Within Reason - #126 Was Jesus an Ancient Magician? - Religion for Breakfast

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Exclusive NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/withinreason. Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee.Andrew Mark Henry is a scholar of religious studies. His research focus is early Christianity and late Roman religion. He earned his PhD at Boston University.His YouTube channel is "Religion for Breakfast", find it here.Timestamps:0:00 - Was Jesus a Magician?3:35 - The Origins of ‘Magic’10:02 - Celsus, Christianity’s Earliest Critic16:35 - The Wise Magi19:59 - Did Jesus Use a Wand?30:22 - Curses, Rituals, and Magical Formulas40:43 - What Kind of “Magus” Was Jesus?43:52 - Was Jesus a Freelance Ritual Expert?48:34 - Charisma and the Origin of Exorcism53:03 - Grimoires: The Magic of the Written Word01:08:40 - The Religion Department

You made a video a few years ago now, asking whether Jesus was a magician. An interesting title, because it sort of conjures up images, if you will, of Jesus walking around with a sort of wizard hat on acting like David Blaine, doing a bit of sleight of hand kind of magic. But I don't think that's the kind of magic that scholars have in mind when they're talking about the ancient world. What is the kind of magic that we're talking about in that time period? I mean, it's a great question because when we think of magic in English, it conjures, to use that term again, the folklore, pop culture idea of a magician, so the Harry Potter's, the Gandalf's. It also brings up ideas of stage performance like David Blaine, but also there's like, we use it as a term to describe a category of ritual performance. And there's, you know, contemporary Wiccans today, contemporary pagans and witches that practice what we would call magic. And when we use terms like, like that, we think of these smaller scale rituals that might include various, you know, potions or ritual paraphernalia like magic wands. So we kind of have these three valences of magic, the folklore, the stage performance, and then a category of ritual. And when I was asking

that question, you know, was Jesus a magician, we kind of have to grapple with, with all three of those ideas. And this came up controversially in the late 70s with the ancient historian Morton Smith, who basically published a book called Jesus the Magician, and he argues exactly that. Like, Jesus, for all intents and purposes, was a magician. The problem with the book is he doesn't quite grapple with what he means by a magician, but what I really appreciate what Morton Smith did back in the late 70s was he challenged our categories of miracle versus magic. Because when we think of miracle, we kind of have a sense of what that means,

doing these wondrous feats of supernatural power, raising the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine. But also, magic are wondrous feats that are supernatural and unexplainable. And when I talk about magic in the ancient world, people try to trot out definitions like, oh, miracles are this, and they provide a definition. And magic is this, and they provide a definition. But I can always find examples in ancient literature that kind of explodes both of those categories, things that we would call, you know, miracles look kind of magical and things that are magical look miraculous. And the example that comes up in the Gospels are what I call the spit miracles or the saliva miracles. There are two miracles in the Gospels

where Jesus uses spit to effectuate the miracle. There's one in the gospel of John where he puts saliva onto a blind man's eyes to make him see. And then also in the gospel of Mark, he puts, I think it's mixing mud and spit and puts it on the guy's eyes and it half heals him. And he's Oh, I still, I see a little bit, but people are walking around. They look kind of like trees, and then Jesus does it again, and he's completely healed. And the interesting thing is, so the interesting thing is that Jesus is using a substance to work the miracle. Usually, he doesn't use substances. He says a powerful phrase like peace be still, or he heals by touching.

So this is an example of some sort of substance being used, and that's usually the first definition that people try to bring out when they're trying to define magic. like, oh, well, magic requires materiality, like potions or what have you. And I'm like, well, you know, Jesus has at least one example where he does use this, so can we call him a magician? Now, the term magician is interesting, right? Because, of course, whenever we're dealing with ancient literature and ancient ideas, they're not like speaking and writing in modern English, right? And so when we hear words like magic or magician or indeed sorcerer or anything,

like that. What kind of words do we tend to be talking about in like the New Testament and Greek and maybe some other sources too? Yeah. This is a really good question because when we say magic in English, it is derived directly from the Greek, but when we go back to the Greek source of the term, it doesn't have that exact equivalence to our modern day word magic. So magic is derived from the Greek word Magia, or Magaea, which itself comes from the Persian. And it refers to the practices of the magi, the magoy, the arts and practices of the magi. And this refers to priestly religious functionaries in ancient Persia. And it made its way into Greek referring to all sorts of things. So some early Greek authors like Herodotus did try to use the word Magoy

kind of anthropologically or ethnographically. They're like, oh, this is a term used for Persian priests and they do priestly things like divine the will of the gods. They perform sacrifices. Sometimes they do more uncanny things like dream divination, but nothing that would be like outside the realm of like the usual functions of a priest in antiquity. But around the exact same time that Herodotus was writing these things, other Greek writers were starting to use the word Magoi or Magus in kind of a pejorative sense of spooky, illegitimate, why. wonderworkers. I think Heraclitus, for example, uses the term in reference to, like, the Bacic mysteries or the mysteries of Dionysus, where they're kind of, kind of frenzied or, you know,

enthused, mantic kind of people who are called Magoy. And in that sense, it's kind of used as a term of, you know, othering, these people do weird stuff over there. I don't do weird stuff here. So this term Magia pretty quickly has connotations of spooky otherness, illegitimate ritual, ambiguous ritual that we don't really know how to define or we don't, we don't write, we don't like outright. And so that's how it gets received into the Roman period. So by the time, you know, Jesus is walking around, nobody's calling themselves amygus in a sense of, I'm proud to be amegas. You know, when you think of the job title of Harry Potter or Gandalf, they're called wizards, and that's, and it's not a bad thing. It's their job title, their in-universe job title, as it were. But nobody's going to call themselves, you know, Simon Magus is called Simon the Magus. He's this figure in the Book of Acts. And he's not a good figure. He tries to buy his way into supernatural power to, you know, give the Holy Spirit to people by laying on hands. But he's not called Simon the Magus because he wants to be a Magus. It's because people on the outside are like, oh, he's doing bad stuff. We're going to call him Simon Magus. So this is where I take it up with Morton Smith, where he was using this term magician,

he's alighting our English sense of the term, and with the ancient sense of the term, even though the ancient term was a term of accusation. You know, you call someone you don't like a megas because they're doing spooky things called Magia, which is illegitimate ritual that we don't like. So in that sense, I would say Jesus was not a magus, but what? he was doing is ambiguously could be as ambiguous as he's doing these powerful feats that we're not sure how he's doing it or you could there's instances in the gospels where people are actually afraid of what he's doing like he exercises the legion of demons in mark chapter five and the audience

is kind of scared like oh man so like the audience could read the same text and see him doing these these feats of of supernatural power and interpret them either morally like oh these are miracles or immorally, oh, this stuff is the work of demons. I'm going to call this Magia. And this is where I make the argument that miracle and magic as categories of ritual are subjective. They are in the eyes of the beholder. If you like what the guy's doing, and if you think he's getting the power through God or angels or something good, oh, we're going to call it miracles. But if he's doing the power through the power of demons, oh, we're going to call it magic. And we see hints of this with the so-called beelizable accusation, where in the Gospel of Mark,

Jesus, you know, exercises demons, and then his opponents are like, oh, well, you're exercising by the power of Beelzebel, who's this demonic figure. So even his own critics were like, oh, even an exorcism, which we might think of as a good thing, getting demons out of somebody, you could be doing it through illegitimate means. And New Testament scholars, like Giovanni Bazana at Harvard Divinity School, have made arguments that this might be one of the kernels of the Gospels that were pretty confident are historical. that Jesus might have been positioning himself as an exorcist because this story would be both his opponents and his proponents viewed him as an exorcist, but his opponents called him, you know, infused with the power of Beelzebel.

And that because this is an accusation being hurled at him, this might, this accusation might actually date back to his lifetime as the historical Jesus being accused of being a demon worker. So this is what I mean by a category of ambiguous or illegitimate ritual, because you can look at the exact same ritual and exorcism and put it into two moral buckets, miracle or magic. And I would say there's no, there's no, you know, anthropological sense where we can define miracle vis-a-vis magic. They're both in this broad anthropological category of thaumaturgy or thaumaturgical performance, which is the technical term of one-day. working. And sometimes that wonderworking could be clocked as evil and sometimes it can be clocked as good. But as the anthropologist, as the archaeologist, as the historian, we can't look at that and be like, oh, this is magic, this is miracle. It's all thaumaturgical performance and the opponents of Jesus would move it into the illegitimate bucket, thereby calling it Magia.

There's a lot to unpack there. One important thing to point out is that, of course, when we ask sort of, you know, was Jesus a miracle, a magician, you and I aren't looking at this and thinking like, you know, we have to believe that Jesus actually performed these miraculous feats and how do we interpret, you know, was he acting by demons or was he not? When we say a magician, I mean, I don't think that Jesus was really performing miracles as he was walking around, but the thing we're interested in is not literally was he performing magic or was he performing miracles, but rather the stuff that he was accused of doing and said to have done these miraculous workings and healings and things, how were they interpreted not only by his

contemporaries, but also by sort of early writers who were reacting to what Jesus had to say. And so, you know, we're kind of looking at how Jesus was received. Of course, a Christian is going to look back and say, this is ridiculous. He wasn't a magician. He was a miracle worker. But as you said, it's not so much that there's a dispute about what Jesus was doing, but rather by what powers he was doing them. And I think the best example to draw this out is our earliest Christian critic, Celsus,

and his sort of, you know, battle across the decade with origin. So maybe you could tell us who Celsus was, who origin was, and what that can tell us about not disagreeing about what's happening, but just disagreeing about how it's being done. Yeah. Yeah, and just to back up, you're right. Like, we as historians as scholars of the New Testament, we're not making judgments on whether Jesus was actually performing miracles. You know, that's not not the question for a critical scholar of religion to be trying to tackle. We're reading these texts that are not uncomplicated eyewitnesses

of the life of Jesus. They are, you know, biographies of the life of Jesus that have a particular rhetorical goal in mind. But I would say that it's very plausible that Jesus would have positioned himself as some sort of faith healer because you see faith healers or exorcist today. You can go on YouTube right now and see Pentecostal ministers performing faith healings in front of their audience. So that is well within the realm of an ancient social role, where they position themselves as a ritual specialist casting out demons. And we as the critical anthropologist who is not saying demons exist or not, we're saying, oh, this person at least is participating in this discourse of demonological power where they're like, oh, I know how to control demons.

Let me show you. And I would put that in the realm of ritual studies, where they're doing ritual that we would call exorcism. And you're right, there's this Greek philosopher named Kelsus, or Selsus, who was writing in the late 100s, who apparently was really, really miffed by Christianity. He was scandalized by it, thought it was stupid or silly, and he wrote a giant rebuttal against Christianity. And we don't have that text. It doesn't survive in its whole, but it does survive in quotations from the early church theologian origin, who's Alexandria Christian philosopher and theologian who wrote this text against Kelsus, which was basically a line-by-line rebuttal of Kelsus. So we have huge quotations from Kelsus because origin quotes them.

And it seems that Kelsus hurled the accusation of Magia against Jesus. He straight up says Jesus went to Egypt and learned from the Egyptians. You know, it's kind of this exoticizing argument from the Greek mindset. Oh, if you want to learn anything spooky and sorcery type, like go to go to egypt so in jesus's flight to egypt according to the gospel of matthew he must have learned the ways of the egyptian uh magoi and learned how to do supernatural powers but he he doesn't dispute that the powers were real they he calza seems to take that for granted that jesus must have been doing some sort of powers but he attributes it to demons he attributes it to exotic training in egypt and he also makes arguments of like fraudulence and charlatanism so

is he does leave room for both it being fake but also power through the power of demons and origin is like well no he's he's helping people he's getting this power through god but i think the the against kelis argument where origin and kelis are going back and forth in this text is case and point where we have both kelis and origin are reading the same text they're reading the same thematurgical performances in the gospels and kelis clocks it as demonic and magia and origin clocks as miraculous and through the gifts of God and the Holy Spirit. So they're moving the, they're looking at the same text, looking at the same performances, and they're moving it into two different moral buckets, magia or miracle.

And we see that today as well when people say, oh, Jesus is a magician, they're trying to move it into like the spooky realm, oh, they must be doing something illegitimate or he must have been doing something illegitimate or different. And then the apologist saying, oh, no, he was doing good, miraculous powers that were not relying on those things that we think are magical that require potions and stuff. So it is kind of a battle over these subjective categories, even though I would say the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, theometurgical performances are in the eye of the beholder, and we'll get back to andrew in just a moment, but first, have you ever can apply, we can approach this topic more anthropologically, was, was Jesus positioning himself as a ritual specialist of some sort? We'll get back to Andrew in just a moment, but first, have you ever.

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you recommended this huge text, the guide to the study of ancient magic, I think, edited by David Frankfurter. And there's a chapter in there on early Christianity by what's his name Joseph Sanzo, Sanzo, that's right. And one thing he pointed out in this essay or this chapter that I found interesting was that in the birth narratives, you get this, at least in Matthews, you get this mention of these magi, right? People think of them as the wise men or the, or the magi from the east. And it's this word, right, magi, which as you say, comes to be a pejorative term. If you call someone a magi, it's kind of an insult or a mark of suspicion. But in Matthew's birth narrative, the magi are the protagonists of the story.

They correctly identify the position of Jesus. It seems like they're good people in the eyes of God. He sort of leads them there. He also shows up in a dream and warns them. And so he points out that at least at the time of the writing of that gospel, or at least of the birth narrative part of the gospel, that term didn't necessarily have that same pejorative connotation, right? Like as if it used to be something that just wasn't that bad. Yeah.

Yeah. And that would be an example of the term still being attempted to use in a more anthropological, ethnographic sense. So when Matthew, in the Gospel of Matthews says the Magoi from the east came and were able to find Jesus, I don't think there's any hint of the spooky illegitimate. There's exoticizing there. I think Matthew is positioning these. figures as purveyors of exotic knowledge who were able to see the truth, despite not being from Judea, but we don't see any hint of Magoi as purveyors of illegitimate ritual.

So this does, we do see this around the first century BC, the first century CE, the first century CE. Philo of Alexandria also talks about the Magoy as priestly philosophers who know that they can talk about the divine so it's not like 100% everybody was like oh if i hear magoy i'm thinking i'm thinking uh illegitimate sorcerer um but you know simon magus appears in the book of acts and these magui appear in the gospel of matthew and both of these texts were written within a half century of each other at least if not closer but writers for of both these texts can use that term either as a term of a pejorative term, Simon the Magus, that bad guy doing bad stuff, and the Magoy in the birth

narrative of Gospel Matthew owe those purveyors of exotic wisdom. So even into the Roman period, we do see a range of semantic meaning for this term. It's, I would say, pretty overwhelmingly a term of a pejorative term. I think even because the term Magia shows up in the book of Acts as well, and it's referring to illegitimate ritual. But, Again, I think people at that time still would have thought of it, oh, yeah, that's referring to Persian priests as well. So it has a range of semantic meanings. Some writers would try to use it more anthropologically, and some would use it as a term of accusation. I'm really interested in some of these sort of ancient indications that people were interpreting Jesus as a magician.

Of course, Orthodox Christianity, as we know it, would reject that label. But of course, they agree that he was performing these miracles. One of the most interesting cases of this that I learned about from your materials, yours and esoterica, Justin Sledge, as well, who you sort of collaborated with on this kind of topic, is there's this image from the catacomb of Giordani underneath Rome. And I'll have my wonderful editor put it on screen. Sorry for the extra work there, Alex. it's this image from it's like some kind of wall painting or something really it's quite simplistic and it depicts jesus raising lazarus from the dead which is a very sort of common scene to depicting christian art but he's holding this stick he's like pointing this stick at lazarus

and using that to raise him from the dead and it kind of looks like this wand-like instrument which there's no mention of in the gospel of john and yet somebody has decided to give him this stick in art And what might this tell us? Yeah, that's a good question. This motif shows up a lot in early Christian art, not just in catacomb frescoes. So in a lot of catacomb frescoes, Jesus is holding some sort of thin, wand-like stick, pointing toward Lazarus, oftentimes Lazarus, but sometimes like multiplying the loaves and fish. It shows up in sarcophagi carvings, Jesus holding a staff, like a short rod of some sort. But so this is sometimes trotted out as, oh, look at this.

This is examples of even people back then thought of Jesus as a magician. The real question, though, is this how magicians would have been portrayed in ancient art? These are devotional images of Jesus in a Christian catacomb on a Christian sarcophagus. So that alone should tell you they were not thinking of him as a magus because of that or a goase, which is another term for a sorcerer. So they're obviously not thinking of him like that because that's for Kelsus to say. He's the opponent to Jesus. These are devotional images. So the short answer is a magic wand is part of the toolkit of a wizard in our modern understanding, our pop culture understanding of a magician.

And that seems to derive from European folklore, maybe northern Europe, possibly even Norse folklore. But it doesn't seem to have been part of the toolkit of a magic work. in Greco-Roman mythology. We do have one very notable example in the Odyssey, where Circe is this sorceress figure who does have a rod. It uses the term robdos, which means just stick or rod. And when she turns Odysseus's men into pigs, she uses potions. It uses some sort of derivative of the word pharmacia, where we get the word pharmacy.

And then also she has a rob dose. The argument would be she's using the potions to turn them into pigs. not the wand itself. I think that's a little bit parsing maybe too much. It's part of her toolkit, but it's not something that shows up again and again as a trope. Medea is another famous sorcerer in Greek mythology. She doesn't have a wand. Stick-like ritual implements show up all the time in Greek and Roman ritual contexts.

Roman augurs had the litus, which was kind of a curved stick. That was more of like a symbol of power like a sceptor. Hermes had the Caducius, which was, you know, the entwined snakes around a rod, but he doesn't seem to use it magically. So the short answer is like, I think an ancient audience would have walked up and seen that catacomb fresco, their mind wouldn't have immediately went like, ah, sorcery, like Searcy. The argument put forth by the scholar Lee Jefferson is that it's actually a reference to Moses's staff. So the staff of Moses, where he strikes the rock with a staff. there's actually a fresco, a catacomb fresco where Jesus is on one side with a staff

pointing toward Lazarus's tomb and then on the other side is Moses striking the rock. So there's like parallelism in the actual catacomb painting where they're positioning Jesus as the new Moses or standing in this lineage with Moses. Then you can make the argument, well, is Moses being positioned as a magician? Moses actually does show up in like Greek magical papyri

as standing in some lineage of thaumaturgical power. The short answer is wands were not part of the toolkit of a magic worker in antiquity. The long answer is these images are ambiguous. And I think even if Kelsus looked at that fresco, he would be like, aha, look at that. It's just like Moses, who's in that magic book over there. So it would have been moving Jesus into one of those moral buckets again, though the artist who painted that catacomb fresco,

was not thinking Magia when they painted that. They might have been thinking, oh, the staff of Moses held by Jesus now. Interesting, I see. Okay. And so if that's not what people would be looking for to identify a magician, a sorcerer, like, what would they be looking for?

I mean, today, we would imagine, if we're not talking about pop magic, because today there are still magicians. There are people who practice magical practices with their sort of, grimoires and their books full of spells and you've got like wicker pagan types of people I don't really understand a lot about the way that they they function but it's got a lot to do with with magic and presumably that's not quite the same as it was in the ancient world maybe it was

but if we're not looking for a stick and a wand and whatnot like what would identify a magician in the ancient world outside of the odd sort of spit miracle so the short answer is magician was not a job title in antiquity you know magician was a Magus was a term of accusation. Nobody called themselves that. But when we look at rituals that we would call magical, like amulets or curse tablets, so in the Roman world, in the Greek world as well, if you wanted to curse someone, you would write a curse onto a piece of lead, and you would roll up that piece of lead and pierce it with a nail, and you would deposit it in a grave or throw it into a bonfire or bury it under an altar in a temple. If you were trying to curse a chariot

team. You really don't want the green team to win. You would curse the chariot team that bury it under the starting gate of the hippodrome. We would call that cursing. We would call it an amulet protection. We might lump it all into this category of magic. But what is the job title of someone who makes an amulet or a curse tablet or a magic gem? It's not magician. It's a scribe. It's a metal worker. It's a gem artisan. And their toolkit doesn't include a magic wand. It's a chisel and you know, trying to make their little magic gem. So my whole job as a historian of ancient magic is to try to demothologize it. It's actually quite mundane. If you really wanted the green team to lose, you would go to the local lead guy, buy some lead from him, and then maybe take it to the

local scribe and say, hey, what do you got for anti-chariot curses? And then he would write it down on the curse tablet for you because you're probably illiterate or semi-literate. And then you would bring it to where you want to bring it. You would bring it to a hippodrome. But a lot of the curse tablets we find are found in temples. There's a temple to Demeter and Persephone on the slopes of Acrocoranth, which is this big mountainous rocky outcropping jutting up out of the ancient city of Corinth, and archaeologists found a bunch of cursed tablets buried around an altar, a series of altars, in this temple precinct. And you would be like, oh, well, that was like sneaking into the temple and burying it, but how would you possibly do that? What's more likely is it was

part of the normal functioning of that temple, where the priestesses of Demeter were like, hey, let me help you with that. I'll show you where you should put your curse tablet. We see this. There's a double temple to Isis and Mater Magna, the great mother goddess, in what's modern, modern day minds Germany. It's a double temple. We have one temple to ISIS, one temple to Magna Mataer, and archaeologists found a bunch of cursed tablets half melted in like a burn pit behind the temple. And a lot of these cursed tablets draw attention to the fire, like just like how this cursed tablet melts. May my target Alex melt. And they would roll it up and then throw it into the burn pit. Some of them apparently did not melt and for archaeologists to find

many years later. It was probably part of the normal functioning of that temple. Bring your cursed tablet to the temple of Isis and Magnamater and deposit it into the burn pit. And yet another example was found in England at Bath, the city of Bath, which was an ancient town to the goddess Sulis, who is the syncretized goddess between Sulis, who was like a Celtic goddess and Minerva, obviously a Greco-Roman goddess. And again, in the temple priest, You had the temple and outside the temple we had the altar and right off to the side of the altar was a spring and we found a bunch of cursed tablets I say we bunch of archaeologists found a bunch of cursed tablets deposited in the spring and they were for really mundane stuff like so-and-so stole my hooded cloak for it may he may justice be brought down upon his head a lot of them were for like petty crime and so I can think of I think of that little spring in that temple precinct as kind of the the lost and found of the town like did you lose your hoodie did you lose your money? Yeah, this jumped out at me because I recently, I hired, I went to an event where I had to wear like white tie, you know, like tuxedo with tails and everything. And I got this top hat and it went missing and I'm pretty sure someone stole it.

And when I saw in your video that the quote from that curse on that sort of ancient tablet reads, I curse him who has stolen my hooded cloak that the goddess Sulis inflicts death upon him, inflict death upon and not allow him sleep or children now and in the future until he has brought my hooded cloak to the temple of her divinity and I instantly thought of my top hat and I thought gosh if I could get someone to write out on an amulet a curse like that then I would probably do it it's really interesting to see but one thing that you also pointed out actually I think you pointed this out on your video on grimace is that we're not just dealing with like when you think of ancient people sort of cursing each other you might be thinking of you know

your sort of disgruntled farmer or whatever, but these are physical materials, written materials in the ancient world. We kind of forget today, like how difficult it is to produce written materials in the ancient world, right? Not just because of the physical labor involved in bringing them out, but also because hardly anyone was literate. And so given that these curses and things and these spells and these books of spells that begin to develop throughout history, you might think of them as sort of some whackos out in a cave

somewhere writing stuff down, but you have to be pretty educated, right, to even be able to write this stuff. So what does that tell us about the kind of people who are engaging with this? Yeah. Well, let's use the cursed tablets. The cursed tablets from Bath, England, as an example. We've found probably 160 of them there, maybe 180, so dozens and dozens of these curse tablets, with varying ranges of skill when it comes to the handwriting. Some seem to be cursive, Latin, that's very difficult to read. Some of it seems to be a more bookish, professional hand. So there must have been some sort of range of literate skills coming to the table here.

But the ones that are very professional probably were made by professionals, a professional scribe whose whole job was let me help you write your get my hoodie back curse that you could then bring probably with the help of a priest of Sulis to deposit it into this pool. So, at least for the textual magic, anything written on a piece of papyrus or an amulet, was probably created, I say probably, almost certainly created by some sort of literate specialist. And who were the literate specialists in, say, late Roman Egypt? It was monks and bishops, you know, Christian ecclesiastical functionaries. So much of the ancient, so-called magical formulas from late antique Egypt show evidence. of somebody with knowledge

of Christian liturgy. So a phrase like, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, the so-called Trisagion that appears in both Jewish and Christian liturgies very prominently in Christian liturgies shows up all the time as kind of a protective incantation that shows up on amulets that people

would roll up and put on a necklace or put it in their pocket. Psalm 91 is another common protective phrase which says like God is my refuge in my fortress. He protects me from the snare of the hunter. So it's a very protective formula. This appears inscribed on like the edges of like these circular medallions that people would wear with a picture of like Solomon spearing a demon. Again, with the haggios, hoggios, hoggios, holy, holy phrase. So the vast majority of at least

late Roman magical formulas that show some sort of Christian influence were probably made by the literate specialists of that era, which were monks, priests, and bishops. And when we look further east into Mesopotamia, we find a whole corpus of incantation bowls, little clay bowls, something that you would eat your ancient porridge out of. And in these bowls are inscribed these spiral incantations, usually against demons, sometimes specifically against a demon like Lilith. They're found buried upside down in the house, maybe as like an ancient roach motel where you're trying to capture the demon and neutralize it. And a lot of these show, they're written in Jewish Aramaic. They show evidence of rabbinic literature.

So who was the ritual specialist in a Jewish community in 6th century Mesopotamia? Rabbis. So you initially asked me, like, what does a magician look like in antiquity? I'm like, that's not a job title. The person who was making an amulet or an incantation bowl, they were monks, they were rabbis, they were metal workers, they were gem workers, so much of this was coming out of workshops. It was just part and parcel of a marketplace of ritual power. in the Roman Empire, and nothing about it would, would, from the material evidence indicates it

was, it was secret or occult or evil. We'll sometimes see, you know, Roman law codes complaining about magic, particularly, um, cursed tablets or anything that you could, you could view as, as poison, uh, trying to, you know, poison someone with potions. So anything that's kind of aggressive or harmful will sometimes see law codes against that. But of course, how, how could you possibly enforce that? in the Roman Empire. Like, there's, it's not like it was a, it was, you've had like one Roman jurist per 100,000 people. It's not like these laws could have been easily enforced.

Instead, you had temples like the temple of Sulis in England or the temple of ISIS and Magnamater in Germany, offering it as part of their regular services. So the, like, I dispute the question. There weren't magicians in antiquity. There were magicians, magoi in folklore and mythology. And then there were people who offered ritual specialties to clientele that we might call an amulet worker or a rabbi who on the side made incantation bowls or a monk where somebody in the hinterlands of late Roman Egypt came up and said, hey, my baby has typhus. What can you do for me? Well, let me write you an archangel amulet to put on the baby's forehead.

That's going to help. It was part and parcel of daily life and antiquity. And this kind of practice shows up across religious traditions. I mean, I've heard you talk, again, when you're talking about grimoires, about people who would, there were, aren't there Islamic communities that will take the words of the Quran, sort of write them onto, you know, some kind of material, and then wash the words off into a bowl of water and then drink the water. And somehow that's part of their, like, ritualistic practice. this kind of stuff crops up all over the place. And I guess it's not so much about, there's another point raising the reading that you sent over

is that like there's sort of two questions. There's what was magic in the ancient world and who called each other magicians, but also what would a modern scholar look at and say this is what today we might call magical practice even though they didn't call it that then. And I guess we're sort of more doing the latter, looking back at just sort of practices that people engaged in

and today saying that's what we might now sort of broadly put into the magical category. So I go out of my way to avoid the term magic, at least in my own work, because I don't find the term useful to describe a category of ritual. I would try to be a little more precise and say we have cursing rituals, we have protection rituals, we have healing rituals, we have exerciseism rituals. Some of them use paraphernalia like potions or mud or spit, and some of them just use the spoken word, but they all fall under these categories of healing, protecting, exercise.

And it's kind of, again, because the term magic is subjective and up to the audience, the eye of the beholder, will I'll sometimes call a behavior, a ritual magical, and that might offend somebody. I'm like, well, like, I'm purposely doing that to try to show you that there's really not a huge distinction. So an example would be John Chrysostom, he was the bishop of Antioch and later the bishop of Constantinople. this was in the 300s and early 400s, he complains constantly about people in his audience, his congregation, using amulets. And in some of his homilies, he's like,

oh, some of you are using coins of Alexander the Great as an amulet. Why would you possibly rely on this Greek king when you could rely on the king of kings, Jesus Christ, to protect you? And then in other homilies, he like explicitly says, hey, you want to keep demons away from you? Do the sign of the cross.

The sign of the cross is a great way to keep demons away from you. And I'm like, what makes that gesture legitimate and another gesture to keep demons away from you magical? You know, this is a gesture versus an object, but we could probably think of some sort of gesture that would be clocked as magical, even though it's just a gesture to keep you protect you from supernatural harm.

And the answer is, well, John Chrysystem is playing a value and judgment game where he's like, this is a legitimate ritual and this is an illegitimate ritual, even though from the outside they both an amulet and crossing yourself to keep demons away from you, both fall under this category of protective ritual. And there's another example. There's the acts of Peter and Paul is an apocryphal text from the 400s, I think it's fifth century CE, that is a, it almost reads like a comic book.

The Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul are facing off against Simon Magus, that spooky bad guy from the Book of Acts. And they have an audience in front of Nero, the Roman emperor. and they're kind of doing a thomaturgy battle where Peter does a work of power and then Simon does a work of power and it culminates with Simon building a wooden tower and then he climbs to the top of the tower and he starts flying

and everybody, Nero's like, well, all right, Simon won, look at, he's flying. That's like the ultimate power. And then Peter like says, well, watch this. And Peter then says, oh, angels of Satan that are carrying Simon into the air, stop. And they drop him and Simon falls to his death. but Simon doesn't use a magic wand he's not using potions he's not using amulets or any materiality he's he's speaking just like Jesus would in like the gospels he says dogs come forth and like these supernatural dogs appear and leap at Peter and then Peter says gone and then

the dogs disappear and then Simon doesn't really say anything he just starts flying and presumably these these demons or angels are carrying him through the air so this is why I'm like from the outside if we try to describe what what Simon is doing from a completely neutral anthropological perspective. It's just miraculous powers. But the author of the acts of Peter and Paul is unambiguously saying what he is doing is Magia and what Simon, Peter is doing, is miracles. Like, one is from Jesus and God and one is from demons, even though they're really just doing

the same thing, which is speaking power into, you know, doing power through ritual performance. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So does that mean then that circling back to the question we started with and the question that you title a video about, you know, was Jesus a magician, is the point that this is like a meaningless question? I mean, it seems to you like that's a difficult category to sort of even discuss. But I mean, I know that's your view, but presumably there are scholars out there who think it's a perfectly serviceable category and will discuss whether Jesus fit into it. And so if I were to ask you that question, is that how you'd answer? And how do other scholars tend to interpret that question?

Yeah. So I would say Kelsus thought he was amygus. I would say he was not a magician in the sense of the folkloric sense of amygus. Like the gospel writers position him as a wonder worker. Was he a ritual specialist? We can at least say it's plausible. He wasn't, as far as we know, he wasn't a gem worker or an amulet maker or an incantation bowlmaker. Like, those are job titles that we can identify as a social role in society, someone who makes an amulet, someone who makes a curse tablet.

I think it might be plausible that he was a positioned himself as like a stage exorcist, faith healer, like, hey, let me show you that I have power of demons. because we see that in roughly contemporaneous materials as a social role that did exist in first century Judea. So Josephus, for example, talks about an exorcist named Eliezer who exercises a demon. I think in the audience of Vespasian, the Roman emperor. Eliezer uses a ring of Solomon and some sort of incantation, so he's using some sort of ritual paraphernalia. The Dead Sea Scrolls, there are a few examples of exorcistic formulas. So exorcisms were being performed in first century, Judea, and the galley. And it's hard to parse what parts of the Gospels are historical and what are not,

but it is at least within the realm of plausibility that Jesus would have positioned himself as a ritual specialist. But I wouldn't call that a magician because, yeah, I do find the term hopelessly fraught. And the scholars that do work on this material, I think, would agree with me, that they would, they would, they are very careful to parse between the, the mythological or the fantasy or the pop culture caricature of the sorcerer or the magician versus the, the historical social role of a ritual specialist. And that looks a lot more mundane. Somebody in their workshop making an amulet, then a priestess of Demeter taking that cursed tablet and burying it in a room in the temple precinct. Like it's just a lot more mundane than like Harry Potter shooting light out of a magic wand. so we had to we had to parse the caricature versus the social role and jesus was certainly caricature was made of him by chalcis so there was at least something about the gospels that made chalcis think oh this guy is in the same realm of medea or circe but then um from the anthropological point of view you know that's not that was not someone walking around calling

themselves amegas you said um ritual specialist a few times i remember in your video you talked about this concept of a freelance ritual expert, which Heidi Wendt, I think, has written about, are they the same thing? And if not, what is a freelance ritual expert? Yeah. So ritual expert is just like a, in some sense, a hopelessly broad term to someone who specializes in a particular type of ritual. You could say a priest is a ritual expert who knows how to lead the liturgy and knows how to lead the Eucharist. Some of those religious functionaries went on to use our liturgical skills to make amulets for your sick baby. So Heidi Wendt wrote this very excellent book talking about ritual experts that are not tied to institutional, you know, like a church or a monastery or a temple precinct.

So someone that might through just their own charisma or skill have a following and that following might be mercantile or economic in the sense of like selling their skills. So, Kelse is actually, hence freelance. Yeah, and the freelance also implies the non-institutional aspect of it. I mean, some of these holy men in the late Roman Empire were not tied to a particular monastery or church as well. You could have a guy off in the desert like St. Anthony. I think of John the Baptist when you mentioned this as a sort of disconnected from institutional authority, some kind of expert ritualists that people are going to, seeming to be working of his own accord,

performing a kind of ritual which, you know, absent the tradition of baptism, if we'd never heard of baptism and we discovered this ancient ritual where human beings were submerged in water and came back up, it was a different kind of, have this sort of spooky, cauldron-esque feeling to it, I think. And so there's a world in which that could easily

have been seen as some kind of magical practice, right? Yeah. I mean, I think John the Baptist is a great, example of a freelance ritual expert like he possibly through his own creativity um reworked this this ritual this water ritual you know water rituals were a known thing within judaism at the time and he had his his unique spin on it the the sectarians living at kumran where we get the dead sea scrolls also had their own unique spin on water rituals within the within the uh worldview of judaism um and yeah john the bapt is apparently not connected to any sort of institution wandering through the desert having a following based on his own charisma. I think he would fall well within that idea of a freelance ritual expert. Whether he was selling his skills or not, we don't know. We have no reason to believe that, but he was a freelancer in the sense of he was not tied to a particular institution. So freelance ritual experts, they're relying on their own charisma. They're relying on

their own ability to convince people of their skill. And I would say Jesus as an exorcist or Paul as a preacher, they would fall under this. And there's arguments to be made that Christianity grew so successfully. A lot of, because of holy men like this, who were able to convince people, hey, I have control over demonic forces. So many of these holy men, I was about to mention St. Anthony, who's one of the Desert Fathers, a biography or a hegiography was written of him by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria.

And St. Anthony, like, the whole biography is just him, like, conquering demons left and right. And I think this, the historian Ramsey McMullen makes this argument that Christians, more so than other religious institutions and religions of the time, positioned themselves as having power over evil spirits. And it was through that ritual performance, they were able to get so many followers. People weren't necessarily convinced by the hopeful message of the gospel. they were like, oh, that Holy Man, that St. Anthony, that guy out in the desert, I hear he can get rid of the evil demons that are plaguing my kid or haunting that cave over there. So we should listen to this guy. He seems to have that power. And it's kind of the Holy Man's role in the late Roman Empire to parse and identify demonic powers in the landscape. And then Richard, truly exercise them, whether from a person or from a building. And again, to go back to John Chrys' system, he basically does that as well, teaching his audience, hey, do the sign of the cross, this is how you get rid of demons, how to keep them

away from you. So much of early Christianity was about demonological control. Isn't there an interesting, well, there is an interesting moment in Acts chapter 19, where we hear about these seven sons of Skeva who are these Jews who are going around driving out evil spirits and trying to invoke the name of Jesus, sort of finding possessed people and, you know, commanding spirits to come out of them in the name of Jesus who Paul preaches about. And it seems like it's kind of like not working because one day the evil spirits say back to one of these sons, You know, I know Jesus and I know Paul, but who are you? Yeah.

And then the man who has the evil spirit, the possessed man, like, jumps on this guy and starts, like, attacking him and sort of beats him mercilessly, such that he gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. And so there's this idea that there really is something special about, like, Paul, which we already knew, you know, Paul's a special guy. But there's kind of this feeling that like, you know, it's Jesus who does the, who does the demonic exorcism, but this idea of that needing to be ritualistic experts and exorcism is a kind of ritual, there's a hint here as well that even if you are somebody who's going around, you know, performing exorcisms in Jesus's name, you kind of have to be a particular kind of person invested with a particular kind of power. And I don't know if I saw that and I saw two people doing the same thing and then the sort of demons listened to one. one of them, I'd be quite inclined to think that there's something special about that Paul guy. He's got some kind of particular magical power that the others don't. And you're saying that's got, it's potentially part of the explanation as to why Christianity could grow because Paul kept doing that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, so there's this towering figure in sociology named Max Weber who developed this idea of charisma. So when we think of charisma today,

we think of those, you know, self-help YouTube channels about how to be a charismatic person. But originally in the religious studies sociological sense it's about someone with like almost otherworldly abilities and power so when we say like jesus was a charismatic figure or john the baptist was charismatic it was because they were viewed as you know imbued with miraculous power and standing and touched by god and so much of the freelance ritual expert i think hinges on that charisma your ability to convince people, hey, I can control these demons. And so we see a lack of charisma with the sons of Sceva. What's interesting, so the word exorcism, it derives from the Greek exorchizo,

which is actually a legal term, exorchizo. It means it's related to the Greek word meaning oath, horcos, and it's used in a legal sense of putting someone, commanding someone as if under an oath. We actually see the exact same verb in Matthew 26 at the trial of Jesus, where the high priest says, I exorchizo you, I put you under oath. Are you the Messiah? It's the exact same verb. And he's not saying I exercise you as a demon. He's saying, I'm putting you under, I'm commanding you under oath. And we sometimes translate this with the unusual English verb, adjure. I adjure you, which just means I command as if under oath. You know, are you the Messiah? And so when Jesus is saying, I exorchizo you talking to a demon, it's like, I am putting you under an oath. I'm putting you under a legal obligation. Like, get out of that person. Wow. So this again points to the how so much of what we would call magic or thaumaturgical performance is the purview of literate specialists where they would use legal terms like that. It also tells us something about ancient people viewing law as having power. And we see that here in the 21st century. Like if you're sued or you're like, said to go to jail, you're compelled to do something. So even in antiquity, like legal language has power. And it's so much of it is the exorcistic formulas are pretty formulaic, as in I adjure you, I extra kids you, I put you under an oath, by some power, usually then you list

some sort of power of power, by the power of Sula's Minerva, and then some sort of threat of some sort. So there's these formulas, but all in this kind of legalese sense. Hmm. Can I ask you, you've mentioned a few times about sort of amulets and writing, and we've talked about books. And I mentioned this word grimoire earlier. Could you just tell us what a grimoire is and its relation to magic? And particularly, I'm interested in the usage of like the Bible by some Christians and sometimes as a kind of grimroar of a kind. Yeah. So when we say grimoire, in a text, technical sense, it usually refers to some sort of magical handbook. You can maybe even use the word a textbook. So a book that's a collection of formulas, a collection of instructions on how to make amulets. And it's used like that in the modern sense. So you might have a contemporary Wiccan or a contemporary witch who would keep their own book of shadows, which is a

grim more in a sense of like a collection of incantations or rituals. And in the context of antiquity, We see compendia of formulas, usually surviving in Egypt. So there's this big collection of texts called the Greek magical papyri, which is a modern category where scholars put, brought all these texts from ancient Egypt, from the Ptolemaic period, up through the late Roman period, and kind of publish them in these books that we call the Greek magical papyri. But there are all these different disparate scraps of papyri that are brought together. into this kind of artificial category. Really what these were were texts created by Hellenized Egyptian priests operating in the Roman Empire. And it was part of their job to collect as literate specialists to collect these rituals

and put them into compendia that we might call a grimoire. Like here's a scroll with a bunch of instructions. Like here's how to fix a migraine headache. Here's how to fix a sick stomach. Like your stomach feels bad. Some of these texts are very short. like write this, so do you have a scorpion sting? All right, write this formula onto a piece of papyrus, put the piece of papyrus on your scorpion sting, you'll be okay.

Other, some of these texts are long, almost, you know, beautiful poems. There's one called the Mithras Liturgy, how you kind of go through this multi-stage formula to interact with Helios himself, the sun god. so grimoires you know are the purview of literate specialists that there's arguments over whether people were actually doing these rituals was that priest then going out and helping someone hey do you have a scorpion sting let me have just the thing for you or was it just part of like the bookish mindset of like the encyclopedic mind of trying to collect all these texts into a into a text that you would then pass on to the next your your apprentice but The idea of the grimoire as a book of magic, this continues through many centuries of occult knowledge, where the grimor is how ancient specialists regulated knowledge, passed on knowledge to the next generation.

But to the semi-literate population, who doesn't really know how to read, the written word itself is viewed as efficacious. so if you were living in late Roman Egypt and you barely know how to read, when you pick up a book or a scroll or look at some sort of piece of writing, your first thought is not necessarily, oh, these are words conveying meaning. You're encountering them as graphic symbols, you know, symbols on a page. So there's, theorists in religious studies would talk about the magic of the written word, where humans through most of history, since most humans throughout history were not literal. it would have viewed the written word as inherently powerful because of this. And a great example of this, at least in the Christian tradition, is the so-called story of King Abgar, where King Abgar of Edessa, which is a city in southeastern Turkey, so modern-day Sean Leurfa, King Abgar gets sick, so he writes a letter to Jesus and says, hey, can you come to Edessa? I'm sick. I need you to come heal me. Jesus writes back and says, hey, I'm really busy. I can't make it, but I'll send one of my disciples to heal you, which is an interesting story.

It's not historical. It's an apocryphal story. But what's interesting is that this is one of the few examples of Jesus writing something. So this letter of Jesus to Abgar goes down in Christian history as a magical object. We have amulets from ancient Egypt, preserved in the sands of Egypt, that Christians apparently wrote the letter of Jesus to Abgar as an amulet. We have stories from historians like Procopius who mention cities writing the letter of Abgar, Jesus, on the city gates to protect from invasion. The city of Philippi, which is famously from the city of where Paul writes the letter of the Philippians, there was an inscription found that used to be on the city gates of Philippi that was the letter of Jesus and Abgar to protect the city gates. And the argument is like, well, these words have inherent power, like, ritual.

power is infused into these letters because the hand of Jesus touched this pen, which then touched this letter, you know, pen to paper, and the graphic symbols themselves that we call words, who cares that it's a kind of boring banal letter? Hey, I'm busy. I'll send my disciple later. It doesn't say anything like, protect this city from invasion. It's actually a pretty simple letter. But the fact that the words themselves were written by Jesus or believed to be is what matters, is it what makes them magical. Well, there is something really magical about, about sort of language, the written language that we've kind of forgotten about

in that you can imagine not being literate. It's a bit like, you know, I saw someone the other day sort of typing in a sort of non-Latin script. So if you imagine like, you know, someone who's Chinese or Japanese or something like writing something out on a computer. And I saw someone doing this the other day. And I was just sort of mystified about like how these symbols translate into words, hieroglyphics are the same. The way that we look at those with like, yeah, we understand that it's a language, but it's so fascinating.

There's something almost like eerie about the way that these images sort of contain communication. It's just, you know, like harder to notice that we're doing the same thing with our language, of course. But if you couldn't read the English language and you saw these scribblings on a page and someone took a glance at it And, you know, now they just know something new. It would seem, you know, for want to a better word, a bit magical, a bit sort of spooky, you know, and so especially given this physical object. And then think about the person who wrote it. Like, oh, that person also must have special power because that guy, that scribe, knows how to write this. They're conjuring it up.

They're conjuring it up. So you can see how the literate specialist might be viewed as a purveyor of supernatural, of thaumaturgical performance because they're able to write, which, you know, 5% of the population. population might have been able to. No, it's a really smart observation. And we see that play out in what we could call pseudo-writing in ancient magical practice, where these fake letters that mean nothing pop up all the time in amulets and cursed tablets. They're sometimes called characteres, where you know the word character, where they look like, they look like letters, but they don't really mean anything. Some of them look like ring signs where you'll have like an X, but like little rings at the end of the each

spine of the letter. Some people attempt to draw what they think looks like Hebrew or Egyptian. I mentioned that bronze amulet that has Psalm 91 around the edge, you know, protect, God protect me from the snare of the hunter,

and then there's a picture of Solomon spearing a demon, and then squeezed in between some of the figures or what appear to be the tetragrammaton, you know, Y-H-W-H, but not in Hebrew. It's like someone who obviously doesn't know Hebrew, but it's like trying to draw Hebrew letters because they're like, oh, this is the mystery language, the tetragrammaton. I'm going to put this on my anti-demon amulet. And we see this in the Greco-Egyptian magical papy where, depending on your

language, your native language, if you're a Greek speaker, you want to have Coptic, as in a Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language, as your magical language. Or if you're a Coptic speaker, you either want hieratic or some earlier form of Egyptian writing or language as your language of magic or maybe Greek. So you kind of see this exoticizing, the exoticizing power of different languages, whether it's a pseudoscript, like a symbol that means nothing, or your attempt at drawing Hebrew or hieroglyphs or demonic or something like that. You know what it makes me think of? You know about cargo cults? I mean, you've probably heard of these, but these...

Yeah, vaguely, yeah. Sort of interesting groups of people who tend to live on sort of isolated, like, islands, tribes of people who live on these islands. And during, like, the colonial period or during, like, the World Wars or something, you know, Europeans would come and visit these islands and they would bring cargo, you know, they'd have all of these, these sort of wonderful things with them. They'd have food. They'd have weapons. They'd have all sorts. And then they sort of, you know, went away. And these tribes are sort of left to try and understand what's just happened. And there have developed these religious movements around this cargo. And so the John Frum cargo cult went viral not long ago because they sing together. And it's quite a sort of eerie but beautiful kind of singing. And it went viral on social media, this clip of them all singing. And they're singing about the return. of John from with his cargo and one really interesting thing that I can't remember who it is that did this but once upon a time a landing strip for an airport was built you know in in the in the middle of the forest or whatever and an airplane came down and dropped off all of this cargo and then they all sort of went away and so in the hopes that the cargo will come back

some tribe somewhere had built an airport out of like you know like sticks out of would. They'd sort of built like a control tower and a runway and stuff, sort of thinking that this might somehow incant this, this plane to come back as if the airport being built was what made the plane come. And it seems like a similar confusions going on there with like, well, if we just sort of write these scribbles on a page that look a bit like this, it somehow sort of does something a bit religious and a little bit magical. It just kind of made me think of that, that people are sort of misfiring about what's going on. But it's easy to see why if you didn't know what an aeroplane was or an airport was,

it's easy to see why you might think that this runway with its flashing lights and stuff would cause this magical aircraft to come in the same way. If you couldn't understand the written word, you might be mistaken into thinking that there's something about these mystical scribblings that literally brought about the sort of magical powers or religious significance. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking so much about writing, but we can also think about materiality, like the object of lead.

Yeah. Why lead for cursed tablets? It's not all cursed tablets were written on lead, some were papyrus, a few were, like, crystal, like gypsum or something like quartz. But lead, it was easy to find. It was easy to work with. I've tried writing on lead before. It's actually quite easy because it's such a soft metal. But it's also cold and dark and heavy. And a lot of these cursed tablets draw attention to that fact, like just as this lead is cold and heavy make so-and-so cold and heavy.

So the materiality matters. This comes up in so-called magical gems as well. So a lot, you can think of like a signet ring where you have like your, let's say your signature on a ring and you stamp a piece of clay. Like I'm authorizing this letter with my signet ring. These sorts of gems also show up in magical practice in the Roman Empire. And the gem type would sometimes correspond with certain powers or certain abilities. So hematite, which is like this iron oxide, semi-precious stone. was thought to have some sort of healing ability.

Sometimes we're blood, bleeding, you know, to anticoagulant almost. So we have evidence that they would actually grind up hematite and ingest it, ingest it to try to heal you. There's also a few examples from the Greek magical papyri that mentioned grinding up a magnet and ingesting it, which is just kind of inherently interesting. So the materiality matters. It's not just the writing. It's what you're writing on. And sometimes it's kind of mundane, like to take a piece of laurel or take a particular leaf. And then sometimes it's kind of purposely odd or different.

So in the magical papyri, it always mentions, like, animal parts. Like, take a recently drowned cat and then use the cat for some sort of formula. I think there's an invisibility spell that's like take the dung of a dung beetle and spread it. on you and it will make you invisible and this way that will make people it might have that seem like it has that effect because suddenly people you know don't want to don't want to go near you or seem to sort of pretend like you're not there i can i can certainly imagine i sometimes wonder were these were these egyptian priests really trying these out or are they just collecting them in kind of an encyclopedic sense because i don't know if somebody attempted the the dung beetle

invisibility spell i'm like oh it's just not working but yeah or maybe there was just prangle someone they didn't like, you know, maybe they just didn't like someone and said, oh, yeah, you know, I think, I heard that this is probably what you need to do. Just rub dung all over yourself and see how that works out. Although I've never tried it. You know, who knows? Maybe it works. I mean, yeah, I talk about it on one of my videos, but I've yet to try that particular spells. It has not been put to a double-blind study to my knowledge. My hunches probably won't work. It would make for a very good YouTube video. I know that much. Maybe the next time we meet, we can put it to test. We'll flip a coin to see, you know, who's the observer and who's the participant. I don't know. It's a far cry away from, you know, the materials that we create, which literally seem not even to have a substance that they're written on. I mean, we're sort of talking through, you know, electromagnetic waves in the air or whatever. It's interesting to think how things have developed. And I think the most important thing is recognizing that the kinds of spells and books and texts of this period are not like a PDF that you'd read online. I mean, they are in the sense that it's the same material, but there's this sort of sacrosanctity to physical objects. It's not just the information, but it's the fact that you've got a physical object with etchings in them that somehow contain information.

It's it's much more, well, seems much more magical than, you know, a PDF on a screen, I guess. Yeah, I do wonder, I mean, this is well outside my subfield, but contemporary, which is who do keep the wrong book of shadows, like can a book of shadows be a PDF file? Or does that just remove the so-called magic of writing that we were talking about? You remove the materiality and you move the magic, remove kind of the, etching on on the object. So digital witchcraft in the 21st century, somebody needs to study that. You end your book on grimauds, your video on grimauds talking about whether these these books can count if they're like on a PDF because the physicality is so important.

I'd be interested if there are any sort of witches out there who think that it does count as a grimoire to have a PDF. What happens when I turn off the computer and the grimoire is still like stored in the Hard drive with like a bunch of zeros and ones, but it's not actually currently on my screen. Does that count as a grim more? You know, like, there's so many, so many questions, and maybe I should have a witch on the show to discuss them. But at least as far as Magic and Jesus goes, we've covered some good ground. You do more on your own channel.

People probably already know it. It's in the description. It's religion for breakfast. Congratulations on a million subscribers, by the way. I know that didn't happen super duper recently, but it's really, really cool to see. You've also just started a really interesting project called the Religion Department. Right. Can you tell us about that? Sure. I mean, I've been doing YouTube videos for well over a decade now, and there's only so much information you can convey in a YouTube video. And I try my best to show you the scholars that I'm citing in my videos. I'll have their picture pop up and say, Dr. So-and-so studies this, and this is what they argued. And through making religion for breakfast, I have all these connections in the academic study of religion. And I'm trying to bring those scholars to you with the religion to department, which is a learning platform with religious studies scholars teaching guest lectures, multi-week seminars on everything. We have language classes like Coptic, which is the final phase of the ancient Egyptian language. So we have a Coptic class coming up this semester. We have a scholar of contemporary witchcraft teaching a class on paranormal beliefs in the United States. So you can join as a member of the religion department and take classes with these professors and kind of learn.

I always view myself as just a translator of scholarship. So much of religion for breakfast is not like my own ideas. It's me taking complicated ideas from other anthropologists and historians and sociologists and then presenting it as a YouTube video. And here it's like bringing the academy to you. And it's a cool project. I'll link that down in the description down below as well. It's like I guess, you know, if you want to do like an academic study of religion, but

academic study, it costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of time. You've got to show up to class and whatnot. I mean, I guess there are remote things and whatnot. But like, for much, much, much cheaper and much, much more convenience, you choose the classes that are interesting to you, you know, it's, it seems like a cool way to. Or something you might not have access to. I mean, I went to, like, Coptic is not a language that's offered in very many universities. Right. It's probably just a small sliver of universities in the world offer ancient Coptic.

But we had dozens and dozens of people show up for our summer Coptic class. and are now reading the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. That's just so cool. So, like, if you're, like, a super nerd of religious studies as I am, and so many people in the Religion for Breakfast audience are, and your audience, for that matter, like, if you want to, in a very affordable way, learn ancient Coptic or the sociological study of American paranormal beliefs,

like, this is a place to do it. Yeah, YouTube videos can only go so far. So if you want to go deeper, the links are in the description. But YouTube videos are worth it, too. And I hope that this podcast proves it. Andrew Mark Henry, thank you. so much for your time. It's been great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me.