Contenu du sommaire

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a cliché circulating according to which magicians were also experts in astrology. Some were reported to have used music to summon astrological powers through the planets, based on a Pythagorean tradition, and the vowels that we find in the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri were said to record the musical scale. Yet this “tradition” is primarily a matter of historiography and does not match with the practices and dynamics of cultural accommodation. A detailed analysis of the corpus reveals that the astrological interpretation does not derive from a Greek philosophical tradition but is rather a specific and targeted invention. It is therefore necessary to look at this practice from an emic perspective: vowels are occasionally linked with planets but they essentially stand for the power of breathing (πνεῦμα) and its capacity to produce sounds.

Magical gems are engraved stone amulets: they are partly empowered by inscribed barbaric names and carved images, including several Greek, Egyptian or Graeco-Egyptian deities. Sometimes, it seems that their design combines both writing and drawing in order to depict the names of divinities. This process is shown explicitly in some ritual texts, but for others we shall set the hypothesis that a symbolic value is given to the elements of the image according to a certain understanding of the hieroglyphics in the Roman world. The handling of these onomastic and iconographic attributes alike is an innovation built on an Egyptian tradition in a world where writing with animal figures has an authoritative value in the perspective of seeing the gods.

The creativity of the ritual practices found in the Graeco-Egyptian magical tradition, and its Christian successor, consistently and paradoxically represents itself as being based in an ancient and eternal knowledge, transmitted from the divine sphere to the human realm either temporally – through a series of “figures of memory” or across an ontological distance – by direct divine revelation. This study explores the tensions and contradictions in these two sources of “tradition” through two case studies, the so-called ‘Mithras Liturgy' and the ‘Prayer of Mary in Bartos', two ritual texts which at once represent themselves as the heritage of an ancient, and implicitly more divine, past, and promise direct access to the divine in the present.

The Latin traditions of ritual magic attributed to Solomon, far from having a stable form, were the object of permanent rewritings when they were copied into manuscripts. With the help of two examples that are better documented than the others, the Ars notoria on the one hand, and the Almandal on the other, we can follow the main dynamics at work, whether it is a question of increasing the number of signs considered as performative, simplifying a tradition considered as too complex, or Christianizing arts unanimously condemned by ecclesiastical authorities. Tradition, innovation and authority thus come together at different levels.