Abstract
How do human beings receive answers to the most urgent questions they have of the powers of heaven? How do celestial beings provide guidance for perplexed humans? People living around the Mediterranean in the first few centuries CE devised many ways of seeking heavenly guidance; one of them was adjuration, in which they commanded gods, angels, or daemons to appear on earth and both reveal the mysteries of the universe to them and answer their questions about the problems of daily life. Similar techniques of adjuration occur in the Greco-Egyptian ritual texts usually referred to as the Greek magical papyri, the early Jewish mystical works known as the hekhalot literature, andSefer ha-Razim, a collection of adjurations in Hebrew, heavily influenced by both Greco-Egyptian ritual texts and the hekhalot tradition of hymnology. These adjurations assume that human beings, through their knowledge of the correct invocations and divine names, possess the power to persuade or force the gods or angels to fulfill their desires.
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