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, written mostly in ancient Greek (but also in Old Coptic, Demotic, etc.), which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward. 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.
History
Production
The corpus of the PGM were not based on an ancient archive, but rather are a modern collection that has been added to over time. The unclear circumstances of each text's production, over a span of centuries, have therefore occasioned some debate. Hans Dieter Betz, the English translator of the PGM, claims that the texts form a fraction of the "magical books" that must have existed in antiquity, and considers them a form of "underground literature" subject to book-burnings at the time. He cites book-burning in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19:19), Augustus' orders to burn magical books according to Suetonius (Suet. Aug. 31.1), and what he terms "numerous" early Christian book-burnings.
David Frankfurter, on the other hand, considers these texts productions of "innovative members of the Egyptian priesthood during the third-/fourth-century decline of the Egyptian temple infrastructure," and lends them considerably less "underground" status than Betz. Alan F. Segal goes further, using the PGM to question the dichotomy of magic and religion in scholarship on the Hellenistic world. He uses the existence of hymns in the PGM to suggest that the people who wrote them in such 'magical' texts saw no distinction between such material and the more overtly magical content in the same documents. Just how "underground" the practitioners that produced these texts were therefore remains contested, though Betz points to the admonitions to secrecy about the details of certain practices in certain of the papyri.
Discovery
The first papyri in the series appeared on the art market in Egypt in the early 19th century. Another papyrus (PGM III) was acquired by the diplomat Jean-François Mimaut (1774–1837) and ended up in the French Bibliothèque Nationale. 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, Egypt. Anastasi acquired a great number of other papyri and antiquities as well. The "Thebes Cache" also contained the Stockholm papyrus, and Leyden papyrus X which contains alchemical texts.
A similar individual, known as he who appeared in Thebes, Prince Khamwas, was the fourth son of King Ramses II and high priest of Ptah in Memphis, Egypt. According to Miriam Lichtheim:
Publication
PGM XII and XIII were the first to be published, appearing in 1843 in Greek and in a Latin translation in 1885. However, according to Betz 1992, the first scholarly publication has been credited to the British scholar Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, who published for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, one PGM V, translated into English with commentary in 1853.