Episode 32

The Papyri Magicae Graecae & The Theban Magical Library Part 2 – Blood of a Hoopoe

Welcome to the Poison Room, a podcast about written things that are sometimes bad, or sometimes supposedly let you do bad stuff.

Last episode was all about a how Egyptomania lead to the finding of a selection of Graeco-Egyptian magical formularies now referred to as the Theban Magical Library and about where the specific find site might have been, why the papyri might have ended up wherever it was they ended up, and the potential authors, users, and owners of the archive. This episode we’re gonna talk about the contents of the archive. Except for the Eighth Book of Moses. That one we’ll get to next episode.

The Theban Magical Library is big in terms surviving ancient magical libraries, and its content is delightfully varied. Jacco Dieleman creates four basic categories for the contents of magical archives. There’s a lot of sub-categories in some of them, but the four basic areas of concern he identifies are knowledge, control over others, protection, and healing (2019: 296).

Knowledge involves a lot of divination stuff, and there’s a lot of divination stuff in the Theban Magical Library. The owners were big fans of trying to find stuff out. And there are a lot of different ways of trying to figure out what will happen in the future. My personal favourite actually isn’t in the Theban Magical Library. It’s in PGM 7 (= GEMF 74), which contains one of three surviving versions of the Homeromanteion. You roll three 6-sided dice one after the other and then match the combination of the numbers you rolled to a giant table which gives you a verse from either the Iliad or the Odyssey that’s somehow supposed to relate to whatever question you asked. Some delightful soul has actually made a website version of one. I’ll post a link in the show notes. This isn’t the only use of Homeric verses in magic. PGM 4 (= GEMF 57), which is part of the Theban Magical Library has multiple uses for Homer. There’s a charm for restraining anger using Homeric verses (467-468), another for making friends (469-470), and several others. The charms are literally just one verse from Homer that would probably have been written on an object such as an amulet. These kinds of things have also been done with verses from holy texts, such as the Bible and the Qu’ran, but we can talk about that at another time.

Back to divination stuff. Lots of it. PGM 14 (= GEMF 16) alone has a lot of spells for divination. I mean, it has a lot of spells full stop. It’s the largest of the papyri – it’s the one that’s 5 metres long – and it has 108 recipes. The very first recipe on it, in fact, is a divination spell, and begins with:

something something ‘edge of whose strap rests in Pelusium, his face being like a spark’ something something of an unclean(?) cat whose testicles(?) are (like) a rearing(?) uraeus’.
(PGM 14/GEMF 16.1-3)

An uraeus is a snake, by the way, it’s an asp. If you think of the asp on the headdress of a pharaoh, that’s an uraeus So… I don’t really know how you get a cat’s testicles to do that, but like. I’m not a vet. I am, however, someone whose google search history now contains the phrase ‘cats testicles rearing’. I had a thought that it could be a comparison between a cat’s testicles and maybe the venom glands on a snake? So the implication would be like, lots of venom ready to go, and then maybe that’s referring to how tom cats especially do a lot of spraying, except obviously that’s urine, not something coming from the testicles, but I have no idea of the extent to which ancient Egyptians understood cat anatomy, and then I thought… ‘I am spending too much time thinking about this. This is not a thing I need to do with my life.’

So anyway, this is a divination spell that involves a youth staring into a shallow bowl of liquid – oil, or water, or both. The idea is that the ritualist has in mind a certain question, or area of interest, and invokes a god to answer that question. The god appears in the liquid, and the child relays what they see or hear. Which is hopefully the answer to your question (Johnston 2001: 100-101). This recipe is pretty detailed – it’s 87 lines long. You have an initial comment about cat’s testicles, which is part of an initial incantation, invoking the gods to appear to a youth who you have acquired from somewhere, and who’s been given a bowl of liquid for them to lean over and stare into (except they start the ritual with their eyes closed).

As I said, the ritualist tells the gods that they want to ask them some questions. Then they get the youth to open their eyes. If the kid can see light: great, continue with spell. If not: bad. They need to shut their eyes again and the ritualist then has to say a reasonably long formula seven times. And then tell the kid to open their eyes again. I presume if it’s still dark they just keep reciting the anti-darkness part of the formula until the kid assures them that they can see the light, at which point they can finally continue with the spell, which involves reciting a different formula and then they… basically like… role-play a feast for the gods? Maybe? The ritualist tells the kid they’re using to tell Anubis to bring a table in for the gods, and let them sit, and then they wait for them to be seated, and then the ritualist tells… Anubis to bring wine and bread in so the gods can feast and make merry. But this is all happening in the liquid that the kid is staring into. When they’re finally done the ritualist asks the kid to ask Anubis to ask which of the gods is going to be answering their questions today, and when the answer is relayed back to them then they can ask their questions.

That’s the actual ritual part of the spell. There’s also part of the recipe all about the preparations for the ritual. Here’s the start of that part:

bring 7 new bricks which have not been moved in order to overturn them to the other side. You should lift them while you are pure, without touching them to anything at all. And you should set them (back) in their manner in which they were set again. And you should set 3 bricks under the oil. And the other 4 bricks, you should set them up in the vicinity of (i.e. around) the youth without his body touching the ground. Or 7 palm staffs. You should do the same with them and you should bring 7 pure loaves (of bread) and you should lift them up in the vicinity of the oil together with 7 lumps of salt. And you should bring a new bowl and you should fill it with pure oasis-oil and you should put (it) into the bowl very slowly without allowing cloudiness to appear so that it becomes exceedingly clear. And you should bring a pure youth who has not been with a woman. You should speak down into his head while he is standing in front, saying “Will he be useful for going to the vessel?” If he will be useful, you should have him lie down on his belly.’ (PGM 14/GEMF 16.62-69)

And that’s not even all of the preparation instructions. There’s advice on what signs to look out for to know whether the kid will be useful or not which… involves his ears speaking? If both ears speak: good. If the right ear speaks: also good. If just the left ear speaks: bad. The next two parts of the papyri are additional instructions for enhancing the spell – for making the vessel enchant quickly, and to make the gods speak. And then it lists some variants. If you want to bring the gods in by force – presumably if they’re not playing ball – then you need to put bile of a crocodile on the brazier. Then there’s variations for if you want to bring in: a living man, or a spirit, or a drowned man, or a dead man who presumably died any way but by drowning, or if you wish to bring in a thief. And don’t worry, there’s also details of what to do if you want to make them all go away again. (PGM 14 LINES = GEMF 16.77-86)

The final part of the recipe is a couple more methods for making the vessel enchant quickly, the last of which involves making an amulet for your kid to wear:

You should bring a bandage of linen of 16 threads, 4 white, 4 [green], 4 blue and 4 red and you should make them into one bandage and you should stain them with the blood of a hoopoe and you should bind it to a scarab in its stance of the sun, drowned, wrapped in byssus. And you should bind it to the front of the youth who is carrying the vessel. It enchants quickly, there being no [delay] in it.

No idea how a kid is going to feel about you tying a dead scarab to them. Maybe they’ll think it’s great fun.

That is not an insignificant spell. The whole thing is clearly going to take a chunk of time; not just in conducting the ritual itself – obviously there are a lot of steps there, but there’s setup to do, and quite a few ingredients involved – some of which also require their own preparations. Of course, not all the recipes are this long or have that many steps – some of them are only a couple of lines long.

When reading stuff like this I always find myself asking ‘did they really think this worked? Like, literally, as described? Not just in some metaphorical way?’ This spell you could say ‘well the kid just lies, right?’ But even if the kid just plays along, you’re gonna find out at some point if the information they gave you was good or not. But people today who visit mediums, psychics, fortune tellers etc. all hold genuine beliefs that those people can tell the future. And whether the predictions actually turn out to be right or not rarely seems to matter – there are ways in which mistakes and incorrect predictions can be explained away.

People paid for experts to perform these rituals for them to find out the future. They clearly thought it worked. In the case of divination spells, I see no reason to doubt that. But with some of the other recipes it gets harder to figure out what they could have believed. The next ones that I want to talk about, though, fall into the category of ‘not too hard to accept that people thought this did exactly what they wanted it to do.’

These spells are called oneiropompeia. Dream sending spells.

Dream sending is not unique to the Theban Magical library, but it is the archive that you’d go to if someone told you to go get them a dream sending spell. There are some in another archive known as the Hermonthis Magical Archive, but that’s kind of it. But one of the rolls in the Theban Magical Library, PDM Supplementum (= GEMF 17), is all about dream sending. Which, in some ways, is an incredibly self-explanatory title. It’s a recipe to send a dream! But to who? From whom? Featuring who? For what reason?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was another type of divination spell – for premonitionary dreams, or dreams that would reveal certain types of information. Premonitionary dreams are, after all, a trope that’s several thousand years old, at least. The very reason the Israelites were in Egypt is because Joseph correctly interpreted the pharaoh’s dreams for him. Those dreams were premonitionary dreams – warning of years abundance and famine. And there are actually spells for that kind of thing! But they’re referred to as ‘dream oracle’ spells and this is not what these spells are.

But if they’re not dreams for conveying knowledge or foreknowledge, then… who are our dream sending spells sending dreams to, and why?

They’re sending dreams to whoever the customer is asking them to send dreams to. With whatever content the customer is asking for. Why are they sending them? Imagine (or maybe you don’t have to) that you know someone who absolutely believes that they get premonitionary dreams – some divine being of some sort lets them know things, or warns them of things, in dreams. Someone who actively makes life decisions based on the contents of their dreams. Imagine you want them to take a specific course of action that would benefit you. Say… break up the business empire they just inherited from their father. Of course, they’re not going to listen to you, though. Maybe they don’t know you, or don’t like you, or you’re a rival business, and/or what you’re suggesting isn’t going to sound like a great idea to them. But they might well listen to a dream.

These are spells of the ‘control over others’ type.

What do the recipes look like? Well. The first few on the roll are so fragmentary that you can’t get a sense of what’s going on. The first recipe goes like this: ‘something youth(?) of something scarab of something soul of four faces(?) something And I something you something complete something’. And then the accompanying procedure is, uh: ‘on a leaf something and you put a something it and you write something embalming house something. (PDM Suppl. 1-6 = GEMF 17.1-6)

But that ‘embalming house’ might give you a hint that there’s a kinda’ necromantic vibe going on with these spells, and that’s more obvious in some of the more intact – and longer – ones. Another one, for instance, starts with the phrase ‘Listen to my voice O spirit, noble mummy of a man of the necropolis’. (PDM Suppl. 41 = GEMF 17.41) Why is this dream-sending spell starting by invoking a mummy? Because who do you think is going to be appearing in the dream? Not the ritualist, certainly. These are recipes in which the practitioner is harnessing the power of an entity – often a dead spirit, and saying ‘okay, I want this person to have this kind of dream, with this content – go give them that dream’.

This same recipe is also, as far as I can tell, specifically trying to send someone a dream which would be interpreted as premonitionary - the spell instructs the spirit of the mummy to go to the sleeper and ‘report an omen’, as well as doing other things which the ritualist tells them to do (PDM Suppl. 53 = GEMF 17.53).

The preparation instructions for that same spell also include the instruction to write the name of those involved ‘with blood of a hoopoe on a reed leaf’ and ‘put it under the head of a dead man’ and then also do something with a clay something which you also possibly put under the head (PDM Suppl./ GEMF 17.54-56). I brought up this passage because I have questions about the exact frequency with which people might be doing this – and I’ll get back to that – but there’s another interesting thing going on here: the blood of a hoopoe. A hoopoe is a bird. I don’t know what Egyptians believed about it but the Greeks had some weird ideas about hoopoes. But that is not even the thing that’s interesting here. The word ‘hoopoe’ was written in a cypher alphabet. If you remember last episode, I mentioned that there’s a cypher alphabet in some of these texts that’s unique – as far as we know – to the Theban Magical Library. This is that cypher. Now obviously it’s been solved, otherwise we wouldn’t know that the word in question was ‘hoopoe’. It was solved over 100 years ago. William Groff ‘demonstrated’ how to solve it in and when Francis Griffith and Herbert Thompson published their edition of PGM/PDM 14 they included the explanation of how to solve it and the full list of words written in cypher.

It may sound strange, but scholars aren’t even sure who exactly the cypher was meant to exclude. Firstly, the cypher appears only in the spells written in Demotic, but, as Jacco Dieleman explains, even within the demotic spells the majority of them don’t contain the cypher (2005: 91). It’s not something that’s being consistently applied to make sure the uninitiated or the unskilled can’t read or successfully complete rituals. Secondly, there are instances in which passages that use the cypher script have parallels written elsewhere in the manuscript which don’t contain the cypher, which makes it super easy to solve (and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Groff pointed out when he explained how to solve it).

The cypher does not appear in the invocation parts of the spells, but only in the instructions, or ‘preparations’ parts. A lot of the encoded words are, as with our hoopoe, for ingredients (Dieleman 2005: 91). There doesn’t seem to be a pattern in terms of which types of spells the cypher appears in, so it’s not like someone was like ‘oh let’s stop people doing just the weird necromantic stuff’ – there are other spells, for other things, that contain this cypher – but there are some instances in which it seems kinda probably like the intention was to hide what the spell was for. Dieleman points to this spell in PGM 14/GEMF 16:

If you drown a hawk in a ⟨measure of⟩ wine, and you make the man drink it, ⟨then⟩ he dies. If you put the gall of an Alexandrian weasel into any piece of food, ⟨then⟩ he dies. If you put a two-tailed lizard into the oil, and [you cook] it, and anoint the man with it, ⟨then⟩ he [dies (PGM 14.387-89 = GEMF 16.386-88.)

Yes, talking about dream-sending has gone off on a tangent into murder recipes. Anyway. The word for ‘he dies’, all three times it occurs, is in cypher, as are ‘hawk’, ‘gall’, and ‘lizard’. The same thing happens again with the verb ‘die’ in a different recipe to kill someone, (if you’re interested, it’s quite a short recipe - put the blood of a camel and the blood of a dead man into a wine and make someone drink it) (Dieleman 2005: 91-92). At other times, to “disguise” the intent of a murder recipe the scribe wrote ‘it does the job’ which, let’s be real, is… it’s not really subtle, is it? We all know what that means. Especially if you’re telling someone to put blood in someone else’s drink. Like, we can figure this out from context.

Dieleman offers two suggestions as to what the cypher was used for – or rather, two groups that it might have been intended to exclude – other practitioners, so they can’t steal your super powerful spells, or the authorities because they tend to frown on murder. Though, remember, the cypher does not appear purely in murder spell recipes, and not every murder spell recipe uses the cypher. The fact that it’s applied inconsistently, he suggests, might be explained by the fact that the cypher wasn’t invented for use in demotic and a scribe might have been writing the spells out, then seen a Greek text using the cypher, thought it was cool, and decided to apply it from then on to the demotic stuff they were writing out (Dieleman 2005: 91-92).

There are genuinely not actually that many murder recipe spells in the Theban Magical Library. Like… less that ten. Probably. And you may well argue that that is too many murder recipes! And I have no moral grounds on which I could disagree with you. The thing that I find weird, however, is how easy they are. Could I catch a falcon to drown in wine? Absolutely not. Could I get the blood of a camel and a dead man? I mean… to be brutally honest the camel is going to be more of an issue, there.

But our dream-sending spell required the blood of a hoopoe in order to write the name of those involved on a reed leaf which was then to be placed under the head of a dead man. Personally, I would give those the same difficulty rating. And the next dream-sending spell on that roll is definitely harder.

Step one: Acquire the head of a man who was killed.

Step two: Bring it in the last day of the lunar month (I don’t know where you’re supposed to bring it. Maybe that’s just specifying when you’re supposed to be using it. Or collecting it. Or both).

Step three: Wash it very thoroughly in cow’s milk.

Step four: anoint it with lotus ointment.

Step five: get seven reed leaves and… put them in the seven openings of the head. Then bind them with linen. This can’t be any old linen – it has to be linen made by the hand of… someone. Unfortunately, that part of the recipe is illegible.

Step six: At the dawn of the lunar month you put the head opposite the sun (please don’t ask for clarification on that I have no idea).

Step seven: Acquire some seeds of barley.

Step eight: put them in the ground!

Step nine: water them for seven days, using the water from the divine lake.

Step ten: dig them up.

Step eleven: (Yes. We are on step eleven and have already taken at least seven days) Dry the seeds until the 15th of the month. Fifteen days! We are on day fifteen of trying to send someone a dream.

Step twelve: give up, go home, and use one of your other dream-sending spells.

Step thirteen: pound your grain sprouts with myrrh, green eye-paint, [black] eye-paint(?), a qes-ankh-stone, and a plant that we don’t actually know for sure what it is. Also the seven reed leaves which I assume you have to go remove from the head you bound them to which has been sitting there at least fifteen days.

Step fourteen: Acquire a scarab with the face of a bull and put it in a copper vessel. (I checked, bull-headed dung beetles are a thing.)

Step fifteen: heat the vessel until your beetle dies.

Step all-the-rest-of-it: take the beetle out, put the something. to the head of the something, put the blood of your(?) left foot(?) of your (right) foot(?) on them, then knead… whatever that is and make the form of a mummy of Osiris, which amounts to 7 fingers. Then embalm it with myrrh, with ointment [and a garment of] royal [byssus]. Then Afterwards you should make a base of sand in(?) your [house], you [should] set the figurine on the base of sand and leave the scarab on the body of the [figurine]. Now write the words which you desire on a papyrus with carob-tree(?) water, leave it upon the image and… cause the head which is on it to bend down. Use a bandage of 4 [colours] – blue, red, white, black – on the head, then leave it in a hidden place. Then put incense and barley to the brazier before it and offer it bread, beer, and milk. Also just… let some blood fall from you on the brazier, and also put a piece of a red lizard before it, and finally you should recite the ritual formula to it up to 7 times at night while you are in a place which is clean, while you lay down before it (PDM Suppl./GEMF 17. 80-101).

To. Send. A. Dream!

You may remember that I originally brought up this passage because I have questions about the exact frequency with which people might be doing this. And you can see why I would have questions about that, right? Was anyone actually doing this? I mean, I also want to know if anyone was actually trying the murder spells, too, but I honestly find it more believable that people tried those than that someone tried this. I mean… why would you? Just… why would you, full stop, but also: why would you given that there are simpler spells for the same purpose on the same roll? Did anyone, in the entire time period this ritual was being shared, and written, and transcribed, actually follow these instructions?

I assume if you did you’d at least charge an arm and a leg for it, right? I’d hope they charged a lot for the murder spells, too. But no. I genuinely cannot believe that someone actually performed this. We do know that people did do necromantic stuff. We find evidence of curse tablets and associated paraphernalia in tombs. People were prepared to go disturb the dead for the sake of certain rituals and goals. In researching this I’ve not seen anyone mention evidence from Egyptian graves or tombs that suggest an abundance of mummies with missing heads. Then again, so many mummies just got… used for unwrapping parties, paints, ground up for medicine or just as kindling – yeah, d’Anastasy could probably have purchased mummies just as easily as papyri – anyway, point being, maybe there were a bunch of headless mummies and they all got sold and ground up for paint or consumption. But I suspect not.

Maybe it’s just a good one to have in your inventory, like ‘yeah, look at me with my epic spells. No, you can’t use it that I only have one 8th level spell slot and I am not wasting it on this. But you can look at it, though’.

But speaking of spells involving dead people’s heads, here’s another one. This one’s from PGM 4:

A restraining seal for skulls that are not satisfactory [for use in divination], and also to prevent [them] from speaking or doing anything whatever of this [sort]: Seal the mouth of the skull with dirt from the doors of [a temple] of Osiris and from a mound [covering] graves. Taking iron from a leg fetter, work it cold and make a ring on which have a headless lion engraved. Let him have, instead of his head, a crown of Isis, and let him trample with his feet a skeleton (the right foot should trample the skull of the skeleton). In the middle of these should be an owl-eyed cat with its paw on a gorgon’s head, in a circle around [all of them], these names: IADŌR INBA NICHAIOPLĒX BRITH. (PGM 4/GEMF 57.2125-39)

Again, there’s so much going on here in just a few lines. Firstly, the idea of someone having tried to use a skull for something like divination and ended up with a useless, but very chatty head is delightful. Secondly: the idea of a metalsmith being approached by a ritualist who has turned a leg fetter into a ring and now wants… a headless lion with a crown of Isis trampling a skeleton and somehow in the middle of that also a cat with owl eyes with a paw on a gorgon head with some strange words all around it is… also delightful.

Thirdly: if you’re wondering about what those words at the end mean – IADŌR INBA NICHAIOPLĒX BRITH – they’re voces mysticae. I discussed these in episode 7 on curse tablets, and it’s wholly unsurprising to see them here – and in many of the recipes in the Library, because, well, they’re part of the same practice. There are recipes for binding tablets and amulets in the Theban Magical Library, but I’m not going to talk about them given that I covered the activated objects in episode 7. But as a reminder, the voces mysticae are combinations of letters that are mostly pronounceable but have no intelligible meaning – though they purport to be the secret real names of gods or demons and thus are considered quite powerful. They may have originally been epithets of other gods or otherwise sacred phrases from different religions, but over time and with repeated transcription they’ve mostly become unintelligible (Dieleman 2019: 285); though there are some clearly recognisable names still in there.

Fourthly… what do you do with the ring?? It doesn’t say! It just gives you instructions on what it should look like. Do you have to wear it? Forever? If you take it off are you suddenly going to be able to hear the distant echoes of a skull chattering away inanely? Or do you leave the ring with the skull? Do you need a supply of these rings in case you encounter a sequence of useless skulls?

Finally: where’s the spell for enchanting the skull?

It’s called ‘Spell of Attraction of King Pitys over any skull’:

Stand facing the east and speak thus: I call upon you, lord Helios, and your holy angels on this day, in this hour: Preserve me your name, for I am THĒNŌR, and you are holy angels, guardians of the ARDIMALECHA. And ORORŌ MISRĒN NEPHŌ ADŌNAI AUEBŌTHI ABATHARAI THŌBEUA SOULMAI SOULMAITH ROUTREROUTĒN ŌPHREŌPHRI ŌLCHAMAŌTH OUTE SOUTĒATH MONTRO ELAT CHOUMIOI LATHŌTH ŌTHETH, I beg you, lord Helios, hear me, your name and grant me power over the spirit of this man who died a violent death, from whose tent I hold [this], so that I may keep him with me, your name as helper and avenger for whatever business I crave from him. (PGM 4.1928-1954 = GEMF LINES)

Next, follows a hymn. Hymns occur throughout the Theban Magical Library. They have a very different vibe to the standard formulas for rituals. But I don’t want to read it out if I’m not going to discuss it and I don’t want to discuss it because there is not enough time. But it’s there. It is a component of the ritual. There is a hymn which you recite at sunset, then you burn some amara (don’t ask me what that is, I don’t know) and some uncut frankincense and go home (presumably you have been at the graveside of the guy whose skull you’re nicking). Then you grab some ivy with thirteen leaves and, starting on the left, with myrrh you write a string voces mysticae. Finally: put the ivy on as a wreath and then write the same words on the skull with – I think – ink made from serpent’s blood and the soot of a goldsmith (PGM 4.1991-2005).

So exactly what type of recipe is this? What have you just done? Assuming you followed the instructions correctly, you now have a paredros. The recipes we’ve talked about so far often tend to use the assistance of some other thing, whether living or dead, to perform the ritual – the kid, a minor deity, daimon, dead person, etc. but the rituals themselves have a specific purpose and the assistant is helping with that specific instance of the ritualist performing that ritual. This ritual, and a few others like it in the Theban Magical Library, is specifically for creating a supernatural assistant – a paredros. There are only a few recipes for making or summoning a paredros at all, and all bar two of them, as far as I know, are in the Theban Magical Library.

They don’t all require skulls, or dead people – you could also end up with a mummified falcon, a statuette of the god Eros, which may or may not also require an engraved stone, or an inscribed metal lamella. Or nothing at all. Sometimes there is no physical object tied to your supernatural assistant (Ciraolo 2001: 286).

In PGM I (= GEMF 30) there’s another recipe to summon a paredros which does not involve dead people, and also like… should you want a recommendation for a ritual to summon a paredros, this is the one I would recommend to you. This. Guy. Does. Everything. And the recipe is comparatively simple! It does involve one dead falcon, but it’s worth the effort. The effort of finding an already dead falcon. Don’t kill flacons. Anyway, to start with you have to do the preliminary purification, which, I think, is go vegan - or at least vegetarian – for a while. After that just pick any random night you want and find the roof of a tall building to stand on whilst wearing a pure garment and a pure black Isis band on your eyes (this is, as far as I can figure, a black bland of cloth, perhaps referring to her wearing black whilst mourning the death of Osiris – which, possibly, is more of a Greek idea than an Egyptian, and possibly comes from Plutarch, but I did not dig further into that rabbit hole) (Griffiths 1970: 90). Anyway. Black band of Isis round your eyes. And in your right hand you hold the head of a falcon and if you hold anything in your left hand, I unfortunately cannot tell you because that is where there is a lacuna in the text. But the next thing you do is, at dawn, repeatedly greet the sun as it rises and shake your falcon head at it, recite a formula, burn some uncut frankincense, libate some rose oil (i.e. pouring some out as an offering) and also making a burnt offering of a heliotrope plant.

At this point a falcon will descend from the sky, give you an oblong stone and then bugger off again. You need to carve it at once. Carve it with what? Dunno. Text unclear, or, in academic commentary terms, ‘the standard supplement is difficult to construe’, but possibly at this point you’re just carving the stone into the correct gemstone shape to be carved with the actual design later. But then having at some point engraved it (which-may-be-a-different-thing-to-carving-it) you also need to perforate it so you can wear it around your neck.

You do a similar thing the next night: wearing your stone, stand on a rooftop, greet the moon a few times , burn some myrrh and this time instead of a falcon, a star will descend. Then the star will slowly dissipate and in its place will be a messenger. Take the messenger’s right hand, hold it firmly and then there’s an oath you say to get him to stay with you, obey you, and talk with you. Then, still holding his hand, jump off the roof.

Don’t worry. Assuming you’ve done everything correctly, you’ll be fine. The recipe varyingly refers to this paredros as a messenger, or a god, or an aerial spirit, and you treat him a lot nicer than the dead-spirit skull. The next part of the recipe goes like this:

after bringing (him) [into] the roofed place, where you reside, [sit] (him) down. After first preparing the house, as is fitting, and making ready all types of foods and Mendesian wine, recline near the god, while an uncorrupted child serves (the meal) and maintains silence, until the messenger departs. And (then) you send the god off with a speech: “I shall lovingly hold you as a paredros, a benefactor, a god, who serves me, and whenever I say ‘Quickly!’, you with your power immediately appear to me on earth, yes, yes, O god!” And you yourself (i.e. the practitioner), while (still) reclining, speak concisely about what you are pondering. And test his oath itself, with regard to [what] you wish. But when 3 hours have passed, the god will immediately leap up. Command the child to run (and open) the door. And say, “Go, lord, blessed god, where you exist continually, as you wish,” and the god vanishes. (PGM1/GEMF 37.83-95)

Congratulations, you have wined and dined a god and now you have your very own paredros. Now. What can this guy do? Apart from helping you jump off buildings and land unhurt he can (96-130, 175-180):

And also when you die, he will ‘wrap your body as befits a god, and lifting up your spirit he will take you up into the air with him.’ And I guess you become an aerial spirit too, at that point?

Now, that is a long list of things your paredros can help you with – he’s a one stop shop for an awful lot of the things you can also find as individual recipes in the Library – healing, harming, gaining knowledge, and… invisibility.

There are recipes in the Library that are just invisibility spells. And invisibility spells are one of the areas where I really want to know… who thought these worked? And how did they think they worked? Who was using them? What were trying to use them for, and just… what exactly is going on, here? This is the one where I was finally like, ‘No. Someone must have written something about this already’. And someone has! – a guy called Richard Phillips. So first of all, he points out that ideas that people can become invisible are not confined to the Graeco-Egyptian formularies, and scepticism of claims of people being able to turn invisible is also not new. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE complained about the fact that some people believed something as ridiculous as a specific stone being able to turn someone invisible (Natural Histories 37.60). And if Pliny is talking about it then, given the sources he uses, it’s probably is indicative of a longer tradition of people thinking that certain objects or rituals or combinations thereof, could convey invisibility (Phillips 2009 :17)

Invisibility crops up in Greek myth – Athena uses the cap of Hades in the Iliad, which turns her invisible and prevents Ares from seeing her (5.840-845). That same cap crops up in other textual sources. (Phillips 2009 :17) Being able to appear only to one person without the others around them noticing is something that Gods can do. Invisibility also comes up in a Demotic folktale in which two rival ritualists have a show-down. One ritualist first casts a big cloud to obscure everyone’s vision as he tries to escape and then, when his opponent dissipates it, he does what is described as a feat of sorcery in order to become invisible and escape. Once again, his opponent reverts the spell and what is revealed is the fact that ritualist had changed himself into a goose and was about to escape (Phillips 2009: 18-19).

What Phillips points out here, and what you may have noticed, is that we have an instance here in which something is described as invisibility outside of a strictly narrow sense. The being that was the ritualist did not become invisible – but his recognisable form certainly ceased to be visible. Someone else later in the story does just become invisible in the narrow sense, though. This range of options appears in invisibility spells in the Theban Magical Library – you can either change yourself, change the situation, or change the other person. You can change yourself – take on a form that makes you unrecognisable, you can change the situation so that you cannot be seen – summoning clouds or darkness, or you can alter someone’s ability to even perceive you. And once you’re thinking with this broader idea, in a culture where the ability to turn invisible is not quite as ludicrous as would generally be thought today, it’s kinda’ easier to say, ‘yeah, potentially a practitioner did think that there were ways in which he could make himself invisible’, maybe they thought they could turn invisible in the One-Ring sense, but they could also believe that they could be invisible by becoming unrecognisable, or creating situations which obscure other people’s vision.

And sure, we might say ‘but you could just… look at your own hands, or look in a mirror and you’d be able to tell if you were invisible’, but that only works if your understanding of invisibility is based on your own body suddenly becoming transparent. If your invisibility functions through changing the perception of other people, then being able to see your reflection doesn’t disprove anything.

But… turn into a goose? Still can’t wrap my head around that one. There’s a spell in PGM 13 (which is the 8th Book of Moses) which, whilst it fails to list goose as one of your top choices, does profess to allow the ritualist to turn into ‘a wolf, dog, lion, fire, tree, vulture, wall, water’ or whatever the ritualist wants (270-77). On this spell Phillips comments that:

of course, in the ritual context of [this recipe] one has to be sceptical as to the practitioner’s actual ability to transform himself, an act which like “vanishing” and numerous other magical acts, is seemingly impossible to accomplish, especially before a captive audience – yet at the same time one must remember that the practitioner thrives in the realm of the impossible, especially within a society of believers… When in [the ritual] the practitioner says, “make me become in the eyes of all created things – a wolf, or dog, or lion, or fire, or tree, or vulture, or wall or water (or whatever you want),” one has to think that the one who believes the practitioner possesses such a power can never quite be sure about the true nature of the animate or inanimate objects surrounding him.’ (2009: 26)

If you live in a world where you think these things are possible, then any animal acting strangely, or fire not quite burning the way you expect it to, or even suddenly noticing a tree you hadn’t really paid attention to before, can be proof that someone has transformed themselves. So I totally accept that people genuinely thought some people, with the right training or objects or heritage, could turn invisible – even if that meant ‘can turn into even an inanimate object like a wall’.

But that doesn’t help with figuring out whether a practitioner thought they could transform themselves. When they performed one of these rituals, did they somehow think that it worked? Did they claim that they could totally make that ritual work but knew they couldn’t? Did they think that maybe the particular recipe they had was dud, but there were definitely other methods that worked? Did they think their recipe worked in principle, but they were clearly just doing something wrong? Or did they just genuinely believe that they had used these recipes and successfully take on the appearance of a pond? These are not questions that can ever be answered, not even by a paredros. And I find that very frustrating.

If you remember at the beginning, I explained that Jacco Dieleman had divided the spells in the Theban Magical Library into four categories - knowledge, control over others, protection, and healing. So far we’ve covered… knowledge and control over others. Maybe you can count invisibility as protection sometimes? But there are actual specific ‘protection’ spells in the Library, too.

However. When I was running through my copy of the Library trying to get to one, my eyes fell upon the word ‘slander spell to Selene’, and I said ‘wait. Tell me more.’. I’m going to start with the recipe which is the one before the one officially titled as a slander spell, but… it’s definitely a slander-spell.

And, In fairness, this spell does mention protection. You should wear it. Because If you get this spell wrong, the goddess will be angry at you. If you get it right: she’ll be angry at someone else. Because this spell works by just invoking the goddess Selene and telling her someone totally said all this mean stuff about her. You say stuff like:

Let the darkness of clouds be dispersed for me, and let the goddess AKTIŌPHIS (aka, Selene) shine for me, and let her hear my holy voice. For I come announcing the slander of her name, a defiled and unholy woman, for she has slanderously brought your holy mysteries to the knowledge of men. She, her name, is the one, [not] I, who says, ‘I have seen the greatest goddess, after leaving the heavenly vault, on earth without sandals, sword in hand, and [speaking] a foul name.’ It is she, her name, who said ‘I saw [the goddess] drinking blood’. (PMG 4.2474-2485)

The formula continues for a bit and ends with a… request? Demand? Suggestion? That Selene ‘take away the sleep’ of the victim, ‘put a burning heat in her soul’, as well as ‘punishment and frenzied passion in her thoughts’ and also banish her from everywhere and force her to come to the ritualist’s place. After that you do a sacrifice, you need to groan loudly as if everything is awful, and walk backwards down off your roof (yeah, you were on your roof for this). Your victim will come immediately, so the recipe advises you to pay attention for the victim so that you can open the door for her, or ‘the spell will fail.’ Which sounds like a fantastic excuse for how to explain away the spell not working – you just missed her arrival and so the spell failed, and she went away again. That said, Preisendanz understands the line to mean ‘or she’ll die’.

That recipe actually contains two more spells for making Selene angry, and that first one is ludicrously tame compared to the third one – which is actually nearly entirely the same as the one formally labelled as a slander spell – that’s what happens when you’ve got scribes who are determined to record every version that they find. It’s a little lengthy but absolutely amazing. The only English translation I could find is by Edward O’Neil because the new translation and commentary that’s literally due out this year has still not come out. And when it does, I suspect their version will have a different vibe to it. Two things can be said before you hear this. Firstly: one would imagine that for a ritual in which you are deliberately antagonising a powerful goddess, should indeed be hard to get through. Secondly: ‘hard to get through’ is certainly something that can be said of O’Neil’s translation:

She, her name, is burning for you, /
Goddess, some dreadful incense,
And dappled goat’s fat, blood and filth,
The menstrual flow of virgin
Dead, heart of one untimely dead,
The magical material
Of dead dog, woman’s embryo,
Fine-ground wheat husks, / sour refuse,
Salt, fat of dead doe, and mastic,

And myrtle, dark bay, barley,
And crab claws, sage, rose, fruit pits and
A single onion, / garlic,
Fig meal, a dog-faced baboon’s dung,
And egg of a young ibis.
And this is sacrilege! She placed
Them on your altar; she set
The flaming fire / to juniper
Wood strips and slays a seahawk
For you, a vulture and a mouse,
Your greatest myst’ry, goddess.
She said, too, that these deeds of pain
You had performed so harshly:
For she said that you slew a man
And drank the / blood of this man
And ate his flesh, and she says that
Your headband is his entrails
That you took all his skin and put
It into your vagina,
[That you drank] sea falcon’s blood and
That your food was dung beetle.
But Pan before your very eyes
Shot forth his seed unlawful. /
A dog-faced baboon now is born
Whene’er there’s menstrual cleansing.
(PGM 4/GEMF 58.2574- 2604)

So… I’m not entirely convinced that O’Neil really got the tone right, there. And you might say, ‘well, you read it in such a dramatic way!’ and to that I would say, ‘you try and say ‘But Pan before your very eyes shot forth his seed unlawful’ in a way that doesn’t sound absurd. And hey, I could genuinely be totally wrong about what it’s supposed to sound like and maybe this tone absolutely nailed it. No one seems to have written anything specifically about these recipes so I am just guessing that it’s supposed to be a bit easier to take it seriously.

But stylistic choices aside, you can see why one might want to wear protection before starting this ritual.

The framing device for the attraction spell proclaims that:

Pachrates, the prophet of Heliopolis, revealed it to the Emperor Hadrian, revealing the power of his own divine magic. For it attracted in one hour; it made someone sick in two hours; it destroyed in 7 hours, sent the Emperor himself dreams as he thoroughly tested the whole truth of the magic within his power. And marvelling at the prophet, / he ordered double fee be given to him (PGM 4/GEMF 58.2449-2455).

Which is not a pedigree to be sniffed at, were it true. It also gives you an idea of some of the things this spell can be used for. With a range like that, you might be wondering ‘is this another paredros spell? No. For each thing you want to do you have to include separate commands and each time you want to do it you have to do the whole spell all over again. And the recipe goes on to warn you not to do it too often, ‘for the goddess is accustomed to make airborne those who perform this rite unprotected by a charm and to hurl them from aloft down to the ground.’ Don’t worry, the author of the recipe has ‘thought it necessary to take the precaution of a protective charm so that you may perform this rite without hesitation.’ (PMG 4/GEMF 58.2505-2515)

And I know you want it, so here’s the protective amulet:

Take a hieratic papyrus roll and wear it around your right arm with which you make the offering. And these are the / things written on it: “MOULATHI CHERNOUTH AMARŌ MOULIANDRON, guard me from every evil daimon, whether an evil male or female.” Keep it secret, son.

That ‘keep it secret, son’ is not me being flippant, that’s literally in the recipe. Anyway, there’s a recipe for something protective, I guess! Well, one of them. There’s another two protection spells in the slander spell and I’d recommend using all three, just to be safe. Protect yourself before you wreck yourself.

You may be wondering about the fact that in these spells, unlike the others, the default victim is a woman, rather than a man as in all the others we’ve covered. I presume it’s because it clearly started as a spell of attraction – as in, it’s a spell for erotic attraction, and the majority of those spells are written with women as the intended targets. Then the other stuff is just there for funsies, I guess. The third recipe from the attraction spell also ends with a statement that the victim should be immediately attracted to the ritualist, who assures the goddess that, ‘I myself will clearly convict her of everything, goddess, which she has done while sacrificing to you’ (4.2620), and the spell after the slander spell is also titled ‘another love spell of attraction’. So… whatever it is now, it apparently started as an erotic spell.

So that totally counts as covering the protection category. Onto healing. There’s a couple of spells that are exorcisms which definitely classes as healing and I think are super cool and interesting but I just hit 9k words. I wanted to pick a very short one but instead I’m just gonna say that, among the spells that can be found in PDM 14 for fighting off poison that’s already been drunk, and stopping bleeding, and a couple for dog bites, there’s one to be used against a sting – probably a scorpion sting. Firstly you say some words to the sting – as you’d expect. Then you lick it. Then you talk to a little pot of oil, reciting a formula to it seven times as you apply it to the wound daily.

Thanks for listening.

If you have questions, comments, corrections, feedback, want to suggest a topic, etc. You can find the podcast on twitter: @poisonroompod
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Transcripts of all episodes are available at poisonroom.com, where you can also see the references and bibliography. As always if the sources are publicly available, they’re linked to.

Not sure exactly when the next episode will be after this. I’m working on it, but it definitely won’t be next Monday. I’ll try and aim for the Monday after that, though.

You have been listening to The Poison Room. The voice in your ears has been: locating the closest camel sanctuary.




Bibliography

Betz, H. D. (1986) The Greek Magical Papyri, University of Chicago Press.

Ciraolo, L. J. (2001) ‘Supernatural Assistants in the Greek Magical Papyri’ in Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, Meyer, M. W. & Mirecki, P. A. (Eds), Brill. Pp. 281-293.

Dieleman, J. (2005) Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100-300 CE), Brill.

--- (2009) ‘The Greco-Roman Magical Papyri’ in Frankfurter, D. (Ed.) Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, Brill, Pp. 283-321.

Faraone, C. A. & Torallas Tovar, S. (Eds) (2022) Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation, Vol. 1

Gager, J. G. (1999) Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, Oxford University Press.

Griffith, F. L. & Thompson, H. (1921) The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden Vol. 3, Clarendon Press.

Griffiths, J. G. (1970) Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, University of Wales Press.

Johnston, S. I. (2001) ‘Charming Children: The Use of the Child in Ancient Divination’ Arethusa, Pp. 97-117.

--- (2010) ‘Sending Dreams, Restraining Dreams: Oneiropompeia in Theory and Practice’ in Sub Imagine Somni: Nighttime Phenomena in Greco-Roman Culture, Scioli, E. & Walde, C. (Eds), Edizioni ETS. Pp. 63-80.

Phillips, R. L. (2009) In Pursuit of Invisibility: Ritual Texts from Late Roman Egypt