#126 Was Jesus an Ancient Magician? - Religion for Breakfast

25:40And presumably that's not quite the same as it was in the ancient world. Maybe it was. But if we're not looking for a stick and a wand and whatnot, what would identify a magician in the ancient world outside of the odd sort of spit miracle?

25:52Andrew Mark Henry:So the short answer is magician was not a job title in antiquity. Magus was a term of accusation. Nobody called themselves that. But when we look at rituals that we would call magical, like amulets or curse tablets. So in the Roman world, in the Greek world as well, if you wanted to curse someone, you would write a curse onto a piece of lead and you would roll up that piece of lead and pierce it with a nail and you would deposit it in a grave or throw it into a bonfire or bury it under an altar in a temple. If you were trying to curse a chariot team, you really don't want the green team to win.

26:27Andrew Mark Henry:You would curse the chariot team, then bury it under the starting gate of the hippodrome. We would call that cursing. We would call it an amulet protection. We might lump it all into this category of magic. But what is the job title of someone who makes an amulet or a curse tablet or a magic gem? It's not magician. It's a scribe. It's a metal worker. It's a gem artisan. And their toolkit doesn't include a magic wand. It's a chisel and trying to make their little magic gem. So my whole job as a historian of ancient magic is to try to demythologize it. It's actually quite mundane. If you really wanted the green team to lose, you would go to the local lead guy, buy some lead from him, and then maybe take it to the local scribe and say, hey, what do you got for anti-chariot curses?

27:24Andrew Mark Henry:And then he would write it down on the curse tablet for you because you're probably illiterate or semi-literate. And then you would bring it to where you want to bring it. You would bring it to a hippodrome. But a lot of the curse tablets we find are found in temples. There's a temple to Demeter and Persephone on the slopes of Acro-Corinth, which is this big mountainous, rocky outcropping jutting up out of the ancient city of Corinth. And archaeologists found a bunch of curse tablets buried around an altar, a series of altars in this temple precinct. And you'd be like, oh, well, that was like sneaking into the temple and burying it.

27:59Andrew Mark Henry:But how would you possibly do that? What's more likely is it was part of the normal functioning of that temple where the priestesses of Demeter were like, hey, let me help you with that. I'll show you where you should put your curse tablet. We see this. There's a double temple to Isis and Mater Magna, the great mother goddess in what's modern day Mayans, Germany. It's a double temple. We have one temple to Isis, one temple to Magna Mater. And archaeologists found a bunch of curse tablets half melted in like a burn pit behind the temple. And a lot of these curse tablets draw attention to the fire, like just like how this curse tablet melts, may my target Alex melt.

28:36Andrew Mark Henry:And they would roll it up and then throw it into the burn pit. Some of them apparently did not melt. And for archaeologists to find many years later, it was probably part of the normal functioning of that temple. Bring your curse tablet to the temple of Isis and Magna Mater and deposit it into the burn pit. And yet another example was found in England at Bath, the city of Bath, which was an ancient town to the goddess Sulis Minerva, who is the syncretized goddess between Sulis, who was like a Celtic goddess, and Minerva, obviously a Greco-Roman goddess. And again, in the temple precinct, you had the temple, and outside the temple, you had the altar, and right off to the side of the altar was a spring.

29:17Andrew Mark Henry:And we found a bunch of curse tablets. I say we, a bunch of archaeologists found a bunch of curse tablets deposited in the spring. And they were for really mundane stuff. Like so-and-so stole my hooded cloak. May justice be brought down upon his head. A lot of them were for like petty crime. And so I can think of, I think of that little spring in that temple precinct as kind of the lost and found of the town. Like, did you lose your hoodie? Did you lose your money? Yeah, this jumped out at me because I recently, I hired, I went to an event where I had to wear, like white tie you know like tuxedo with tails and everything and i got this top hat and uh it went missing and i'm pretty sure someone stole it and when i saw in your video that the quote from that curse on that sort of ancient tablet reads i curse him who has stolen my hooded cloak that the goddess sulis inflict death upon him inflict death upon and not allow him sleep or children now and in the future until he has brought my hooded cloak to the temple of her divinity and i instantly thought of my top hat and i thought gosh if i could get someone to to write out on an amulet a curse like that then i would i would probably do it um it's really interesting to see but one thing that you also pointed out actually i think you pointed this out in your video on grimoires is that we're not just dealing with like when you think of ancient people sort of cursing each other you might be thinking of you know your your sort of disgruntled farmer or whatever but these are physical materials written materials in the ancient world we kind of forget today like how difficult it is to produce written materials in the ancient world right not just because of the physical labor involved in bringing them out but also because hardly anyone was literate and so given that these curses and things and these spells and these books of spells that begin to develop throughout history you might think of them as sort of some some wackos out in a cave somewhere writing stuff down but you have to be pretty educated, right, to even be able to write this stuff.

31:14So what does that tell us about the kind of people who are engaging with this?

31:17Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. Well, let's use the curse tablets, the curse tablets from Bath, England, as an example. We've found probably 160 of them there, maybe 180. So dozens and dozens of these curse tablets with varying ranges of skill when it comes to the handwriting. Some seem to be cursive Latin that's very difficult to read. Some of it seems to be a more bookish professional hand. So there must have been some sort of range of literate skills coming to the table here. But the ones that are very professional probably were made by professionals. A professional scribe whose whole job was let me help you write your get my hoodie back curse that you could then bring probably with the help of a priest of Sulus to deposit it into this pool.

31:58Andrew Mark Henry:So at least for the textual magic, anything written on a piece of papyrus or an amulet was probably created, I say probably, almost certainly created by some sort of literate specialist. And who were the literate specialists in, say, late Roman Egypt? It was monks and bishops, Christian ecclesiastical functionaries. So much of the ancient so-called magical formulas from late antique Egypt show evidence of somebody with knowledge of Christian liturgy. So a phrase like, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, the so-called trisagion that appears in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, very prominently in Christian liturgies, shows up all the time as kind of a protective incantation that shows up on amulets that people would roll up and put on a necklace or put it in their pocket.

32:50Andrew Mark Henry:Psalm 91 is another common protective phrase, which says, like, God is my refuge and my fortress. He protects me from the snare of the hunter. So it's a very protective formula. This appears inscribed on the edges of these circular medallions that people would wear with a picture of Solomon spearing a demon. Again, with the hagios, hagios, hagios, holy, holy, holy phrase. So the vast majority of at least late Roman magical formulas that show some sort of Christian influence were probably made by the literate specialists of that era, which were monks, priests, and bishops. And when we look further east into Mesopotamia, we find a whole corpus of incantation bowls, little clay bowls, something that you'd eat your ancient porridge out of.

33:36Andrew Mark Henry:And in these bowls are inscribed these spiral incantations, usually against demons, sometimes specifically against a demon like Lilith. They're found buried upside down in the house, maybe as like an ancient roach motel where you're trying to capture the demon and neutralize it. And a lot of these show, they're written in Jewish Aramaic. They show evidence of rabbinic literature. So who was the ritual specialist in the Jewish community in 6th century Mesopotamia? Rabbis. So you initially asked me, what does a magician look like in antiquity? I'm like, that's not a job title. The person who was making an amulet or an incantation bowl, they were monks, they were rabbis, they were metal workers, they were gem workers.

34:20Andrew Mark Henry:So much of this was coming out of workshops. It was just part and parcel of a marketplace of ritual power in the Roman Empire. And nothing about it from the material evidence indicates it was secret or occult or evil. We'll sometimes see Roman law codes complaining about magic, particularly cursed tablets or anything that you could view as poison, trying to poison someone with potions. So anything that's kind of aggressive or harmful will sometimes see law codes against that. But of course, how could you possibly enforce that in the Roman Empire? It's not like it was one Roman jurist per 100 ,000 people.

35:05Andrew Mark Henry:It's not like these laws could have been easily enforced. Instead, you had temples like the Temple of Sulis in England or the Temple of Isis in Magna Mater in Germany, offering it as part of their regular services. So I dispute the question. There weren't magicians in antiquity. There were magicians, Magoi, in folklore and mythology. And then there were people who offered ritual specialties to clientele that we might call an amulet worker or a rabbi who on the side made incantation bowls or a monk where somebody in the hinterlands of late Roman Egypt came up and said, hey, my baby has typhus. What can you do for me?

35:46Andrew Mark Henry:Well, let me write you an archangel amulet to put on the baby's forehead. That's going to help. It was part and parcel of daily life and antiquity. And this kind of practice shows up across religious traditions. I mean, I've heard you talk, again, when you're talking about grimoires, about people who would, aren't there Islamic communities that will take the words of the Koran, sort of write them onto some kind of material and then wash the words off into a bowl of water and then drink the water. And somehow that's part of their ritualistic practice. This kind of stuff crops up all over the place.

36:22And I guess it's not so much about... There's another point raised in the reading that you sent over is that there's sort of two questions. There's what was magic in the ancient world and who called each other magicians, but also what would a modern scholar look at and say, this is what today we might call magical practice, even though they didn't call it that then. And I guess we're sort of more doing the latter, looking back at just sort of practices that people engaged in and today saying that's what we might now sort of broadly put into the magical category.

36:52Andrew Mark Henry:So I go out of my way to avoid the term magic, at least in my own work, because I don't find the term useful to describe a category of ritual. I would try to be a little more precise and say we have cursing rituals, we have protection rituals, we have healing rituals, we have exorcism rituals. Some of them use paraphernalia like potions or mud or spit, and some of them just use the spoken word, but they all fall under these categories of healing, protecting, exercising. and it's kind of again because the term magic is subjective and up to the the the the audience the the eye of the beholder will i'll sometimes call a a behavior a ritual magical and that might offend somebody i'm like well like i'm purposely doing that to try to show you that there's really not a huge distinction so an example would be um john chrysostom he was the bishop of antioch and later the Bishop of Constantinople.

37:50Andrew Mark Henry:This was in the 300s and early 400s. He complains constantly about people in his audience, his congregation, using amulets. In some of his homilies, he's like, oh, some of you are using coins of Alexander the Great as an amulet. Why would you possibly rely on this Greek king when you could rely on the king of kings, Jesus Christ, to protect you? And then in other homilies, he explicitly says, hey, you want to keep demons away from you? Do the sign of the cross. The sign of the cross is a great way to keep demons away from you. And I'm like, what makes that gesture legitimate and another gesture to keep demons away from you magical?

38:25Andrew Mark Henry:You know, this is a gesture versus an object, but we could probably think of some sort of gesture that would be clocked as magical, even though it's just a gesture to keep you, to protect you from supernatural harm. and the answer is well John Chrysostom is playing a value and judgment game where he's like this is a legitimate ritual and this is an illegitimate ritual even though from the outside both an amulet and crossing yourself to keep demons away from you both fall under this category of protective ritual and there's another example there's the Acts of Peter and Paul is an apocryphal text from the 400s I think it's 5th century CE that is it almost reads like a comic book.

39:05Andrew Mark Henry:The apostle Peter and the apostle Paul are facing off against Simon Magus, that spooky bad guy from the book of Acts. And they have an audience in front of Nero, the Roman emperor. And they're kind of doing a thaumaturgy battle where Peter does a work of power and then Simon does a work of power. And it culminates with Simon building a wooden tower. And then he climbs to the top of the tower and he starts flying. And Nero's like, well, all right, Simon won. Look, he's flying. That's like the ultimate power. And then Peter says, well, watch this. And Peter then says, oh, angels of Satan that are carrying Simon into the air, stop.

39:43Andrew Mark Henry:And then they drop him and Simon falls to his death. But Simon doesn't use a magic wand. He's not using potions. He's not using amulets or any materiality. He's speaking just like Jesus would in the gospels. He says, dogs come forth and these supernatural dogs appear and leap at Peter. And then Peter says, gone. And then the dogs disappear. And then Simon doesn't really say anything. He just starts flying. And presumably these demons or angels are carrying him through the air. So this is why I'm like, from the outside, if we try to describe what Simon is doing from a completely neutral anthropological perspective, it's just miraculous powers.

40:21Andrew Mark Henry:But the author of the acts of Peter and Paul is unambiguously saying what he is doing is and what Simon Peter is doing is miracles. One is from Jesus and God, and one is from demons, even though they're really just doing the same thing, which is doing power through ritual performance. So does that mean then that circling back to the question we started with and the question that you title a video about, was Jesus a magician? Is the point that this is like a meaningless question? I mean, it seems to you like that's a difficult category to sort of even discuss. But I mean, I know that's your view, but presumably there are scholars out there who think it's a perfectly serviceable category and will discuss whether Jesus fit into it.

41:11And so, if I were to ask you that question, is that how you'd answer? And how do other scholars tend to interpret that question?

41:19Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. So, I would say, I, Kelsus thought he was a magus. I would say he was not a magician in the sense of the folkloric sense of a magus, like the gospel writers position him as a wonder worker. Was he a ritual specialist? We can at least say it's plausible. He wasn't, as far as we know, he wasn't a gem worker or an amulet maker or an incantation bowl maker. Those are job titles that we can identify as a social role in society, someone who makes an amulet, someone who makes a curse tablet. I think it might be plausible that he was a positioned himself as like a stage exorcist faith healer, like, hey, let me show you that I have power over demons, because we see that in roughly contemporaneous materials as a social role that did exist in first century Judea.

42:12Andrew Mark Henry:So Josephus, for example, talks about an exorcist named Eliezer who exorcises a demon, I think, in the audience of Vespasian, the Roman emperor. Eliezer uses a ring of Solomon and some sort of incantation, so he's using some sort of ritual paraphernalia. The Dead Sea Scrolls, there are a few examples of exorcistic formulas. So exorcisms were being performed in first century Judea and the Galilee. And it's hard to parse what parts of the gospels are historical and what are not, but it is at least within the realm of plausibility that Jesus would have positioned himself as a ritual specialist. But I wouldn't call that a magician because I do find the term hopelessly fraught.

42:52Andrew Mark Henry:And the scholars that do work on this material, I think would agree with me that they are very careful to parse between the mythological or the fantasy or the pop culture caricature of the sorcerer or the magician versus the historical social role of a ritual specialist. And that looks a lot more mundane. Somebody in their workshop making an amulet, then a priestess of Demeter taking that cursed tablet and burying it in a room in the temple precinct. Like it's just a lot more mundane than like Harry Potter shooting light out of a magic wand. So we had to parse the caricature versus the social role.

43:32Andrew Mark Henry:And Jesus was certainly caricature was made of him by Celsus. So there was at least something about the gospels that made Celsus think, oh, this guy is in the same realm of Medea or Circe. But then from the anthropological point of view, that was not someone walking around calling themselves a magus. You said ritual specialist a few times. I remember in your video, you talked about this concept of a freelance ritual expert, which Heidi Wendt, I think, has written about. But are they the same thing? And if not, what is a freelance ritual expert? Yeah. So ritual expert is just like a, in some sense, a hopelessly broad term to someone who specializes in a particular type of ritual.

44:16Andrew Mark Henry:You could say a priest is a ritual expert who knows how to lead the liturgy and knows how to lead the Eucharist. Some of those religious functionaries went on to use other liturgical skills to make amulets for your sick baby. So Heidi Wendt wrote this very excellent book talking about ritual experts that are not tied to institutional, you know, like a church or a monastery or a temple precinct. So someone that might through just their own charisma or skill have a following and that following might be mercantile or economic in the sense of like selling their skills. Hence freelance. Hence freelance.

44:58Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah, and the freelance also implies the non-institutional aspect of it. I mean, some of these holy men in the late Roman Empire were not tied to a particular monastery or church as well. You could have a guy off in the desert like St. Anthony. I think of John the Baptist when you mentioned this as a sort of disconnected from institutional authority, some kind of expert ritualist that people are going to seeming to be working of his own accord, performing a kind of ritual which, you know, absent the tradition of baptism, if we'd never heard of baptism and we discovered this ancient ritual where human beings were submerged in water and came back up, it was a different kind of, it would have this sort of spooky cauldron-esque feeling to it, I think.

45:43And so there's a world in which that could easily have been seen as some kind of magical practice, right? Yeah.

45:48Andrew Mark Henry:I mean, I think John the Baptist is a great example of a freelance ritual expert. He possibly through his own creativity reworked this ritual, this water ritual. Water rituals were a known thing within Judaism at the time, and he had his unique spin on it. The sectarians living at Qumran, where we get the Dead Sea Scrolls, also had their own unique spin on water rituals within the worldview of Judaism. And yeah, John the Baptist is apparently not connected to any sort of institution, wandering through the desert, having a following based on his own charisma. I think he would fall well within that idea of a freelance ritual expert.

46:26Andrew Mark Henry:Whether he was selling his skills or not, we don't know. We have no reason to believe that. But he was a freelancer in the sense of he was not tied to a particular institution. So freelance ritual experts, they're relying on their own charisma. They're relying on their own ability to convince people of their skill. And I would say Jesus as an exorcist or Paul as a preacher, they would fall under this. And there's arguments to be made that Christianity grew so successfully because of holy men like this who were able to convince people, hey, I have control over demonic forces. So many of these holy men, I was about to mention St.

47:07Andrew Mark Henry:Anthony, who's one of the desert fathers. A biography or a hagiography was written of him by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. And St. Anthony, the whole biography is just him conquering demons left and right. And I think the historian Ramsey McMullin makes this argument that Christians, more so than other religious institutions and religions of the time, positioned themselves as having power over evil spirits. and it was through that ritual performance they were able to get so many followers. People weren't necessarily convinced by the hopeful message of the gospel. They were like, oh, that holy man, that St.

47:45Andrew Mark Henry:Anthony, that guy out in the desert, I hear he can get rid of the evil demons that are plaguing my kid or haunting that cave over there. So we should listen to this guy. He seems to have that power. and it's kind of the holy man's role in the late Roman Empire to parse and identify demonic powers in the landscape and then ritually exercise them, whether from a person or from a building. And again, to go back to John Chrysostom, he basically does that as well, teaching his audience, hey, do the sign of the cross. This is how you get rid of demons, how to keep them away from you. So much of early Christianity was about demonological control.

48:33Isn't there an interesting moment in Acts chapter 19 where we hear about these seven sons of Sceva who are these Jews who are going around driving out evil spirits and trying to invoke the name of Jesus, finding possessed people and commanding spirits to come out of them in the name of Jesus who Paul preaches about. And it seems like it's kind of like not working because one day the evil spirits say back to one of these sons, you know, I know Jesus and I know Paul, but who are you? Yeah. And then the man who has the evil spirit, the possessed man, like jumps on this guy and starts like attacking him and sort of beats him mercilessly such that he gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.

49:29and so there's this idea that there really is something special about like pool which we which we already knew you know pool's a special guy but there's kind of this feeling that like you know it's jesus who does the who does the demonic exorcism but this idea of that needing to be ritualistic experts and exorcism is a kind of ritual there's a hint here as well that even if you are somebody who's going around you know performing exorcisms in jesus's name you kind of have to be a particular kind of person invested with a particular kind of power and i don't know if i saw that and i saw two people doing the same thing and then the sort of demons listen to one of them i'd be quite inclined to think that there's something special about that that paul guy he's got some kind of particular magical power that the others don't and you're saying that's got it's potentially part of the explanation as to why christianity could grow because paul kept doing that kind of thing.

50:23Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. I mean, so there's this towering figure in sociology named Max Weber who developed this idea of charisma. So when we think of charisma today, we think of those self-help YouTube channels about how to be a charismatic person. But originally in the religious studies sociological sense, it's about someone with almost otherworldly abilities and power. So when we say Jesus was a charismatic figure or John the Baptist was charismatic, It was because they were viewed as, you know, imbued with miraculous power and standing and touched by God. And so much of the freelance ritual expert, I think, hinges on that charisma, your ability to convince people, hey, I can control these demons.

51:06Andrew Mark Henry:And so we see a lack of charisma with the sons of Sceva. what's interesting so the whole the word exorcism it derives from the greek exorkidzo which is actually a legal term exorkidzo it means it's related to the greek word meaning oath horkos and it's used in a legal sense of putting someone commanding someone as if under the under an oath we actually see the exact same verb in matthew 26 at the trial of jesus where the high priest says, I exorcidzo you, I put you under oath. Are you the Messiah? It's the exact same verb. And he's not saying I exorcise you as a demon. He's saying, I'm putting you under, I'm commanding you under oath.

51:52Andrew Mark Henry:And we sometimes translate this with the unusual English verb, adjure, I adjure you, which just means I command you, I command as if under oath. You know, are you the Messiah? And so when Jesus is saying, I exorcidzo you talking to a demon, It's like, I am putting you under an oath. I'm putting you under a legal obligation. Like, get out of that person. So this, again, points to how so much of what we would call magic or thaumaturgical performance is the purview of literate specialists, where they would use legal terms like that. It also tells us something about ancient people viewing law as having power.

52:28Andrew Mark Henry:And we see that here in the 21st century. Like, if you're sued or you're, like, said to go to jail, you're compelled to do something. So even in antiquity, like legal language has power. And it's so much of it is the exorcistic formulas are pretty formulaic, as in I adjure you, I exorcids you, I put you under an oath by some power. Usually then you list some sort of power by the power of God, by the power of Sulis Minerva, and then some sort of threat of some sort. So there's these formulas, but all in this kind of legalese sense. can i can i ask you you've mentioned a few times about sort of amulets and writing and we've talked about books and we i mentioned this word grimoire earlier um could you just tell us what a grimoire is and its relation to to magic and particularly i'm interested in the usage of like the bible by some christians and sometimes as a kind of grimoire of a kind.

53:28Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. So when we say grimoire, in a technical sense, it usually refers to some sort of magical handbook. You can maybe even use the word a textbook. So a book that's a collection of formulas, a collection of instructions on how to make amulets. And it's used like that in the modern sense. So you might have a contemporary Wiccan or a contemporary witch who would keep their own book of shadows, which is a grimoire in a sense of like a collection of incantations or rituals. And in the context of antiquity, we see compendia of formulas usually surviving in Egypt. So there's this big collection of texts called the Greek Magical Papyri, which is a modern category where scholars brought all these texts from ancient Egypt, from the Ptolemaic period up through the late Roman period, and kind of published them in these books that we call the Greek magical papyri.

54:26Andrew Mark Henry:But there are all these different disparate scraps of papyri that are brought together into this kind of artificial category. Really what these were, were texts created by Hellenized Egyptian priests operating in the Roman Empire. And it was part of their job to collect, as literate specialists, to collect these rituals and put them into compendia that we might call a grimoire. Like here's a scroll with a bunch of instructions, like here's how to fix a migraine headache. Here's how to fix a sick stomach. Like your stomach feels bad. Some of these texts are very short, like write this. So do you have a scorpion sting?

55:03Andrew Mark Henry:All right, write this formula onto a piece of papyrus, put the piece of papyrus on your scorpion sting, you'll be okay. Other, some of these texts are long, almost, you know, beautiful poems. There's one called the Mithras liturgy, how you kind of go through this multi-stage formula to interact with Helios himself, the sun god. So grimoires are the purview of literate specialists. There's arguments over whether people were actually doing these rituals. Was that priest then going out and helping someone? Hey, do you have a scorpion sting? I have just the thing for you. Or was it just part of the bookish mindset of the encyclopedic mind of trying to collect all these texts into a text that you would then pass on to the next, your apprentice.

55:52Andrew Mark Henry:But the idea of the grimoire as a book of magic, this continues through many centuries of occult knowledge, where the grimoire is how ancient specialists regulated knowledge, passed on knowledge to the next generation. But to the semi-literate population who doesn't really know how to read, the written word itself is viewed as efficacious. So if you were living in late Roman Egypt and you barely know how to read, when you pick up a book or a scroll or look at some sort of piece of writing, your first thought is not necessarily, oh, these are words conveying meaning. You're encountering them as graphic symbols, symbols on a page.

56:38Andrew Mark Henry:So, theorists in religious studies would talk about the magic of the written word, where humans through most of history, since most humans throughout history were not literate, would have viewed the written word as inherently powerful because of this. And a great example of this, at least in the Christian tradition is the so-called story of King Abgar, where King Abgar of Edessa, which is a city in southeastern Turkey, so modern-day Shanliurfa, King Abgar gets sick. So he writes a letter to Jesus and says, hey, can you come to Edessa? I'm sick. I need you to come heal me. Jesus writes back and says, hey, I'm really busy.

57:17Andrew Mark Henry:I can't make it, but I'll send one of my disciples to heal you. Which is an interesting story. It's not historical. It's an apocryphal story. But what's interesting is that this is one of the few examples of Jesus writing something. So this letter of Jesus to Abgar goes down in Christian history as a magical object. We have amulets from ancient Egypt preserved in the sands of Egypt that Christians apparently wrote the letter of Jesus to Abgar as an amulet. We have stories from historians like Procopius who mention cities writing the the letter of Abgar Jesus on the city gates to protect from invasion, the city of Philippi, which is famously from the city of where Paul writes the letter of the Philippians, there was an inscription found that used to be on the city gates of Philippi.

58:07Andrew Mark Henry:That was the letter of Jesus and Abgar to protect the city gates. And the argument is like, well, these words have inherent power, like ritual power is infused into these letters because the hand of Jesus touched this pen, which then touched this letter, pen to paper, and the graphic symbols themselves that we call words, who cares that it's a kind of boring, banal letter? Hey, I'm busy. I'll send my disciple later. It doesn't say anything like protect this city from invasion. It's actually a pretty simple letter. But the fact that the words themselves were written by Jesus or believed to be is what matters, Is it what makes them magical?

58:46Well, there is something really magical about the written language that we've kind of forgotten about in that you can imagine not being literate. It's a bit like, you know, I saw someone the other day sort of typing in a sort of non-Latin script. So if you imagine like, you know, someone who's Chinese or Japanese or something like writing something out on a computer. and i saw someone doing this the other day and i was just sort of mystified about like how these symbols translate into words hieroglyphics are the same the way that we look at those with like yeah we understand that it's a language but it's so it's so fascinating there's something almost like eerie about the way that these images sort of contain communication it's just you know like harder to notice that we're doing the same thing with our language of course but if you couldn't read the English language and you saw these scribblings on a page and someone took a glance at it and, you know, now they just know something new.

59:46It would seem, you know, for want of a better word, a bit magical, a bit sort of spooky, you know, and so especially given this visible object.

59:54Andrew Mark Henry:And then think about the person who wrote it, like, oh, that person also must have special power because that guy, that scribe knows how to write this. So they're conjuring it up. They're conjuring it up. So you can see how the literate specialist might be viewed as a purveyor of supernatural, of thaumaturgical performance because they're able to write, which, you know, 5 % of the population might have been able to. No, that's a really smart observation. And we see that play out in what we could call pseudo writing in ancient magical practice, where these fake letters that mean nothing pop up all the time in amulets and curse tablets.

1:00:30Andrew Mark Henry:They're sometimes called characteres, you know, the word character, where they look like letters, but they don't really mean anything. Some of them look like ring signs where you'll have like an X, but like little rings at the end of each spine of the letter. Some people attempt to draw what they think looks like Hebrew or Egyptian. I mentioned that bronze amulet that has Psalm 91 around the edge. You know, God protect me from the snare of the hunter. And then there's a picture of Solomon spearing a demon and then squeezed in between some of the figures or what appear to be the Tetragrammaton, you know, YHWH, written, but not in Hebrew.

1:01:09Andrew Mark Henry:It's like someone who obviously doesn't know Hebrew, but it's like trying to draw Hebrew letters because they're like, oh, this is the mystery language, the Tetragrammaton. I'm going to put this on my anti-demon amulet. And we see this in the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri where depending on your native language, if you're a Greek speaker, you want to have Coptic as, you know, Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language as your magical language. Or if you're a Coptic speaker, you either want hieratic or some earlier form of Egyptian writing or language as your language of magic or maybe Greek.

1:01:39Andrew Mark Henry:So you kind of see this exoticizing, the exoticizing power of different languages, whether it's a pseudoscript or like a symbol that means nothing or your attempt at drawing Hebrew or hieroglyphs or demotic or something like that. You know what it makes me think of? You know about cargo cults? I mean, you've probably heard of these, but these sort of interesting groups of people who tend to live on sort of isolated like islands tribes of people who live on these islands and during like the colonial period or during like the world wars or something you know europeans would come and visit these islands and they would bring cargo you know they'd have all these these sort of wonderful things and they'd have food they'd have weapons they'd have all sorts and then they sort of you know went away and these these tribes are sort of left to try and understand what's just happened and there have developed these religious movements around this cargo and so the john from cargo cult went viral not long ago because they sing together and it's quite a sort of eerie but beautiful kind of singing and it went viral on social media this clip of them all singing and they're singing about the return of of john from with his cargo and one really interesting thing that i i can't remember who it is that that did this but once upon a time a landing strip for an airport was built you know in in the in the middle of the forest or whatever and an airplane came down and dropped off all of this cargo and then they all sort of went away and so in the hopes that the cargo will come back some tribe somewhere had built an airport out of like you know like sticks out of wood they'd sort of built like a control tower and a runway and stuff sort of thinking that this might somehow encant this this this plane to come back as if the airport being built was what made the plane come and it seems like a similar confusion is going on there with like well if we just sort of write these scribbles on a page that look a bit like this it somehow sort of does something a bit religious and a little bit magical it just kind of made me think of that that people are sort of misfiring about what's going on but it's easy to see why if you didn't know what an airplane was or an airport was it's easy to see why you might think that this runway with its flashing lights and stuff would cause this magical aircraft to come in the same way if you couldn't understand the written word, you might be mistaken into thinking that there's something about these mystical scribblings that literally brought about the sort of magical powers or religious significance.

1:04:01Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. I mean, we've been talking so much about writing, but we can also think about materiality, like the object of lead. Why lead for curse tablets? Not all curse tablets were written on lead. Some were papyrus, a few were like crystal, like gypsum or something like that, like quartz. But lead, it was easy to find. It was easy to work with. I've tried writing on lead before. It's actually quite easy because it's such a soft metal. But it's also cold and dark and heavy. And a lot of these curse tablets draw attention to that fact, like just as this lead is cold and heavy, make so-and-so cold and heavy.

1:04:32Andrew Mark Henry:So the materiality matters. This comes up in so-called magical gems as well. So you can think of like a signet ring where you have like your, let's say your signature on a ring and you stamp a piece of clay. Like I'm authorizing this letter with my signet ring. These sorts of gems also show up in magical practice in the Roman Empire. And the gem type would sometimes correspond with certain powers or certain abilities. So hematite, which is like this iron oxide, semi-precious stone, was thought to have some sort of healing ability, sometimes for blood bleeding, to anticoagulant almost. So we have evidence that they would actually grind up hematite and ingest it to try to heal you.

1:05:24Andrew Mark Henry:There's also a few examples from the Greek magical papyri that mentioned grinding up a magnet and ingesting it, which is just kind of inherently interesting. So the materiality matters. It's not just the writing, it's what you're writing on. And sometimes it's kind of mundane like to take a piece of laurel or to take a particular leaf and then sometimes it's kind of purposely um odd or different so in the magical papyri it always mentions like animal parts like take a recently drowned cat and then use the cat for some sort of uh formula um there's a i think there's an invisibility spell that's like take the dung of a dung beetle and spread it on you and it will make you invisible and this way that will make people wise it might have that seem like it has that effect because suddenly people you know don't want to don't want to go near you or seem to sort of pretend like you're not there i can i can certainly imagine why i sometimes wonder were these were these egyptian priests really trying these out or are they just collecting them in kind of an encyclopedic sense because i don't know if somebody attempted the the dung beetle invisibility spell i'm like oh it's just not working but yeah or maybe they were just playing a prank on someone they didn't like you know maybe maybe they just didn't like someone said oh yeah you know i think i heard that this is probably what you need to do just rub dung all over yourself and see how that works out.

1:06:41Although I've never tried it.

1:06:42Andrew Mark Henry:You know, who knows? Maybe it works. I mean, I, yeah, I talk about it in one of my videos, but I've, I've yet to try that particular spells. It has not been put to a double blind study to my knowledge. My hunches probably won't work. It'd make for a very good YouTube video. I know that much. Maybe, maybe the next time we meet, we can, we can put it to the test. We'll flip a coin to see, you know, who's the observer and who's the participant. I don't know, but it's a far cry away from, from, you know, the materials that we create, which literally seem not even to have a substance that they're written on.

1:07:08I mean, we're sort of talking through, you know, electromagnetic waves in the air or whatever. It's interesting to think how things have developed. And I think the most important thing is recognizing that the kinds of spells and books and texts of this period are not like a PDF that you'd read online. I mean, they are in the sense that it's the same material, but there's this sort of sacrosanctity to physical objects. It's not just the information, but it's the fact that you've got a physical object with etchings in them that somehow contain information. It's it's much more, well, it seems much more magical than, you know, a PDF on a, on a screen, I guess.

1:07:42Andrew Mark Henry:Yeah. I do wonder, I mean, this is well outside my, my subfield, but contemporary witches who do keep their own book of shadows, like can a book of shadows be a PDF file or does that just remove the so-called magic of writing that we were talking about? You remove the materiality and you move the magic, remove kind of the etching on, on the object. So digital witchcraft in the 21st century. Somebody needs to study that. You end your book on grimoires, your video on grimoires talking about whether these books can count if they're like on a PDF because the physicality is so important. I'd be interested if there are any sort of witches out there who think that it does count as a grimoire to have a PDF.

1:08:23What happens when I turn off the computer and the grimoire is still like stored in a hard drive with like a bunch of zeros and ones, but it's not actually currently on my screen. Does that count as a grimoire? You know, like there's so many, so many questions and maybe I should have a witch on the show to discuss them. But at least as far as Magic and Jesus goes, we've covered some good ground. You do more on your own channel. People probably already know it. It's in the description. It's Religion for Breakfast. Congratulations on a million subscribers, by the way. I know that didn't happen super duper recently, but it's really, really cool to see.

1:08:54You've also just started a really interesting project called the Religion religion department, right? Can you tell us about that?

1:09:01Andrew Mark Henry:Sure. I mean, I've been doing YouTube videos for well over a decade now, and there's only so much information you can convey in a YouTube video. And I try my best to show you the scholars that I'm citing in my videos. I'll have their picture pop up and say, Dr. So-and-so studies this, and this is what they argued. And through making religion for breakfast, I have all these connections in the academic study of religion. And I'm trying to bring those scholars to you with the religion department, which is a learning platform with religious studies scholars teaching guest lectures, multi-week seminars on everything.

1:09:35Andrew Mark Henry:We have language classes like Coptic, which is the final phase of the ancient Egyptian language. So we have a Coptic class coming up this semester. We have a scholar of contemporary witchcraft teaching a class on paranormal beliefs in the United States. So you can join as a member of the religion department and take classes with these professors and kind of learn. I always view myself as just a translator of scholarship. So much of Religion for Breakfast is not like my own ideas. It's me taking complicated ideas from other anthropologists and historians and sociologists and then presenting it as a YouTube video.

1:10:12Andrew Mark Henry:And here it's like bringing the academy to you. and it's it's a cool project i'll link that down in the description down below as well it's like i guess you know if you want to do like an academic study of religion but academic study it costs a lot of money it takes a lot of time you've got to show up to to class and whatnot i mean i guess there are remote things and whatnot but like for for much much cheaper and much much more convenience you choose the classes that are interesting to you you know it's it's it's it Or something you might not have access to. I mean, I went to, like, Coptic is not a language that's offered in very many universities.

1:10:48Andrew Mark Henry:Right. Probably just a small sliver of universities in the world offer ancient Coptic. But we had dozens and dozens of people show up for our summer Coptic class and are now reading the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. That's just so cool. So, like, if you're, like, a super nerd of religious studies, as I am, and so many people in the Religion for Breakfast audience are, and your audience for that matter, If you want to, in a very affordable way, learn ancient Coptic or the sociological study of American paranormal beliefs, this is a place to do it. Yeah, YouTube videos can only go so far. So if you want to go deeper, the links are in the description.

1:11:24But YouTube videos are worth it too, and I hope that this podcast proves it. Andrew Mark Henry, thank you so much for your time. It's been great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me.