Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity.

• Author: Miller, Daniel R.

Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity. Edited by SHAUL SHAKED. Institute of Jewish Studies Studies in Judaica, Vol. 4. Leiden: BRILL, 2005. Pp. x + 320, illus. [euro] 149.

The majority of the essays in this volume originated in an international symposium organized in 1999 by the Institute of Jewish Studies of University College London, described by one participant as "concerned with the question of how magical texts, procedures, uses, amulets, etc. work" (p. 255 n. 1). Two of the thirteen pieces have in fact already been published in a 2003 volume (p. x), while another is a translation of an essay previously published in a Hebrew-language journal (p. 269).

Eleven contributions deal with magical texts and/or materia magica. In the opening essay, editor Shaul Shaked discusses nine Jewish Aramaic magical bowls of Babylonian provenience dating to the end of the Sasanian/late Talmudic period now in the Schoyen Collection in Oslo and London. He remarks, inter alia, on the presence thereon of some prayer formulae, of several texts belonging to the genre of the Jewish mystical Hekhalot literature, and of two Mishnaic texts (p. 3).

Joachim Oelsner discusses not only magical bowls and clay tablets of southern Mesopotamian provenience but also many other (non-magical) texts relating to the Babylonian cult. He concludes that "well into the Parthian period Babylonian cults and culture were still alive" (p. 44) but had almost entirely died out by the Sasanian period (p. 45). Markham Geller investigates possible influences from Sumerian-Akkadian magical texts in the later Jewish Aramaic magical bowls of similarly Mesopotamian (Babylonian) provenience. He finds many more differences than similarities between the two corpora, asserting that the bowls preserved only "a scant few of the ancient magical traditions of Sumer and Akkad" (p. 70).

Antonio Panaino deals with the Iranian sphere, specifically Zoroastrian culture. His piece is devoted primarily to terrestrial and astral omina, respectively the sighting of snakes and the appearance of the moon. (Divination is obviously considered a form of "magic" by the author, although the mantic arts are not classified as such by all scholars.) Hagit Amirav deals with a "coercive" (pp. 128, 137) incantation intended to facilitate a male client's securing of a woman's affections. The spell is written on a papyrus from the celebrated archeological site Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. (Strangely, the papyrus...