Conjuros Magicos del Atharvaveda: Estudio, transcripcion del texto sanscrito, traduccion y comentario.

• Author: Taracena, Sofia Monco
• Position: Book Review

Conjuros Magicos del Atharvaveda: Estudio, transcripcion del texto sanscrito, traduccion y comentario. By MARTIN SEVILLA RODRIGUEZ. Oviedo: SERVICIO DE PUBLICACIONES DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE OVIEDO, 2002. Pp. 183.

This book is a representative anthology of fifty-seven hymns of the Saunakiya version of the Atharvaveda, chosen for their magical content, which the author has translated, commented upon, and reproduced in transcription (even including the punctuation!) following the edition of Vishva Bandhu, with which he disagrees occasionally, resorting even to the Paippalada version when, according to his criterion, the reading seems more convincing.

This philological work is introduced by a study of the language of magic, analyzing the stylistic figures and syntactic characteristics of this class of texts: anaphora, poliptoton, metaphors, etymological figures, syntactical usages, etc. Some of these devices were analyzed in great detail previously by the Italian scholar S. Sani in "Tecnica enumeratoria e potere magico del nome negli incantesimi dell'Atharvaveda," Studi vedici e medioindiani (Pisa, 1981), 101-38.

M. Sevilla Rodriguez does not limit his study of the language of magic to the Atharvaveda, but compares it with texts of the same nature belonging to Indo-European and non-Indo-European cultures, selecting for this purpose a corpus of magical texts including Germanic and Gaelic parallels, Greek defixiones, Basque spells, and other examples of a diverse nature from the Hittite, Jewish, Egyptian, Arabic, Anglo-Saxon, and Asturian traditions. Based on this collection of material, which is broad, but not exhaustive and somewhat arbitrary, the author argues for the universality of the language of magic, claiming that this language has its own characteristics that are repeated in the discourse of magic wherever and whenever it arises. The same procedures are used as indispensable tools for the achievement of the magical aim. One might object that some of the rhetorical mechanisms studied here are proper to all poetry of popular character, others proper to oral poetry, and others proper to ancient poetry, especially that of Indo-European origin. The magical character of the spells may not lie just in their formal structure, but in their contents, particularly in the ritual activity that accompanies the recitation, which the author describes in the commentary to each poem.

The spells selected are classified according to their areas of...