: This paper explores the concepts of nature, cause, and agency as they define Greek magical practice in the Classical period. I seek first to demonstrate that the authors of the Hippocratic and Platonic attacks on magic share basic assumptions about nature and divinity with the magical practitioners themselves. Next, I situate magic within the mechanical, teleological, and volitional modes of Greek causal explanation, demonstrating how these modes can overlap in the explanation of a magical event. Finally, I consider figurines as a test case for concepts of causality in magical action. I argue that figurines, like Greek statues generally, are viewed as social agents capable of causing events to happen in their vicinity. Once we situate the figurines within a network of social relations, new explanations can be derived for the practice of binding and abusing them.
. : by contrasts than in its essence. 1 Without a context for magical practices-whether curses, rituals, prayers, the fashioning of figurines or dolls, or the use of pharmaceuticals-we cannot give a full account of what Greeks of the Classical period understood as magic. And even when a context exists for these activities and we appear to be in a better position to analyze magical behavior, serious category confusion persists. Public, state-sponsored curses, for example, seem to defy
University of Michigan1 The bibliography here is large, but I have found the following works especially helpful in outlining current approaches:
This article reconstructs the practice of Greek hepatoscopy in the classical period and thereafter. Based on historical, literary, and comparative anthropological material, it argues that hepatoscopy was a binary system involving both fixed and fluid points of reference on animal livers. Attention is given to the most relevant features of the liver as they pertain to divination, in both Greek and later Roman sources, as well as to the seers who specialized in this form of divination. Finally, I contrast Greek liver divination with a contemporary African example of entrails-reading in an effort to illustrate how Greek hepatoscopy might have proceeded.
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