MHC Course Examines Magic in the Ancient World

While studies of religion traditionally address public rituals associated with sacred texts, great monuments, and temples, Williams's class focused on the ancients' most private spiritual preoccupations and practices--those that occurred offstage on rooftops, in graveyards, and in other secret locales. Williams's students examined the texts, iconography, rituals, myths, and lifestyles that modern scholars associate with "magic" and that reveal how our Mediterranean predecessors sought divine favors through personal channels. Students learn that the multicultural world of the late Roman Empire--with its blending of deities, myths, and esoteric terminology of power--was the ultimate crucible of mystery and magic.

A major component of the course is a group Web project on a selected research topic, such as the study of horoscopes in Greek antiquity; erotic magic; magic and Judaism; the language and objects of spells; and an ancient magician's working library. Each student was responsible for writing about one aspect of the project, and all students had to attend a Web publishing workshop to learn how to create a Web site. The sites were composed of written text and visual imagery that might include ancient art, images of coins, or drawings. All included links to each of the areas researched by the group.

Anna Nizzari '02 delved into the world of erotic magic for her group project, with a personal focus on violence toward women in Greek mythology and in Latin love poetry. Her group examined issues of language, gender, and the history of curse tablets, used for erotic and other spells. Since she came to the class with Web familiarity, creating the site was less challenging to Nizzari than other factors, such as the ample course reading, which she found extremely compelling nonetheless. "The Greek magical papyri in translation are very difficult to comprehend," she says of the ancient texts that include recipes for a wide range of spells written in both Greek and Egyptian. Other texts studied in the class included works on astrology and actual spells written by practicing magicians in antiquity. But Williams's impassioned lectures made it an especially exciting course, says Nizzari, who was surprised to learn that early Christianity and Judaism had connections to magic. As a Catholic, she felt she learned things she'd never known about the roots of her own religion.

"Magical practitioners appealed to the same basic view of the cosmos, the order of the universe, that pagan philosophers and Jewish and Christian religious teachers subscribed to," says Megan Williams. "The only difference," she explains, "was in how the magician or the astrologer claimed to wield power within that universe, and his or her relation to an individual client." She notes that many of the texts scholars describe as magical "express both a promise to deal with everyday practical problems and a profound spirituality." The "substantial number of modern pagans" in her class found it "spoke to their own religious convictions as a course on Chrisianity or Judaism could not," while other students found some of the material "shocking."

Getting students to "take the material seriously without abandoning their critical faculties" was challenging, says Williams, but she loved teaching the course and having an opportunity to "addresses elements of the Western religious traditions that get left out of the normal curriculum."