This collection challenges the tendency among scholars of ancient Greece to see magical and religious ritual as mutually exclusive and to ignore "magical" practices in Greek religion. The contributors survey specific bodies of archaeological, epigraphical, and papyrological evidence for magical practices in the Greek world, and, in each case, determine whether the traditional dichotomy between magic and religion helps in any way to conceptualize the objective features of the evidence examined. Contributors include Christopher A. Faraone, J.H.M. Strubbe, H.S. Versnel, Roy Kotansky, John Scarborough, Samuel Eitrem, Fritz Graf, John J. Winkler, Hans Dieter Betz, and C.R. Phillips.

Miracle-workers and magicians are diffcult characters for contemporary readers of Greco-Roman narratives to comprehend and to distinguish. Hindered both by our modern definitions of "miracle" and "magic," we need to focus our attention on those ancient texts that deal with such characters and their differentiation. Two such texts, the Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, come from quite different religious backgrounds, but demonstrate remarkably similar subtle cultural scripts at play. A detailed investigation of the social interactions in these two narrative worlds brings these characters and their communities alive and reveals how legitimate miracle-workers were distinguished from illegitimate magicians by the Mediterranean population of the Greco-Roman world.

Modern interpretation of the Manichaean religious tradition requires a firm foundation in the sober and meticulous reconstruction of highly fragmentary sources. The studies collected in this volume contribute to such a foundation by bringing new primary texts to the public for the first time, extracting new data from previously known sources, and defining and delimiting important but previously neglected sets of material. The studies are authored by an international group of leading scholars in the fields of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern studies, comparative religion, early Christianity, patristics, art history, Turkic studies and Coptology. The textual and art historical materials examined possess distinctive histories, character and significance representing the broad geographical range of Manichaeism from Algeria to China. By elucidating these essential remains of the Manichaean religion, the comprehensive treatments contained in Emerging from Darkness provide a provocative picture of Manichaeism as a diverse and productive tradition in a variety of settings and media. The volume will be foundational for future scholarly studies on the sources presented and for studies in Manichaeism and late antique religions in general.

"Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal" reads Galatians 2:11-15 and 3:26-29 through the lens of the 19th-20th century experiences of French colonialism by the Diola people in Senegal, West Africa, and portrays the Apostle Paul as a "'sociopostcolonial hermeneut who acted on his self-understanding as God s messenger to create, through faith in the cross of Christ, free communities' -- a self-definition that is critical of ancient Graeco-Roman and modern colonial lore that justify colonization as a divine mandate." Aliou C. Niang ingeniously compares the colonial objectification of his own people by French colonists to the Graeco-Roman colonial objectifications of the ancient Celts/Gauls/Galatians, and Paul's role in bringing about a different portrayal.

Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. Defining Magic is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic, establish its boundaries and key features, and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category, their impact on future scholarship, and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together, these texts - from Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas, Augustine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Dennis Diderot, Emile Durkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, James Frazer, Susan Greenwood, Robin Horton, Edmund Leach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Christopher Lehrich, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Plato, Pliny, Plotin, Isidore of Sevilla, Jesper Sorensen, Kimberley Stratton, Randall Styers, Edward Tylor

The first attempt that has ever been made to give a comprehensive account of the religious life of ancient Athens.

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation. This volume aims to construct such an agenda by exploring the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity, and highlighting a number of important paradoxes of ancient violence. It explores the forceful nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate and canalise violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regards to private and public space, landscapes and territories. The contributions to this volume range widely in both time and space: temporally, they cover the full span from the archaic to the Roman imperial period, while spatially they extend from Athens and Sparta through Crete, Arcadia and Macedonia to Egypt and Israel.

The Pin Is Mightier Than the Sword “Denise Alvarado is a true hoodoo mamba home girl who burned hi-octane conjure in New Orleans where she grew up, and on visits to relatives in the Mississippi bayous, where she was formally introduced to the Voodoo/hoodoo path. Called by the spirits and taught conjuration by family members, she was working the goofer from five years old. That’s some serious heat. Denise is no pretender. She’s for real. She fixes the formulas, raises the spirits, calculates the mathematics, and works wonders at the old dirt track crossroads.” -Doktor Snake, author of Doktor Snake’s Voodoo Spellbook When it comes to Voodoo, few things are more iconic than the Voodoo doll. Known also as conjure dolls, doll babies, dollies, baby dolls, poppets, fetich, fetish, and effigies, they are servants of fast-acting, long-lasting magic. If you are seeking a new job or new friends, need to find your one true love or keep your lover at home, wish to be rid of your enemies or protect yourself from thievery, in these pages you will find the doll and the spell to do just that and more. Drawing not only on New Orleans Voodoo and hoodoo traditions, Alvarado also presents doll spellwork from ancient Greece, Egypt, Malaysia, Japan, Africa, and the European grimoires of old magic. You’ll learn how to make, use, and properly dispose of your Voodoo doll. Be warned: this is some of the most effective magic that exists so be ready to reap what you are about to sow, or in this case, sew!

Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice--the writing of incantations on amulets--changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians. This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.