use the word magic for certain things, and what that means, means why can't we use just the word ritual? And so I guess that question leads to questions like when we talk a lot about power and efficacy, and so much of magic and so much of the rituals in these formularies has to do with constructing something that works. But what do we mean by work? And how does working come from language or from objects? How is efficacy constructed? That's the way I would put it. And does that point to certain ways in which we live, all of us, even today, in a world where a lot of things are working on us all the time? Our cell phone is actually demanding that we check social media, and the refrigerator demands that we open it up and check on things, and our car demands that we do an oil change, the objects around us, the world around us, has certain ways of impinging on our reality. So when we are talking about magic, are we actually trying to lay claim to some of that agency that we experience around us all the time? Are we actually kind of hooked into and working with a world of agencies and objects that have their own Intentions. I'm thinking magic also can refer to the kind of minor rituals that we do in order to feel a sense of control in the world. So there's a famous article that I had my seminar students read on baseball magic and how pitchers engage in extensive small rituals when they are pitching. Because so much stress and responsibility goes on, it lands on them at that particular moment. And if you are in the outfield or if you're in second base or if you're batting, you just there. It. There just isn't the same amount of. I don't want to use the term anxiety, but I guess kind of responsibility at that point. And so with that responsibility, with that capacity to that danger of failure, you see more and more ritual acts kind of working around. That's the same kind of thing with truck drivers in Africa who go on long overnight drives through the Sahara, and they fill their cabs with all kinds of amulets because it is so dangerous to drive a truck in Africa. So these are. This is one of the ways in which we kind of learn something about how magic. Complicated term, touches on so many different parts of life. And we have to understand that sometimes
- [28:28]
B
when people talk about magic or the belief in magic, they'll talk about humans in this sort of. This long developmental span where we used to be, you know, believers in magic, and we were, you know, taken by superstition. And then through the. Through the enlightenment and modernity, we overcame magic, and now we're rational and scientific. What do you. What do you make of just this general idea or theory? And do you think, in a way, it misunderstands maybe, how people in the past might have thought about magic in their day?
- [29:05]
C
Yeah, it's a particular model that goes back to James Frazer, who wrote the Golden Bough. And Frazer's idea is that we. It was really a question of do we understand causality in the world? And his belief, reading a lot of missionary reports, was that primitive people don't understand causality. They think of it as all connected to sympathetic connections. So if you have somebody's hair, you can control them. Or if you have a doll that looks like somebody, you can control them. Or if you do a dance that looks like rain, you could make rain happen. That's what they think. And then that was supplanted by religion, where causality comes from a God. And then that is supplanted by science, where we finally understand how causality happens in the world. So it's a very philosophical approach, kind of use of magic and invention. Of magic. Frazer at one point, he says that they overlap a little bit, but really it's nonsense. For one thing, magic isn't an issue of causality. Nowhere in the guide do we even and give it the time of day because we're trying to be cutting edge. Students have to understand that history because this is where the study of magic comes out of and in many ways is responding to. And for some scholars, it will never truly get out of that kind of idea that magic always seems to suggest a concept of causality and a concept of. Of wrong thinking in a way. But every culture has what we might call magical practices. But again, what I would say is a view of religious materials, a view of language, a view of writing, a view of places as having special powers that can be. Be in some ways appropriated, exploited, directed, redirected. So I'm not sure that magic is the best word for that, but I would say that people just use it in every culture. It's in every culture.
- [31:45]
B
We've already talked a little bit about how what the study of ancient magic tells us about things today or can help us think about different activities or thoughts or actions that people participate in today. Like you're. Like you're a baseball pitcher. Example. I'm so interested in how popular magic is just as a subject in culture. There, you know, horror movies that. That, you know, will. Will hinge on some doll or an amulet or something like that, you know, are very popular. And when you see the, you know, the prevalence of magic just as a subject in pop culture today, what does that make you think in terms of how your own study of these ancient practices, what does that make you think about how, you know, today we think about it versus, you know, how you think about it more so as a scholar?
- [32:38]
C
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it's kind of the relevance of the guide. The guide is really dedicated to scholars, scholars of Near Eastern studies, classics, religion, stuff like that, I am well aware, and actually often enjoy movies and books that involve, you know, performance of supernatural rights and things like that. We. We love to think about the caricatures, the exotic stereotypes of witches on the periphery, the kinds of rites that are exciting and might be dangerous, the ways you might focus your energies on a particular amulet, and then it turns out to be an evil amulet. I mean, this goes back to probably the 18th century, 19th century, and actually before, I mean, so much of Latin literature was this kind of stuff. People love this kind of stuff because it gives you a thrill and it articulates what the dangers of the exterior are. You know, for a lot of evangelical Christians, the magic of Harry Potter books, for example, is, is dangerous. You know, you have to stay away from that. Magic is something to be avoided. And so all the thrill you get from Harry Potter is something really not to be thrilled by, but to be scared of. So I think that that's one of the functions of these kinds of materials. I should say that in the history of tales and legends of magic on the periphery, there has been a tendency sometimes for it to be frankly racist or even misogynist. Racist in the sense that a number of movies and books since the 19th century have caricatured the religion of Haiti as being a kind of dangerous, polluting force coming into our cities. The image of women as being especially prone to magical activities, you know, that it can have a misogynist part as well. So we enjoy this stuff, but we do have to be careful about what the caricatures, the stereotypes are that are being turned into fun movies. Right?
- [35:35]
B
I mean, there's something, I think that's, that's a really great point that you bring up. And you know, the, the way in which, you know, this notion of like the, the outsider, you know, a practice that is just practiced by outsiders, how that can appear to us like dangerous magic, you know, where we might internally have our own practices that we just see as fun, super fun elements of superstition. It's interesting to think about that way and just the, you know, what one practice and one culture might mean to the participants in it versus their next door neighbors. My last question for you is, do you have a favorite fictional or historical magician, a person that you, that you know, that you've just have found fascinating in some way, shape or form, form. For example, when I was a kid, I think it might have been because of Mark Twain or something, but I just was obsessed with Merlin for some reason. Don't know why.
- [36:34]
C
Merlin's a really interesting character. And I think in college I took a course in Arthurian literature, so I should know more about Merlin. But I have to say I read the Lord of the Rings series at the right time in my life and also in history, long before the movies were out. And I'm pretty much in awe of those books. They capture something about the power in objects, the efficacy of objects, that is just much more kind of exotic then, you know, I can, I find those
- [37:19]
B
fascinating and the impact of those books on our culture, not just in terms of, you know, the popular cultural impact of the films, but also just you know, the impact on the impact of those books on the tech world is pretty astonishing. The number of tech leaders that treat the Lord of the Rings as kind of their roadmap, their bible for understanding contemporary politics and business. You know, I'm sure that, you know, assuming the not everything is kept, maybe in thousands of years when people are going and doing research on us, they'll be like, oh, these people really believed in Lord of the Rings as they're some founding story about their world.
- [38:02]
C
One of the things I think about Tolkien is how he had such tremendous expertise in Norse mythology and Norse texts and could read the languages. So he's coming out of a scholarly background that I can detect when I read that stuff.
- [38:22]
B
Yeah, well, maybe the next time we'll have you on, you'll have a novel. Well, David, thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to speak with you about your book.