Drawing down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drawing down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III David B. Levy Radcliffe G. Edmonds III. Drawing down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 474. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-6911-5693-4. Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor Michael Arnush, Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866; email: marnush@skidmore.edu. This is a fresh approach and welcome comprehensive account of phenomena of magic in ancient Greece and Rome. It will undoubtedly become a benchmark in the field of ancient magic scholarship alongside the studies by David Frankfurter (Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, 2019), Lindsay Watson (Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome, 2019), Fritz Graf (Magic in the Ancient World, 1997), Georg Luck (Arcana Mundi: Sources, 1985), Daniel Ogden (Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 2002), and Christopher Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Magika Hiera, 1991). Edmonds analyzes from nearly a millennium, from fifth century ce in ancient Greece to the fourth century bce. He also investigates a range of Mediterranean cultures, including Egypt and the Near East, and how the formation of magical practices differed across these cultures through time and geographic space. The book contains eight thematic chapters that are sandwiched by book-ends, including two theoretical introductions and a conclusion. The meat of the book explores a variety of genres, drawing upon literary sources and material culture. Edmonds examines images of witches, ghosts, and demons, as well as powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, reversals and alterations of nature. Ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms, healing potions, amulets, and talismans constitute the kinds of evidence treated. Twenty-one figures and eight colored plates testify to the material aspect of emic ritual practices. The theoretical introductions define magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world, differentiating between a non-normative or emic approach, and a normative or etic approach to ritual discourse. This is a question of whether magic should be viewed from the perspective of an insider-practitioner, who has often undergone initiation into mystery cults, versus an outsider scholarly analyst with objective criteria. The practitioner believes in the efficacy of enchantment and incantation to spellbind, while the academic views it as a sociological phenomenon as does P. Bourdieu (Revue francaise de sociologie, 12, [1972], 295–334). For example, Vergil as a literary artist seems to view the magical arts to encapsulate this power as when he writes carmina vel caelo possunt deducere Lunam (“incantations have the power to draw the moon down from the sky,” Ecl 8.69). Normative implies institutions related to religion, medicine, healing, and ritual that carry the authority of what Foucault calls power-knowledge regimes that socially sanction legitimacy. For Edmonds, magic is non-normative in emic terms. That is to say, with Durkheim, it is often anti-socially practiced by those at the margins of society who have been excluded from institutional power. While institutions rely on compliance that is submissive and supplicatory, magic often works outside the conventional social systems. Edmonds adopts criteria (efficacy, aims, social location, style of performance) which provide a litmus test for whether a magical act operates within the language discourse, a parlance web of magic terminology that often operates by symbolic encryptions of esoteric [End Page 355] keyed communication—what Malinowski calls obtaining to a “coefficient of weirdness.” Edmonds helps the reader better understand how certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as magic and were set apart from normative practices, thereby shedding light on the shifting variable process of ancient normal religion in different ways by different groups. In this way, Edmonds is better able to attempt to define and conceptualize magic—its origins, nature, and functions. The eight illuminating and substantive chapters deal thematically with genres of magic. Chapter 3 is on defixiones or cursing malefic magic. Chapter 4 treats love charms and erotic magic. Chapter 5 considers protective magic as a defense against the dark arts. Chapter 6 considers prayer magic. Chapter 7 looks at some varieties of divination sometimes facilitated by necromancy. Chapter 8 contemplates astrology and its uses. Chapter 9 turns itself...