Magic and Religion

Is there are any difference between them? Theologians say yes, that in religion (usually theirs), their god works through the magician (priest, supplicant, etc.). Theological power comes from their god, not the magician/priest. There is a post on Evidence (and why it's important) which addresses such terminology and the supernatural. Empirical knowledge of the supernatural does not exist and therefore there is no language with which to describe it.

A religious ritual is the same as a magical ritual. A prayer is the same as a magical spell. Any supposed difference is imaginary – differences are cultural and have no basis in science (archaeology and historiography). That is, whatever differences may exist are only in the heads of those who believe in them.

Of course later religions are drawn on earlier. Of course Greek magic is the basis of Coptic Christianity. Of course Lancelotto is correct when he describes how the religion created by Hadrian is the father of the children, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

There has long been much archaeology to describe this and the sole problem is in recognising it. People’s heads are full of the stuff and nonsense placed there by parents, priests and not-very-good teachers: old wives’ tales.

Carving of a tupilak (spirit), Eskimo, collected in Angmagssalik, E. Greenland, 1931-2. National Museum of Denmark, Department of Ethnography

The theology of 'Living Stones' is just sophiscated animism: a philosophical, religious or spiritual idea that souls or spirits exist not only in humans but also in animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment.

Eskimos traditionally find a stone and take it into their igloo for the winter night. In the dark and using touch, they discover the inner spirit of the stone and then carve it so that the stone takes the form of the spirit. This is 'living stone' and not the pretty things made for tourists.

The 'living stones' theology of Christianity seems to be based on the same Greek magic used to 'animate' panhellenic statues, of which those made by order of Hadrian for the resurrected Antinous are an example.

Christian liturgy must, perforce, also be based on magical ritual.

The statues of Buddha and other divine men of the panhellenic world – Antinous being an obvious example – seem to share a theological basis with the consecration of Christian churches.

The archaeology of 'living stones' has much to tell us.

John

While much of the fourth century debates on the Christian Eucharist centered on the issue of leavened vs. unleavened wheat bread offerings and therefore possessed an essential Judaic theological frame of argument, there exists a second century and largely panhellenic-Egyptian aspect of wheat, water, and wine offerings associated with the sacrificed and resurrected Osiris.  From a liturgical point of view, it is a very short step from performing rites involving sacred wheat, water, and wine before the image or statue of a panhellenic deity and performing the same or similar ritual in the name of a Christian Sotor.  The comparisons between Christ and Osiris are now ubiquitous within the digital historiography of the internet; however, the actual relationships between ritual, magic, liturgy, and image, where they may be demonstrated to exist, receive insufficient attention.

Liturgies within cults in both ancient Egyptian religion and emergent Christianity centered around rituals utilizing water, wine, wheat, and bread.

1 Corinthians: 35-49:

But some man will say: How do the dead rise again? Or with what manner of body shall they come? 36 Senseless man, that which you sow is not quickened, except it die first. 37 And that which you sow, you sow not the body that shall be: but bare grain, as of wheat, or of some of the rest. 38 But God gives it a body as he will: and to every seed its proper body. 39 All flesh is not the same flesh: but one is the flesh of men, another of beasts, other of birds,  another of fishes. 40 And there are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial: but, one is the glory of the celestial, and another of the terrestrial. 41 One is the glory of the sun, another  the glory of the moon, and another the glory of the stars. For star differs from star in glory. 42 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption: it shall rise in incorruption. 43 It is sown in dishonour: it shall rise in glory. It is sown in weakness: it shall rise in power. 44 It is sown a natural body: it shall rise a spiritual body. If there be a natural body, there is also a spiritual body, as it is written: 45 The first man Adam was made into a living soul; the last Adam into a quickening spirit. 46 Yet that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural: afterwards that which is spiritual. 47 The first man was of the earth, earthly: the second man, from heaven, heavenly. 48 Such as is the earthly, such also are the earthly: and such as is the heavenly, such also are they that are heavenly. 49 Therefore, as we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly.

These texts of the late first and early second century depend in their resurrection imagery on Pauline metaphors of seeds and first fruits.   But they do not mean at all what Paul means.  By and large these images stress not the change from corruption to incorruption, or the difference between natural and spiritual, between the dry, the dead seed and flowering sheaf; rather, they make the world to come a grander and more abundant version of this world.  Expressing enormous optimism about the goodness of creation, they draw such a close analogy between resurrection and natural change that they either make resurrection a process set in motion by the very nature of things, or they make all growth dependent on divine action. (Souce:Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, (Columbia University Press, 1995) p. 24)

The eminent historian Caroline Bynum has written so much of value pertaining to positioning medieval Christian theology and doctrine into sharply defined historical contexts that one finds it difficult to quickly pick out from this large treasure of work just one jewel to work into the tapestry of our argument.  However, in The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, (Columbia University Press, 1995), she comes as close as she ever has to discussing elements of ancient religious belief related to the doctrine of resurrection during the period we at HHI are exploring during our present series of posts.

In The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, Bynum cites 1 Corinthians 15: 35-49.  Without contesting Bynum’s views of the dates of the first century texts (this is open to serious question), her overall point concerning the second century is important: the shift in the doctrine of resurrection represents a shift within the power structure backing emerging Christianity.

It is noteworthy that this shift appears to occur at the end of the second and beginning of the third century CE. P46, about which we wrote in brief detail in The Gospels According to Hadrian, Part III: The Aelian Canon and the Main Hand of God contains our earliest canonical physical artifact attesting to 1 Corinthians and this second century view of the material resurrection of the body after death.

That the author of 1 Corinthians also relates this resurrection to a, shall we say, sliding scale of heavenly bodies, some of which are named, links this text to second century astrology and suggests that part and parcel to determining ones level of immortality depended to a certain extent on the nature of one’s personal relationship to the stars and how Christ interceded to make this celestial relationship more effective.

Careful study of the images used in major treatises on the resurrection from the years around 200 reveals that the seed metaphor continues but in a sense almost antithetical to Paul’s.  It often now expresses a rather crude material continuity.  Such continuity, sometimes understood as the continuity of particles or atoms, is both a defense against and an articulation of the threat of decay, which is understood as absorption or digestion. (p. 27)

Damnatio ad bestias.

The science and stagecraft of feeding condemned criminals and enemies of the state to wild beasts was well-developed by the second century CE.

One of the most detailed and graphic illustrations of this practice may be found in the Zilten Mosaic (left). For those condemned who were deemed worthy of a quick death, exposure to a large carnivore was considered a humane means of dispatch.  For the condemned worthy of particularly heinous crimes, exposure to smaller beasts was the sentence and elaborate delivery mechanisms existed to place the victim before the animals and, with an eye toward showmanship, keep the condemned in the center of the arena where the execution could be seen by all.  The Zilten mosaic dated to circa 200 CE, was found not far from Leptus Magna, birthplace of the emperor Septimus Severus.

Martyrdom of Christians in the arena, particularly the act of dismemberment and ingestion by wild beasts, as Bynum calls attention to later in this same passage quoted above when discussing the martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch, is not a simple act of cruelty, but part of the public and symbolic theological dialogue amongst the hostile factions contending for political, economic, and religious authority in the empire.  The martyrdom by beasts in the arena thus worked on a variety of levels: for the masses enjoying the blood spectacle, this was perhaps merely entertainment; however, we should not be too quick to dismiss the blood symbolism inherent in the ritual of the arena itself.

For educated panhellenes of the elite classes, particularly those who held proto-Rabbinical and pre-Christian views of bodily resurrection,  the practice of Imperial authorities of ritually feeding members of a sect espousing bodily resurrection to wild beasts who would leave little left to resurrect, was both an answer, a challenge, and an insult on supremely theological grounds.  This was a world very different from our own and martyrdom by wild beast in the areas of the empire represented a kind of religious and scientific experimental proof.  It’s clear object was to undermine the proto-Rabbinic and early Christian doctrines of resurrection.

As Bynum notes throughout the course of her work on Resurrection, there is an observable dividing line between the second and third centuries within Christian treatises on the doctrine of resurrection: in the second century resurrection is more material in aspect; after the second century, resurrection is fundamentally spiritual in doctrine. Bynum goes one to present: [b]y the later part of the second century, the concerns Ignatius expresses here: [resurrection though his body is disarticulated and digested by beasts] are couched in much more crudely literal language.

Two of the earliest second century treatises on resurrection – Justin Martyr’s and Athenagoras’s – have been labeled apocryphal by some scholars partly because of the presence in them of certain technical scientific arguments (such as the chain consumption argument) that concentrate on material continuity and are sometimes thought [by scholars] to be later.  I accept these treatises, both because they are accepted in some recent scholarly considerations and because many study of metaphors establishes that the technical arguments at stake are compatible precisely in their materialism with contemporary treatises known to be authentic.  With the exception of some fragments recently attributed to one “Josipos” and the Epistle to Rheginos (both of which see resurrection as largely spiritual), the major discussions of the resurrected body from the second half of the second century use predominantly organic metaphors but express through them material continuity. (The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, (Columbia University Press, 1995) pp.28-29).

Christianity has its own metaphors expressing immortality through the imagery of living stones.  This idea is rooted in the idea of a holy city and this theological concept is alien to neither Panhellenism nor Judaism.

By the early fourth century, in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, the church edifice itself is associated with the living stones of a celestial Jerusalem or heavenly kingdom. Augustine, Sermon 66, part of the Mass of Dedication for new churches since 10th century: Then I say, at the end of the world shall the stones be joined to the foundation, living stones, holy stones, that at the end the whole edifice may be built by that Church, yea by this very Church which now sings the new song, while the house is in building.

There are numerous hymns based on the link of a church edifice’s stones with the living stones of transcendent spiritual church.  One such hymn from the 7th century CE  based on Augustinian theology is composed thus:

Blessed City of Heavenly Salem/Vision Dear of Peace and Love/Who of living stones upbuilded/Art the joy of Heaven above/And, with angel cohorts circled/As a bride to earth doth move./From celesital realms descending/Bridal glory round her shed/By her Lord shall she be led:/All her streets, and all her bulwarks,/of pure gold fashioned./Bright with pearls her portals glitter,/They are open evermore/And by virtue of his merits/Thither faithful souls may soar,/Who for Christ's dear name in this world/Pain and tribulations bore. (Source: Urbs Beata Jerusalem, Scriptural and Patistic Sources, Ephemerides Liturgicae 70 (1956), pp. 238-41)

While professor Bynum's work focuses in the main on the medieval period, her scholarship touches on points where the history and artifacts of ancient religion quite literally come alive.  Here is a link to a long but very interesting discussion on, among other topics, the miracle host of Wilsnak as well as the miracles performed by medieval Christian statues and icons.  We would do well to consider just how far back such forms of religious expressions extend in time into the pre-orthodox Christian traditions of the ancient world.

Professor Caroline Bynum on Miracles in the Later Medieval Period

The ‘Roman Limes’ represents the border line of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent in the 2nd century. It stretched over 5,000 km from the Atlantic coast of northern Britain, through Europe to the Black Sea, and from there to the Red Sea and across North Africa to the Atlantic coast.

The Limes Romanus

The word limes (plural: limites) was utilised by Latin writers to denote a marked or fortified frontier. This latter sense has been adapted and extended by modern historians concerned with the frontiers of the Roman Empire; e.g., Hadrian’s wall in the north of England is sometimes styled the Limes Britannicus, the frontier of the Roman province of Arabia facing the desert is called the Limes Arabicus, and so forth.

Portus Adurni – Porchester castle – the best preserved Roman fort north of the Alps, occupies a commanding position at the head of Portsmouth Harbour.
The fort was built during the 3rd century, predating any Saxon threat by at least a century.
The fort is square, enclosing an area of 9 acres (36,000 m²) with outer walls 20 feet (6 m) high, 10 feet (3 m) thick and 210 yards (200 m) long.

The most notable examples of Roman limites or limes are:

• Hadrian’s Wall – Limes Britannicus

• Antonine Wall – in Scotland

• Limes Germanicus, the Germanic & Raetian Limes

• Limes Arabicus, the frontier of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea facing the desert

• Limes Tripolitanus, the frontier in modern Libya facing the Sahara

• Trajan’s Wall, the frontier in Moesia Inferior (currently in Bessarabia and Dobrudja)

• Limes Transalutanus, the frontier in the lower Danube

• Limes Moesiae, the frontier in eastern Romania and Moldavia

We can now see how these limes were part of the process of Romanisation. What I find interesting is that as Rome adopted much of Greek culture, so the empire became part of the panhellenic world, as described here.

The post ended "The receipt by Antinous of traditional rituals (“opening the mouth") was recorded in hieroglyphs on the last commissioned obelisk, thereafter erected in Rome" and you added: "In the constellation of Aquila was seen the magic device used for the ritual opening of the mouth."

The ritual sacrifice by Hadrian of Antinous must be viewed in the context of Greek magic, as practised in Egypt in this period and this included Ptolemaic astrology.

To that I would like to add this:

Ancient Egyptian Ritual Worship by Wim van den Dungen

It seems unlikely for a processional & ritual construction as the Osireon, not to have been used for a netherworldy Osirian mystery drama. As no other evidence of the sort of papyrus Leiden 32 T has (yet) been found, no final conclusions are at hand. But even if these Egyptian initiation rituals were historical, they would differ from the Greek mysteries and should neither be confused with Hermetic and other cross-cultural syncretisms (like the cult of Serapis). In these, native Egyptian thought was Hellenized and modified to satisfy the Greek "noetic"mentalities (just as the Torah was Hellenized).

Under the Ptolemies, the original, native context had been lost for over eight centuries (namely at the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period, ca. 1075 BCE), although the cultural pattern and its sacral core continued to remain operation long after Pharaonic Egypt -in Greek guise- had finally come to an end with the suicide of Queen Cleopatra VII (30 BCE).

the Hellenistic reconstruction : Ancient Egyptian religion, after having influenced the Greeks, was eventually Hellenized. The cults of Osiris and Isis, as well as Hermetism, evidence the survival of Hellenized forms of the native Egyptian ways. But the Greeks intermixed their somber views of the hereafter with the extended Egyptian funerary rituals. Their extatic, "away from the body" mystery traditions was escapist. The role of Anubis as "guide of the dead" and initiator and Osiris as "king of the dead" was reinterpreted in terms of the Greek religious attitude.

…the Egyptian view on their mysteries and secrets was Oriental. The Egyptians loved life and saw death as the gate to an even more richer life. After purification in the Netherworld, the final transformation of the soul takes place, initiating the spirit-state. The rituals guaranteed a two-way communication between the spirit-world and the material plane : the false door in the tomb is a way to leave the tomb but also a way to return to it. In the spiritual economy of the Old Kingdom funerary temples, this return of the spirit to the tomb was crucial. Thanks to the funerary magic of the tomb, the deceased could make his family benefit from his (or her) invisible powers and liberty of movement, free of shadow and extremely fast. In this way, magic could be accumulated and passed on to future generations…

In the Graeco-Roman mind, nobody returned to Earth, the escape was final. Death brought rupture and disconnection. When, for literary reasons or to close a play with a "deus ex machina", a spectre of the dead or a deity appeared, then surely only vaguely and mostly to announce something bad or worse.

The purpose of the Ritual of Opening the Mouth was to ensure that life would re-enter into a deceased person so that he gained life in the Hereafter.

Man-made statues, temple buldings and deceased persons could, by Egyptian thought, be imbued with life anew. But though the ritual was performed preferrably by the king, a sem-preist or another deputy priest, it was the Creator god himself who made it possible for this to happen. It was him who had:
"made the images that are on earth, by means of instruments he himself made".
"Thus the gods entered the bodies made of wood, minerals, clay and all the other things that grow and in which they took form."

1. Purification by the ‘Lords of Purification’.
2. A priest impersonates the god Ptah, another one the god Sokar. Ptah takes his chisel to open the mouth of the statue and Sokar opens the eyes.
3. A priest presents a wavy wand with a ram´s head on top. (this is called ‘Taking the Sorcerer’ [wr-kh3w], we don´t know what was done more).
4. Next the priest was ‘Presenting the Finger of Gold’.
5. Then the ‘Adze of Yinepu’ was presented to the statue.
6. The head officiant [s3-mry-f], son-whom-he loves, now ‘opens’ the eyes with this adze, and touches the mouth with four small stones [`bwt]with the words: "I perform the Opening of the Mouth upon this your mouth so that
you may speak in the Afterlife".
The adze was made from meteoric iron found in the desert, and made especially for ritual purposes.
7-9. Slaughtering of animals (oxen, gazelles, goose). These sacrifices were probably symbolical and had probably been made in advance, as no killing was usually allowed in front of a deity, lest he should take offense. It was also a matter of practicality, to have the offerings of various kinds ready to arrange on the offering table and be presented.
10. The great oblation of bread, beer and meat was presented.
11. Opening the Mouth of Throne-of-the-Protector-of-his-Father. (This probably adhered to the officiants now going round to the other parts of the temple)
12. All halls and rooms, with reliefs were now undergoing the same ritual: Censing its cult-chambers and purifying its chapels.
13. Sokar feeds the priesthood from the oblation, ‘gladdening their hearts with their largess’. At a Consecration Ceremoy, this was a great meal from the offerings in which not only the priesthood and officiants partook but also craftsmen and workers who had been active in building the temple.
14. Ceding Wetjset-Hor to His Majesty. When the meal was over, the temple building was ready to be ‘Handed over to its Lord’ by which means by the King himself. It could now function to celebrate services and festivals in.

This next part is particular relevance to Hadrian, with his project manager of Aeila Capitolina, Aquila, who is also supposed to have made the translation into Greek – Septuagint – of the Hebrew Bible.

Aquila and ‘Opening of the Mouth’

Tefnut, in the Great Pyramid, observed the western sky, where Pharaoh was reborn: Nut, the king’s mother, gave birth to him in the Occident. Pharaoh was seen in the constellation of Cygnus. Deneb was his head, and Wega his heart in a white alabaster canope. Pharaoh, in Cygnus, traveled through the liquid fields, where he encountered the Celestial Serpent Draco, whose head was the Judgment Hall of Osiris. In this hall Pharaoh’ heart would be weighed against Maat’s feather. Would he survive and become a god? Would he be true of voice? Would his heart be light, or heavy with sin? Would he be devoured by the crocodile Amemait, his soul and shadow burnt by the snake Aaruthankut? Fortunately the king could rely on the help of Tefnut. She was his purifying fire; she guided him across the sky and protected his heart (Wega) against the heavenly snake (Draco); and if the king were still attacked by the snake, she could save him by wielding Aquila, which follows Cygnus. In the constellation of Aquila was seen the magic device used for the ritual opening of the mouth. According to a modern physician, this mysterious device, a small adze, was actually used by Egyptian doctors to force open the tracheas of scorpion sting or snakebite victims: and if the king were attacked by the Celestial Serpent, Tefnut would employ it to save his life.

Left: "Opening of the Mouth" Tool Kit. Instruments such as these were used to restore the senses of the deceased. They were derived from sculptors’ tools. Near the end of the Graeco-Roman Period, the tool kit usually contained only miniature versions of tools.

When Atair in Aquila rose above the western horizon, Tefnut in the pyramid looked towards Pharaoh’s southern hand (zaeta Cygni) while reaching for his northern hand (iota and kappa Cygni): … and Tefnut takes his hand in order to install him at the head of the two Enneads and the gods Tefnut 1 (Cygnus as Pharaoh, Deneb his head, Wega his heart, Draco as the Celestial Serpent, Atair in Aquila rising above the western horizon; Tefnut reaching out for the king’s northern hand, guiding him safely across the sky, protecting his heart, and receiving him back in the pyramid) / Tefnut 2 (Osiris in the Judgment Hall, together with Maat, further deities, and a large snake; from the funerary papyrus of the priestess Nesitanebetisheru, ca. 900 BC) / Tefnut 3 (Atair and Aquila as the device used for the ritual opening of the mouth)
– Evidence in the Great Pyramid : Chamber shafts, statues, pyramidion, a hidden chamber, A Vision of Early Egypt by Franz Gnaedinger, Zurich