Magic in the ancient Greco-Roman and ancient Jewish worlds

Abstract

In Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, Radcliffe Edmonds provides us with a new etic framework for understanding ancient magic, but one steeped in the emic perspectives of the actual practitioners and clients as preserved in the literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. In this paper I examine Edmonds’s findings in relation to the ancient Jewish magical and mystical traditions found mainly in Sefer HaRazim, “The Book of the Mysteries,” a late-antique ritual handbook written in Hebrew.