Archaeology of first-century wizards

There is magic in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Nag Hammadi library.

Magi is a term, used since at least the 4th century BCE, to denote a follower of Zoroaster, or rather, a follower of what the Hellenistic world associated Zoroaster with, which was – in the main – the ability to read the stars, and manipulate the fate that the stars foretold.

Avestan – the religious caste into which Zoroaster was born, (Yasna 33.7: “so I can be heard beyond Magi”) – seems to be the origin of the term.

The basic element of Zoroaster’s belief system is the duality between good and evil: the Creator Ahura Mazda is all good and no evil originates from Him; evil is trying to destroy the creation of Mazda, while good is trying to sustain it.

According to Zoroastrian cosmogony, one of the twin spirits engendered by Ahura Mazda, named Spenta Mainyu (“Beneficent Spirit”) chose good and life, while the other, Angra Mainyu (“Destroying Spirit,” or Ahriman, as he is known in the later documents) chose evil and death. As a result, humans must make the same choice.

We will now see that duality appear in magical form.

Pervasive throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia until late antiquity and beyond, Greek “magian”/Magician was influenced by (and eventually displaced) the Greek for the older word for a practitioner of magic, to include astrology, alchemy and other forms of esoteric knowledge.

In English, the term “magi” is most commonly used in reference to the Gospel of Matthew’s “wise men from the East”.

For scholarly discussions of magic in the Scrolls, I suggest:

• The Dead Sea Scrolls and Later Jewish Magic and Mysticism by MD Swartz (2001)
• Qumranica Minora: Thematic studies on the Dead Sea scrolls by Florentino García Martínez, Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (2007)
• Demonology in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament by Hermann Lichtenberger

1QS iii.17-26 describes how God created two spirits, ‘the Angel of Darkness’ exercising dominion over ‘the sons of deceit’, and ‘the Prince of Lights’ who holds dominion over ‘all the sons of justice/righteousness’, and the text promises that ‘the God of Israel and the angel of his truth will assist all the sons of light’.

There is a formal parallel here with such a passage as 1 Cor. ii 12, where Paul says, “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God”. I do not accept any of the Pauline letters as authentic.

Florentino Garcia Martinez, professor of religion and theology at the University of Groningen and a leading expert on messianic ideas in the Dead Sea scrolls, in his paper Magic in the Dead Sea Scrolls:

The magic revealed by these texts is not the magic of the marketplace and cannot be dismissed as an accidental expression of popular religion. Both types of the magic Alexander discovers at Qumran are learned magic: the first type (exorcism) is clearly based upon the biblical text and is expressed within the dualistic world-View of the community; the second (divination) is a direct consequence of the community’s determinism. Both forms are thus perfectly adapted to the needs of the community.
- The metamorphosis of magic from late antiquity to the early modern period, Volume 1 of Groningen studies in cultural change, by Jan N. Bremmer, Jan R. Veenstra; Peeters Publishers, 2002

The “tetragrammaton” (four-lettered name for God) found in Hebrew and Aramaic materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls became a popular magical feature on gemstones:

While any general tendency to use abbreviations is lacking, such as will be encountered regularly in later Christian manuscripts (“nomina sacra”), the treatment of the special four-lettered name for God, the “tetragrammaton,” deserves close attention. There is little unanimity among the witnesses, which suggests that even if we can posit a “Jewish style” on the basis of other considerations, it is not so homogeneous a “style” as to control this particular feature. Similar comments can also be made about variety in dealing with the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew and Aramaic materials in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Factors other than scribal style seem to be at work here! As a point of added interest, use of the tetragrammaton, both as a term and in its various forms, became popular in the world of “magic,” as can be illustrated from various gemstones.
– Continuities and Discontinuities in the Transitions from Jewish to Christian Scribal Practices, lecture by Dr. Robert A. Kraft (University of Pennsylvania) 2002.

Magic has an important place in the history of Classical Antiquity and the development of faiths. Moreover, there is a theme, running from Babylon and Persian Zoroastrianism, into both Judaism and the earliest Christianity.

The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, a Jewish religious group that flourished from the 2nd century BCE until at least the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73) and probably until the third – the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135).

The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (1QM, 4Q491-496) is a manual for military organization and strategy that was discovered among the Scrolls. It is possible that The War of the Messiah is the conclusion to this document. (The Dead Sea Scrolls – Revised Edition: A New Translation, pp. 368-371.)

This group (by whatever name) opposed the Herodian elite under Roman rule and disappeared from history as the Roman army repeatedly attacked and destroyed the Jewish nation.

In a series of posts, I suggested that the canonical gospels were a Greco-Roman response, creating a parody of the Teacher of Righteousness, a figure found in some of the Scrolls, most prominently in the Damascus Document:

- Archaeology of the earliest canonical gospels
– Flavian Midrash Sources of the New Testament
– Josephus as a primary source for the New Testament
– Hadrian’s parody
– Hadrian’s perverted insanity

When we begin to consider the relationship between those that wrote and hid the Scrolls, with the founders of Christianity, we must establish a firm framework for their chronologies.

Carbon dating the Dead Sea Scrolls

The following table shows all the Qumran-related samples that were tested by Zurich, Tucson and Libby. The column headed “14C Age” provides a raw age before 1950 for each sample tested. This represents the ideal date for the amount of 14C measured for the sample. However, as there is fluctuation from year to year as to the quantity of 14 absorbed by all life, the figure needs to be calibrated based on the known fluctuation. This calibrated range of dates is represented in the last column, given with a 2-sigma error rating, which means at 95% confidence. (Although the tests included documents which were not from Qumran, with the exception of the Wadi ed-Daliyeh deed, these will not be listed below.)

The texts are ordered chronologically, based on their 14C age.

My conclusion: no texts were added after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, as suggested by Eisenman, and may have been placed in the Qumran caves up until that time. Note that the date of the texts must be earlier than when then were placed in the caves. The actual date for the terminus ad quem is therefore some time during the Revolt 132-136.

Most scholars agree that the scrolls were deposited in the cave in or around 68 AD, but often mistake this date…for the terminus ad quem for the deposit of the scrolls in the caves/cessation of Jewish habitation at the site, when it cannot be considered anything but the terminus a quo for both of these, i.e., not the latest but the earliest possible date for such a deposit and/or Jewish abandonment of the site. The actual terminus ad quem for both of these events, however difficult it may be to accept at first, is 136 AD.
– Eisenman, Robert, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians. Rockport, MA: Element Books, Inc. (1996) pp. 129–30.

You will see the importance of the carbon dating for the Dead Sea Scrolls when considering this scholarly view for The Three Steles of Seth, a Sethian Gnostic text from the New Testament apocrypha, the main surviving copies coming from the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.

In December 1945, Egyptian peasants found a pottery jar with Coptic manuscripts in a cave near Nag-Hammadi, Upper Egypt. The jar contained at least 12 codices and eight leaves of another one that were inside the front cover of what was later called Codex VI. So, the thirteen codices of Nag-Hammadi contain at least 52 texts and 46 different works, of which 40 were previously unknown (Robinson 1984). Most of the texts belong to Gnostic sects of the first centuries: probably the same tractates utilized by the heresiologists to fight the «Gnostic Hydra» (cf. Ir. Adv. haer. I, 30, 15), a complex phenomenon involving manifold ideological and cultic influences.

My first point as regards the magical texts of Nag-Hammadi is their relationship with Zoroastrianism, the faith of Persia and Darius the Great, as we discussed in a number of posts:

- The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 2. Altars
– Archaeology of good governance
– Persian, Greek and Roman syncretism in the Kharga Oasis

In the the Kharga Oasis, I noted how: Under the patronage of the Achaemenid kings and by the fifth century BCE as the de-facto religion of the state, Zoroastrianism would reach all corners of the empire.

We saw how Darius the Great merged solar worship of Egypt and Persia, and that this process was continued by the Ptolemies, then Roman. Now, we see that this syncretic process was applied also to magic.

The contribution of Mazdaean Zoroastrianism to the evolution of Gnostic doctrine was decisive, as is shown by dualism among Light and Darkness, the identity of divine and human spiritual forces or virtues, the idea of the Soul’s journey and that of the end of the world and the last judgment. These traditions passed in to Gnostic texts not directly from the Iranian lore, but were already accepted and assimilated in the Judaeo-Aramaean world since the pre-Christian times (Albrile 2001: 27-54). And a few examples of this syncretistic process are to be found in the Nag-Hammadi texts.
– Zoroaster at Nag-Hammadi by Ezio Albrile

The history for the relationship between, on one hand, Philip II and his son Alexander III of Macedon, and on the other, Zoroastrian Persia, has not yet – in my opinion, been written. Instead, we seem to have a simplistic, naive even, faith in later sources which are more like the Alexander Romance from Alexandria in the late 1st-early 2nd century period, than a proper history, which would be based on reliable primary sources. We saw, in the archaeology of the Kharga Oasis, that much of this history is made in Egypt, through the syncretism of Persian and Egyptian beliefs, followed by Greek, Roman and Christian.

Right: Darius the Great in Egyptian Style

The Three Stelae of Seth is a series of hymnic prayers and blessings, each of which is addressed to a person of the Gnostic divine triad (Father, Mother, and Son) in conjunction with a communal liturgical practice. A short prologue (118,10-24) introduces Dositheos, the revealer of the three stelae. Whether or not this Dositheos is the disciple of John the Baptist, a Samaritan sect founder (Isser 1976), and a kind of forefather of the Gnostic schools, is unclear (Pseudo-Clement, Rec. 1,54-63 and 2.8; Hom. 2,15-25; Origen, Comm. in Ioh. 13,27).

The hymns contained in the Three Steles of Seth complicate the distinctions sometimes drawn between “magic,” mysticism, and religious liturgy. The category of ritualised empowerment, though less precise, encompasses a variety of cultic practices. In the way that it uses divine power; however, this text is different from the majority of texts in the present collection. Rather than pulling the deity down into the world to use its power, this text uses divine power to lift the worshiper up into a state of deification. Although the dynamics are the same, the force moves in a different direction.
– Ancient Christian magic: coptic texts of ritual power by Marvin W. Meyer, Richard Smith Princeton University Press, 1999

This thought-provoking collection of magical texts from ancient Egypt shows the exotic rituals, esoteric healing practices, and incantatory and supernatural dimensions that flowered in the early Christianity that gave rise to the Dead Sea Scrolls. These remarkable Christian magical texts include curses, spells of protection from “headless powers” and evil spirits, spells invoking thunderous powers, descriptions of fire baptism, and even recipes from a magical “cookbook.” Virtually all the texts are by Coptic Christians, and they date from about the 1st-12th centuries of the common era, with the majority from late antiquity. By placing these rarely seen texts in historical context and discussing their significance, the authors explore the place of healing, prayer, miracles, and magic in the early Christian experience, and expand our understanding of Christianity and Gnosticism as a vital folk religion.

“Ancient Egypt” here does not mean pharaonic – from the times of the pyramids – but Greco-Roman.

Two points in the above, scholarly view stand out to me:

1. this text uses divine power to lift the worshiper up into a state of deification…

This strikes me as a methodology to create that class of characters in Classical Antiquity I label ‘divine men’.

2. Virtually all the texts are by Coptic Christians, and they date from about the 1st-12th centuries of the common era.

From the first century – and therefore contemporaneous with the writing of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and predating all the canonical gospels.

Greek amulet with a pseudo-Hebrew inscription
The Coptic wizard’s hoard: a group of Coptic papyri which appears to have been a hoard or library of ancient magical texts,
produced by five copyists sometime in the fourth through seventh centuries and originating from a now unknown location in Egypt.

We are not, at this stage, going to try to examine all the many ramifications and implications of Zorastrian-Judaic-Coptic magical practices. Personally, I have no interest in the imaginings of others, whether of a religious, mystical, astrological or magical nature, for to me, they are all of a muchness and their significance lies only in how people behave towards them.

My interest is in the history of the period and at this point I want to try and learn: who did it? Essene, Copt, Jew and Greek as terms do not reveal the individuals. History is about people and their actions. (I am unsure that it is possible to have certain knowledge of a person’s beliefs.)

The Greek Magical Papyri is a collective term for a collection of texts, written mostly in Ancient Greek (but also in Coptic, Demotic Egyptian, etc.), found in the deserts of Egypt, which cast light in some way on the magico-religious syncretistic world of Greco-Roman Egypt and the surrounding area.

The papyri date mostly from the second century BCE to the fifth century or so CE.

The religion of the Papyri Graecae Magicae, is an elaborate syncretism of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and even Babylonian and Christian religious influences engendered by the unique milieu of Greco-Roman Egypt.

In 1920 S. Eitrem purchased 329 papyri (including fragments) from several dealers in Cairo and in the Fayum, among them the magical roll P.Oslo 1 and about 30 Coptic texts. Main sources are Karanis and Theadelpheia. They are all Roman and come again from the Fayum circa 100 CE.

The “Oslo Papyrus” (P.Oslo 1 1), a magical papyrus roll about 8.3 feet long, written in 12 columns on the recto and transversa charta on the verso, and consisting of magical recipes especially for love magic:

Seven of its columns of text are illustrated by figures of the demons invoked. The illustration is done in the Egyptian style. The papyrus also includes a remedy to prevent conception, the only one that exists in the world.

Zodiac and months from Tetrabiblos of Ptolemaios
Manuscript from the 8th century CE. Geographia of Ptolemy; Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
Helios in the centre, identified as the Christ by the cross, twelve naked female figures represent the hours, twelve clothed apostles represent the twelve months, and surrounding that the twelve zodiac signs.

In Claudius Ptolemy – a Ptolemy I suggested that this famous geographer, astronomer and astrologer of Alexandria belongs to the Greek family who had ruled Egypt for centuries, the Ptolemies.

Right: Claudius Ptolemaeus (ca. 90-168) using a quadrant and pointing to the earth, to indicate the dependence of geography on astronomy.

We discussed, in The Ptolemaic zodiac: from where the sun shines, how the same dynastic power-brokers in Alexandria who created new philosophies and religions centred on Helios, also created the astrological system with the Helios-centric zodiac.

A theme of this Ptolemy is divination for the purpose of predicting (and thereby having some control over) human affairs.

The Sethians – authors of the hymns contained in Three Stelae of Seth – were a group of ancient Gnostics who date their existence to before Christianity.

Dositheos was a Samaritan religious leader, founder of a Samaritan sect, often assumed to be a gnostic. Eusebius of Caesarea said he was a follower of John the Baptist, and the teacher of Simon Magus.

Many of their concepts derived from a fusion of Hellenic philosophy, Platonic (c. 427–c. 347 BCE), and later, Neoplatonic (ca. 253 CE) concepts with the Old Testament. This was also done by Philo, who had engaged in a similar fusion. (Sethian Gnosticism: a literary history by Dr. John D. Turner, professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska and well known for his translations of the Nag Hammadi library.)

That gives us some names.

One of the earliest known depictions of the Biblical Magi from a third century sarcophagus.
Vatican Museums, Rome.

Philo we have often mentioned, along with that he is a Lysicmachus of Alexandria and author of the first christology.

The character known as Simon Magus we will treat later.

Related posts:

1. Archaeology of a first-century wizard
2. Private: The Royal Library of Alexandria in the first century
3. Private: Acts of the Chresmologoi: the Role of Oracles and Chronicles in the Creation of Divine Men
4. Private: Resurrection in the second century
5. The vacuum of evidence for pre-4th century Christianity
6. Archaeology of Ein Gedi
7. Private: An army of divine men and the secret army of Mithras
8. Private: Lifting the Vaults of Heavenly and Earthly Peace
9. Archaeology of the earliest canonical gospels
10. Chrest Magus