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Magic in the Roman World
Using in-depth examples of 'magical' practice such as exorcisms, love rites, alchemy and the transformation of humans into divine beings, this lively volume demonstrates that the word 'magic' was used widely in late antique texts as part of polemics against enemies and sometimes merely as a term for other people's rituals. Naomi Janowitz shows that 'magical' activities were integral to late antique religious practice, and that they must be understood from the perspective of those who employed them.
160 pages, Paperback
First published June 21, 2001
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December 19, 2022
Update 8: This is one of the most disappointing books i have ever encountered. Like Neusner/Chilton or Sandmel, it begins beautifully, using well-reasoned arguments and presenting with clarity a rational and well-supported thesis; but unfortunately, also like Neusner/Chilton and Sandmel, it quickly spirals into a hodge-podge of personal biases, contradictions and (I'll give them all the benefit of the doubt) sloppy scholarship. I'll be using excerpts for my dissertation, but not very many, and I sadly cannot recommend anything beyond the introduction and first chapter.
Update 7: I don't think I've ever before encountered such a brief text that provoked so much frustration and incredulity yet wasn't written by Freud. Her final chapter, the one on women and magic, is as bad as Neusner or Pagels, selectively targeting the ancient texts which present female magical practitioners in a bad light and then superimposing onto them conclusions drawn from modern feminist social theory (eg: she expends great energy analyzing the depiction of the hideous Thessalian witch from Lucan's "Civil War", yet completely ignores the depiction of the Delphic Oracle from the same text). This analysis would have been more convincing were I less familiar with the material she is using AND the material she is ignoring, but it's even more baffling given that she previously spent an entire chapter discussing well-documented cases in which women were considered the sources par excelence of positive alchemical and magical knowledge. Likewise her decision to interpret any reference to infidelity and prostitution in the Hebrew Bible as literal accusations of those crimes falls flat if one has ANY KNOWLEDGE of the texts at all; because the Israelite god was considered the king of the Israelites and the husband to the Israelite people, any pagan worship or deviation from accepted religious practices and beliefs was depicted as treason or infidelity/prostitution. This was a common metaphor and would later be renewed by the Christians when they depicted Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church. Janowitz seems, improbably, entirely ignorant of these facts, which leads one again to suspect that she has chosen to interpret according to her agenda rather than according to the context or the meaning of the texts themselves. Particularly damning is her decision to accept a rabbinic interpretation of a biblical incident as the truth simply because the rabbinic interpretation fits her thesis while the literal meaning of the Hebrew text does not. It goes on like that for 11 pages.
Update 6: GAH! She repeats the claim that references to shining "like the stars" in Hebrew texts is actually meant to convey a sort of astral divinization in which the souls of the righteous dead BECOME stars. The text doesn't support that claim, nor does the cultural context, but it has somehow become extremely popular among scholars. She does rightfully note that modern Jewish and Christian abhorrence at the notion that humans can become "gods" (as opposed to THE God) would have been baffling to followers of mainstream ancient Judaism and Christianity, where the belief in divinization was commonplace. I'm accentuating the positive aspects of this book in my mind, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to finish it.
Update 5: She seemed to be reining it in, but quickly went from bad to worse. While discussing "Maria the Jew" she (wisely) notes that claims to knowledge about alchemy and metallurgy were often made by appealing to the authority of Jewish women due to the myth about angels falling to mate with women and teaching them the secrets of the natural world. Men, or gentile women in some cases, often disguised their own inventions by claiming to have received them from a source readers would have believed to be authoritative (which, for example, is why many Greek spells invoked Jewish- and Egyptian-sounding gods/angels/etc.). However she then takes at face value that Maria the Jew was a real Jewish woman who revolutionized alchemy all on her own, despite the fact that she is only referred to by other authors, there is no evidence of her having actually existed, she left no known corpus of writings, "Maria" (Mary, Miriam, Maryam) was an INSANELY common name in ancient Jewish culture, and all references to her and citations from her writings come from later (male, Greek, gnostic) alchemists, particularly one named Zosimos. Given her effusive praise of Maria, I got the feeling that she was turning a blind eye to the possibility of Maria being a fictional persona simply because Janowitz was determined to raise the profile of ancient women; she saw references to a woman who allegedly revolutionized "the Sacred Art" and her feminism got the better of her. An analogous situation would be my writing an essay about Latin-American life, including my own personal observations but attributing them to a fictional Mexican-American source named "Jose Martinez", and having a Mexican-American scholar ignore the inconsistencies because he is so eager to raise the profile of Mexican-Americans. Well-intentioned though both Janowitz and this hypothetical scholar might be, neither is doing themselves or their cause celebre any favors. That's not all, however! Janowitz, despite having earlier condemned modern translators for their imprecise translations and tendency to insert the word "magic" into phrases in which the original text has no such connotation, herself plays fast and loose with the translations of Greek words to make them fit her thesis more closely, particularly in this chapter. I was willing to forgive her inelegant translations, since not everyone can be a great translator, but after she so roundly condemned others it just seems hypocritical of Janowitz to do the same thing in full view of the reader and with terribly obvious motives. Le sigh.
Update 4: Janowitz continues to lose points in chapter 2 as she attempts to use her earlier, reasonable proposition that "daimones", like "magic", cannot actually be defined and systematized (because it was a cross-cultural catch-all term for a variety of supernatural beings) to support an approach which involves mixing and matching various beliefs about angels, demons, gods and daimones from throughout the ancient world and throughout the first few centuries of the Common Era. Because some rabbinic Jews later believed that angels and demons had wings, she concludes, therefore all ancient peoples must have believed the same about daimones; because some ancient Greek philosophers believed that the gods were alien and removed from human nature and affairs, she assumes, then all ancient peoples must have done so. It goes on like that for several pages.
Update 3: I was afraid of this. Another book which starts strong then beaches itself upon the shores of groundless speculation. The chapter on angels and daimones (chapter 2 of all things) quickly spirals into a dizzying collection of modern interpretations read backwards into history and superimposed onto various biblical passages. I've written elsewhere about the popular fallacy that the "sons of God" mentioned in Genesis refer to some sort of angelic beings, but she not only assumes that to be the case but ADDS WORDS to the account while presenting her interpretation as though it were the only possible reading of the Hebrew text. Likewise, she latches on to the later belief in Asherah as an original consort to the Israelite God, tacitly admits that such a belief is not to be found in the biblical texts or any contemporary documents, but then dismisses that absence by assuring the reader that it was likely suppressed by later proponents of monotheism. She likewise assumes that "Ha-Shem" ("the name", a Hebrew euphemism intended to prevent the over-frequent use of the tetragramaton) is some sort of angelic servant of the Israelite God, a belief I suspect she inherited through medieval rabbinic Judaism, liked, and decided to superimpose on ancient Israelite religion. All of what I have described occurs within the space of a few paragraphs, less than a page of text, and the sudden outpouring of all these specious and demonstrably false claims at once actually set my mind a-boggling. This is what is wrong with biblical scholarship these days; indeed, this is what is wrong with religious studies as a discipline. Absolute objectivity is demanded of others by scholars, but none is demanded of scholars themselves unless said scholars are religious. Scholars like Janowitz need to recognize that they themselves have subjective, baseless beliefs which influence their supposedly-scholarly work, and which are in some ways no different than those of the religionists; in many ways they are actually much, much worse because scholars pass themselves off as secular and objective and most readers (and students and other scholars!) actually buy into that pretense. They are destroying their own credibility, and this is why the field does not progress; this is why their conclusions and theories and "discoveries" find no purchase in any but the most culturally-assimilated religious communities. Such scholars are not peeling back the mists of history to expose the realities of ancient life, praxis and credo; they are simply offering an alternative set of beliefs, an alternative religion with even LESS claim to objectivity and historical reality, but which such scholars cannot recognize for what it truly is.
Update 2: It hit a hiccough when she began to treat a surprisingly specious theory as objective historical reality on pg. 21. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in academia, and I'm trying not to let her sloppy scholarship in this instance taint my reading of the rest of the book. I think the best analogy I can offer is the casual racism which crops up in classic literature; you can recognize the greatness of the material, but you can't in good conscience recommend the book to others without offering a caveat.
Update 1: So far another book which began beautifully, the author ripping to shreds the popular assumptions that: A) Jews/Christians were the first to be judgmental, closedminded and dismissive re: other religions; B) that accusations and persecution of witchcraft and sorcery began with Christianity; and C) that neo-pagans/wiccans are practicing anything even remotely related to the ancient pagans. She clearly has a great deal of respect for HISTORY and REALITY rather than popular culture's revisions and reinterpretations of selectively-read pseudo-facts.
Update 7: I don't think I've ever before encountered such a brief text that provoked so much frustration and incredulity yet wasn't written by Freud. Her final chapter, the one on women and magic, is as bad as Neusner or Pagels, selectively targeting the ancient texts which present female magical practitioners in a bad light and then superimposing onto them conclusions drawn from modern feminist social theory (eg: she expends great energy analyzing the depiction of the hideous Thessalian witch from Lucan's "Civil War", yet completely ignores the depiction of the Delphic Oracle from the same text). This analysis would have been more convincing were I less familiar with the material she is using AND the material she is ignoring, but it's even more baffling given that she previously spent an entire chapter discussing well-documented cases in which women were considered the sources par excelence of positive alchemical and magical knowledge. Likewise her decision to interpret any reference to infidelity and prostitution in the Hebrew Bible as literal accusations of those crimes falls flat if one has ANY KNOWLEDGE of the texts at all; because the Israelite god was considered the king of the Israelites and the husband to the Israelite people, any pagan worship or deviation from accepted religious practices and beliefs was depicted as treason or infidelity/prostitution. This was a common metaphor and would later be renewed by the Christians when they depicted Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church. Janowitz seems, improbably, entirely ignorant of these facts, which leads one again to suspect that she has chosen to interpret according to her agenda rather than according to the context or the meaning of the texts themselves. Particularly damning is her decision to accept a rabbinic interpretation of a biblical incident as the truth simply because the rabbinic interpretation fits her thesis while the literal meaning of the Hebrew text does not. It goes on like that for 11 pages.
Update 6: GAH! She repeats the claim that references to shining "like the stars" in Hebrew texts is actually meant to convey a sort of astral divinization in which the souls of the righteous dead BECOME stars. The text doesn't support that claim, nor does the cultural context, but it has somehow become extremely popular among scholars. She does rightfully note that modern Jewish and Christian abhorrence at the notion that humans can become "gods" (as opposed to THE God) would have been baffling to followers of mainstream ancient Judaism and Christianity, where the belief in divinization was commonplace. I'm accentuating the positive aspects of this book in my mind, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to finish it.
Update 5: She seemed to be reining it in, but quickly went from bad to worse. While discussing "Maria the Jew" she (wisely) notes that claims to knowledge about alchemy and metallurgy were often made by appealing to the authority of Jewish women due to the myth about angels falling to mate with women and teaching them the secrets of the natural world. Men, or gentile women in some cases, often disguised their own inventions by claiming to have received them from a source readers would have believed to be authoritative (which, for example, is why many Greek spells invoked Jewish- and Egyptian-sounding gods/angels/etc.). However she then takes at face value that Maria the Jew was a real Jewish woman who revolutionized alchemy all on her own, despite the fact that she is only referred to by other authors, there is no evidence of her having actually existed, she left no known corpus of writings, "Maria" (Mary, Miriam, Maryam) was an INSANELY common name in ancient Jewish culture, and all references to her and citations from her writings come from later (male, Greek, gnostic) alchemists, particularly one named Zosimos. Given her effusive praise of Maria, I got the feeling that she was turning a blind eye to the possibility of Maria being a fictional persona simply because Janowitz was determined to raise the profile of ancient women; she saw references to a woman who allegedly revolutionized "the Sacred Art" and her feminism got the better of her. An analogous situation would be my writing an essay about Latin-American life, including my own personal observations but attributing them to a fictional Mexican-American source named "Jose Martinez", and having a Mexican-American scholar ignore the inconsistencies because he is so eager to raise the profile of Mexican-Americans. Well-intentioned though both Janowitz and this hypothetical scholar might be, neither is doing themselves or their cause celebre any favors. That's not all, however! Janowitz, despite having earlier condemned modern translators for their imprecise translations and tendency to insert the word "magic" into phrases in which the original text has no such connotation, herself plays fast and loose with the translations of Greek words to make them fit her thesis more closely, particularly in this chapter. I was willing to forgive her inelegant translations, since not everyone can be a great translator, but after she so roundly condemned others it just seems hypocritical of Janowitz to do the same thing in full view of the reader and with terribly obvious motives. Le sigh.
Update 4: Janowitz continues to lose points in chapter 2 as she attempts to use her earlier, reasonable proposition that "daimones", like "magic", cannot actually be defined and systematized (because it was a cross-cultural catch-all term for a variety of supernatural beings) to support an approach which involves mixing and matching various beliefs about angels, demons, gods and daimones from throughout the ancient world and throughout the first few centuries of the Common Era. Because some rabbinic Jews later believed that angels and demons had wings, she concludes, therefore all ancient peoples must have believed the same about daimones; because some ancient Greek philosophers believed that the gods were alien and removed from human nature and affairs, she assumes, then all ancient peoples must have done so. It goes on like that for several pages.
Update 3: I was afraid of this. Another book which starts strong then beaches itself upon the shores of groundless speculation. The chapter on angels and daimones (chapter 2 of all things) quickly spirals into a dizzying collection of modern interpretations read backwards into history and superimposed onto various biblical passages. I've written elsewhere about the popular fallacy that the "sons of God" mentioned in Genesis refer to some sort of angelic beings, but she not only assumes that to be the case but ADDS WORDS to the account while presenting her interpretation as though it were the only possible reading of the Hebrew text. Likewise, she latches on to the later belief in Asherah as an original consort to the Israelite God, tacitly admits that such a belief is not to be found in the biblical texts or any contemporary documents, but then dismisses that absence by assuring the reader that it was likely suppressed by later proponents of monotheism. She likewise assumes that "Ha-Shem" ("the name", a Hebrew euphemism intended to prevent the over-frequent use of the tetragramaton) is some sort of angelic servant of the Israelite God, a belief I suspect she inherited through medieval rabbinic Judaism, liked, and decided to superimpose on ancient Israelite religion. All of what I have described occurs within the space of a few paragraphs, less than a page of text, and the sudden outpouring of all these specious and demonstrably false claims at once actually set my mind a-boggling. This is what is wrong with biblical scholarship these days; indeed, this is what is wrong with religious studies as a discipline. Absolute objectivity is demanded of others by scholars, but none is demanded of scholars themselves unless said scholars are religious. Scholars like Janowitz need to recognize that they themselves have subjective, baseless beliefs which influence their supposedly-scholarly work, and which are in some ways no different than those of the religionists; in many ways they are actually much, much worse because scholars pass themselves off as secular and objective and most readers (and students and other scholars!) actually buy into that pretense. They are destroying their own credibility, and this is why the field does not progress; this is why their conclusions and theories and "discoveries" find no purchase in any but the most culturally-assimilated religious communities. Such scholars are not peeling back the mists of history to expose the realities of ancient life, praxis and credo; they are simply offering an alternative set of beliefs, an alternative religion with even LESS claim to objectivity and historical reality, but which such scholars cannot recognize for what it truly is.
Update 2: It hit a hiccough when she began to treat a surprisingly specious theory as objective historical reality on pg. 21. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in academia, and I'm trying not to let her sloppy scholarship in this instance taint my reading of the rest of the book. I think the best analogy I can offer is the casual racism which crops up in classic literature; you can recognize the greatness of the material, but you can't in good conscience recommend the book to others without offering a caveat.
Update 1: So far another book which began beautifully, the author ripping to shreds the popular assumptions that: A) Jews/Christians were the first to be judgmental, closedminded and dismissive re: other religions; B) that accusations and persecution of witchcraft and sorcery began with Christianity; and C) that neo-pagans/wiccans are practicing anything even remotely related to the ancient pagans. She clearly has a great deal of respect for HISTORY and REALITY rather than popular culture's revisions and reinterpretations of selectively-read pseudo-facts.
January 28, 2013
This was a nice, short 100-page overview of the subject of magic in the Roman Empire among Jews, Christians, and pagans from 0-300 CE. It is written pretty readably and had good footnotes with lots of interesting additional information. Janowitz seems very up on all the latest hip new research, without yet ever getting really bogged down with horrid postmodernist academic jargon that can make wading through academic books so torturous sometimes. She does cite happily to all kinds of scholarship and theory, from venerable conservative scholars like Gerschom Scholem and Peter Schaefer to more daring thinkers like Daniel Boyarin and theories about performative language.
A major point Janowitz makes is that the term magic has historically always been a very subjective one - one person's religious practice is another person's magical practice.
Some really amazing and fascinating details to be found here, though, like the chapter on a Jewish woman named Maria who may have lived in first-century Alexandria and was kind of a proto-scientific pioneer in experimenting with metals for alchemististic purposes. I envision her as a kind of ancient Marie Curie. Fun!
My one quibble is that I didn't love the system for citing to the references ... for me the easiest system to navigate has always been the old-fashioned one where the notes are on the bottom of the page below the text they refer to, and all the information on the work is right there along with the substance of the note. I guess modern editors see this as too cumbersome and bulky, so instead the social sciences citation system is used, where you have to flip to the back of the book and hunt down the endnote. And then the endnote only gives you the authors last name and the date, so if you want to see what's actually being referred to, you have to flip through more pages to find the bibliography and match up the name and date. I find it incredibly aggravating to have to flip around so much to find references.
A major point Janowitz makes is that the term magic has historically always been a very subjective one - one person's religious practice is another person's magical practice.
Some really amazing and fascinating details to be found here, though, like the chapter on a Jewish woman named Maria who may have lived in first-century Alexandria and was kind of a proto-scientific pioneer in experimenting with metals for alchemististic purposes. I envision her as a kind of ancient Marie Curie. Fun!
My one quibble is that I didn't love the system for citing to the references ... for me the easiest system to navigate has always been the old-fashioned one where the notes are on the bottom of the page below the text they refer to, and all the information on the work is right there along with the substance of the note. I guess modern editors see this as too cumbersome and bulky, so instead the social sciences citation system is used, where you have to flip to the back of the book and hunt down the endnote. And then the endnote only gives you the authors last name and the date, so if you want to see what's actually being referred to, you have to flip through more pages to find the bibliography and match up the name and date. I find it incredibly aggravating to have to flip around so much to find references.
October 28, 2015
This is more a study of ancient rituals and how they were interpreted/misinterpreted by other faiths of the time. It reads as a collection of individual studies, some of which I found more interesting than others. Still, it raises some interesting questions.
December 19, 2014
Rather too short and superficial for my liking, but still very interesting.
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