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Coptic Magic?

alexis

19:39 / 05.11.06

Hi everybody,

Wondering if anybody here knows of any magic unique to Egyptian copts. I only know of them from Naguib Mahfouz's 'Miramar' and the excellent Lawrence Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet'. In the latter, they're written as deeply mystical, and I know they have a lot of animistic imagery in their icons, but is there a hard and fast magical tradition among them? This is research for a potential novel, but in the non-fiction books I've read, they seem pretty orthodox.

alphito

22:10 / 19.11.06

a coptic magician i am not, but picked this up a couple of days ago, possibly due to having seen this thread title:

ancient christian magic: coptic texts of ritual power

so far i've only flipped through it and read the introduction but it seems pleasingly meaty, and it's a nice addition to any grouping of folk-magic stuff. if you've got it on your desk already, apologies for bringing up the obvious!

ghadis

23:26 / 19.11.06

A very good place to start looking into this is the Greek Magical Papyri mostly translated by H.D.Betz. A collection of magical texts dating from 100bc - 400ad ish. Mostly Greco-Roman with a lot of Egyptian and some emerging Coptic Christian and Gnostic flavors. Its a great example of the syncretic magic of the time.

It also has a good translation of an invocation that, through Crowley, later became known as Liber Samekh, or Invocation of the Bornless One (or Headless One), which is a fantastic invocation (for protection) of Set.

ghadis

23:31 / 19.11.06

The Leyden Papyrus also has texts dating from this period.