Science vs mageía: The Greeks' polemic view

710 ἔθελγέ μ᾽:  he bewitched me

Before we discuss the nature of charm in The Women of Trachis, let's take another quick look at how Sophocles quietly makes us aware that the heroic career of Heracles begins and ends with Centaurs. Chiron stands at the beginning, the divinely wise master of the greatest Greek heroes. Nessus, after bewitching Deianira, sends Heracles a "gift" that ends his labors, and his earthly life.

What's worth noting is the symmetry: these two centaurs are positioned like bookends at either end of the hero's life. One brings enlightenment, skills, the powers of the mind and body, medicine; the other brings delusion, error, and death.

Deianira links the two in her momentous epiphany. Nessus, she says,

bewitched me in order to destroy the man who had shot him. And now too late I gain the knowledge of this, when it can no longer help. Yes, I alone—unless my outlook prove mistaken—I, miserable one, shall completely destroy him! For I know that the arrow which made the wound harmed [715] even the god Cheiron, and that it kills all varieties of beasts that it touches. Since it is this same black venom in the blood that has passed out through the wound of Nessus, must it not kill Heracles also?

Deianira is beginning to work out, to reason about, what has happened. She is no longer in thrall to the dark power of the charm.

Today we are confident that if we mix vinegar and baking soda, we can make a bottle rocket. It's a recipe or formula that produces a predictable result so long as the materials are combined in the prescribed manner.

The ancient world was suffused in charms that had designs upon people. I recently came across a collection of ancient Mesopotamian charms which in fact were counter-charms. They were used to ward off, or neutralize, the work of other people's charms.

Here's a sample counter-charm from Babylonia taken from a scholarly collection at the Universitat Wurzburg:

[If a m]an is constantly frightened (and restless) on his (sick)bed, healways suffers from [depres]sion, 4he has [ver]tigo (and) his feet cause him a stinging pain, 5figurines of that man have been buried in the tomb of a dead person. 6[In the mornin]g you purify the claypit. You take clay from the clay pit. 7You make [two figur]ines.[For the] male [figurine]: 8[You take] a bronze ring [an]d you press(it) on [his] wais[t]. 9[... of ced]ar wo[od ...] you press (it) on her[wa]ist. 10You have them stand [...] ... [...]. 11[...], you libate beer.12[...] ... [

While this practice made for an elaborate system in the Middle East, it was not received without skepticism by the Greeks, according to the authors of the Wurzburg site:

from the very beginning, mageía is not a word that objectively refers to ancient Near Eastern practices, but a term that carries a value judgment prompted by Greek perceptions of the Middle East. Therefore, the origins of ‘magic’ may well be regarded as an early example of ‘Orientalism’, and, characteristically, a blend of fascination, contempt and misunderstanding has accompanied the concept of magic ever since its inception.

Indeed, the authors go on:

Early on Greek authors used the term mágos, a direct loan from Old Persian maguš, not only as a designation for Iranian experts in religious matters, but also as a pejorative term for ritualists whose practices, in the author’s view, lack piety. Derived from mágos, the term mageía soon ubiquitously carried the same polemical connotation. Usually it served as a derogatory label for ritualistic activities that are, by using this designation, characterized as obscure, irrational and impious. Ultimately, in this line of argument, mageía is a powerful deception performed by shrewd practitioners on their immature, credulous victims.

This is not to say the Greeks didn't enjoy elaborate narratives involving magic. But if we think of a character like Circe in the Odyssey, we find a localized "shrewd practitioner" whose powers are not unlimited, and in fact are thwarted by Odysseus with the help of a counter-charm Homer calls moly. For the Greeks, the world was shaped less by rote charms and more by relations between humans and the gods.

One can almost feel the Greek contempt for the roteness of magic formulae. To succeed, a charm does not depend upon anything other than the proper repetition of a series of actions. One need not know chemistry or science, one simply (mindlessly) follows a set of instructions, with the idea that a certain result is guaranteed.

We might suggest a basic distinction here between a charm and a scientific experiment. If one is applying knowledge of materials, of chemical properties, to discover new facts about the world, and follows a set of procedures to that end, this is cognitive: one learns something about the properties of materials and about the world.

But if one simply follows instructions that purport to convey power, or perform some act, there is no burden of inquiry, no yield of discovery. Rather, there's mere repetition of a set of actions. If the actions are properly executed, they produce an effect - somehow. A charm is a technique -- a power that can be accessed by anyone who can access designated materials and follow a set of scripted actions. It's dark technology, causation divorced from any understanding of its nature.

The only thing is, from the standpoint of an outside observer, it might be difficult to tell whether someone is working a charm or performing a scientific experiment -- they share a good deal of external attributes, even as the thinking and intent behind them can be entirely distinct. These happen to be the alternatives embodied in our two Centaurs: Chiron the wise teacher of science and medicine, and Nessus, persuasive Hydra-bile salesman.

The next post will look at a few more aspects of the charm motif in The Women of Trachis.

Erotic spells, potions, curses, and mojo

As the Nurse and Phaedra continue to talk about how to resolve Phaedra's plight -- her passion for Hippolytus -- in a way that does not involve her death, the Nurse alludes to the potency of verbal spells:

There are incantations, and words that charm: something will turn up to cure this love. [480]

εἰσὶν δ᾽ ἐπῳδαὶ καὶ λόγοι θελκτήριοι:
φανήσεταί τι τῆσδε φάρμακον νόσου. 480

A little while later, she says she suddenly remembers she has a drug in the house. She has already described Phaedra's condition as νόσος - which can mean literal sickness, as well as a bane, or madness, so thinking of a medicine is perfectly understandable. But it does shift the kind of magic from words to things:

Nurse 

I have love-medicine (θελκτήρια ἔρωτος) [510] within the house—I just thought of it this very moment—that will free you from this malady without disgrace to you or harm to your mind, if only you do not flinch. 

***We must get some token from the man you love, a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, [515] then compound from the twain a single blessing.*** 

Phaedra 

This drug (φάρμακον), is it an ointment or a potion? 

Nurse 

I know not: strive for benefit, not lore.

Note the lines above in italics are omitted in Grene's edition, but are found in Kovacs on Perseus. To complicate matters, Richard Hamilton's Bryn Mawr edition has "word" (logos) instead of "lock of hair" (πλόκον). He assumes it would be a magic word identifying Hippolytus.

Phaedra asks about the medicine. But for the Nurse, once it's a question of a potion, ointment, or compound, bothering to understand what it is becomes pointless. All that matters is what it does.

There seems a certain incoherence here. The Nurse's words lead us to think she intends some magic drug or object. Yet in the next scene, the first thing we learn when, mediated by Phaedra, we overhear the Nurse talking to Hippolytus is that she has revealed to him Phaedra's passion for him. We never hear the Nurse's exact words, or learn why she tells him, and we also do not hear her extracting his oath of silence. We the audience have auditory gaps in our understanding. This will probably merit some attention further on. The seeming inconsistency might explain why Grene omits the lines that introduce thingly magic entirely. 

For now I just want to point to some of the thinking about ancient love spells, charms, and the like, since these modes of trying to cause someone to fall in love, or to fall out of love with someone else (separation spells), seem to go back as far as language and inscriptions can take us. 

Christopher Faraone associates much erotic incantation with the form of the curse. "What I discovered was that most of the technologies that are used in spells for throwing erotic passion into someone are borrowed from the realm of cursing," he says in an interview.

Eleni Pachoumi surveys several kinds of spells in this article. Some are supposed to lead the loved one to the lover; others unbind them from those they currently love. She also speaks of defixiones -- curse tablets in which a god or gods are asked to do harm to someone.

[Update: Here's a note on two medieval love charms.]

Incidentally, it is gratifying to see articles like Pachoumi's published in an open access format, rather than behind the accursed paywalls of JSTOR, Project MUSE, or others.

Here's an ancient curse - the words and translation are here:

Horace's very funny satire I.8, has Priapus as a half-carved block of wood recounting how he was forced to confront two witches invading Maecenas's garden.

While Horace was having his laugh, credence in the power of lotions, powders and potions that attract, separate, or destroy is alive and well in the world of love, magic and commerce:

Lucky Mojo

Cassini on Christmas

Another of Milton's semi-contemporaries was Giovanni Domenico Cassini:

Cassini was an astronomer at the Panzano Observatory, from 1648 to 1669. He was a professor of astronomy at the University of Bologna and became, in 1671, director of the Paris Observatory. He thoroughly adopted his new country, to the extent that he became interchangeably known as Jean-Dominique Cassini — although that is also the name of his great-grandson.

Cassini was the first to observe four of Saturn's moons, which he called Sidera Lodoicea, including Iapetus, whose anomalous variations in brightness he correctly ascribed as being due to the presence of dark matter on one hemisphere (now called Cassini regio in his honour). In addition he discovered the Cassini Division in the rings of Saturn (1675). He shares with Robert Hooke credit for the discovery of theGreat Red Spot on Jupiter (ca. 1665). Around 1690, Cassini was the first to observe differential rotation within Jupiter's atmosphere.

In 1672 he sent his colleague Jean Richer to Cayenne, French Guiana, while he himself stayed in Paris. The two made simultaneous observations of Mars and, by computing the parallax, determined its distance, thus measuring for the first time the true dimensions of the solar system.

Cassini was the first to make successful measurements of longitude by the method suggested by Galileo, using eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter as a clock.

The astronomer's intellectual trajectory suggests the uncertain boundaries between astronomy and astrology, science and magic, belief and skepticism at the heart of the 17th century:

Attracted to the heavens in his youth, his first interest was in astrology. While young he read widely on the subject of astrology, and soon was very knowledgeable about it; this extensive knowledge of astrology led to his first appointment as an astronomer. Later in life he focused almost exclusively on astronomy and all but denounced astrology as he became increasingly involved in the Scientific Revolution.

Images from the Cassini-Huygens Titan probe offer new glimpses of Saturn, just in time for Christmas: