Marina Warner
Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World
Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III. Princeton University Press, 474 pp., $45.00
The enchantress Circe, who could turn men into beasts with a wave of her wand—her rhabdos—wouldn’t be puzzled by the magical paraphernalia on sale today in Oxford, where pilgrims to the film locations of Harry Potter can choose from any number of wands or take home a stuffed messenger owl that might have flown from the pages of Apuleius. Magical thinking has bathed, it seems, in the Fontaine de Jouvence; it is flourishing well beyond the entertainment industry and children’s literature. Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, in his ambitious and enthusiastic study of magic in classical antiquity, Drawing Down the Moon, brings a sensibility tuned to the revival of traditional superstitions and folk rituals. Many customs and beliefs, rooted in ancient practices of affecting reality and averting danger by acts of propitiation and protection, are being reinvented—including wayside shrines on the sites of fatal accidents. The Greeks would have recognized them: the place where a death has occurred needs to be purified, and the forces that caused it must be placated. In 1997, a shrine to Princess Diana sprang up spontaneously across from the Pont de l’Alma in Paris, above the tunnel where she died, and visitors continue to leave her ex-voto messages of hope and thanks on the ground, beside the full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty’s torch that has become identified with her.
In Drawing Down the Moon, Edmonds, who teaches classics at Bryn Mawr, roams through nearly a millennium’s worth of material, from Hesiod and Homer all the way to late antiquity and the reign of Julian, the last pagan emperor; he sweeps west to Wales and east to the Black Sea and Georgia—the full extent of the classical world. He sums up astrology and alchemy, divination and theurgy (good magic) with impressive deep reading and powers of synthesis. In a particularly lucid and authoritative chapter, he expounds the psychological meaning of the daimon, or indwelling spirit of Greek and Hellenistic thought, in contrast with the stigmatized Judeo-Christian demon or devil associated with evil. (Philip Pullman in the trilogy His Dark Materials, with his inspired invention of individual-accompanying “daemons,” has begun to restore the original sense of the word.) Nor does Edmonds overlook the many methods of scrying for signs and portents in the flight of birds, the entrails of sacrificed animals, sneezes, twitches, moles, and casting dice. It’s a work of great synoptic energy, but it is far more than a survey. Edmonds firmly sets aside the traditional distinction between religion and magic, derived from the influential author of The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer, who argued that religion exacts a submissive and humble approach to the godhead, imagines the end of time, and hopes for general good and personal salvation; magic, for Frazer, represented an earlier, primitive stage of humankind, as it set out to coerce the supernatural to fulfill the wishes of an individual, including inflicting harm on enemies. Instead, Edmonds argues throughout for the richness of magical knowledge systems and points out that entreating supernatural powers to grant a wish, protect a child, avoid pestilence, flood, drought, fire, and war are just as much the business of official prayers as the object of incantations. With a definition that echoes the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s celebrated axiom about concepts of purity and pollution (“dirt is matter out of place”), Edmonds declares that “magic is a discourse pertaining to nonnormative ritualized activity.” It is not so much what you do as where you do it and who you are: one person’s state religious ceremony is another’s voodoo; one woman’s high priest is another’s necromancer. (As Lewis Carroll put it in Through the Looking-Glass, “‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’”) The recognition of “organic intellectuals” and “knowledge from below” has led to a profound reevaluation of mother wit and traditional wisdom of all kinds, and historians such as Carlo Ginzburg have brought sympathy and open-mindedness to the study of early modern witchcraft, heresy, and shamanism. In a similar spirit, inflected by contemporary gender and race studies, Edmonds sets out to rethink classical magic for our times and redress its reputation for ignorance and superstition. His pages on alchemy are partisan—he praises adepts as practical wise men and women, even venturing that turning copper yellow is “to produce a substance that serves for all intents and purposes as gold—or at least for the purposes of use in a ring.” And when practical benefits elude the magician or diviner, psychological effects (magic as therapy, magic as placebo) are not dismissed. The book also differs from many earlier studies of witchcraft, astrology, and the like because Edmonds has been able to draw—and does so with relish—on rich archaeological discoveries of spells and love charms, recently unearthed in Rome from the sanctuary of Anna Perenna. According to Ovid’s Fasti, she was Dido’s sister and, in memory of Dido’s treatment at the hands of Aeneas, acted as a special protectress of wronged women. Thousands of incised amulets, curse tablets, ex votos, and other invocations, begging for her aid against false-hearted lovers and other foes, have been dug up there.
Drawing down the moon was a celebrated magical exploit—“the illicit inflaming of love”—at which Thessalian witches were especially adept. The book’s cover illustration, a line drawing from William Hamilton and Johann Tischbein’s 1791 catalog of Greek vases, shows two young women, both of them naked and on the sturdy side; one is standing and carrying a wand while the other is running with a short sword in hand, hailing the moon with the word Kale (“beautiful one”). Between them, the moon descends on a cord, like a yoyo. (The vase on which this alluring scene appeared went down in a shipwreck on its way from Naples to London; the subject remains rare in art. See illustration on page 28.) Theocritus in a poem describes Simaetha spinning her magical instrument, the iunx, to draw down the moon, then melting a wax figure of her lover, Delphis, and ending with the cry, “O Iunx, drag this man to my house.” Her magical acts are intended to tap into lunar power, the erotic sphere under the sway of the goddess.
Edmonds also adapts from anthropology his dual theoretical approach: on the one hand, “emic,” referring to an insider’s perception, that of men and women of the time; and on the other, “etic,” referring to the analyses of classical scholars like himself, as well as historians, social scientists, and anthropologists, who interpret the past in the light of possible functions and meanings that were not known and might have been unrecognizable to the people involved (Oedipus was not aware of his Oedipus complex). To the ancient Greeks, Circe the enchantress is the daughter of Helios the sun and a figure of profound wisdom who can give Odysseus reliable instructions about going to the world of the dead and back; she may be an intermediate figure, who could be dangerous but choose to be benevolent, too, as she is, ultimately, to Odysseus. By contrast, for later, nonpagan readers of Homer since the Middle Ages, her metamorphic powers over nature (such as when she changes Odysseus’s companions into swine), her irresistible seductiveness, and her knowledge of the underworld mark her as evil, even diabolical. These features are bound up with wary, pejorative Greek ideas about femaleness, as is also the case with Medea—Circe’s niece, as it happens, who is so polluted by her crimes that when, in the Argonautica, she entreats Circe to purify her, Circe admits that her powers are too weak. In postclassical times, Circe generates a line of avatars, both imaginary and real—“the foul witch Sycorax” in The Tempest even echoes her name, and the Weird Sisters in Macbeth are cast in this mould. But the mythological fantasies leaked, fatally, into reality, and the often indigent, powerless targets of European witchhunts were stigmatized as malignant sorceresses, tortured, and killed. Frequently, magical knowledge is presented as foreign, originating on an exotic periphery or in an ambiguous zone. For example, ever since Herodotus, ancient Egypt has been perceived as the supreme fountainhead of secret knowledge and enchantments, its wisdom evoked in support of attempts to bless or curse, to defy time and mortality. Thessaly and Persia were also sources of esoteric and often suspect learning (the magi in the Gospel of Matthew reflect this legacy, as do the evil Zoroastrian enchanters in the 1,001 Nights). When Dido, queen of Carthage, is building her funeral pyre, she consults a wise woman from beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the known world; in The Aeneid, Virgil evokes this priestess in lurid imagery:
She’d sprinkled water, simulating the springs of hell, and gathered potent herbs, reaped with bronze sickles under the moonlight, dripping