S3 Ep5: Introduction to the Greek Magical Papyri with Tom McArthur

Seeking Witchcraft

Religion & Spirituality, How To, Society & Culture, Education, Spirituality

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode features guest Tom McArthur as he and talks all about the Greek Magical Papyri, also known as the PGM! This advanced topic is easily explained by Tom and is filled with tons of interesting historical information. You can find Tom on Twitter at @tommcarthur777, or at the "Cross Country Witchcraft" blog which will become live on October 31st. If you want to learn more, you can also check out this video of Tom presenting the PGM on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEpsPuAI1aI&feature=youtu.be

You can find Ashley on Twitter (@SeekWitchcraft), Instagram (@seekingwitchcraft), Facebook (Seeking Witchcraft Podcast), or the community group ("Witches Seeking Witchcraft"). Want to support the show and gain access to cool bonus events and features? You can do so on Patreon at https://patreon.com/seekingwitchcraft

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Seeking Witchcraft. It's me, your host, Ashley, and today I have on a special guest, Tom.
0:07.0	Tom is going to be talking a little bit about a more advanced topic, the Greek magical papyri,
0:12.7	which is a collection of ancient magical texts that have influenced magical practitioners today.
0:17.9	Tom has given presentations on this topic before, so I'm super stoked that he's on the show today to speak about this with the listeners. So Tom, welcome. Please introduce yourself. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So yeah, my name's Tom. I'm a classicist. So I studied a classist university and well, I worked on the Greek magical papyri doing research on them.
0:38.9	I'm also a magical practitioner. I'm a gardenerian witch and just in my personal practice
0:43.6	do a bit of everything. So I've worked with these texts both from a academic and a magical
0:49.1	perspective and I just think they're brilliant. I'm very excited to be able to nerd out about
0:52.3	them with you. Awesome. Well, I'm excited for you to talk about this. So when I was kind of asking people like,
0:58.9	hey, like, you know, do anybody has a topic they want to talk about? Tom was like, oh, I'll talk
1:02.6	about this. And I'm like, I have no idea what that is. Perfect. So now this is my chance to learn all about the Greek magical papyriary, because I have no idea what this is. But when he's talked a little bit about it and how it's influenced magical practitioners
1:13.3	today, I was like, I'm excited to hear about this topic.
1:17.2	Thank you. So the, I mean, the first place to start is what are the Greek magical
1:21.7	papyri? And so they are a collection of magical texts written on papyrus, hence the name papyri, that were found in Egypt.
1:31.1	They're largely written in Greek, and the collection that we have today wasn't actually put together by the ancient Egyptians.
1:38.5	They were actually collected by a German scholar named Karl Prysendans in the 1920s and have since been republished in an English
1:44.6	edition by this guy called Betts, which is the one that most magicians work from today.
1:48.2	So already we're not looking at a collection of text put together by magicians, rather it's
1:52.3	kind of like all these scraps of things that look vaguely magical have been put together by scholars.
1:57.3	The papy themselves date from the second century BCE through to about the fifth century CE,
2:02.6	so most of them from about the fourth, fifth century CE, so sort of three, 400 AD CE.
2:08.6	And that span of up to 700 years, and it's all the magical text we found from that period.
2:15.6	So at this time, Egypt had been a Roman province
	...

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