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The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells: Texts
"The Greek magical papyri" is a collection of magical spells and formulas, hymns, and rituals from Greco-Roman Egypt, dating from the second century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. Containing a fresh translation of the Greek papyri, as well as Coptic and Demotic texts, this new translation has been brought up to date and is now the most comprehensive collection of this literature, and the first ever in English.
The Greek Magical Papyri in Transition is an invaluable resource for scholars in a wide variety of fields, from the history of religions to the classical languages and literatures, and it will fascinate those with a general interest in the occult and the history of magic.
"One of the major achievements of classical and related scholarship over the last decade."—Ioan P. Culianu, Journal for the Study of Judaism
"The enormous value of this new volume lies in the fact that these texts will now be available to a much wider audience of readers, including historians or religion, anthropologists, and psychologists."—John G. Gager, Journal of Religion
"[This book] shows care, skill and zest. . . . Any worker in the field will welcome this sterling performance."—Peter Parsons, Times Literary Supplement
The Greek Magical Papyri in Transition is an invaluable resource for scholars in a wide variety of fields, from the history of religions to the classical languages and literatures, and it will fascinate those with a general interest in the occult and the history of magic.
"One of the major achievements of classical and related scholarship over the last decade."—Ioan P. Culianu, Journal for the Study of Judaism
"The enormous value of this new volume lies in the fact that these texts will now be available to a much wider audience of readers, including historians or religion, anthropologists, and psychologists."—John G. Gager, Journal of Religion
"[This book] shows care, skill and zest. . . . Any worker in the field will welcome this sterling performance."—Peter Parsons, Times Literary Supplement
411 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1986
48 people are currently reading
1441 people want to read
About the author
Hans Dieter Betz
53 books10 followersHans Dieter Betz is a German/American scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chicago. He has made influential contributions to research on Paul's Letter to the Galatians, the Sermon on the Mount and the Greco-Roman context of Early Christianity.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 29, 2007
Interesting stuff. The Greeks had complex magic procedures for, like, getting your goats to be less noisy. This is always passed over in books on Greek philosophy, but it shouldn't be - it's important to remember that when "philosophers and boy-lovers" Aristotle and Plato argued the primacy of reason, they were definitely in the minority.
Read
November 13, 2018PGM IV. 2943-57
"Love-spell of attraction through wakefulness: Take the eyes of a bat and release it alive, and take a piece of unbaked dough or unmelted wax and mold a little dog; and put the right eye of the bat into the right eye of the little dog, implanting also in the same way the left one in the left. And take a needle, thread it with the magical material and stick it through the eyes of the little dog, so that the magical material is visible. And put the dog into a new drinking vessel, attach a papyrus strip to it and seal it with your own ring which has crocodiles with the backs of their heads attached, and deposit it at a crossroad after you have marked that spot so that, should you wish to recover it, you can find it." pg. 94
PGM XIII. 705-717
from "The Eighth, Hidden Book of Moses" - what to do after you have successfully conjured a god:
"Now when the god comes in do not stare at his face, but look at his feet while beseeching him, as written above, and giving thanks that he did not treat you contemptuously, but you were thought worthy of the things about to be said to you for correction of your life. You, then, ask, 'Master, what is fated for me?' And he will tell you even about your star, and what kind of daimon you have, and your horoscope and where you may live and where you will die. And if you hear something bad, do not cry out or weep, but ask that he may wash it off or circumvent it, for this god can do everything. Therefore, when you begin questioning, thank him for having heard you and not overlooked you. Always sacrifice to this god in this way and offer your pious devotions, for thus he will hear you." pg. 189
For How to Summon an Angel: https://www.maryoverton.work/reflecti...
"Love-spell of attraction through wakefulness: Take the eyes of a bat and release it alive, and take a piece of unbaked dough or unmelted wax and mold a little dog; and put the right eye of the bat into the right eye of the little dog, implanting also in the same way the left one in the left. And take a needle, thread it with the magical material and stick it through the eyes of the little dog, so that the magical material is visible. And put the dog into a new drinking vessel, attach a papyrus strip to it and seal it with your own ring which has crocodiles with the backs of their heads attached, and deposit it at a crossroad after you have marked that spot so that, should you wish to recover it, you can find it." pg. 94
PGM XIII. 705-717
from "The Eighth, Hidden Book of Moses" - what to do after you have successfully conjured a god:
"Now when the god comes in do not stare at his face, but look at his feet while beseeching him, as written above, and giving thanks that he did not treat you contemptuously, but you were thought worthy of the things about to be said to you for correction of your life. You, then, ask, 'Master, what is fated for me?' And he will tell you even about your star, and what kind of daimon you have, and your horoscope and where you may live and where you will die. And if you hear something bad, do not cry out or weep, but ask that he may wash it off or circumvent it, for this god can do everything. Therefore, when you begin questioning, thank him for having heard you and not overlooked you. Always sacrifice to this god in this way and offer your pious devotions, for thus he will hear you." pg. 189
For How to Summon an Angel: https://www.maryoverton.work/reflecti...
January 11, 2014
For a look at actual spells, formulas, hymns and rituals from the Greco-Roman period, you need look no further. This is an incredible and indespensible resource.
September 10, 2020
A truly superb tome of ancient magick. Obviously not all of the rituals can be done in this day and age, but with a little creativity and adaptation, there is so much beauty to be garnered here. There are also some particularly lovely hymns; every Hellenic pagan should have this book! Hell, even if you're not an occultist, it's fascinating from a historical perspective at the very least. Highly, highly recommended.
December 4, 2012
An actual translation of an Authentic Hellenstic Magikal Text! What a true treasure tome!
June 14, 2014
this taken in context with nag hamandi- iamblichus' 'on the mysteries..' and the corpus hermeticum really explains a lot.
April 21, 2024
This is a 2005 revision (with a bibliographical update) of a review originally posted on Amazon in 2003. It is now missing, and from experience I don't expect to be able to re-post it there.
Magic and Syncretic Religion
According to the introduction to this volume, among other competent sources, one of the more interesting shocks to the delicate sensibilities of nineteenth-century classical scholars was delivered by papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt. The serene and rational "classical" Greeks of their (mainly German) imaginations turned out to be human beings “ with messy fears, desires, hatreds, and jealousies, and a willingness to turn to magic (ugh!) to obtain their ends. There they were, in Greek, actual "magical papyri" -- spell books, that is, not so much documents purporting to be potent agents in themselves, in the old Egyptian manner of ritually empowered images and paintings.
A common reaction: Let's keep it a secret!
It didn't work. A younger generation of scholars (also mainly, but not entirely, German) began mining the texts for information on daily life (astrological papyri proved more helpful) and religion (more successfully) in late antiquity. Texts scattered in museums and published, if at all, in a variety of journals, had to be assembled and properly edited. Some early efforts were exemplary, some problematic (and some both). It sometimes seemed as if a curse had been laid on the enterprise. Early deaths, the First World War, and economic chaos delayed the publication of a carefully edited volume of collected papyri (Greek passages only). The second volume survived World War II only in proof copies. Meanwhile, more papyri turned up, and the project had to be re-done.
One of the more fortunate results of this delay is the present volume, a careful translation of the Greek papyri containing magic spells, along with the Demotic (late Egyptian in a native "shorthand") and Coptic (late Egyptian in a mostly Greek-derived script) passages in the same manuscripts. A team of scholars worked on the translations, which come with concise introductions and notes. It is based on the arrangement in the earlier text editions (although, frustratingly, it does not come with page-references to the first edition, used in over half a century of scholarly literature).
A second volume, including fuller references, and, above all, indexes, was announced, but never appeared. This is frustrating given the number of topics, names, and materials mentioned in just the larger manuscript collections.
As for the work at hand, it is fascinating, if inherently frustrating. We have parts of a library of someone who may have been a working magician, with the habits of a scholar, and actual charms and amulets for a less discriminating clientele. There are instructions on how to pull off party tricks, win (or torment) a lover, or influence important people, as well as protect yourself from the spells of others.
Greek gods mingle with Egyptian deities older than the Pyramids, and Mesopotamian (even Sumerian) Powers make brief appearances. Garbled bits of Jewish and Christian lore are sprinkled throughout. The extent to which any of this represents a real synthesis of religious beliefs (syncretism), or is an unthinking compilation of whatever might give access to power, is a question long debated. I suspect that every instance needs a separate answer, and in most cases we will never have one.
At least four fairly large groups of readers should find the book invaluable.
Those interested in Egypt will welcome a mass of post-Pharaonic material, a lot of it with good parallels from earlier centuries. This has a large and growing bibliography. With some reservations, I would suggest Bob Brier's Ancient Egyptian Magic: Spells, Incantations, Potions, Stories, and Rituals as a place to start, with the bibliography in Betz for additional titles.
For the really serious, David Frankfurter's Religion in Roman Egypt (1998) will be rewarding, but not as a start. It is available in paperback from Princeton University Press in the MYTHOS series, as is a revised version of Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (1993; originally 1986), another valuable work intended for relatively advanced students.
Those interested in the gods of Greece will find here much evidence of how they were viewed in popular (rather than elite) culture, and what happened to them when carried abroad by their worshippers. As supplements on these areas, I suggest two far-ranging surveys, Fritz Graf's Magic in the Ancient World and Matthew W. Dickie's Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World. I have some methodological concerns with both, and with what I regard as some serious errors by Dickie (particularly regarding Mesopotamian and Jewish topics), but both display immense learning and intelligence. Graf is easier, and also has some excellent discussions of the Egyptian material to add to Brier, with more bibliography. With a narrower range, but extremely important, is Christopher A. Faraone's Ancient Greek Love Magic, which deals directly with a whole class of texts translated in Betz et al., and places them in a long cultural context.
Thirdly, students of early Jewish mysticism will at last get ready access to texts which have been used to date "Merkabah" and "Hekhalot" texts (concerning heavenly ascents and visions of the Divine Throne), which survive only in medieval manuscripts. There is a remarkable overlap of "secret names" of God and angels, and some shared ideas of the cosmos, and how to obtain visionary knowledge. The bibliography for this is large, and I have yet to find a good introductory volume; for now, see my review of Rebecca Macy Lesses's Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism
Fourthly, the late pagan spells fade off into the Coptic literature of early Christian Egypt, although "Christian Magic" usually has received separate treatments, and is only incidentally represented in this collection. A good place to start (and containing some minor overlaps) is Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (1994), translations with commentary, edited by Marvin W. Meyer and Richard Smith. The supposed limits of official “Christianity, superficially Christianized paganism, fringe Christianity, and Gnosticism, are crossed and recrossed in the texts presented. This too is available, slightly revised, in the Princeton MYTHOS series of trade paperbacks (1999).
(Addendum: A close analysis of one type of spell in the Greek (and Demotic) papyri is Evocating the Gods: Divine Evocation in the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, by Christopher A. Plaisance.)
{Further Addendum: Betz, et al. is being replaced by a new edition, with original texts and a commentary in addition to a new translation. The first volume is .Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translations., Volume 1, edited by Christopher A. Faraone and Sofia Torallas Tovar, It contains only fifty-four of the documents, those judged to be the earliest. There is a companion volume (apparently not Volume 2), The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes, from the same editors. Neither shows up on Goodreads.
See
https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Egyptian...
and
https://www.amazon.com/Greco-Egyptian... }
IMPORTANT ADDITIOIN: As of April 20, 2024, a free online and PDF version of the book is available.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9650...
and
https://www.academia.edu/77249730/Gre...
Both are awkward to use, as the book is designed to have facing pages of text and translation which won't fit on every screen.
Concluding note: As for practicing magicians -- everyone should know that you can't just use someone else's book of spells, you need authorization and personal instruction! And a copy made personally from a manuscript....
Magic and Syncretic Religion
According to the introduction to this volume, among other competent sources, one of the more interesting shocks to the delicate sensibilities of nineteenth-century classical scholars was delivered by papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt. The serene and rational "classical" Greeks of their (mainly German) imaginations turned out to be human beings “ with messy fears, desires, hatreds, and jealousies, and a willingness to turn to magic (ugh!) to obtain their ends. There they were, in Greek, actual "magical papyri" -- spell books, that is, not so much documents purporting to be potent agents in themselves, in the old Egyptian manner of ritually empowered images and paintings.
A common reaction: Let's keep it a secret!
It didn't work. A younger generation of scholars (also mainly, but not entirely, German) began mining the texts for information on daily life (astrological papyri proved more helpful) and religion (more successfully) in late antiquity. Texts scattered in museums and published, if at all, in a variety of journals, had to be assembled and properly edited. Some early efforts were exemplary, some problematic (and some both). It sometimes seemed as if a curse had been laid on the enterprise. Early deaths, the First World War, and economic chaos delayed the publication of a carefully edited volume of collected papyri (Greek passages only). The second volume survived World War II only in proof copies. Meanwhile, more papyri turned up, and the project had to be re-done.
One of the more fortunate results of this delay is the present volume, a careful translation of the Greek papyri containing magic spells, along with the Demotic (late Egyptian in a native "shorthand") and Coptic (late Egyptian in a mostly Greek-derived script) passages in the same manuscripts. A team of scholars worked on the translations, which come with concise introductions and notes. It is based on the arrangement in the earlier text editions (although, frustratingly, it does not come with page-references to the first edition, used in over half a century of scholarly literature).
A second volume, including fuller references, and, above all, indexes, was announced, but never appeared. This is frustrating given the number of topics, names, and materials mentioned in just the larger manuscript collections.
As for the work at hand, it is fascinating, if inherently frustrating. We have parts of a library of someone who may have been a working magician, with the habits of a scholar, and actual charms and amulets for a less discriminating clientele. There are instructions on how to pull off party tricks, win (or torment) a lover, or influence important people, as well as protect yourself from the spells of others.
Greek gods mingle with Egyptian deities older than the Pyramids, and Mesopotamian (even Sumerian) Powers make brief appearances. Garbled bits of Jewish and Christian lore are sprinkled throughout. The extent to which any of this represents a real synthesis of religious beliefs (syncretism), or is an unthinking compilation of whatever might give access to power, is a question long debated. I suspect that every instance needs a separate answer, and in most cases we will never have one.
At least four fairly large groups of readers should find the book invaluable.
Those interested in Egypt will welcome a mass of post-Pharaonic material, a lot of it with good parallels from earlier centuries. This has a large and growing bibliography. With some reservations, I would suggest Bob Brier's Ancient Egyptian Magic: Spells, Incantations, Potions, Stories, and Rituals as a place to start, with the bibliography in Betz for additional titles.
For the really serious, David Frankfurter's Religion in Roman Egypt (1998) will be rewarding, but not as a start. It is available in paperback from Princeton University Press in the MYTHOS series, as is a revised version of Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (1993; originally 1986), another valuable work intended for relatively advanced students.
Those interested in the gods of Greece will find here much evidence of how they were viewed in popular (rather than elite) culture, and what happened to them when carried abroad by their worshippers. As supplements on these areas, I suggest two far-ranging surveys, Fritz Graf's Magic in the Ancient World and Matthew W. Dickie's Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World. I have some methodological concerns with both, and with what I regard as some serious errors by Dickie (particularly regarding Mesopotamian and Jewish topics), but both display immense learning and intelligence. Graf is easier, and also has some excellent discussions of the Egyptian material to add to Brier, with more bibliography. With a narrower range, but extremely important, is Christopher A. Faraone's Ancient Greek Love Magic, which deals directly with a whole class of texts translated in Betz et al., and places them in a long cultural context.
Thirdly, students of early Jewish mysticism will at last get ready access to texts which have been used to date "Merkabah" and "Hekhalot" texts (concerning heavenly ascents and visions of the Divine Throne), which survive only in medieval manuscripts. There is a remarkable overlap of "secret names" of God and angels, and some shared ideas of the cosmos, and how to obtain visionary knowledge. The bibliography for this is large, and I have yet to find a good introductory volume; for now, see my review of Rebecca Macy Lesses's Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism
Fourthly, the late pagan spells fade off into the Coptic literature of early Christian Egypt, although "Christian Magic" usually has received separate treatments, and is only incidentally represented in this collection. A good place to start (and containing some minor overlaps) is Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (1994), translations with commentary, edited by Marvin W. Meyer and Richard Smith. The supposed limits of official “Christianity, superficially Christianized paganism, fringe Christianity, and Gnosticism, are crossed and recrossed in the texts presented. This too is available, slightly revised, in the Princeton MYTHOS series of trade paperbacks (1999).
(Addendum: A close analysis of one type of spell in the Greek (and Demotic) papyri is Evocating the Gods: Divine Evocation in the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, by Christopher A. Plaisance.)
{Further Addendum: Betz, et al. is being replaced by a new edition, with original texts and a commentary in addition to a new translation. The first volume is .Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translations., Volume 1, edited by Christopher A. Faraone and Sofia Torallas Tovar, It contains only fifty-four of the documents, those judged to be the earliest. There is a companion volume (apparently not Volume 2), The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books, and Individual Recipes, from the same editors. Neither shows up on Goodreads.
See
https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Egyptian...
and
https://www.amazon.com/Greco-Egyptian... }
IMPORTANT ADDITIOIN: As of April 20, 2024, a free online and PDF version of the book is available.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9650...
and
https://www.academia.edu/77249730/Gre...
Both are awkward to use, as the book is designed to have facing pages of text and translation which won't fit on every screen.
Concluding note: As for practicing magicians -- everyone should know that you can't just use someone else's book of spells, you need authorization and personal instruction! And a copy made personally from a manuscript....
May 8, 2023
A good primary source overview of Greco-Egyptian magic and really highlights how syncretic the eastern Mediterranean got. The spells are not always useful to modern practitioners but a lot serve as a solid baseline from which modifications can be made.
September 11, 2023
Read for class- collection of translated rites/spells/incantations from ancient Greco-Roman Egypt. Some of these spells are crazyyyy
February 8, 2025
The Greek Magical Papyri aka the PGM is my beloved. It includes rituals, hymns, and magical instructions for everything from calling Apollo (who is also Ywh, who is also Helios, who is also Horus, who is also the archangel Michael etc) to how to remove a splinter. It's an insight into Greco-Egyptian magic and philosophy, and is, in my humble opinion, more important than reading the Iliad or the Odyssey for understanding how the culture worshiped their gods.
May 14, 2025
Very interesting to see how these spells include gods from many ‘distinct cultures’—Egyptian, Hebrew, Persian, Greek—yet the people who wrote these spells worshipped or acknowledged all these gods. A couple spells reference ‘the god of the Hebrews’ and Moses, or Christ, but then also reference a Zoroastrian goddess. Greek gods were definitely the majority, but also there was a lot of mention of Egyptian gods, followed then by other ‘regional’ gods.
It really makes me think—why do I see these ancient cultures as so separate? Osiris might be an ‘Egyptian god’ but he was worshipped in ancient Greece, so perhaps that label doesn’t perfectly fit. Similarly, there were a good amount of spells relating to Abrahamic religions, which are considered monotheistic. But the casters of these spells believed in other gods, in addition to the Abrahamic god, which makes me think of the interpretation of ‘thou shalt hold no other god above me’ that basically means ‘other gods exist, but I must be the greatest in your eyes.’ Also it was interesting to learn that Moses was considered a great magician by the ancient people of that era.
It was funny that there were some spells ‘how to make a girl like you’ and the description is to create a poultice, slather it on your peen, then have sex with her. So basically the spell is ‘use lube’.
It really makes me think—why do I see these ancient cultures as so separate? Osiris might be an ‘Egyptian god’ but he was worshipped in ancient Greece, so perhaps that label doesn’t perfectly fit. Similarly, there were a good amount of spells relating to Abrahamic religions, which are considered monotheistic. But the casters of these spells believed in other gods, in addition to the Abrahamic god, which makes me think of the interpretation of ‘thou shalt hold no other god above me’ that basically means ‘other gods exist, but I must be the greatest in your eyes.’ Also it was interesting to learn that Moses was considered a great magician by the ancient people of that era.
It was funny that there were some spells ‘how to make a girl like you’ and the description is to create a poultice, slather it on your peen, then have sex with her. So basically the spell is ‘use lube’.
September 20, 2022
Fascinating if fragmentary collection of material which showcases the supernatural beliefs arising in a period of fascinating religious syncretism and cultural cross-pollination. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
April 20, 2024
Foundational book to study the collection of spells from Greek writers.
Read
July 13, 2024Crucial on-ramp reference for anyone who want to learn love spells, or how early Greek people cursed rival chariot teams.
June 8, 2025
Gran día para ser helpol
Read
May 15, 2015What an interesting set of documents.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews