Greek Magical Papyri

The Greek Magical Papyri (Latin: Papyri Graecae Magicae, abbreviated PGM) is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek (but also in Old Coptic, Demotic, etc.), which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward. One of the best known of these texts is the Mithras Liturgy. The texts were published in a series, and individual texts are referenced using the abbreviation PGM plus the volume and item number. Each volume contains a number of spells and rituals. Further discoveries of similar texts from elsewhere have been allocated PGM numbers for convenience. The corpus of the PGM were not based on an ancient archive, but rather are a modern collection that has been added to over time. The unclear circumstances of each text's production, over a span of centuries, have therefore occasioned some debate. Hans Dieter Betz, the English translator of the PGM, claims that the texts form a fraction of the "magical books" that must have existed in antiquity, and considers them a form of "underground literature" subject to book-burnings at the time. He cites book-burning in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19:19), Augustus' orders to burn magical books according to Suetonius (Suet. Aug. 31.1), and what he terms "numerous" early Christian book-burnings. David Frankfurter, on the other hand, considers these texts productions of "innovative members of the Egyptian priesthood during the third-/fourth-century decline of the Egyptian temple infrastructure," and lends them considerably less "underground" status than Betz. Alan F. Segal goes further, using the PGM to question the dichotomy of magic and religion in scholarship on the Hellenistic world. He uses the existence of hymns in the PGM to suggest that the people who wrote them in such 'magical' texts saw no distinction between such material and the more overtly magical content in the same documents.