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Liber II · Ancient Magic

Liber II · Ancient Magic · Chapter V: Greco-Roman Magic

The Greek Magical Papyri: Spells of Greco-Roman Egypt

The Greek Magical Papyri explained: spellbooks from Roman Egypt for love, binding, divination and protection, their divine names, and their modern legacy.

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The Greek Magical Papyri (often abbreviated PGM, from the Latin Papyri Graecae Magicae) are a body of spellbooks and single spells written on papyrus in Greco-Roman Egypt, dating from roughly the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. Written mostly in Greek, with sections in Demotic Egyptian and Old Coptic, they contain rites for love, binding, divination, healing and protection that call on Egyptian, Greek and Jewish divine names, and they are the single most important source for how magic was actually practised in the ancient Mediterranean.

What the Greek Magical Papyri Are§

The name "Greek Magical Papyri" is a modern scholarly label, not an ancient title. It covers several dozen papyrus rolls and codices, together with many shorter sheets, that contain magical instructions. Some are long handbooks running to thousands of lines; others are a single amulet text folded and worn on the body, or a one-off spell written for a named client. The standard numbering, PGM I, PGM II and so on, follows the edition begun by the German philologist Karl Preisendanz, published in two volumes in 1928 and 1931 and revised by Albert Henrichs in 1973–74.

What makes the collection so valuable is its practical character. Most ancient writing about magic comes from its critics: philosophers, satirists, lawmakers and, later, Christian authors who described sorcery in order to condemn it. The papyri, by contrast, were written by people who used them. They give quantities of ink and myrrh, the times of day and phases of the moon thought suitable for a rite, the words to be spoken, the figures to be drawn, and sometimes notes recording that a procedure had been tested. Scribes added marginal corrections, alternative versions and remarks such as "another way", which show manuals being copied, compared and improved over generations.

The papyri belong to a wider world of Greco-Roman practice that is described in the overview of Greco-Roman magic. They are closely related to lead curse tablets, engraved magical gems and amulets, which often use the same names, symbols and formulae.

The Anastasi Collection and the Theban Magical Library§

The core of the corpus reached Europe in the 1820s through Giovanni Anastasi, a merchant and diplomat in Alexandria who acted as consul for Sweden and Norway and sold large collections of antiquities to European museums. His papyri were dispersed among Leiden, the British Museum in London, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, Berlin and Stockholm. Anastasi reported that much of the material came from Thebes (modern Luxor), and scholars have long suspected that many of the finest manuscripts once belonged to a single ancient library, perhaps a tomb deposit or the private collection of a learned practitioner. This hypothetical group is often called the "Theban Magical Library".

Among its most famous items are:

  • PGM IV, the Great Paris Magical Papyrus, a fourth-century codex of more than three thousand lines, the largest single magical text to survive from antiquity. It includes love rites, divinations, exorcistic formulae and the so-called "Mithras Liturgy".
  • PGM XIII, the Leiden papyrus sometimes called the "Eighth Book of Moses", which presents initiation rites and a cosmogony under the authority of Moses, reflecting the ancient reputation of Moses as a master of magic discussed in Moses as magician.
  • The London-Leiden Magical Papyrus, a bilingual manuscript largely in Demotic with Greek glosses, rich in divination by lamp and bowl.
  • The Leiden and Stockholm papyri, which are not spellbooks but technical recipes for dyeing, imitating precious metals and colouring stones; they are often discussed alongside the earliest Greek alchemical writings.

Other papyri came to light later in excavations and purchases, and new fragments continue to be published. The Demotic spells (cited as PDM) and the Coptic material show that the same practitioners moved easily between languages and scripts.

Love, Binding, Divination and Protection§

The range of purposes in the papyri is broad, and it mirrors the needs that ancient people brought to specialists.

Love and attraction rites§

A large share of the spells concern erotic attraction, usually rites meant to draw a named person to the client. Scholars such as Christopher Faraone have shown that these "leading" spells (Greek agōgai) often use violent, coercive language, and that they were part of a long Mediterranean tradition rather than an Egyptian peculiarity. Some involve figurines, others written texts deposited in graves or wells. They are preserved here as historical evidence of desire, rivalry and social pressure, not as reliable methods.

Binding spells and curses§

Binding spells (katadesmoi) aim to restrain an opponent: a rival in love, a competitor in business, a charioteer in the races, or a litigant in court. The papyri provide model texts of the kind inscribed on lead tablets found across the Roman world. Their legal and athletic contexts show that magic was woven into ordinary competitive life; the subject is treated more fully in maleficium, curses and protective magic.

Divination and dream requests§

Many rites seek knowledge rather than power: questions answered through a lamp flame, a bowl of water or oil, a boy medium gazing into a light, or a god who appears in a dream. Others aim to obtain a paredros, an assisting spirit that would serve the practitioner, answer questions and perform tasks.

Healing and protective amulets§

Short recipes for amulets against fever, headache, scorpion stings and the evil eye are common. They usually prescribe a text, divine names and figures to be written on papyrus, metal foil or a gem and worn on the body. A few ancient rites in the corpus also involve animal offerings; these are recorded by historians as part of the evidence for ancient ritual and are not repeated here.

Divine Names, Voces Magicae and the Mixing of Gods§

The papyri are notorious for their strings of strange words. Alongside recognisable names such as Helios, Hermes, Hekate, Selene, Aphrodite, Osiris, Isis, Thoth and Typhon-Seth, they invoke Iao, Sabaoth and Adonai, forms of Hebrew divine names, and archangels such as Michael and Gabriel. They also use voces magicae, "magical words" that are not ordinary vocabulary: palindromes like ablanathanalba, the name Abrasax (whose Greek letters add up to 365, the days of the year), sequences of the seven Greek vowels associated with the planets, and the so-called Ephesian letters.

For practitioners, these names were not nonsense. Many were understood as the true or secret names of gods, sometimes said to be spoken in the languages of birds, baboons or the gods themselves. The emphasis on knowing and speaking the right name continues an Egyptian tradition stretching back to the Pyramid Texts, where the creative power of the spoken word, heka, was itself divine.

The papyri also contain charaktêres, ring-ended figures that act as a visual script of power, as well as images of the ouroboros, the lion-headed serpent and the headless god. This mixture of traditions is sometimes called syncretism, but scholars increasingly prefer to speak of a coherent working culture with its own logic: Egyptian temple ritual provided the structure, Greek became the working language, and divine names from many peoples were gathered because each was believed to carry real force.

Priests, Practitioners and Ritual Settings§

Who wrote and used these books? A growing consensus, developed by scholars including Robert Ritner and Jacco Dieleman, holds that many of the major manuals were produced in the milieu of Egyptian temple priests. By the Roman period, the temples were losing state funding and prestige, and literate priests trained in hieratic and Demotic could adapt temple rituals for private clients. The papyri preserve techniques recognisably drawn from temple practice, such as purification, offerings of incense, the opening of a statue's mouth and the invocation of gods at sunrise, now performed in a house or at a tomb.

At the same time, the papyri show the influence of philosophical and religious currents of the day. The "Mithras Liturgy" in PGM IV, named by the scholar Albrecht Dieterich in 1903, describes the soul's ascent through the heavens to meet Helios and a supreme god, and is often compared with the Hermetic writings and the Chaldean Oracles. Some rites speak of initiation, rebirth and immortality, blurring any neat line between magic and mystery religion.

This is one reason modern historians have become cautious about the very word "magic". In antiquity it was frequently a label applied to other people's rituals. The papyri allow us to see the same practices from the inside, as a form of skilled religious work.

Rediscovery and Modern Influence§

European scholars at first paid limited attention to the magical papyri, which seemed to many classicists a corruption of noble Greek religion. In 1852 the English Egyptologist Charles Wycliffe Goodwin published a fragment from the London papyri as Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic. One rite in it, the invocation of the "Headless One" (now PGM V), was later adapted in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as the "Bornless Ritual" and reworked by Aleister Crowley; in this way a Roman-era Egyptian invocation entered modern ceremonial magic.

Serious study grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Albrecht Dieterich and his students, culminating in Preisendanz's edition. The English translation edited by Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells (1986, second edition 1992), made the corpus widely accessible and stimulated a new generation of research by historians of religion, classicists and Egyptologists. Today the papyri are central to debates about how to define magic, how religion functioned in Roman Egypt, and how ancient ideas passed into the Hermetic, Gnostic and grimoire traditions. They are also read by modern practitioners of reconstructed Hellenic and Egyptian magic, who adapt their invocations to contemporary practice.

Frequently asked questions§

What does PGM stand for?§

PGM stands for Papyri Graecae Magicae, "Greek magical papyri", the title of Karl Preisendanz's edition of 1928–31. Individual texts are cited by a Roman numeral for the papyrus and line numbers, so "PGM IV.475–829" refers to the Mithras Liturgy in the Great Paris Magical Papyrus.

How old are the Greek Magical Papyri?§

The texts range from about the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, but most of the large handbooks were copied in the third and fourth centuries CE. Many spells are older than the surviving copies, since the manuals were repeatedly recopied and revised.

Are the Greek Magical Papyri Egyptian or Greek?§

They are both. Most are written in Greek, the administrative language of Roman Egypt, but their ritual structure and many of their gods are Egyptian, and some sections are written in Demotic or Old Coptic. Jewish divine names and Greek philosophical ideas are woven through them as well.

Where are the papyri kept today?§

The major manuscripts are held in museums and libraries in Leiden, London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm, reflecting how the Anastasi collection was sold in the nineteenth century. Smaller pieces are scattered across many collections in Europe, Egypt and North America.

Sources and further reading§