Magical papyri

The Greek Magical Papyri (Latin Papyri Graecae Magicae, abbreviated PGM) is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 18th century onwards. One of the best known of these texts is the Mithras Liturgy.

The texts were published in a series, and individual texts are referenced using the abbreviation PGM plus the volume and item number. Each volume contains a number of spells and rituals. Further discoveries of similar texts from elsewhere have been allocated PGM numbers for convenience.

The first papyri in the series appeared on the art market in Egypt in the early 19th century. The major portion of the collection is the so-called Anastasi collection. About half a dozen of the papyri were purchased in about 1827 by a man calling himself Jean d'Anastasi, who may have been Armenian, and was a diplomatic representative at the Khedivial court in Alexandria. He asserted that he obtained them at Thebes (modern Luxor), and he sold them to various major European collections including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. H. D. Betz who edited a translation of the collection states that these pieces probably came from the library of an ancient scholar and collector of late antiquity based in Thebes. Anastasi acquired a great number of other papyri and antiquities as well. The "Thebes Cache" also contained the and Leyden papyrus X containing alchemical texts. Another papyrus (PGM III) was acquired by Jean Francois Mimaut and ended up in the French Bibliothèque Nationale.

PGM XII and XIII were the first to be published, appearing in 1843 in Greek and in a Latin translation in 1885.

In the early twentieth century Karl Preisendanz collected the texts and published them in two volumes in 1928 and 1931. A projected third volume, containing new texts and indices, reached the stage of galley proofs dated "Pentecost 1941", but the type was destroyed during the bombing of Leipzig in the Second World War. Photocopies of the proofs circulated among scholars. A revised and expanded edition of the texts was published in 1973-4 in two volumes. Volume 1 was a corrected version of the first edition volume 1, but volume 2 was entirely revised and the papyri originally planned for vol. III were included. The indexes were omitted, however. The PGM can now be searched in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database and various concordances and dictionaries have been published. The most recent addition was the book Abrasax, published by Nephilim Press in 2012.

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