Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered: Love Charms and Erotic Curses

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-115
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Modern Perspective

This chapter focuses on erotic magic. While there is no way to judge, from a modern perspective, whether any of this erotic magic “worked,” from the standpoint of cultural history one can nevertheless conclude that erotic magic was a real part of the Greco-Roman world, both in the imagination of its possibilities and in the practices of those seeking extraordinary solutions to the endless problems that can arise in erotic relationships. The evidence, in literature and in epigraphic sources, provides insights into those problems as well as into the ways people thought those problems might be solved. This material is a rich source for the understanding of ancient Greco-Roman sexualities, providing glimpses of the underlying patterns of erotic behavior, both in the fantasies of the ancient Greeks and Romans and in the realities of their relationships. The social location of the performer is particularly interesting in erotic magic, since the literary evidence would suggest that erotic magic is generally associated with the objectively profane: the female, the old, the foreign. In reality, however, both males and females made use of erotic magic.

The Label of ‘Magic’ in the Ancient Greco­Roman World

2019 ◽  
pp. 378-418
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power And Authority

This concluding chapter assesses why the label of “magic” is applied, by whom, to whom, and in what circumstances. Many of the things labeled as “magic”—curses or prayers or divinatory rituals—may, depending on the circumstances, be regarded as perfectly normative. However, these ritual acts may also be considered non-normative if the same things are done by different people in different contexts (social location) or with different claims to power and authority (efficacy). The chapter then considers the ways these cues of social location and efficacy are used in the discourse of magic, both for the labeling of the self and of others. For other-labeling, the dynamics are especially clear in the legal arena, where the community or its representative are deciding where that person fits within the community. In such evidence, claims of extraordinary efficacy remain secondary to the cue of the social location of the performer. By contrast, self-labeling is much rarer and appears only in limited kinds of evidence, such as the Greek Magical Papyri, but the cue of extraordinary efficacy is the most important, and claims to extraordinary social location tend to be secondary to it. The appearance of such self-labeling, however, is unusual in the discourse of magic found in other cultures, so these examples are particularly revealing for the nature of the discourse of magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco­Roman World

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

This introductory chapter provides a definition of magic. One of the most useful adjustments in the recent scholarship on magic has been the turn to considering magic as a dynamic social construct, instead of some particular reality. Magic is not a thing, but a way of talking. Thus, magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. Such a discourse always has a history, since such a way of talking about things shifts over time as different people do the talking. When one speaks of “magic,” therefore, one should always explain: “magic for whom?” Any specific piece of evidence from the ancient Greco-Roman world provides an example of magic for that particular person, from one particular perspective. To speak of “magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world” is thus to refer to the whole range of things that various people in those cultures during those times could label as “magic.” The chapter then considers the act of drawing down the moon.

The idea of becoming an individual in the context of early Christianity

1997 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Pavlo Pavlenko
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

The last centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, the first centuries after that, were enveloped in the history of mankind as a period of the total crisis and the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization, a crisis that covered virtually all spheres of the social life of the Roman world and which, as ever before, experienced almost every one, whether he is a slave or a free citizen, a small merchant or a big slave or an aristocrat. As a reaction to the crisis, in various parts of the empire the civil wars and the slavery uprising erupt in different parts of the empire. Under such conditions of life, the world around itself no longer seemed to man to be self-sufficient, harmonious, stable, "good" and warded by a cohort of traditional deities. Yes, and the gods themselves were now turned out to be incapable, unable to change the unceasing flow of fatal doom.

Some Egyptian Elements in the Genesis Apocryphon: Evidence of a Ptolemaic Social Location?

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Machiela
Keyword(s):  
Roman Period ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Genesis Apocryphon ◽  
Special Knowledge

Though the social and geographic milieu of the Genesis Apocryphon has regularly been considered to be Greco-Roman period Palestine, there are several indications that the author(s) of this text had a special knowledge of, and interest in, Egypt. This essay explores three possible connections with Egypt: use of the name Hyrcanus for the Pharaoh’s official, employment of the name Karmon for the river separating Canaan and Egypt, and the practice of sibling marriage for Shem’s children only after the flood. Taken cumulatively, these factors speak to a general familiarity of the author(s) with Egypt, plausibly during the Ptolemaic period, though an Egyptian compositional setting is far less certain.

Town and Countryside in Early Christianity

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. C. Frend
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

A visitor to the Greco-Roman world about the year 350 AD would have found himself confronted by one of the great ‘sea changes’ in the lives of its peoples. The structure of city, farm and village that had persisted for centuries would appear to be intact. The market-places of the towns would be lined with altars and statues of long-dead benefactors. Temples to the gods of Rome and perhaps to a native deity duly Romanised, would dominate the scene. Wherever one stood in the city the temples in the forum would be the landmark. Nearby, would be the amphitheatre and great bath-building, the social centres of the old community, and near the entrance to the town the triumphal arch, marking perhaps the unification of Roman citizen and native inhabitant into one community.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Presentation

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
History Of

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>

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