The
paper I offer for discussion here is to form part of the introduction to a
collective volume incorporating the results of a research-programme at the
University of Zaragoza, directed by Francisco Marco Simón, whose primary aim
was to map the archaeology of magical practice in the western (Latin-speaking)
Roman Empire. We aimed to collect all relevant archaeological data onto a data-base,
part of whose purpose was to construct digitalised distribution-maps of
different types of material. These data have also provided much of the
empirical evidence required for the volume, which is devoted to the contexts of
magical practice in the western Empire, temporal, topographic, physical,
social. A subsidiary topic is the techniques used to enhance the authority of
specifically literate magical texts. An earlier volume resulting from a
conference held in Rome in November 2010, entitled Contesti magici/Contextos Mágicos, was a first, relatively
informal, attempt at tackling some of the issues involved.[1]
Such an aim immediately raises a series of questions,
of definition, scope and representativity, that we discuss in the introduction.
What do we mean by magical activity (or, as the Spanish title has it, ‘magico-religious’
activity)? Can we define it coherently? In view of the debates of the 1960s and
70s on understanding alien belief-systems, can historians properly use the term
‘magic’ at all? What it is the price paid for such use? Can it be minimised and
thereby made acceptable? Is it merely sleight of hand to concentrate on
archaeological evidence, even if ‘archaeological’ here is used in a wide sense
to include epigraphic, iconographic and even papyrological evidence? Can such material
be meaningfully interpreted if literary evidence is largely excluded? What is
the nature of that literary evidence? Its agendas? Does it matter, how much
does it matter, if the archaeological evidence, by its very nature, can tell us
nothing about many familiar types of magical practice, especially the practice
of the very numerous, low-level specialists such as rhizotomoi/ herbarii, low-level manteis/harioli and their skills in divination,
and those specialists, such as astrologers, that fell into the Roman category
of ‘magicians’ but not ours?
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