Chapter 4 - Roman Antiquity

Summary

This chapter traces the emergence of the magic-religion dichotomy in the wider context of imperial age culture, with special attention to developments in cosmology, theology, and demonology. It explores more closely the boundaries between the polemical representations of magic in the literary, legal, and philosophical sources of the imperial age and the reality of magical practice as it appears in the formularies. In imperial discourses on magic, human sacrifice is typically linked to necromancy, an association that is not attested in classical Greek sources. Egyptian priests and Persian magi were supposed to be experts in necromancy, and the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri certainly confirm that communication with the dead was part of the repertoire of an Egyptian magician. Pythagoreans and Egyptian priests are frequently linked in other imperial sources. The Christian equation of paganism and sorcery was persuasive because it exploited instabilities internal to late pagan daimonology.