Magical Formulae Research Articles

Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World ed. by Mar�a Jes�s Zamora Calvo (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World ed. by María Jesús Zamora Calvo Jordan Vanderpool Zamora Calvo, María Jesús, ed. Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2021. 214 pp. ISBN 978-0-8071-7561-3. Edited and compiled by María Jesús Zamora Calvo, Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain in the New World (WWISNW) accomplishes a great deal in bringing to light narratives of marginalized women during the inquisitorial period in Spain and the Americas. Zamora Calvo's introduction surveys each author's contribution and presents an unequivocal thesis that is largely followed throughout the work: namely, that inquisitorial persecution of women of the time always bore the shadow of hatred and disdain. To finalize the contextual framework of the book, Zamora Calvo offers a brief overview of the three hundred and fifty years of the Holy Office (1478-1834). Consisting of three essays, part one addresses cases of witchcraft in Spain. Beatriz Moncó Rebollo draws on the paradox of orthodox and heterodox discourse existing together in flux during the Baroque era to flesh out the binomials of woman/devil and body/evil as manifested in individual cases and mass pandemics. Sonia Pérez Villanueva addresses racial tensions in early 17th century Spain and exposes propagandist artwork's role in constructing a culture of ethnocentrism. As a conclusion of the first part, Zamora Calvo defends the case of Catalina Mateo—accused of infanticide and witchcraft—, while also considering the infamous myth of the demonic pact and its possible economic and psychological motivations. In the more tolerant environment of the New World, less severe trials occurred, but WWISNW devotes seven studies to the topic. Alberto Ortiz begins part two by outlining the practice of ligatures and investigates the use of these spells in the case of María de la Concepción. Cecilia López-Riduara reveals the belief in magical impotence as having stemmed from the sexual obsession of the authors of Malleus Malificarum, which is followed by Robin Ann Rice's analysis of proto-medical midwife practices and occult charms as a [End Page 181] unique means for monetary gain available to women at the time. Yadira Munguía's essay studies a unique instance of self-denunciation in front of the Holy Office, which results in a relatively positive outcome for the defendant. Deviating slightly from previous essays, Claudia Carranza and Jair Antonio Acevedo López investigate the use of an esoteric plant in magical formulae, and Graciela Rodríguez Castañon brings attention to the witch as a cultural myth. Ana María Díaz Burgos brings the book to a close by addressing two cases of witchcraft motivated by economic advancement in the face of marital struggles in Cartagena de Indias. The merits of this study are numerous and worthy of mention. WWISNW links the role of the inquisition in Spain to its role in the New World, elucidating the similarities and the notable differences between the Holy Office's operation intercontinentally. Moreover, the diversity of subjects perhaps proves the book's greatest advantage. Far from merely narrating numerous case studies, Zamora's complication seeks, and successfully manages, to arrive at a greater understanding of the essence of witchness during the Baroque period, principally through examining the individual woman, but also by means of more conceptual exploration. What is the often the study's greatest strength, however, at times turns into structural weakness. To some degree an outlier from the other contributors, Rodríguez Castañon's essay explores the cultural construct of the witch during the time of the Inquisition, and while a praiseworthy piece, the placement distracts from the author's astute observations. As the penultimate essay of the book, the pattern of a historiographical analysis of various inquisitorial cases in each essay has already been sufficiently established, so an essay that addresses no individual case, instead focusing on a more theoretical cultural phenomenon, results in some dissonance in the flow of the book, in particular when followed by another paradigmatic trial documentation. Munguía's investigation of an abnormal...

Repression, Retraction? Re-reading!

Since there have been books, there has been a need to get rid of them. From powerful magical formulae and heretical wisdom to the early drafts of poetry, authorities and writers tried to remove certain texts from circulation, or tried to inhibit or steer their reception. In the first part, this article gives a brief overview of forms of book-disposal, voluntary and involuntary, in antiquity and points to their significance for Augustine of Hippo in particular. In a second section, the article features Augustine’s Revisions (Retractationes), a commentary on his own literary production and an innovative effort to gain control over the reception and interpretation of his own works. In this late retrospection, Augustine employs the persona of a self-critical author—fallible and pressed by the duties of his office but always in pursuit of God’s truth—that allows him to reconfigure his authorial past in relation to himself, his texts, and his audience. The article will trace the implications of Augustine’s self-fashioning for the recurrent problem of controlling the reception and interpretation of written works.

The female authorship of Babylonian Jewish incantation bowls

The general consensus in scholarly research is that rabbis, male scribes and male practitioners wrote the incantation bowls. However, a survey of the Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowls published thus far shows a majority of named female authors. This article will elaborate on five of them who wrote incantation bowls in a unique style. The female authors presented in their magical formulae ideas in a discourse which opposes the religious and cultural perception of the rabbinic milieu. Therefore searching the internal space of the Jewish community is not sufficient. Rather, it would be more fruitful to look for an answer to the question of who wrote the incantation bowls using a wider prism. We should, in this case, explore the society and culture of the Sasanian Empire in particular, and late antiquity in general.

“... to grasp the native's point of view...” - A Plea for a Holistic Documentation of the Trobriand Islanders' Language, Culture and Cognition

In his famous introduction to his monograph “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” Bronislaw Malinowski (1922: 24f.) points out that a “collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum , as documents of native mentality”. This is one of the prerequisites to “grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. Malinowski managed to document a “ Corpus Inscriptionum Agriculturae Quriviniensis ” in his second volume of “Coral Gardens and their Magic” (1935 Vol II: 79-342). But he himself did not manage to come up with a holistic corpus inscriptionum for the Trobriand Islanders. One of the main aims I have been pursuing in my research on the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture, and cognition has been to fill this ethnolinguistic niche. In this essay, I report what I had to do to carry out this complex and ambitious project, what forms and kinds of linguistic and cultural competence I had to acquire, and how I planned my data collection during 16 long- and short-term field trips to the Trobriand Islands between 1982 and 2012. The paper ends with a critical assessment of my Trobriand endeavor.

Magical formulae for market futures: Tales from the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos

Markets are often portrayed as being organized by way of rationalized knowledge, objective reasoning, and the fluctuations of demand and supply. In parallel, and often mixed with this modality of knowledge, magical beliefs and practices are prevalent. Business leaders, management consultants, and financial advisors are often savvy in the art of creatively blending the ‘objective facts’ of markets with magical formulae, rites, and imaginaries of the future. This article looks at the World Economic Forum's yearly Davos meeting as a large‐scale ritual that engages senior executives of global corporations, top‐level politicians, and civil society leaders to contribute to the overall aim of ‘improving the world’. The Davos gathering has become a vital part of the business calendar, just as much for the intensity of its networking as for the declarations of action from the speakers’ podiums. The presentations and performances in Davos work as ‘technologies of enchantment’ in Gell's (1992) sense, instilling a sense of agency onto participants. The ritual also contributes towards securing the acquiescence of individuals and organizations in a transnational network of politico‐economic intentionalities. By invoking global and regional challenges and risks, discussing possible scenarios and solutions, presenters invoke a sense of urgency and contribute to the articulation of global ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. It is proposed that the magic of Davos resides to a large extent in the ritualized form of interaction and the technologies of enchantment through which it is set up.

Some Notes on Binding Magic (maʾǝsärä ǝgr) in Ethiopia

Ethiopian magical texts abound in their inclusion of magical formulae for binding slaves (maʾǝsärä ǝgr, ‘the tying of feet’), used with the intention of preventing, usually a slave, from running away. This paper will embark on a description of binding magic, the context of their uses and highlight the role of the däbtära, whose ‘in betwixt’ status enables him to cross rigid boundaries of traditional power structures in Christian Ethiopian culture.

Leaving the Magic Out: Knowledge and Effect in Different Places

In 2010, Porer Nombo and I launched a book about indigenous Papua New Guinean plant knowledge to a large audience at a university near to his village on the north coast of that country. Members of the audience commented that the book made a record of important practices. But they asked if those practices were dependent on secret magic to be effective? What gave us the right to include such secrets? Or, if there was in fact something fundamental missing from the book (magical formulae to activate the processes described), then what was the use of publishing the book? Thinking through their questions suggested the need to analyse what ‘knowledge’ is in different places, and why plants might be effective in some, but not others. In this paper I attempt an explanation that does not rely on a ‘social’ explanation of magic but instead suggest that what we call ‘magic’ are mechanisms whereby a gardener (or healer, or hunter) positions an action, or a thing in relation to other things. I liken the way myth works in these systems to the way intellectual property law provides a comparable ‘mythic’ structure that locates effect in the places that have developed ‘knowledge economies’ and I conclude by asking; if places embody their history and politics, and generate different understandings of effect, then what are the implications of calling Porer's practices with regard to plants, ‘knowledge’?

Divorcing Lilith: from the Babylonian incantation bowls to the Cairo Genizah

One of the striking features of ancient Jewish magic is the disappearance of numerous magical spells and formulae that are known to us from the Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls; spells that come to be absent from the register of later Jewish magic. In the present paper we present one exception to this general rule, by editing a Genizah fragment (Hebrew Union College 1029) that contains a spell which is well attested in the incantation bowls. The fragment in question was copied in the twelfth century as part of a larger magical recipe book. One of its recipes, entitled ‘A deed of divorce for Lilith’, contains an anti-demonic get (divorce formula) which is attested in several different versions in the Babylonian incantation bowls, produced half a millennium earlier. In our paper, we offer a synopsis of all these versions, and a detailed assessment of the significance of this discovery.

May Yhwh Bless You and Keep You from Evil: The Rhetorical Argument of Ketef Hinnom Amulet I and the Form of the Prayers for Deliverance in the Psalms

Abstract Most of the attention that the two silver amulets discovered at Ketef Hinnom Jerusalem have received in recent scholarship has centered upon their date and relationship to the biblical texts. This is due in part to the fact that both amulets preserve formulations of the biblical Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6:24–26. The new edition of the amulets published in 2004, however, provides impetus for new questions about the form of the incantations on the amulets and what the magical objects tell us about ancient Judahite apotropaic practices. In particular, the new edition provides a clearer picture of the content and form on both amulets. In turn, the new edition paves the way for a better understanding of how the incantations functioned as magical texts, which attempted to make an argument about their own efficacy as apotropaic objects. Despite this fact, few studies have devoted sufficient to the overall form and content preserved in the incantations. The following paper will describe the content and structure of the incantation on Amulet I and argue that the specific statement made therein provides a unique glimpse into the argument of magical texts in ancient Judah. Finally, the following paper will also briefly compare the content and structure of the incantation to several Psalms that petition Yhwh for protection against various ills. Such a comparison reveals that there may have been more fluidity between magical formulae and ancient Judahite prayer traditions than previously recognized.

Les livres des jours (<I>rishu</I>) des Qin et des Han: la logique éditoriale du recueil A de Shuihudi (217 avant notre ère)

Since the 1970s archaeologists have brought to light significant numbers of collections of hemerological materials and magical formulae generically called daybooks {rishu). Written on bamboo slips bound into rolls, these collections reveal a level of intertextuality that prompt us to examine carefully all the elements likely to help trace back the editorial logic from which each text as it stands now was evolved. This article is devoted to a daybook excavated from a Shuihudi tomb that was closed in 217 BC. A meticulous codicological description of the support and text is proposed in the first part. The editorial diversity of this particular collection suggests that there existed several manners of devising the production of a manuscript. Quality varied not only according to the abilities of the editor/copyist, but also according to the uses intended for the manuscript. In the long run the choices made by copyists contributed to the formation of lineages of textual transmission.

The structure of the fairy tale in Kira Muratova's The Sentimental Policeman

The Sentimental Policeman (1992) by Kira Muratova can be linked to the Russian fairy tale because of its ‘a-psychological’ characters and because of the similarity between the use of language in the film and in folk narration: the dialogue is full of redundant expressions (typical of folk narration) and of magical formulae. This article analyses the film in the light of Vladimir Propp's theory of the fairy tale structure, and reaches a seemingly contradictory conclusion: while the fairy tale hero traditionally rejects consanguinity bonds (family) in favour of alliance bonds (marriage), the film hero aspires to create consanguinity bonds (by having children) but manages to do so only in the end. Moreover, whereas in previous films by Muratova the narration was impregnated with (and depended on) the inner world and the emotional crisis of characters, in The Sentimental Policeman — and in later films — the. characters are shown from an external, neutral point of view, allowing them to develop. The fairy tale narrative of The Sentimental Policeman thus marks a new phase in Muratova's cinematic oeuvre.

Situations and Interpretations: Explorations in Interpretive Practice

Interpretation has long been a central problem for linguistic and cultural analysis. Given that conceptual categories never completely fit the messy situations of everyday life, how do people make sense out of situations in ways that make sense to others? How do they articulate the meanings they derive from the streams of experience around them? Much of the literature that has focused on these issues has emphasized the ways in which interpretation is overdetermined by the political, economic and social contexts in which it takes place. Such analyses often run counter to the life experiences of the interpreters themselves. On the other hand, analytic approaches that reduce interpretation to pre-established rules, routines and frames often emphasize the notion of shared norms of interpretation. They hence fail to address the fact that acts of interpretation take place within situations that are experienced sometimes as routine, sometimes as unique and unrepeatable, but which are always bound by local histories and social relations. One way to examine such problems is to look into the lives of those actors socially charged with responsibilities for interpretation: diviners whose proclamations articulate cultural meanings and reproduce social structures, journalists who must turn strips of experience into reportable and consumable events, healers who must convert visual signs and oral reports of subjective experiences into diagnoses and treatments, bureaucrats who must translate the life experiences of clients into legalistic categories. This collection of articles is an initial effort to engage with practice, the ways that routine procedures, cultural categories, and social positions come together in particular instances of interpretation. By paying special attention to the discourses through which actors articulate their own experiences, the authors of these articles explore ways anthropology can understand practices of interpretation as habitual but indeterminate, strategic and situational. They thus seek to present insights into the lives of those charged with the task of interpretation, to offer an ethnography of interpreting which reveals insights into not only the process of interpretation itself, but also into the cultural fault lines that are exposed by the interpretation process. Interpretation as Practice The role of interpretation as central to anthropology has its roots in Weber's notion of verstehen, and his insistence on the centrality of the hermeneutic tradition in the analysis of social interaction (Weber 1949, 1968). But it is also rooted in the pragmatic linguistics of Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski's efforts to discover the meanings of magical formulae led him to the realization that interpretation is a process that subsumes translation; indeed, he argued, mere translation is, in fact, impossible. In order to translate anything one must recreate the social and cultural context in which the item to be translated exists, and this requires considerable rhetorical work (Malinowski 1966). For anthropologists writing ethnographic accounts, it is often easier to use untranslated vernacular terms unapologetically, hoping that the reader will come to an understanding of what they mean once they have completed the monograph, and assimilated the broad context in which these materials live. However, the focus on interpretation in the social sciences has tended to center on the role of scholars in people's actions ex post facto. The process of constructing causal narratives and structural models for explaining human action often sidesteps the issue of how these patterns are realized in everyday life. A central problem for anthropology involves exploring how people make sense of the world around them from messy situation to messy situation, managing ambiguity, repairing misunderstandings and negotiating meanings. The articles in this collection address this problem by studying people who do kinds of interpretive work-ethno-interpretive work, if one likes. …

Reading the Bible in a Javanese Village

Reading the Bible is the principal religious practice of many Javanese Protestants. It is here compared to Javanese interpretive approaches to other texts, such as the Qur'an, magical formulae, and schoolbooks. While many aspects of the format of the village Bible study group constitute a break with conventional Javanese interpretive practices, the interpretive discourse of a Bible study meeting is still constrained by long-standing status and gender distinctions. Nevertheless, the innovative format of Bible study opens some room for interpretations that undercut more authoritative and conservative readings.

Verbe coranique et magie en terre d'Islam

La fonction attribuee au verbe en magie islamique ne derive pas de la simple idee que la parole vehicule une force, ou que la structure du langage correspond a celle de l'univers. Pour les esoteristes musulmans, le monde sensible et le langage sont deux faces d'une meme realite. Les paroles prononcees ou ecrites manifestent et accompagnent le deploiement en acte de la creation. Les ouvrages d'al-Buni ou d'Ibn al-Hâjj Tilimsâni proposent des techniques ou l'usage des noms et notamment des versets coraniques permet d'exercer une action sur des anges, des djinns ou des forces naturelles. Ces pratiques sont souvent assumees par des marabouts, soufis ou supposes tels ; mais chaque croyant peut y avoir acces et profiter des bienfaits du pouvoir secret de la parole sacree.

From mantra to mataráa: Opacity and transparency in the language of Tobelo magic and medicine (Halmahera Island, Indonesia)

This paper presents a definition of the Tobelo concept of ‘magic/medicine’, and examines the role of mataráa (‘magical formulae’) within Tobelo magical/medical activities. The curative use of opaque, esoteric formulae is widely reported; Tobelo also have a specialized speech I call ‘neo-Ternatese’ used for this purpose. Several explanations for the opacity of magical formulae are examined; some apply to the Tobelo case and some do not. Examining the full range of registers in which neo-Ternatese is used, with sample texts, we find a continuum from transparent to opaque, paralleling a continuum of contexts from public to private (or esoteric), and we can identify the techniques used to produce (or increase) a text's opacity. Magical formulae, at the opaque end of that continuum, represent a secret, prestigious, and relatively liquid asset whose high value is maintained by several cultural conventions.

Societies and Academies

Societies and Academies

Magical Formulae on Lintels of the Christian Period in Syria

Previous articleNext article FreeMagical Formulae on Lintels of the Christian Period in SyriaWilliam K. PrenticeWilliam K. Prentice Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 10, Number 2April–June 1906 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 9 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/496990 Views: 9 Copyright © 1906 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Art. VIII.—A New Version of the Creation-story

We all know—for the Bible tells us of it—one of the chief characteristics of the Babylonians and Assyrians, namely, their superstition, as shown by their use of charms and magical formulae. Nahum calls Nineveh “the mistress of witchcraft,” who “selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.” Micah, too, speaks of the witchcrafts and soothsayers of one or both of these countries, and Isaiah mentions the multitude of Babylon's sorceries, and the great abundance of her enchantments, calling upon the multitude of the sorcerers and star-gazers to save her, if they could, from the things which were to come upon her. The great use of charms and magic is, indeed, one of the things which strikes the student who examines the literature of these two remarkable countries; for the number of documents referring to the various branches of this art—the “black art,” in fact—far exceeds that of any other branch of Babylonian or Assyrian literature. Omens, medical formulæ in mystic ideographs, and invocations in Akkadian, in Assyrian, and in the two languages together, abound. Many of these last are very elaborate, and have very interesting introductions, and almost all contain a great deal of information about the mythology and superstitions of the two nations by whom they were used.