Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World

by Noegel, Scott B.; Walker, Joel Thomas; Wheeler, Brannon M.

• ISBN13: 9780271022581
• ISBN10: 0271022582
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

Summary

In the religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, gods and demigods were neither abstract nor distant, but communicated with mankind through signs and active intervention. Men and women were thus eager to interpret, appeal to, and even control the gods and their agents. In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, a distinguished array of scholars explores the many ways in which people in the ancient world sought to gain access to -- or, in some cases, to bind or escape from -- the divine powers of heaven and earth. Grounded in a variety of disciplines, including Assyriology, Classics, and early Islamic history, the fifteen essays in this volume cover a broad geographic area: Greece, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Topics include celestial divination in early Mesopotamia, the civic festivals of classical Athens, and Christian magical papyri from Coptic Egypt. Moving forward to Late Antiquity, we see how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each incorporated many aspects of ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman religion into their own prayers, rituals, and conceptions. Even if they no longer conceived of the sun, moon, and the stars as eternal or divine, Christians, Jews, and Muslims often continued to study the movements of the heavens as a map on which divine power could be read. Published as part of Penn State's Magic in History series, Prayer, Magic, and the Stars appears at a time of renewed interest in divination and occult practices in the ancient world. It will interest a wide audience in the field of comparative religion as well as students of the ancient world and Late Antiquity. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. VII
List of Abbreviations	p. IX
List of Figures	p. XIII
Introduction	p. 1
Locating Magic
Here, There, and Anywhere	p. 21
Prayer, Magic, and Ritual
Thessalos of Tralles and Cultural Exchange	p. 39
The Prayer of Mary in the Magical Book of Mary and the Angels	p. 57
Hebrew, Hebrew Everywhere? Notes on the Interpretation of Voces Magicae	p. 69
Magic and Society in Late Sasanian Iraq	p. 83
Dreams and Divination
The Open Portal: Dreams and Divine Power in Pharaonic Egypt	p. 111
Viscera and the Divine: Dreams as the Divinatory Bridge Between the Corporeal and the Incorporeal	p. 125
Stars and the Egyptian Priesthood in the Graeco-Roman Period	p. 137
Divination and Its Discontents: Finding and Questioning Meaning in Ancient and Medieval Judaism	p. 155
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
Heaven and Earth: Divine-Human Relations in Mesopotamian Celestial Divination	p. 169
Astral Religion and the Representation of Divinity: The Cases of Ugarit and Judah	p. 187
A New Star on the Horizon: Astral Christologies and Stellar Debates in Early Christian Discourse	p. 207
At the Seizure of the Moon: The Absence of the Moon in the Mithras Liturgy	p. 223
Contributors	p. 241
Index	p. 245
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