Ancient Christian Magic

Ancient Christian Magic PDF Author: Marvin W. Meyer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691004587
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
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 early Christianity. 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 Christian Magic

Ancient Christian Magic PDF Author: Marvin W. Meyer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691004587
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
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 early Christianity. 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 Christian Magic

Ancient Christian Magic PDF Author: Marvin W. Meyer
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
ISBN: 9780060655785
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
Gathers the texts of ancient Coptic rituals, including spells, curses, invocations, baptisms, magical amulets, and prayers

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

Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World PDF Author: Scott Noegel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046006
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
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. The reader already familiar with studies of ancient religion will find in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars both old friends and new faces. Contributors include Gideon Bohak, Nicola Denzey, Jacco Dieleman, Radcliffe Edmonds, Marvin Meyer, Michael G. Morony, Ian Moyer, Francesca Rochberg, Jonathan Z. Smith, Mark S. Smith, Peter Struck, Michael Swartz, and Kasia Szpakowska. 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.

A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power

A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power PDF Author: Malcolm Choat
Publisher: Brepols Pub
ISBN: 9782503531700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
This volume publishes a new Coptic handbook of ritual power, comprising a complete 20 page parchment codex from the second half of the first millennium AD. It consists of an invocation including both Christian and Gnostic elements, ritual instructions, and a list of twenty-seven spells to cure demonic possession, various ailments, the effects of magic, or to bring success in love and business. The codex is not only a substantial new addition to the corpus of magical texts from Egypt, but, in its opening invocation, also provides new evidence for Sethian Gnostic thought in Coptic texts. A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power is the first volume in the series The Macquarie Papyri, which will publish the papyri in the collection of the Museum of Ancient Cultures, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia).

The History and Practice of Magic

The History and Practice of Magic PDF Author: Paul Christian
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
ISBN: 9781498125062
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Book Description
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1870 Edition.

Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic

Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic PDF Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004390758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817

Book Description
This volume seeks to advance the study of ancient magic through separate discussions of ancient terms for ambiguous or illicit ritual, the ancient texts commonly designated magical, and contexts in which the term magic may be used descriptively.

Magical Christianity

Magical Christianity PDF Author: Coleston Brown
Publisher: Quest Books
ISBN: 9780835608558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Coleston Brown—scholar and expert on the esoteric Christian traditions—reaches far beyond any other book of its genre to bring us a truly experiential form of Christianity. Drawing on the myths, legends, lore, and symbols inherent in the Christian tradition, Brown reveals the potential in all of us to use, as he does, Magical Christianity as a practice for healing and regenerating the spirit. Brown combines the insights he gained as a student under Gareth Knight, a renowned authority on Kabbalistic magic, with his own study of ancient texts and practice of the esoteric Christian tradition, developing this new work, the official text and formal course of training in what is now known as the Western Magical Tradition. Readers will be captivated by the symbols Brown covers in this book, including the sphere, the holy fire, the wheel of life, and the planes of being. He even details the magical power of sacred architecture rich in the Christian tradition as a basis for magical practice. This revised edition also includes an experiential meditation at the end of each chapter and a CD of guided meditations to bring readers more deeply into the transformative power of Christian symbolism.

Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity

Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity PDF Author: Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161544507
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Book Description
In this work, Jan N. Bremmer aims to bring together the worlds of early Christianity and those of ancient history and classical literature - worlds that still all too rarely interlock. Contextualising the life and literature of the early Christians in their Greco-Roman environment, he focusses on four areas. A first section looks at more general aspects of early Christianity: the name of the Christians, their religious and social capital, prophecy and the place of widows and upper-class women in the Christian movement. Second, the chronology and place of composition of the early apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and Pseudo-Clementines are newly determined by paying close attention to their doctrinal contents, but also, innovatively, to their onomastics and social vocabulary. The author also analyses the frequent use of magic in the Acts and explains the prominence of women by comparing the Acts to the Greek novel. Third, an investigation into the theme of the tours of hell suggests a new chronological order, shows that the Christian tours were indebted to both Greek and Jewish models, and illustrates that in the course of time the genre dropped a large part of its Jewish heritage. The fourth and final section concentrates on the most famous and intriguing report of an ancient martyrdom: the Passion of Perpetua. It pays special attention to the motivation and visions of Perpetua, which are analyzed not by taking recourse to modern theories such as psychoanalysis, but by looking to the world in which Perpetua lived, both Christian and pagan. It is only by seeing the early Christians in their ancient world that we might begin to understand them and their emerging communities. (Publisher's description).
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