Panagiota Sarischouli is invited by Prof. Jean-Luc Fournet, Chair of Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology.
Abstract
Although the phenomenon of voces magicae is most often associated with Roman and Late Antique Egypt, the use of foreign words or strange-sounding sequences in contexts involving communication with the divine has much earlier origins and appears across a wide range of ancient cultures. Such practices can be traced to Assyrian and Egyptian magic as early as the2nd millennium BCE and continued into Byzantine, Jewish, and Arabic magical traditions. This phenomenon can be interpreted as reflecting the preservation, transmission, and transformation of esoteric knowledge within private rituals. This paper investigates the role of magical words-often pronounceable yet unintelligible-alongside sequences of vowels and consonants in the Graeco-Egyptian magical tradition. It explores how these words, together with their associated imagery, were perceived both visually and aurally, tracing the evolution of voces formations from their earliest forms to later iterations, while also examining the factors contributing to their decline in Late Antiquity.
