Did Magic Matter? The Saliency of Magic in the Early Roman Empire

Meggitt, Justin J.

doi:10.1515/jah-2013-0010

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Seneca evokes a wider net of magical significance that overlies the entirety of the drama, further underscoring the uniquely emphasised feature of his Medea as a witch of fairly and squarely unlimited power. Meggitt (2013). The Roman world incorporates and values a broad sense of the power of voice as culturally exhibited in different understandings of song, as Habinek (2005) has amply shown; such a centrality of carmen within this world is directly applicable even without the additional factor of an immersive Egyptian experience on Seneca's part.…”

Section: Medea's Magical Syntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…further assist with contextualizing magic within the popular cultural imagination. For a valuable overview of attitudes towards magic and the various approaches scholarship has taken, see Meggitt (2013). The Roman world incorporates and values a broad sense of the power of voice as culturally exhibited in different understandings of song, as Habinek (2005) has amply shown; such a centrality of carmen within this world is directly applicable even without the additional factor of an immersive Egyptian experience on Seneca's part.…”

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Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Campbell¹

2019

Ramus

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Recent investigations of Seneca's Medea have found consistently fascinating the way in which Medea progressively flags her realization of enacted identity and selfhood. She self-consciously pierces the fabric of her drama with identifying declarations, colored by especial reference to her name: the announcement Medea superest (‘Medea remains’, 166) and bald statement of fiam (‘I will be’, 171) in response to hearing her own name lead to the supreme utterance of Medea nunc sum (‘now I am Medea’, 910). Medea conjures herself into being with these three identifications, stepping fully into the troubling contours she knows of not only her own mythology, but also her literary history. Medea's dominating focus on her name allows this layered acknowledgement of self, of Medea as both mythological figure and literary fixture. In resultant discussions, the weight given to her name in precipitating this sense of identity within her play has, quite naturally, led to a proportionate emphasis upon who Medea is. In some ways, Medea's notably self-annotative process of becoming ‘Medea’ eclipses other useful interrogative frameworks of her identity: the spotlight on the ‘who’ of Medea comes somewhat at the expense of the ‘what’, or the ‘how’. This is not to say that such categories are not mutually informative or intertwined, for Medea (by Seneca's time) does, in fact, have a defining act: the murder of her children. Who Medea is stems from what she does, the sentiment vividly expressed by Medea nunc sum. In light of these considerations, I would suggest a different perspective from which to conceptualize Medea's identity, one that takes into account the paired aspects of being and doing that together comprise an understanding of character, especially within drama. This perspective departs from a framework dependent on progressive structural characterization, as represented by the trio of passages cited above, and focuses instead on characterization via demonstrated patterns of linguistic tendency, on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. From the beginning, Medea displays measured consistency with her relentless knowledge of self as she transforms these categories of identification and action: as the play develops, her sense of ‘this is who I am’ becomes ‘this is what I do’.

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Section: Medea's Magical Syntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Campbell¹

2019

Ramus

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“…18-53)), the extent to which demons lost their power after the coming of Christ, etc. Nor is our goal here to summarize debates about how exactly Christian thought appropriated Jewish ideas of magical practices(Smith 1996;Klutz 2003), or to check recent objections to the dominant picture of the ancient world as full of magical practices(Meggitt 2013). These debates, in other contexts very important and interesting, would easily divert attention from the crucial subject we are discussing here: the structure of ideas that shaped characterizations of prayers and spells.…”

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confidence: 99%

Magic between Europe and India: On Mantras, Coercion of Gods, and the Limits of Current Debates

Fárek

Horák

2021

Religions

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Several scholars have criticized the efforts to explain Indian mantras as spells, but much is left to clarification. Why do submission-versus-coercion characterizations keep reoccurring, albeit disputed? Why does the difference between this-worldly and other-worldly goals also keep its important role in discussions about mantras? Furthermore, how are these ideas tied to analyses of the beliefs of practitioners? We identify three main positions concerning mantras: They are explained as spells, prayers, or both at the same time. However, the criteria for determining whether mantras are magical practices or religious practices apparently allow for characterizing the very same mantra as either of the two or even as ‘magico-religious’. The general theories of magic are not able to explain this problem. In the last part of this article, we analyse the role that the concept of supernatural powers plays in the debates. It was a whole structure of interconnected ideas, deeply rooted in Christian belief in a biblical God and fallen angels, which formulated the dominant characterization of magical practices in modern scholarship on India. We propose a three-step scheme which shows how the originally coherent account of Christian theology gradually dissolved into a set of problematic ideas that have typified discussions of Indian mantras over the last six or more decades.

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“…Therein Versnel emphasises that ‘magic does not exist, nor does religion; what do exist are our definition of these concepts’ (ibid., 177). For a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the definitions given to magic see Meggitt 2013.…”

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confidence: 99%

Roman Magic Figurines from the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire: An Archaeological Survey

Bailliot¹

2015

Britannia

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This paper deals with magic figurines from the Western provinces of the Roman Empire based on an inventory of twelve figurines and their archaeological context. It underlines the place of the figurines in the ritual of defixio and demonstrates that complex curse rituals such as those described in the Greek Magical Papyri (GMP) were not performed only in the Mediterranean basin. It also notes that these magic Western figurines are often found in important places (such as cities and large villas) and in late contexts.

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Did Magic Matter? The Saliency of Magic in the Early Roman Empire

Cited by 3 publications

References 64 publications

Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Magic between Europe and India: On Mantras, Coercion of Gods, and the Limits of Current Debates

Roman Magic Figurines from the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire: An Archaeological Survey

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