The Occult Sciences in Byzantium

PaulMagdalino Maria Mavroudi The Occult Sciences in Byzantium La Pomme d'or Geneva Copyright by La Pomme d'or, 2006 ...

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PaulMagdalino Maria Mavroudi

The Occult Sciences in Byzantium

La Pomme d'or Geneva

Copyright by La Pomme d'or, 2006 All rights reserved

Abbreviations

Cover: Biblioteca Univers'tari di B0 1 Graphic design: Miglena ~avo~a ogna, Bononiensis gr. 3632, fol. 361r. Production: Torovino Ltd, Sofia ISBN-10: 954-8446~2-2 ISBN-13: 978-954-8446~2~

AntCl Antiquite Classique AG Anthologia Graeca AG Les alchimistes grecs BHG Bibiotheca Hagiographica Graeca BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift CAB Corpus des astronomes byzantins CahCMCahiers de civilisation medievale, Xe-Xlle siecles CahHistM Cahiers d'histoire mondiale CollByz Collectanea Byzantina CCAG Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 12 vols. (Brussels, 1898-1953) CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCSG Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca CFHB Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae CMAG Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 8 vols. (Brussels, 1924-32) CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium CSHB Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers ErJb Eranos Jahrbuch GCS Die griechischen christlicher Schriftsteller HAW Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft JOB Jahrbuch der osterreichischen Byzantinistik JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, 'Hellenistic, and Roman Period JRS Journal of Roman Studies ODB Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium PG Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Graeca PLP Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaeologenzeit REB Revue des etudes byzantines RHR Revue de l'histoire des religions

SVF

Stoicorum veterumfragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim

Contents

(Leipzig, 1903) TM Travaux et Memoires

PmbZ PBE ZRVI

Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire Zhornik Radova Vizantoloskog Instituta

Preface

9

Introduction

11

Maria Mavroudi Occult Science and Society in Byzantium: Considerations for Future Research

39

Katerina Ierodiakonou The Greek Concept of Sympatheia and Its Byzantine Appropriation in Michael Psellos

97

Paul Magdalino Occult Science and Imperial Power in Byzantine History and Historiography (9th-12th Centuries) 119

Maria Papathanassiou Stephanos of Alexandria: A Famous Byzantine Scholar, Alchemist and Astrologer 163

Michele Mertens Graeco-Egyptian Alchemy in Byzantium

205

t David Pingree The Byzantine Translations of M!ish!i'allah on Interrogational Astrology

231

William Adler Did the Biblical Patriarchs Practice Astrology? Michael Glykas and Manuel Komnenos I on Seth and Abraham

245

-

AnneTihon Astrological Promenade in Byzantium in the Early Palaiologan Period ·

265!

Joshua Holo Hebrew Astrology in Byzantine Southern Italy

291

Charles Burnett Late Antique and Medieval Latin Translations of Greek 325, Texts on Astrology and Magic George Saliba Revisiting the Astronomical Contacts Between the World of Is~am and Renaissance Europe: The Byzantme connection Bibliography Indices

361 375 437

Preface

The present volume originated as a colloquium organised by the editors and held in November 2003 at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D. C. Earlier versions of all the papers published here were delivered at the colloquium, with the exception of a single one, which the author did not wish to submit for publication. The occasion was entirely financed by Dumbarton Oaks, thanks to the support of the Director, Professor Edward Keenan. The editors gratefully acknowledge the work of Dr Alice-Mary Talbot, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and her then assistant, Caitlin McGurk, in making the practical arrangements for the colloquium. We are indebted to Dr Talbot for sending the manuscript submissions for external review, to the reviewers for their constructive comments, and to the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Publications Committee for releasing us from the obligation to publish in-house. We are deeply grateful to Krassimira Platchkov for accepting our volume to launch her new publication series, Les Editions de la Pomme d'or. Paul Magdalino would like to thank the British Academy for the award of a Research Readership which relieved him from teaching in 2002-4. Maria Mavroudi is indebted to the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley for a research fellowship that halved her teaching responsibilities during the academic year 200405. Finally, the editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help of Thalia Anagnostopoulos in copy editing the

10

Paul Magdalino Maria Mavroudi

volume and compiling the bibliography and copy editing, and of Mariya Spiridonova who compiled the indices. The volume is dedicated to the memory of David Pingree, who passed on 11 November 2005. The quantity, scholarly range, and quality of the work on the exact and occult sciences that he left behind is simply breathtaking. In almost forty books and well more than a hundred articles and book chapters he edited, translated, and studied texts in Akkadian, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Hebrew covering chronologically from the earliest antiquity until th~ end of the Middle Ages and geographically from India to Gibraltar. He was devoted, generous, and kind to those who knew him as teacher, colleague, and friend. Those who never met him cannot but be grateful for the guidance and intellectual com~anionship that his abundant and pioneering publications will contmue to provide. He is sincerely and sorely missed.

Paul Magdalino and Maria Mavroudi

Introduction

This volume represents the first attempt to examine occult science as a distinct category of Byzantine intellectual culture. There have been studies of particular occult sciences, notably the two most intellectually pretentious, astrology and (to a lesser extent) alchemy, though until very recently far more effort has gone into the editing of texts than into evaluating their contents and contextualising their authors. 1 There have also been studies of occult practice, mainly concerned, in the nature of the evidence, with its repression by the authorities and criticism by orthodox religious opinion. But insofar as such discussions have conceived of the occult as a whole, they have defined it in terms of magic. Thus Spyros Troianos analysed the legislation on Byzantine magic; 2 Byzantine magic was the theme of a colloquium and a subsequent volume produced by Dumbarton Oaks; 3 and a table-ronde on Byzantine magic, involving both editors of this volume, took place in the 20th International Congress of Byzantine Studies, held at Paris in 2001. Each of these initiatives surveyed a variety of 1 The place of astrology in medieval Byzantine culture and religion has recently been studied by P. Magdalino, L 'orthodoxie des astrologues. La science entre le dogme et Ia divination il Byzance (VII' -XIV siecle ), Realites byzantines 12 (Paris,

2006). 1

S. Troianos, 'Zauberei und Giftmischerei in mittelbyzantinischer Zeit', in G. Prinzing and D. Simon, eds., Fest und Alltag in Byzanz (Munich, 1990), 37-51, 184-8. 3 H. Maguire, ed., Byzantine Magic (Washington, D. C., 1995).

12

Paul Magdalino Maria Mavroudi

practices, different in each case, not all of which could be strictly classified as magical. Yet magic seemed in all cases to offer the most convenient and comprehensive definition. This is equally true in the study of the civilizations most closely related to Byzantium, from Greco-Roman Antiquity to the Renaissance: discussions of magic abound, but discussions of the occult sciences are rare. Why so? (Most obviously, because magic, not being restricted to a learned tradition, is less elitist and more conducive to anthropological research; it has also left vastly more material evidence, in the form of charms, spells and amulets which when they use writing at all evince, for the most part, a low and formulaic level of literacy. The study of occult science requires some familiarity with specialised languages, methods and techniques, whereas the study of magic is freely available to historians and arthistorians. Moreover, defining the occult as science tends to deprive it of the religious quality inherent in the concept of magic. What then, apart from the need to avoid repetition, is the reason for preferring the occult sciences to magic as the theme and title of this collection?,Is occult science not just magic by another name? The answer lies principally in the corollary of the point made above: the concept of magic does not do justice to the learned, literate end of the spectrum. It puts the educated, sophisticated masters of occult knowledge, some of whom, in Byzantium, were leading social figures, in the same category as the drunken old women who were cari~atured, n_o~ inaccurately according to a recent authority, as the leadmg practltloners of magic in Late Antiquity. 4 It also implies that they offered an alternative religion, or a superstitious substitute for orthodox c_ult, which was demonstrably not the case. In any case, occult sctence cannot be regarded simply as the learned and non-superstitious side of magic. Magic entered the vocabulary of the Greco-Ro~an worl~ as a term of opprobrium, connoting the alt~n, ~uspect ntes of onental Magi.~ Although it came to denote an' obJe~ttve cultural reality, it never lost its negative connotatio~ · M~g~c w~s what the cultural Other practised as a substitute for true rehgwn; mstead of serving the true deity it sought to usurp d' . ' tvme powe b h · al r y mec amc or demonic means; its rituals mimicked M.W. Dickie Magic and M · · . New York, 200,1). aglclans m the Greco-Roman World (London and

introduction

13

religious cult, but in exclusive, private settings. 5 Few men, least of all the learned, were keen to refer to themselves as magoi,,.Oespite, or indeed because of, the natural elision between astrology and astral magic, between the charting of planetary influences and the incantation of planetary spirits, astrologers strenuously denied that their predictions were based on anything other than natural science, and compared their prognostications to the "expert guesswork" of the medical doctor, 'Alchemists, if put on the spot, would no doubt have taken a similar line. This was of course a defensive position, adopted in order to counter charges of sorcery and polytheism, and it does not mean that the practitioners of astrology and alchemy really saw no connection between their knowledge and other types of esoteric learning that were used to predict or to affect the course of nature. However, if pushed to define the connection, they would have done so not in terms of magic but in terms of philosophy. This may strike us as bizarre, and it would certainly be deeply misleading to treat philosophy and occult science as synonymous. Yet intellectual engagement with the occult was rooted in, or sought to cohere with, the philosophical systems of Greco-Roman antiquity, as will be further discussed in this introduction and in a later chapter of this volume. The learned practitioners of the occult had a basic general education including philosophy, and tended to combine their special expertise with a variety of intellectual interests, which made it appropriate to describe them as philosophoi. Philosophos was the generic label for an intellectual in Byzantium. 6 It was also a label strongly coloured by the Late Antique fusion of Pythagorean, Stoic and Neoplatonic traditions which identified philosophy with an ascetic lifestyle and the possession of extraordinary mental and spiritual powers that went far beyond the rational exposition of logic and metaphysics and had much in common with the charisma of Christian holy men7 themselves often referred to as philosophers by their apologists. It was the philosopher's capacity-or reputation-for learning and contriving paradoxa, extraordinary phenomena, which caught the public imagination in Late Antiquity and shaped the image of the 'See F. Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). See ODB, s.v. PHILOSOPHER. 7 E.g. Sozomenos, Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez and G.C Hansen, GCS 50 (Berlin, 1960), I 12. 8, 13.1, 14.1, lll 14, 38.

6

14

Paul Magdalino Maria Mavroudi;

philosopher in the formative period of Byzantine medieval culture (5th-9th c.). In the widely circulated sixth-century chronicle of John 8 Malalas~philosophtzl address secret prayers to the Moon, create 10 9 talismans, - and ~~nish into thin air in addition to predicting ' eclipses 11 and making astronomical discoveries; 12 the "most learned philosopher" Theon of Alexandria (late 4'h c.) is mentioned not only as an astronomer, but as a teacher of Hermetism and Orphism, 13 while Malalas' near-contemporary Proclus features not as the leading Neoplatonist of his generation, but as a dream interpreter for the emperor Anastasius I 14 and as the inventor of an incendiary substance which bums a rebel fleet. 15 In the late eighth-century collection of legends about the monuments of Constantinople, the Parastaseis, the city's large collection of ancient statues are full of hidden meanings and sinister powers, and the men who know how to interpret them are philosophers, not magicians. 16 For present-day purposes, however, 'philosophy' is hardly more appropriate than 'magic' as an identifying label for the scientific aspect of the occult. So should this not simply be considered under the heading of science tout court, or should not science and magic be included, without forced and arguably anachronistic separation, under the same broad umbrella? The merits of this approach, which was exactly the one adopted by Lynn Thorndike Jr. in his still valuable. History of Magic and Experimental Science, are expounded by Maria Mavroudi- in her essay in the present volume. Its disadvantage is that broad umbrellas can be unwieldy, and do 8

Ioannes Malalas, Chronographia, ed. H. Thurn, CFHB 35 (Berlin and New york, 2000),44. 9 Ibid., 81,201. 10 Ibid .• 202. II Ibid., 118 12 Ibid., 130. "Ibid., 265. 14 _Ibid., 335. He is ca~led PJ_Uclus from Asia, but is surely meant to be identical wtth the famous Atheman philosopher. " Ibid., 330-l. The rebel in question is Vitalian, whose revolt broke out in 512· note that the real Proclus died in 485. · 16 Parastaseis syntonwi chroniktJi, ed T Pre er . . . . ed g • Scrtptores ongmum Constantinopo/itanarum, I (Leipzig 1901 ) · 19 3 Herrin, Constantinople in the Earl E' ' • ·• tr., comm. A. Cameron, J. Chronikai (Leiden, I984); see furth:r ~ghth ~entu">;: The Pw:astaseis Syntomoi Power', below. agdalino, P, Occult Science and Imperial

_7

Introduction

15

not always cater adequately to special interests, In this case defining the occult as either magic or science, or -~s magic and '- science combined, risks not emphasizing enough the fact that the ·,--Late-Antique and medieval world did articulate a concept of occult -wliidom that deserves to be considered in its own right. Yet ·mapping out the stages in the development of the Byzantine understanding of the occult is made difficult by the relative dearth of theoretical texts on the topic that can be dated and attributed to known authors with certainty. Modem scholars must gather much of the Byzantine understanding of the occult by examining not so much direct statements by Byzantine authors but the Byzantine Nachleben (manuscript tradition, quotation by other writers, reception among professional and literary circles) of ancient "classics" of the genre such as the Hermetic corpus, the Chaldaean Oracles, the Testament of Solomon, and the Kestoi of Julius Mricanus, whose initial composition or subsequent usage (or both) can only by approximation be dated, localized, and attributed to an identifiable individual. A notable exception to this state of affairs is the work of Michael Psellos (1018-ca. 1081 or later), who emerges from the surviving written record as the most learned, prolific and respected authority who best understood and appreciated the philosophical legacy of antiquity. 17 Psellos occasionally uses the word an6xQu<j>oc; (apocryphal), the direct Greek equivalent of Latin occultus. Thus, discussing the demon Gillo, who was blamed in folk tradition for killing infants at birth, he says that he has not come across her in his usual ancient sources for demonic names, but only in "an apocryphal Hebrew book" ascribed to Solomon. 18 More often, however, Psellos refers to "hidden" meanings and forces by two almost synonymous words that are suggestive of speech rather than 17 The literature by and on Psellos is immense. For a comprehensive survey of the scene in 2005, see P. Moore, Iter Psel/ianum: A Detailed Listing of Manuscript Sources for all Works Attributed to Michael Psel/os, Including a Comprehensive Bibliography (Toronto, 2005); see also the recent collection of essays edited by C. Barber and D. Jenkins, Reading Michael Psel/os (Leiden, 2006). For the writings discussed in this introduction, see particularly J. Duffy, 'Hellenic Philosophy in Byzantium and the Lonely Mission of Michael Psellos', inK. Ierodiakonou, ed., f(,za.ntine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources (Oxfo~, 2002), 1_39:-56. Mtchael Psellos, Philosophica minora, I, ed. D. 0 Meara (Lelpztg, 1989), 164.

-

16

Paul Magdalino Maria Mavrou~

sight: WtOQQfJ'tO~ ("forbidden", "secret") and clQQ1J'tOS) ("unspoken", "unutterable", and, by extension, "inexplicable"). He 1 sometimes uses these words to describe Biblical and Christian mysteries, 19 but usually, in his work, they denote the secrets of· profane learning. By lopking at the passages in question, we g~t a good idea of what a well-educated Byzantine considered to .. occult, and why. .....,.

be

In his funeral oration on his mother, Psellos says that he has read all the Hellenic and even barbarian books "on spoken and unspoken things (:n:EQL 'tE Qf)'t&v xal. UQQTJ'tWV) . . . and reading all their theology and their treatises and proofs on nature, I was delighted at their depth of thought and the enquiring nature (m::g(egyov) of their discussion".Z0 The content of the "unspoken" material is suggested by the list of authors; apart from Plato and Aristotle and the PreSocratics Empedocles and Parmenides, these include Orpheus, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistos. In other words this was largely mythical cosmology, concerned with revealing ~he origi~s and secrets of creation. In the same oration, Psellos writes "I have learned the secret. properties (01JVUJ.IEL£ ... UQQTJ'tOuc;) of stones and herbs, although I have given their experimental use (:rtEQLEQyov XQ'fiotv) a wide berth".Z 1 His treatise On the properties of precious stones ends by mentioni~g the classical authorities on the subject: "among the more ancient sages, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Democritus, and among those not so long before our time, Alexander of Aphrodisias a man m_ost capable of discoursing on all matters and especially th~ secret thmgs of nature (:n:egl ... 't&v vaewc;)". 22 The words
Michael Psellos, Michele Pse/lo Aut0 b. ifia . wgra · Encomw per Ia madre, ed. U. Ibid., 148. "Psellos, Philosophica minora, I, ed. Duffy, 119.

~riscuolo (Naples, 1989), 148_ . ' 9

Introduction

17

<j>uaLxa ~t'tta xal, v Eoo~vwv)". 23 In another p1ece he records the belief that lions fear the cock because it heralds sunris.e and they belong to the lunar order, so lion-faced demons, on seemg a cock, are afraid; "whether this is true, is for se~ret..know.ledge (~ ~OQ(>~) to decide". 24 In the same vem, the hidden meamng has been revealed which contains secret philosophy (tA.ooo<j>tav)", is the theme of his 25 Allegory on the Sphinx, and his Interpretation of the twenty-four letters concerns "the secret and unspoken meanings (

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