Social Knowledge and Spiritual Insecurity: Identifying "Witchcraft" in Classical Greek Communities

Abstract

Social Knowledge and Spiritual InsecurityIdentifying "Witchcraft" in Classical Greek Communities Esther Eidinow 1. "witchcraft": an old story A female magos who promised to make incantations that calmed the anger of the gods did a good trade, and from these activities, made a handsome living. On these grounds, certain people charged her with innovating in divine matters, and they accused her and condemned her to death. A certain person, seeing her leaving the court, said to her: "You claim to be able to calm the anger of the gods; how come you could not persuade ordinary mortals?" Someone might use this tale against a wandering woman, who although she promises greater things, proves incapable of ordinary achievements.1 This essay begins with this Aesopic fable, because I want to argue that the gunê magos it depicts belongs to the (semantic) family of "the witch." This does not mean that I regard this term as indicating, straightforwardly, a universal category. But the conference that generated this essay was based on the assumption of the diachronic and cross-cultural conceptual power of witchcraft beliefs and practices, which encompass both local and global meanings and whose historical trajectory extends back to ancient Mediterranean cultures. The breadth of our coverage in both the conference and volume is not meant to suggest that a direct resemblance can be assumed between one set of phenomena and another across distances of time, place, and culture; nor do we [End Page 62] intend to claim that this etic term "witch" can simply encompass or displace the emic understandings of the subjects of analysis. Rather, it was and is intended to describe a family resemblance; and, in this essay, the phenomena I will use it to describe share in "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing; sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail."2 In addition, and importantly, my use of this term is also intended to prompt recognition and exploration of difference; raising in particular, and to the theme of this collection of essays, questions about the nature, role, and context of specific narratives—and, indeed, vocabulary. I will not be concerned here with etic differences between, for example, sorcery or witchcraft;3although I do think that the difference to which this terminology alludes is of interest for Classical scholarship, as a prompt towards consideration of the emergence of conscious and unconscious forms of supernatural harm achieved by ordinary mortals (for example, we can trace in the ancient sources a discourse concerning the relationship between envy, supernatural harm, and the emergence of the concept of occult aggression that we can loosely label the "evil eye").4 In this essay, however, I restrict myself to the evidence concerned with the exercise of more technical powers, in which supernatural powers were understood to be evoked through ritual expertise. Returning to the Aesopic fable with which this essay started, we can see how this story provides a vivid tableau that illustrates the ways in which accusations of illicit ritual practice—"witchcraft"—could develop in ancient Greek, probably Classical, culture; it also highlights, very succinctly, a number of themes of this essay.5 First, it alerts us to local social dynamics. As the [End Page 63] fable relates, the female magic user or gunê magos is a popular figure, insofar as her skills are clearly in demand (e.g., , "she did a good trade and from these activities made a handsome living"), but she is also hated and abused. Her remarkable success is followed by a downfall that is engineered by people who remain anonymous, "certain people" who bring these accusations; while "a certain person" speaks to the woman as she leaves the court, and appears, from what has been said, almost to enjoy what has happened. What is it that provokes these reactions? The Greek says she was charged "" or "on these grounds," and "these" could refer either to the woman's ritual practices, or her remarkable success. The "certain person" who crows over her as she leaves the court alludes both to the woman's claim to possess supernatural power and to the ways in which the verdict can be read as having falsified that claim. But...