Sean Coughlin presents at the conference “Medical Knowledge and its 'Sitz im Leben': Body and Horror in Antiquity” organized by Georgios Kazantzidis and Chiara Thumiger at Cluster of Excellence ROOTS, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel.

The talk included a re-enactment of blood magic spell from the Magical Greek Papyri. More on the spell here.

Abstract

The collection known as the Magical Greek Papyri contains many recipes for things like inks, ointments and charms that seem as if they were intended to occasion feelings of horror and revulsion. Not only the ingredients these recipes contain—e.g. from human corpses, from animals by vivisection, from human and animal excrement—, but also the way they are ritually used and the harmful and often violent goals they serve, are horrifying; and, like the later and perhaps more familiar unguents associated with early modern witchcraft, these ingredients, practices and aims seem to encode simultaneously for a variety of social and individual fears and desires. What I want to do in this talk is to take one such horrifying recipe as an example and present it in detail: first, I explore the ingredients, contextualizing them with reference to how they appear in magical and medical texts of the same period; second, I will invite conference members to perform the recipe together, in order to become acquainted through scent, touch and sight with those horrifying properties of the ingredients that exist off the page. The precise recipe will be revealed at the presentation.