Mysticism
Malinowski’s concept of the “weird.” These are contemporary scholars who view level of weirdness of practice enough to call something magic. I think that weirdness to our contemporary selves draws us to this topic, but we must understand that weird to us is not unusual within a specific society in the past.
Ph.D. on Roman magic in light of Christianity
Ancient Christian authors demarcated magic from Christianity using arguments
and rhetoric developed from earlier pagan authors regarding superstitio....my work on the strand of scholarship that argues that magic practices are
rituals because they have social value and involve performance of religious behavior.
Moreover, magic practices contain aspects that could be considered based on collective
beliefs, but mostly at the regional and local levels.....
Tertullian, in De idololatria, discusses this economy in Carthage, mainly in the view that to be Christian is not to produce products for use in pagan or magic practices, which both fall under the category of idolatry for him...........Tertullian wrote on his love for the empire and pushed a view of Christianity mostly found in North Africa during the third century CE
magical papyri texts “mention over 450 plants, minerals, animal products, herbs, and other substance as presumably ‘pharmaceutically active’ in recorded spells, incantations, formulas, and imprecations
Luijendijk argued that gospel healing amulets were a side business for Christian priests who sold them as a protection for women and children in Oxyrhynchus...Oxyrhynchus,an ancient city in Upper Egypt (modern-day el-Bahnasa), is one of the most significant archaeological sites in the world, renowned for the "Oxyrhynchus Papyri".
Augustine in Confessions offers evidence that the educated elite survived from selling these rituals early in their careers
Apuleius’ text and North African curse tablets that solely invoke a daimon (see chapter 4) suggest
that some pagans in North Africa believed daimones to be the most important type of
divine entity for delivering the power of prayer and ritual.2...daimones in the aether were simply the spirits of those who died, like Christian souls....Tertullian also showed a similar belief in daimones as Apuleius, but twisted the belief using his understanding of earlier Greek Christian works to separate daemones from human souls.
Tertullian had stated, “almost no human lacks a daemon, which were the cause of
accidental and violent death.”31 In this quote, Tertullian argued that all daemones only
had a harmful nature and were not the same as a human soul.
people did not trust and feared female magic practitioners (or witches) because most people believed in their power and that witches used their powers to fulfill their own desires.
Justin Martyr (c. 100 – 165 CE).
Justin had stated, “sometimes demons [daimones] appear in dreams, sometimes by
magical imposition…. We [Christians] who formerly delighted in fornication but now
embrace chastity alone; we who formerly used magical arts, dedicate ourselves to
good….”69 This passage shows that Justin felt the need to address magic as both a rival
practice and as a response to Jesus and his apostles performing magic and interacting
with daimones in the first century Gospels
Tertullian argued that Jesus’ miracles demonstrate Christ as being made from the god
substance, or [the Holy] Spirit....Tertullian in this work also states that he affirms the
existence of spiritual essences (spiritales substantias), which philosophers knew
as daimones. As an example, he points to Socrates admitting that he was attended
by a daimon as a boy and his awaiting the judgment of a demon (daemonii).
Tertullian further argued that when Christ returned the period of punishment
would end, all the dead would be restored to their original flesh, and their final judgement
would come with their final earthly death.84 This argument shifted pagan and Hellenistic
understandings of the underworld into something Christian where all people, even good
Christians, go to be punished and await resurrection, which did not align with Hellenistic
pagan or Christian beliefs.
Arnobius, like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, defends Jesus as a miracle worker and a
wielder of godly power rather than magic rituals taken from Egyptian religion. He argued
that Jesus did not require the incantations, rituals, or products of a magician to facilitate
his deeds because he operated “solely by the inherent might of His [Jesus] authority.”123
In contrast, magic experts used “the deceits (praestigiae) of demons done by the tricks of
the magical arts.”
Augustine also used “daemonia” to denote evil entities, not daimones in the pagan sense....educated elite, including catechumen, often dabbled in magic practices, just as Augustine did with astrology to make a living and for his own curiosity,
The doctor revealed that he provided a sleeping drug (mandragora, or mandrake plant), rather than a poison, which caused a death-like slumber...a potentdeliriant hallucinogen due to toxic tropane alkaloids (scopolamine, hyoscyamine, atropine). It causes intense, often terrifying hallucinations, delirium, and sedation, rather than the mind-expanding effects of psychedelics. It is extremely poisonous...
Here, Tertullian is being exclusive in his Christianity suggesting that making and selling products that were used in non-Christian ritual, even healing products that Christians might use was all idolatry and should bar these individuals from the Christian Church....
"Among cures, certain substances supplied by nature have very great............
efficacy; magic also puts on some bandage; the art of healing counteracts
with lancet and cup. For some, making haste, take also beforehand a
protecting draught; but sexual intercourse drains it off, and they are dry again. " ...Tertullian and the North African Christian authors after him all use the term daemon in a Christian context of an evil entity attached to humans but his discussions of daemones shows that Apuleius’ understanding was more common among North African pagans and Christians. Tertullian and his successors were making an
argument for a newer Christian understanding of daimon, which eventually did become the normative view of demons.
The Christian authors of Africa Proconsularis spent much of their writings
defending Christianity and establishing their own doctrine, which led to an ongoing
discussion of magic among themselves.
The words in this line are nonsensical, but contain palindromes at least in sound; the first and third words are in opposite directions and the middle word is a true palindrome
Iaioō (Ιαω, a representation of Yahweh in magical texts) has extra letters representing localized pronunciation, which is like the double consonants found on other Carthaginian tablets but with extra vowels representing long vowels, a difference of local dialect. This tablet was produced from a grimoire, as it contains common formulas, magical characters, and angelic names found in the magical papyri...
the Greek daemon names of Egyptian
figures as having the necessary power for this task. These Egyptian figures are not the
spirits of the dead or Christian demons, but rather minor deities or intermediaries of the
gods. Like other Carthaginian tablets, this one directly invokes daemones rather than a
specific deity because of the belief that these figures would intervene in earthly events,
unlike the gods and goddesses.
So the main magic use was for love binding and chariot racing sports....and protection amulets....and gladitorial combat...
most Christians and Jewish people believed in the power of daimones, as in the spirits of the dead, often referring to the person buried in the tomb; these were the most invoked
entities in Carthage and Hadrumetum. Several tablets from Carthage and Hadrumetum
could suggest Christian origin, such as DT 231 in Carthage, which invoked “Lord.”
Cicero argued that Vatinius as a Pythagorean was “accustomed to call up the
spirits of the dead” and make “sacrifices to ghosts of the dead with the entrails of boys.”9
Cicero showed some knowledge of the traditions found in the magical papyri (grimoires)
and displays his attitude towards these practices as magic by describing them as “unheard
of and vile rites” [inaudita ac nefaria sacra] along with associating Pythagoreanism with
these practices.
Greek and Roman Necromancy
Copyright Date: 2001
Published by: Princeton University Press
Constantine had instituted the first three of the laws against magic and its
practitioners between 317 and 324 CE....The idea of
“virtuous minds being turned to lust” seems to be pointing to amatory curses.
remedies for healing sought by individuals or concoctions for
agriculture to protect crops and human labor were not to be included in magic
accusations.40 This law appears to protect agricultural and folk healing, which Galen had
spoken against in the second century CE
...................... https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/8/1075
In the ancient Greek world, the logos replaced myth as the privileged archaic form to recount possible explanations for events of all kinds to which there was no immediate answer. The passage from myth to logos, however, not only makes explicit a methodological shift in human reflection about oneself and the world, but also the form it can take. Images and symbols are conceptualised through words: reasoned and intellectual discourse becomes the key to accessing knowledge as an explanation of the whole. This word, logos, however, carries with it from the outset a certain ambiguity2; not only does it indicate human discourse, the explanation of something, but it also has a divine connotation3. This is the case with Plato4, for whom the logos belonged to the sphere of ideas that came from the Hyperuranium created by the demiurge. It continued, although differently, with the Stoics, and Aristotle himself developed a very rational philosophy in which the divine principle was completely “logical” and absolutely disembodied5. It is, however, a word that corresponds to the human word as an expression or channel of intelligence, of the rationality that explains and orders everything, giving cosmic law to the chaos of the living multiple. Later, Plotinus, although not always using the term in a homogeneous way, distinguished logos precisely in more Aristotelian terms, as a logical definition, from the “one” as a producing power (the more material Stoic sense), to which is added a third logos—of clearly Platonic memory—which is found in the nous and has a higher degree of transcendence. Therefore, in Plotinus, the logos assumes an increasingly richer connotation
the Logos transcends the paradigms that dominate the Hebrew Scriptures» (Waetjen 2001, pp. 277–78). As Časni states, «The Logos is the source and the finality of all things. For John the Evangelist, the Word is not just a personification, but a living Being who is a source of life. Jesus Christ is the Logos, which includes Christ’s full work of salvation» (Časni 2015, p. 197). Therefore, this Logos is not exclusively human word, discourse, idea, or creative word, but it is also not the Hebrew wisdom11; it is a special person in the flesh12. What is more, while the beginning of the Prologue still narrates the precedents of the logos, emphasising its union with God, here it expresses the union of the logos with the human sarchs and thus the approach of the divine to all that is limited, finite, fragile, and transient. In this way, the logos becomes not only audible, as the divine word transmitted through prophets, but visible to the human eye.
sarchs has roots in Eastern Europe, primarily appearing among Jewish communities. It likely derives from Yiddish, possibly relating to an occupational role or characteristic, or acting as a variant of older Ashkenazi surnames that reflect a "search" or "seeker"
, at the moment of Jesus’ abandonment on the cross. There, God is at his farthest distance from himself because he is the negation of relational fullness, typical of the Trinity. The cry of Jesus’ abandonment is the highest expression of the Logos that becomes “logosless,” but being moved by love, it also becomes the highest expression of God, the principle of love that is, the more it gives itself.
The incarnate Logos becomes the absence of the word, and with that the absence of God himself, because the word without a recipient to receive it is a word without meaning, a broken word. Therefore, the human condition that emerges from the revealed datum of the Christian God is a condition of fullness and truth already given—because sons in the Son who is logos from eternity, but who is incarnated in history—still to be realised and discovered in the course of humanity’s journey. To become fully person means, therefore, to bring the Trinitarian communion to visibility through the cry of abandonment of the Logos-Flesh, and to express and build community not only with words but also with their absence.
https://www.mdpi.com/2410-9789/3/3/20
Augustine observed that he was sent to school to obtain learning, the use of which he did not understand (quid utilitatis esset),18 but he learned classical texts and experienced a sinful delight in them.This difficult relationship between classical literature and Christian doctrine was experienced by other contemporaries of Augustine. After giving up his family, friends and home to embrace asceticism, Jerome confessed that the only sacrifice he failed to make was to “give up the bookshop that I had assembled for myself in Rome with so much care and fatigue”.19 After reading Plautus and Cicero, Jerome found that when he begun to read the prophets, their style seemed barbaric and repugnant to him. Hence, his disturbing dream, in which he was condemned because he was a follower of Cicero, not of Christ (non Christianus, sed Ciceronianus)
Ready to demonstrate the contradictions of classical philosophy and the absurdities of poets’ fables, Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, also perceived classical culture as an artifice of demons, which prevented men from arriving at the truth....
Although Jerome resided in Rome to serve Pope Damasus, he continued
to write to and for educated Italo-Roman Christian elites after he went to Bethlehem
Clement is shown as hiring an Egyptian magic practitioner to perform necromancy to evocate a soul for a consultation
In the Life of Saint Hilarion the Hermit, Jerome described an episode in Gaza where a man
in love with a “virgin of God” was unable to seduce her, so he learned the “magical arts”
in Memphis at Asclepius’ temple. Jerome teased his knowledge of Asclepius while
marking his worship as idolatry, “the priests of Asclepius who do not cure souls but ruins
them.”131 Jerome described a binding spell:He inscribed some verbal monstrosities and monstrous forms on plates ofHere, Jerome identified an amatory curse (binding spell) with the suitor acquiring
Cyprian bronze and buried them under the threshold of the Girl’s house.
At once the virgin went mad, She cast off her veil, she swung her hair
around, she gnashed her teeth, and she shouted the young man’s
name….132
Cyprian bronze to inscribe written formulas (verbal monstrosities) and depictions
(monstrous forms) before depositing it under her floor to activate the curse. This curse
follows an eastern approach to magic and shows a negative Christian attitude towards
making this virgin of God (a girl) become frenzied with love.
Jerome’s discussion of magic, like the Clementine Romances, was not part of a specifically Italo-Christian discourse, but they were part of his intended audience for a broader Roman-
Christian narrative on magic.
Pliny the Elder described peoples foreign to Rome as evil-eyers, or
people who could ruin the environment or kill babies with praise and cause people to die
by staring at them. The word for that he uses for sorcery (effascinare) suggests that this
type of magic (a natural genetic type) was in opposition to Fascinus whose phallic
representations were believed to avert the evil eye.
winged phallus, worshipped as a protector against envy, sorcery, and the evil eye (fascinum). Phallic representations, known as fascinum amulets or effigies, were ubiquitous, appearing as jewelry, wind chimes (tintinnabula), reliefs, and votive offerings designed to ward off evil...in combination with other symbols, such as a fist making the "fig sign" (manus fica), which was believed to represent female genitalia and fertility....The victory of the phallus over the power of the evil eye may be represented by the phallus ejaculating towards a disembodied eye.
https://www.mdpi.com/2410-9789/3/3/20
the doctrine of the Λόγος σπερματικός,
Lógos spermatikóswhich is of Stoic origin and is a cornerstone of Justin’s thought (Holte 1958, pp. 109–68). According to Justin, the Logos instilled the seeds of truth, even before his incarnation. However, although the action of the Logos was at work before the incarnation, this dispensation remained partial and obscure: “All the right principles that philosophers and legislators have discovered and expressed well, they owe to whatever of the Word they have found and contemplated in part (κατὰ μέρος)”.52 What Greek philosophers theorized belongs to the Christians, as well.53 However, there is an element to keep in mind as Justin points out: the revelation formulated in the ancient world is a partial revelation: “The authors were able to perceive the truth obscurely thanks to the sowing of the Word that had been implanted in them. But it is one thing to possess a semen (σπέρμα), and a likeness proportionate to one’s capacity, and it is another thing to possess reality itself
Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today
Epimenides stopped a plague, no one saw him eat or crap -
Epimenides' Role: Epimenides of Crete is a prime example of this tradition: a 6th-century BC figure known for sleeping for decades in a cave of Zeus, practicing purification (catharsis), and possessing the ability to project his soul....Epimenides heard the Logos during this cave meditation and believed in the immortality of the Soul....Pythagoras was taught by Epimenides...
https://themarginaliareview.com/is-philosophy-magic-the-roots-of-reason-in-parmenides/
the opening of John’s Gospel, speaks of the Logos facing “the god,” a most strange appellation when translated literally, as I have done, but most translations do not. For the text then immediately adds that “god was the Logos,” dropping the definite article, which it resumes a sentence later. All of this is straightforward enough in its context, but that context has never been rendered into an English translation. The results would shock and offend pious sensibilities.
the problem of "shared essence"....
According to Heraclitus, the soul has its own Logos, which increases itself according to its own needs (fr. 115); and is unfathomable (you could not find its ends... so deep is its Logos, [fr. 45]). All things are one, if one listens to the Law (Logos) (fr. 50). [2]
The concept of the logos in Philo of Alexandria,
Clement of Alexandria, and Origen
what is called God is, Philo states, his most ancient word
(the Logos). [9] The Logos is also an utterance of God (different from the Word of God,
which could be explained by the Aramaic Memra): as God’s words and actions coincide,
what is uttered does not differ from what is done (Som. XXXI, 1.182). By speaking, God
creates; there is nothing between the word and the deed (Sac. XVIII, 65). As God outstrips all creation, the word of the uncreated God outruns the word of creation, it can outstrip and
overtake everything, Philo writes (Sac. XVIII, 66). The Logos (the word of God) provides a
universal bond, consolidation of things in the world, and essence:
Similarly to Philo, Origen explains the use of the definite article in John 1.1: for him the article is to show that the God is “very” God, in contrast with the Son who is just God (Comm John 2.7.16–18).
Also, he claims that the world got created through the Son, which positions him as an executive force of God in the world. The Father could not have ever lacked wisdom, nor could this wisdom have taken any form different from what it now possesses as the Second Person of the Trinity (Princ. 1.2.2). The Logos is in the beginning, that is, in wisdom, always. Its being in wisdom, which is called the beginning, does not prevent it from being with God and from being God, and it is not simply with God, but is in the beginning, in wisdom, with God, insists Origen.
"Hypostatic" refers to
something that is fundamental, essential, or pertains to a distinct substance or personhood, derived from the Greek hypostasis (underlying reality). It is commonly used in theology (the hypostatic union of Christ's two natures)In Origen, however, the Logos is not speech or utterance, as that would make it a secondary function of God (Comm John 1.24.151), see Orbe 1991.
wow the Logos as from the teat!! Prolaction!!
belched time?
So Jesus Christ is prolacted from the heart of Sophia/God/Logos...
AI says:
wow weird!
the original meaning of logos, frequently used by Homer, is “collecting and
laying down” and “giving an account,
https://retrievalphilosophy.s3.amazonaws.com/Copy+of+EPS_+Search+for+the+Logos+Paper.pdf
Protagoras advances the Heraclitian20
flux doctrine with this “two-logoi” statement. He notes that “Sextus [Empiricus] reports
that Protagoras held that “the reasons [logoi] of all the appearances [phainomenon]
subsist in the matter.” The two-logoi, on Schiappa’s interpretation makes the statement
more about metaphysics than about there being two sides to every argument as in a
debate. Schiappa makes the case that Plato, in the Theaetetus must have had a similar
understanding of Protagoras advancing a Heraclitian metaphysical position and says
“when Plato discussed Protagoras’ theory of knowledge in the Theaetetus, he cited
Heraclitus (as well as Empedocles) as someone who would agree with the notion that “if
you speak of something as big, it will also appear small; if you speak of it as heavy, it
will also appear light; and similarly everything.’”
Mind is corporeal in Stoicism. Logos
is analogous with pnuma, heat or breath, by which things are alive. Pneuma “became
the vehicle of the logos” for the Stoics. The Logos is “the Soul of the world, Mind and33
Nature, Nature, God. Nature is an artistic or creative fire, and thus God is the seminal
Logos of the universe.” Hillar says that:34
The pneuma, though corporeal, is not matter itself. Pneuma, unlike other
elements, pervades the universe and establishes the individual parts of it
in Timaeus the soul descends the Scala Naturae (musical scale as implied logarithms)
scala naturae (Great Chain of Being) acts as a form of natural law by establishing a fixed, hierarchical, and teleological order of existence.In Plato’s
Timaeus, the scala naturae (ladder of nature) is expressed as a harmonic, hierarchical cosmos, where the Demiurge builds the World-Soul using musical ratios (35B).
Deuteronomy Rabbah
Devarim Rabbah is a midrash on the book of Deuteronomy compiled in the land of Israel between the fifth and eighth centuries.
the Seven planets as the seven luminaries
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