Late Antique and Byzantine Magic

For the purposes of this article, magical thinking is understood as taking a signifier for a referent, familiar from Byzantine notions of, for example, the Eucharist, miraculous icons, and powerful names on healing amulets. Magical thinking enables the use of words, images, materials, and performances to shape human experience by shaping perceptions of it. Likewise, magical words, images, materials, and performances can remake perceptions of the world as we seek it to be. Byzantines understood magic in various and conflicting ways, whether through powerful words, images, materials, or performances. As the field of magic studies unfolds, the internal conflicts and contradictions of Byzantine texts on the topic and the related material culture only more so reveal a myriad of points of view that destabilize any firm or focused definition. One of the strengths of magic studies is that it demonstrates the value in complicating—rather than clarifying—history. Intertextuality is one of the telling characteristics of the different types of documents of interest to the field. Magic (within and without structures of authority) documents widespread and local experiences, often multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious. Though once considered peripheral to Byzantine history, magic studies bring to light integral and essential questions about syncretic and local Byzantine communities of thought. Studies in magical material culture attentively developed over the last three generations of scholars, exemplifying a general growing interest in previously marginalized topics—marginalized because the field of traditional Byzantine studies relies heavily on Patristic texts that themselves sought to marginalize magic. Concurrently, art historians and historians of religion are increasingly attentive to the function of materials, words, and images. Magic studies itself is a crossroads shaped by various subfields of history, including pilgrimage studies, hagiography, philology, epigraphy, art history, and archaeology, and incorporating methods from anthropology and semiotics, among others. As such, it represents exciting possibilities for collaboration and synthesis in research and thinking. After decades of consternation over definitions of the word “magic,” David Frankfurter’s notion has emerged as functional and widely applicable: that magic is the local application of great traditions. Similarly attentive to particular historical and material contexts, Glenn Peers gives good advice to let the things themselves do the talking, rather than try to fit the material culture into preconceived categories. According to these views, we may attempt to reconstruct the past as best we may by listening closely to the materials themselves and as local applications of traditions that claimed more authority for themselves.