The Paris magical codex in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris
In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is an early fourth century papyrus codex (ms. supplement grec 574) which contains a variety of texts, spells, hymns, etc. It is 36 folios in length – large for a papyrus, and contains 3274 lines.
The manuscript was acquired in Egypt by the collector Giovanni Anastasi (# 1073 in his collection) and bought at auction in Paris by the BNF in 1857. It probably comes from Thebes (=Luxor). Apparently Anastasi was told that his papyri were found in a grave there, perhaps sometime around 1825, although we cannot be sure of this. Anastasi certainly sold a larger collection of papyri to the Dutch archaeologist C. J. C. Reuvens, the founder and first director of the Oudheidkundig Museum in Leiden, sometime after 1825.1
The codex seems to be the working handbook for an Egyptian magician, compiled from many sources. It contains more than 50 documents, doubtless acquired from various sources, and is the single most comprehensive handbook of magic known from the ancient world. The documents contained in it must all be 4th century or earlier — possibly much earlier – and each document has its own history prior to being copied into the codex.
The text was printed by Karl Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae, vol. 1, Leipzig, 1928, rev. 1973, as item IV (hence PGM IV). Various online versions of this seem to exist. An English translation was made by H.-D.Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in translation, 1986. There is an enormous secondary literature.
The best known of these texts is on lines 475- 834, the so-called Mithras liturgy, a series of prayers which begins by invoking Sol Mithras and may — or may not — have some connection to the mysteries of Mithras.
Other parts show Jewish influence, and one spell, an exorcism ending with the words — Come out of NN – on line 3019, contains the words:
I adjure you by the God of the Hebrews, Jesus, Jaba, Jae, Abraoth, Aia, Thoth, Ele, …. 2
and ends with Ptah, which shows how magicians were willing to tap into supposed names of power in just the way recorded in Acts. It also contains a string of the seven vowels of the Greek alphabet (a, e, h, i, o, u, w) which Eusebius tells us in the Praeparatio Evangelica 11.6.36 was treated by the pagans as a name of power equivalent to the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. Its presence in the spell shows that he was right. The same series are also used in the Mithras liturgy.
1 Pieter Willem van der Horst, Jews and Christians in their Graeco-Roman context, p. 269. Here.
2. A. Deismann, Light from the ancient East, pp.258-260 prints the full text of a two leaf spell with English translation, online here.
