Restoring the Magician: Making Room for Ritual Specialists in the Graeco-Roman World

• Author / Creator

  Bamforth, Owain

• Graeco-Roman magic and magicians have been studied and theorized by classicists and historians of religion for at least a hundred years. Despite the sustained interest by the academy,
  magic and magicians have not, until recently, been systematically theorized as belonging to a broader pattern of cultural activity that involved coercing the gods to achieve desirable outcomes. Classicists and historians have also tended to see Graeco-Roman magicians in the ancient world as antithetical to classical Greek thought and philosophy. Practitioners of magic have seldom been taken seriously. This study reappraises the wealth of evidence for the presence
  practitioners of magic in the ancient world, as well as the category “magic” itself, for the purpose of understanding how a broad group of freelance ritual actors worked, operated, and rose in popularity during the first four centuries of the common era. I begin by reassessing the category magic and argue that “freelance ritual specialists” can better encompass the broad group of ritual actors who performed private coercive rituals for clients. I then examine the cultural reception of freelance ritual specialists to demonstrate their
  enduring presence in Roman culture and demonstrate that they were not cultural oddities or outliers. I conclude the study with a theoretical approach to understanding different types of freelance ritual specialists in the ancient world, as well as theorizing how Roman imperialism may have produced an increase in freelance ritual specialists by dislocating local specialized priests from their temples and gods.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • magic
  • ancient religion
  • ritual
  • Roman magic
  • Roman religion
  • magic versus religion
  • ancient magic

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-3hjc-gd76

• License

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