EDUARDO MÁLLEA

1. Any reconstruction of the Theban Magical Library must remain tentative on account of an irreparable lack of information about its archaeological context.

2. The study of the Theban Magical Library has been hindered by a disciplinary division of the bilingual material on ethno-linguistic grounds.

3. The question about the origins of ritual techniques, religious im-ages, idiomatic expressions and text passages is far from settled.

In the light of the above given three observations, the present line of approach can be described in the following terms. First, as the core material for study serve two manuscripts that form a subgroup within the library, both of which can be assigned with certainty to the Theban Magical Library. In this way, problems about the exact make-up of the library can be avoided. These manuscripts are P. London-Leiden (PDM xiv and PGM XIV) and P. Leiden I384 verso (PGM XII and PDM xii).

They can be considered a unity, not only because the Demotic hand is identical, but also because fragments of the Leiden part of P. London-Leiden were discovered within the folded P. London-Leiden I 384 during their first examination in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden in 1829 and 1830.⁶¹ Their Theban provenance is certain since, accord-ing to sparse information provided by Anastasi, the Leiden part of P. London-Leiden was acquired in Luxor, which agrees with the dialect of the Egyptian sections. Because both manuscripts contain substantial parts in Demotic and Greek, and make use of Demotic, hieratic, Old-Coptic and Greek script, the two manuscripts together contain all

lan-61 For a more detailed account of these and the following arguments, see, chapter2.

guages and scripts that are represented in the complete Theban Magi-cal Library. As such, an investigation of the two manuscripts could serve as a case study, the conclusions of which might possibly hold as well for the entire library.

It goes without saying that the present study does not allow for any disciplinary division of the material: the extant manuscripts themselves set the limits for, and give direction to, the investigation. Demotic, Greek as well as Old Coptic spells are included in the research and the diversity of scripts will be fully taken into account. In fact, the variation in language and script is a first indicator of the social and cultural context of production and use of the two manuscripts, since the Demotic and hieratic scripts were only in use among Egyptian priests in the Roman period.⁶²This means that the authors, editors and readers of the manuscripts must have gone through a priestly scribal training and, secondly, that the two extant manuscripts must derive somehow or other from an Egyptian temple milieu. If a native temple context cannot be proven for the phases of storage and burial of the manuscripts, it must nonetheless hold for the phases of composition, compilation and editing of the spells.

This conclusion carries important consequences for the methodol-ogy of the present investigation. Since this study is primarily about the identity of the producers and users of the magical spells, I give pref-erence to an Egyptian reading attitude; this is to say that I attempt to reconstruct the reading experience of the Egyptian owner(s) of the two extant manuscripts in the course of my analyses. This does not imply that I believe that the magical spells, the Greek ones in particular, were by necessity unknown outside native priestly circles; it means that the extant versions of the spells functioned within a native temple context and will be studied as such. At this point it is instructive to quote Stephen Emmel, who recently proposed a similar approach for the study of the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of religious texts translated from Greek into Coptic, which was stored in a large jar and buried around 400 CE in the hills of Nag Hammadi.⁶³

62 W.J. Tait, ‘Demotic Literature and Egyptian Society’, in: Johnson (ed.), Life in a Multi-Cultural Society,303–310.

63 For a general introduction to the content and discovery of this collection, see, James M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English (3^rded.; Leiden1988) 1–26.

Note that the Nag Hammadi Library is an intriguing parallel to the Theban Magical Library, because both were buried around the same period in roughly the same region.

See also Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes,170ff.

The attraction of what I am calling a ‘Coptic reading’ of the Nag Ham-madi Codices is that the codices are our primary data, and presumably they were read by someone—or at least they were laboriously created for that purpose. Hence such a ‘Coptic reading’ takes us (in theory) the shortest distance into the minefield of the texts’ complex history of trans-mission, and therefore it should provide us with more certain—albeit quite different—results than other readings. It is, in a sense, the first task of investigation that such artefacts call for, now that the manuscripts have been fully conserved and the texts published.⁶⁴

Central to this undertaking is to reconstruct the valorisation of the dif-ferent languages, scripts and religious images on the part of a possi-ble Egyptian user. I assume that the composers and compilers of the spells made use only of those scripts, languages, divine names and tex-tual formats that they considered to be efficacious in a magical rit-ual. This implies for example that I regard variation in languages and scripts within a single spell as meant to be meaningful to the ritual and thus reflecting a particular perspective on ritual techniques and the workings of nature. Moreover, I believe that only those marketing tech-niques, such as fictions about authors and miraculous discoveries, could survive several phases of redaction that were in line with the readers and editors’ ideas about magicians and ritual power. A close reading of the spells along these lines will thus provide insight in the cultural and social identities of the producers and users of the magical spells.

64 Stephen Emmel, ‘Religious Tradition, Textual Transmission, and the Nag Ham-madi Codices’, in: John D. Turner and Anne McGuire (eds.), The Nag HamHam-madi Library after Fifty Years. Proceedings of the1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration (Nag Ham-madi and Manichaean Studies44; Leiden 1997) 34–43, 42f.

PRESENTATION OF THE SOURCES P. LEIDEN I 384 AND P. LONDON-LEIDEN