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Magick Matters
"Bringing together the previously disparate fields of historical witchcraft, reception history, poetics, and psychoanalysis, this innovative study shows how the glamour of the historical witch, a spell that she cast, was set on a course, over a span of three hundred years from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to become a generally broadcast glamour of appearance. Something that a woman does, that is, became something that she has. The antique heroine Medea, witch and barbarian, infamous poisoner, infanticide, regicide, scourge of philanderers, and indefatigable traveller, serves as the vehicle of this development. Revived on the stage of modernity by La Péruse in the sixteenth century, Corneille in the seventeenth, and the operatic composer...>>
"Celestial divination, in the form of omens from lunar, planetary, astral, and meteorological phenomena, was central to Mesopotamian cuneiform scholarship and science from the late second millennium BCE into the Hellenistic period. Beyond the boundaries of ancient Mesopotamia, the ideas, texts, and traditions of Babylonian celestial divination are traceable in Hellenistic sciences and philosophies. This collection of essays investigates features of Babylonian celestial divination with special focus on those aspects that influenced later Greco-Roman astronomy, astrology, and theories of signs. A multi-faceted collection of philological, historical, and philosophical investigations, In the Path of the Moon offers Assyriologists, Classicists, and historians of ancient science a wide-ranging series of studies unified around the theme of Babylonian...>>
"The Egyptians were famous in the ancient world for their knowledge of magic. Religion, medicine, technology, and what we would call magic coexisted without apparent conflict, and it was not unusual for magical and "practical" remedies for illness, for example, to be used side-by-side. Everyone resorted to magic, from the pharaoh guarding his country with elaborate magical rituals to the expectant mother wearing amulets to safeguard her unborn child. Magic in Ancient Egypt examines the fascinating connections between myth and magic, and the deities such as Bes and Isis who had special magical importance. Geraldine Pinch discusses the techniques for magic, its practitioners, and the surviving magical texts, as well as the objects that...>>
