Magic and Divination in the Ancient World.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Brief Reviews - Book Review

Magic and Divination in the Ancient World. Edited by LEDA CIRAOLO and JONATHAN SEIDEL. Ancient Magic and Divination, vol. 2. Leiden: STYX-BRILL, 2002. Pp. xii + 151. $69.

This modest volume presents the rather heterogeneous proceedings of a conference on magic and divination in the ancient world, convened at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 1994. Nine essays treat various aspects of communication between man and the para-human sphere (gods and the dead) in early civilizations from Egypt through the Hellenistic world. A tenth paper is an outlier: in "The Poet as Conjurer: Magic and Literary Theory in Late Antiquity," Peter T. Struck traces the semantic development of the term symbolism in ancient Greek literary theory.

Three contributors discuss interaction with the dead. Joann Scurlock ("Soul Emplacements in Ancient Mesopotamian Funerary Rituals") shows how statues--or for the less affluent, chairs--were used to tie the spirit of the departed to the site of the funeral until it could be safely transferred to the next world. Robert K. Rittner ("Necromancy in Ancient Egypt") rebuts recent assertions that inquiry of the dead was unknown in pharaonic Egypt. Such consultation was indeed widely and openly practiced. Jonathan Seidel ("Necromantic Praxis in the Midrash on the Seance at En Dor") presents a fascinating study of how later commentators struggled to understand a forgotten practice in terms of contemporary beliefs.

A further three authors consider aspects of divination, in both theory and practice. Ann Kessler Guinan ("A Severed Head Laughed: Stories of Divinatory Interpretation") takes the comparison of a collection of prodigies signaling the "Fall of Akkad" (SUB [.sup.KUR]UR[U.sup.KI]) with Tablet 88 of the omen series summa alu as the starting point for an insightful discussion of...