[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Maria, in addition to being earlier than either ofthese women, also worked with pans, fires and complex mixtures ofmetals.Perhaps the few exceptional women who were engaged inprimarily theoretical investigation only prove the point that womenare usually relegated to practical questions.25The crowd s fatal imaginings about Hypatia were far from theperceptions such women had about themselves.Maria the Jewessand her complex distillation devices were so far from the worldviewof the rabbis that they do not even bother to denounce her.If adecent woman is full of witchcraft, it is hard to imagine a suitableterm in their eyes for a woman who thought she could lay bare thesecret processes of the world and speed them on their way byheating metals over a stove.Instead in rabbinic literature we remainimprisoned in the fertile imaginations of the rabbis, where it isequally dangerous to walk between two women, palm trees, dogs,or, some say, pigs (bPes 111a).Pairs were generally thought to beunlucky in the Greco-Roman world, and palm trees were thoughtto be home to daimons.Women find them classified with animalssuch as pigs and dogs, placing them by nature and by convention ata tremendous disadvantage.Biblical prejudices merge with Greco-Roman ones, filter through rabbinic anxieties about women sunclean bodies and it is possible to see every woman as a potentialwitch.These imaginings were not always acted upon, but they arepart of the artifice of magic bequeathed to later generations.96RECTO RUNNING HEADCONCLUDING NOTEThe legacy of thefirst centuriesThe point of this study is not that magic is simply another term forreligion.It is true that ancient practitioners considered much ofwhat modern scholars label magic to simply be their religion.Butthis observation hardly begins to articulate the rich imaginingsabout magic in the first three centuries CE, which deserve to beexamined in their own right.Notions of magic were developed at length by numerous writers,given detailed nuances and debated.From the minor theme of fraudto the more threatening themes of cannibalism and murder, theactivities of magicians were understood to threaten society in general.Witches might prey upon total strangers and innocent children, ormore close to home, unsuspecting family members.Everyday life presented endless chances for getting caught up inthe magical powers of one s opponents.In a rabbinic anecdote, awoman complains that she has no power over certain rabbis sincethey did not wipe themselves with a shard, kill lice on vessels oruntie and eat vegetables from a bunch (bShab 81b 82a).All ofthese seemingly innocent actions might have made them vulnerableto her powers.With Pliny, we saw the tremendous plasticity of the term magicas a space-holder for practices far from those originally associatedwith the Persian priests.In a world in which the criteria for estab-lishing the validity of a cure were thin, Pliny tried to differentiatehis material from a vast array of (in his eyes) fraudulent offerings.Pliny reinforced the validity of his writings by denouncing bothdoctors, who used their social status to gain wealth, and the fraudu-lent vanities of the magi who mixed astronomy in their cures.After magic was written into the Roman law codes, it wouldhave required an antiquarian bent to use the term with its moreancient connotations.In most cases, as we saw above, it had acquired97CONCLUDING NOTEtoo many negative associations in Greek and later Latin literaturefor the positive connotations associated with the ancient Persianmagi to survive.The rituals we studied (exorcism, love rites, alchemy, and deific-ation) all point to the importance of the first three centuries.Ideaswhich appeared only in embryonic form before the turn of themillennium undergo tremendous development by the beginning ofthe fourth century.Many of these rites echo much older ideas, suchas ancient notions of possession.They all, however, have distinctconnections with the particular setting of the first centuries.Theyall had an implicit gounding in the notions that on the one handlife on earth is a series of intimate battles between good and evilforces and on the other that it was possible for humans to achieve adivine status, sometimes even while alive.Possession permitted thedaimonic forces to be bodily manifest on earth and then subjectedto personal defeat.Love rites in turn made use of ancient ideas aboutsacrifice, now directed to the angelic and daimonic helpers whosetask it was to assist humans in their struggles.These rites coulddraw upon a plethora of ideas about effective words and objects tohelp ensure success.Alchemical rites turned nostalgically to thenatural world, yet also aimed at divine transformations.Deificationrites drew new boundaries for human identity, enabling humanhands to make power
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]