Old and Forgotten Ways

Further reading has turned up another possible reason for Apuleius' accusers to add piscatorial proddings to their evidence that he is a malificar . Yvon Thebert explains in his chapter "Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa" ( A History of Private Life From Pagan Rome to Byzantium , Paul Veyne ed. Arthur Goldhammer Trans. Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 1987. p. 366) that the frequent depiction of marine life in the mosaics and frescoes of Roman Africa served an apotropaic function by invoking the fertility of the sea against misfortune and the evil eye. Perhaps Apuleius' accusers thought that he was using rare and expensive fish in ritual magic to thwart their efforts against him. 

I have been reading James Davidson's 1997 Courtesans and Fishcakes  over the past week. Davidson offers a possible answer to the odd accusation made by Apuleius's opponents that he sought strange fish for magical purposes (p. 9): In a later period there is evidence that the influence exercised by fish in the process of seduction was thought to reveal some occult power. Apuleius, author of the Golden Ass , had to defend himself from a charge of casting a love-spell over his rich and aged wife with the magical assistance of fish purchased in the market. There is little evidence for this supernatural connection in the classical period, although because of her triple-sounding name, the red-mullet, or trigle , was associated with the triple-faced patron of witches and guardian of road junctions, Hecate.

In the past, we have examined literary characters and their role in the evolution of the folkloric witch. Today, we consider an author whose work expanded the tradition, but also left him vulnerable to a charge of being a witch himself: Apuleius. Apuleius’ best-known literary work is his version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, contained in his novel Metamorphoses (notably retold by C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman as Till We Have Faces ). However, Apuleius’ Apologia –delivered at his trial for bewitching a North African widow into marrying him—has also come down to us. It is this unusual document that we will be discussing today. Those familiar with Renaissance witch trials will immediately notice several common threads in Apuleius’ defense. Witchcraft, as an invisible crime, was notoriously tricky for prosecutors to handle when it came to gathering evidence. Typically, a conviction required a confession on the part of the accused (even if forced) as only circumstantial evidence c...

The Emperor Nero (r. 54-68 A.D.) extinguished his share of intellectual luminaries. Lucan and Seneca went down over a failed assassination attempt. Leaders of The Way, Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul, were killed as scapegoats for the fire that leveled a third of the city of Rome. While Lucan’s books were best-sellers, insuring the Pharsalia’s survival,* the early Christian communities (as they came to be known) began systematically compiling definitive accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, adding them to the corpus of Saul/Paul’s letters and Acts . In one of these accounts, the Gospel According to Matthew , there is material relevant to our discussion. Matthew ’s account of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth reminds us why the Romans were swift to ban magic, divination, and foreign sects. In Matthew we have the account of Magi honoring Jesus as “King of the Jews.” This act of political prognostication prompted Herod the Great, client-king of Rome, to retaliate by killing the young ...

The Augustan authors (Horace, Vergil, and Ovid) offered a range of literary witches, both fair and foul, that suited the needs of Rome’s first emperor. As the Julio-Claudian Dynasty quickly descended into tyranny and madness, the literary witch followed. Nero’s taste-maker, Lucan, provides us with a witch that would make his forerunner Maecenas proud. In contrast to the great Maecenas, however, Lucan was not interested in producing Imperial propaganda. His epic, Pharsalia , and its witch, Erichtho,* are bitter indictments of the regime: the opening salvo of a failed assassination plot which cost Lucan and his famous uncle, Seneca, their lives.** Lucan’s Pharsalia has posed an interpretive problem since its publication.*** As befitting a poem about civil war (the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey), the language is tortured and often counter-intuitive. It fixates on the mangled bodies of the soldiers that mirror Rome’s mangled body politic. Lucan frequently interrupts the actio...

The Julio-Claudian dynasty reigned in the Hellenistic style as “Sons of God” and “Saviors,” bringing order to the chaos of the Mediterranean world. As a part of that order, the Julio-Claudians suppressed destabilizing forces such as magic and divination. During the reign of Tiberius, and particularly under his successors, Gaius Caligula and Claudius, a sect within Second Temple Judaism began challenging the official line. Leaders of The Way, such as Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul, defiantly claimed that the true “Son of God” and “Savior” was an obscure backwater preacher by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been executed for political agitation. As one proof of their claim, Peter and Paul didn’t outlaw witchcraft; they declared war on it. Accounts of powerful confrontations between Peter and Paul and ancient practitioners of magic abound in the earliest organized account of The Way, Acts . It is significant that Acts does not show Peter and Paul forbidding magic so much as annih...

The Metamorphoses was far from Ovid’s only literary creation. True to form, the poet explored many innovative ways of dealing with topics both classical and contemporary. One of his most interesting compositions, the Heroides , predates Metamorphoses and gives an unprecedented voice to female characters. The Heroides are a series of fictional letters written by the women of classical literature to their mythical (and often misguided) lovers.* For the purposes of our discussion, it is interesting that Ovid includes Dido (Letter VII) and Medea (Letter XII). Letter VII is an impassioned plea from Dido to the departing Aeneas not to leave her. While any hint of a malefic death ritual is absent from the letter, Dido does threaten to commit suicide and, in an interesting twist, asserts that she is pregnant with Aeneas’ child. Killing a child to spite a leaving lover is traditionally Medea’s claim to fame. In Medea’s letter, while she is more than willing to taunt Jason with all her ...

Rome’s first recorded witch hunt, the repression of the Cult of Bacchus, was long past by the time Ovid sat down to pen his epic Metamorphoses .* Thousands had reportedly died for crimes including “secret nocturnal rites,” “private initiations, combining men and women,” orgies, forgery, and murder.** This description fits in nicely with Renaissance descriptions of the Witches’ Sabbath, which should clue us in to the long shadow Rome casts on the European imagination.*** It should come as no surprise, then, that Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides us with an account of a particularly “witchy”° Wicked Witch, in the by-now-familiar character of Medea. Medea, as she appears in the Metamorphoses , is animated by a sense of romantic “frenzy” comparable to Vergil’s Dido. This is not the teenage passion of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Medea, but a violent emotional imbalance that serves as the driving force behind the witch’s maleficium . While her motive for helping Jason and his father may begin w...

Ovid was a poet equal in skill and creativity to Vergil, but without his political acumen. His predator’s handbook, The Art of Love , and a dalliance with Augustus’ daughter eventually landed him in exile. Nevertheless, Ovid’s work survived, and with it, engaging new ways of portraying familiar “witches.” In this article, we will begin by examining two of the “witches” of his experimental epic Metamorphoses : Circe and the Sibyl of Cumae. Metamorphoses is unusual as an epic in that it contains neither a central character nor a central plot. Instead, Ovid drew on the Hellenistic tradition of collecting myths and trying to put them into rough chronological order to create his own mythological history of the world; its primary theme is the ubiquity of Change, metamorphosis .* This means that our familiar “witches” are back but with a distinctly Ovidian touch. Here, witches become purveyors of change.** In the first place is the Odyssey ’s Circe. Given that Circe is named by Hes...

Dido isn’t the only character in Vergil’s Aeneid who resorts to necromancy when she hits the end of her rope. Aeneas himself has recourse to that bastion of Roman state religion, the Sibyl of Cumae, when he loses his way. Having disgraced himself by abandoning Dido and his famous “arms,” Aeneas seeks to regain his honor by an act of filial piety in seeking advice from his father. The only problem is that old daddy is quite dead. In order to enter the underworld and consult with his progenitor, he must have recourse to the Roman oracle known as the Sibyl. The Sibyl is a medium who can channel Apollo, but the very violence of her fits and the windiness of her dwelling make it difficult to understand her instructions. Vergil plays the creepy factor of this scene at full force: But the Sibyl … storms with a wild fury through her cave. And the more she tries to pitch the great god off her breast, the more his bridle exhausts her raving lips, overwhelming her untamed heart, bending ...

The Hellenistic kingdoms bound the Mediterranean world together more closely than at any time since the Bronze Age. Rome eventually absorbed these kingdoms into its own empire and added new areas such as Gaul and Briton. As travel and communication became easier than ever before, a new koine emerged: not merely a common Greek language, but a set of common practices and beliefs as well. Magic and witches were not immune from this mass Mediterranean syncretization. The Greeks of the classical age had already begun to work out an organized system of magical practices and practitioners.* The Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire added to this system, with the Romans formally outlawing certain magical practices.** The literary tradition followed these trends, with Apollonius of Rhodes’ Medea serving as a template for later Greek and especially Roman writers.*** Keeping a watchful, if friendly, eye over the first of the new cohort of Roman writers was Augustus Caesar’s personal taste-m...

The vast wealth and intercultural riches of the Hellenistic kingdoms that sprang up from the conquests of Alexander the Great created an artistic explosion across the Mediterranean world. Apollonius of Rhodes, as part of that creative ferment, sought to revive the writing of epic poetry in his four-book Argonautica . In the process, he infused epic with the emergent “genres” of idyll and novel. The result is an epic that revolves around a love story. At the heart of that love story is Medea: teenage witch.* Apollonius inherited the character of Medea from Euripides and plays her witchy credentials to full effect. Medea is made to be Circe’s niece, establishing a family coven right out of the Salem courtroom.** Her coming inspires terror in rural peasants akin to Artemis the night hunter.*** She is a bane to her own family, killing even her brother when he gets in her way.° Medea’s rage is terrifying and full of malicious intent.°° She works her will not only with pharmaka , but...

As we saw in our discussion of Homer’s Circe, the gods of the ancient Mediterranean world practiced magic with wand, cup, and herb.* We have also seen that sons and daughters of the gods, like Machaon, Podilares, and Helen, could employ pharmaka in medicine and hospitality. While each of the figures we have studied so far match aspects of the witches of European folklore, and Circe clearly violates Exodus’ prohibition against necromancy, we have yet to see all these characteristics come together in one person. Today’s subject, Medea, may be the one who takes the title of “First Wicked Witch of the West.”** There are references to Medea in Hesiod’s Theogony , but the first authoritative version we have of her tale is found in Euripides’ play, Medea , performed at Athens in 431 B.C.*** As Euripides tells the tale, Medea had the god Helios as her grandfather.° While this makes her god-blooded, it also places Medea firmly in the mortal realm, even more so than Helen of Troy. Any pow...

After considering users of potent herbs, or pharmaka , in previous posts, we turn to a woman whose uses of such drugs are undoubtedly baleful: the bewitching Circe. Indeed, Circe may be the first figure in our study that fits the image of a fairytale witch.* She is a “she,” brews baleful potions that transform men into beasts, and knows the right rituals to commune with the dead. Homer’s world, however, is not a fairytale, and this image of a witch comes with a twist. The hero Odysseus describes his confrontation with the magic-working goddess Circe in Books 10-12 of Homer’s Odyssey . The hero relates how his men fell into her malefic trap: Within the forest glades they found the house of Circe … round about it were mountain wolves and lions, whom Circe herself had bewitched; for she gave them evil drugs … within they heard Circe singing with sweet voice, as she went to and fro before a great imperishable web … She brought them in … and made for them a potion … but in the food ...

In our last post, we examined the close link between medicine and magic evinced by Homer’s healers in the Iliad . This week, we turn to another Homeric adept in the art of pharmaka , one step closer to the ideal European “witch” Judge Hathorne had in mind at Salem: Helen of Troy. By 1692, Helen of Troy’s name had already entered the pop-canon of European witch-lore with Christopher Marlowe’s play Faust .* Marlowe specifically plays on the idea of Helen’s irresistible sexuality as a temptation of the Devil. While Homer knew nothing of the Devil, he does portray Helen’s beauty as supernaturally baleful. The Trojans are so enraptured by her that they refuse to release her, against the advice of the elders, even though it spells doom for their city. These elders see Helen clearly:   Small blame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should for such a woman long suffer woes; she is dreadfully like immortal goddesses to look on. But even so, though she is like them, let her g...