 Today, I'm very excited to host a very special guest, Dr. Kirsten Switzer. She is an archaeologist with a research focus in ancient magic and ritual practice. She's doing fantastic forward-facing scholarship, bringing this work to a broader audience online. She's currently working on a book about magic, ancient magical signs. So Kirsten, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me as your guest. I'm totally excited to be on your YouTube channel. I love it. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I'm a big admirer of your work, love your channel, learn something new every video that you put out. And I just want to thank you for your scholarship. It's really a great service to the public. It's so kind of you. Thank you. It's OK. So, Kirsten, for those of my audience who are unfamiliar with the Greek magical papyri or the PGM, could you give a brief explanation about what they are? Basically, the Greek magical papyri or what's behind the term, the Greek magical papyri, is a modern compilation of an awesome body of ancient magical papyri from Egypt. They date between approximately the 1st century BC and the 7th century AD. You can differentiate them into two different kinds of primary sources, ritual manuals. So Greek ritual manuals telling you how to perform rituals and magic. And the other primary sources is papyri, is artifacts like from applied magic. We have about 70 ritual manuals and I think published currently are a bit over 100 papyri artifacts. So these are the two main sources for our study in ancient magic and for research in ancient magic or basically for our understanding of ancient magic. It's the ritual manuals and the artifacts. And the Greek magical papyri, as the term says papyri, comprises all the papyri artifacts and manuals. But there are also much more artifacts from different materials like most people have heard or many people have heard of the curse tablets, which are made of lead and of magical gems. So these are really huge groups of artifacts. But the corpus of the body of the Greek magical papyri consists of roughly about, it's already about 200 Richard and artifacts comprised. So the Greek magical papyri were first published in the 1920s from Karl Preisenland, so the German scholar, and the first English translation was edited by Betz in 1986. And the Betz translation is what most people actually work with. Currently, the first volume of a new edition has been released this year by Chris Farrow-Own and Sofia Torales-Tovar. This is like they don't only publish the papyri that were known until 1986. So Betz in the Betz 1986 publication, it's 130 papyri altogether. And the new volumes will have like everything that has been discovered from then until now, there will be translations available in the new volumes, too. It's a modern compilation of all the papyri from Egypt we have about ancient magic. Oh, the Greek magical papyri we have from Egypt. The Greek magical papyri seem to be, they don't seem to have been very appreciated in history until the work of scholars like Albrecht Dietrich, you know, working on these and, you know, appreciating their values. So I didn't know if you could talk about just the reception up until modern times. The earliest modern or the early modern scholars working with this magical text. There are a lot of Germans who did this. And that was in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. And at that time, there was the perception was that magic is everything that's bad. It's bad, magic is black, it's dark, you know, it's all these curses and harming people. And there was this clear differentiation between religion and magic. Religion is everything that's great and good, and magic is everything that's bad. And actually, the first German scholars translating the Greek magical papyri, that was in in in official manners, like when Preisen-Dannes, who compiled the Greek magical papyri and translated them for the first time in two volumes and made them available to more researchers. When he taught this magic papyri at university, he wasn't allowed to use the word magic in the title of his lectures. He had to describe it, but he wasn't allowed to use this term magic. So the perception was for a very long time that this magical text that's not the you know, you have the golden classical grade text from ancient authors or the Egyptian pyramid text and religious types. And they were highly appreciated. And when it came to the magical text, it was like, oh, no, this is not even literature. This didn't have any value. You know, if you if you wanted to be someone in classics or in your research area, you definitely didn't study magic. So this was a very brave approach of the first scholars actually dealing with magic and translating them to translating the the texts. And it's really interesting to see how with the publication of the texts and making them available to more researchers, the our understanding and our approach towards towards magic changed. We came from this it's it's dark and it towards a well, you know, see, if you take a look at it, there's a lot of Egyptian religion in there. There's a lot of Judaism in there. There's a lot of Christian elements in there. You have this syncretistic approach and you do have very elaborate invocations hymns in there. You have texts that clearly they're very much older than actually the the the texts we have. So it shows that there is the knowledge, the people who wrote these ritual manuals and who created the magical artifacts were very well educated. You know, they were very knowledgeable in ancient religion and not just in one religion, but in in multiple religious beliefs. They were very familiar with with traditions, with so so much knowledge, traditional knowledge, this awareness. It came up just because Preisenthans and other scholars started to publish these magic texts, despite the opposition within scholarship towards the the magical texts. We went to like in the in the 80s, 1780s, we went to this discussion, discussion, what is ancient magic? And it was like scholars tended more to while there is not a hard line between religion and magic, we can't really differentiate this. And the tendency was there that, you know, magic is more like religion because you have very similar gods, you have similar traditions, identical techniques like like the invocation, like sacrifices, offerings. And a lot of the the the content, actually, what you said were were recitations from from older texts. So there was this idea, wow, it's all religion magic, isn't that separated? And then there was there was some kind of rise in the 90s in the study of ancient magic. And then that client now since around 2010, the the interest in ancient magic increased drastically and including discussions, new discussions about what is ancient magic and how, you know, we all use the term in scholarship, a lot of publications like ancient magic, magical artifacts, me included. But how do we define this term? Because as a scholar, we should be able to define the technical terms we use. And this is really, really not easy, not only from from the modern approach because that's what what has been a lot a long time. The modern approach to define ancient magic and what the the the the turn we we see in scholarship is like trying to understand magic. We have to do that much more from the practitioner's perspective, you know, from the ancient perspective. And as it is today, there wasn't just one kind of magic and there wasn't one definition of magic or one understanding of magic or one use of magic, despite lots of different terms in the Greek magic, a papyri for magic, which are all translated as magic. But behind these these when you when you read bets and you find the term magic, it's very likely that the original term is not magaea in ancient Greek term for magic, but there are a lot of different terms behind it. So it's a very ancient magic was very diverse, very complex, lots of different thoughts, perceptions underlying the application of magic. And on top of that, you had a lot of people practicing magic and likely all with individual approaches. It's all a matter of edic versus emic perspectives, right? Like, what do we even mean when we say something's a religion versus something's magic? We're defining borders, right? We're saying religion is what we do, but magic is what they did. Very much like an outsider or insider defining term, both religion and magic are anachronistic terms to begin with. You see a lot of bias. You know, the early scholars working with with anti-magical texts faced a lot of bias towards towards magic. And that you still have, if you read academic papers from colleagues, from certain colleagues closely, you still see a lot of bias. And even when they try to to avoid sounding like they despise is a bit tough. But, you know, they disagree with magic or they think magic is something negative or something minor. You can still see it in in the words they use to describe magic, how they describe magicians, how they address them. And you still have this bias, but it has become much better. There's many, many young scholars that approach magic with less bias, but with more curiosity, focusing on the question and not focusing on your values or your personal belief or your personal attitude, but really focusing on on research. Just kind of making a little cross-reference here. When we talk about things like Neo-Platonism and the classics, like you look at a philosopher like Plato and there are certain scholars who want to look at Plato or the Platonic tradition and define it in strictly philosophical terms and forget that there was a lot of mysticism and a lot of magic involved in that, as well, unwritten doctrines, things like that. John Dylan, who wrote the seminal book, The Middle Platonist, coined things like the Chaldean Oracles, the Greek Magical Papyri, Sethian Gnosticism as the underworld of Platonism, the Platonic underworld. So it just goes to show that bias still exists in scholarship as well. Scholars, classic classicists and pure philosophical-minded scholars would go. It's low magic, low. That's what the that's what the others were doing versus the. But what the reality is, is that. I think when you look at something like the Greek Magical Papyri, this is more of a window into what the everyday person was probably doing versus, you know, somebody like Cicero or somebody like Lucian or Clement of Alexandria, these elites, in other words, who are literate and had access to these materials to even write stuff down to send it to posterity. The people on the ground are going to the local ritual specialist, right, and getting their their their love spells or their spells to bind and unbind. You did that wonderful presentation on Patreon about those kind of spells, which I loved getting to the next point. And this kind of ties into what you were talking about. I just wanted to point out this quote that Hans Dieter Betts did make in his book, The Greek Magical Papyri. The religious beliefs and practices of most people were identical with some form of magic and the neat distinctions we make today between approved and disapproved forms of religion, calling the former religion and church and the later magic and cult did not exist in antiquity, except among a few intellectuals. So I think it's a good. Yeah, it's very it's almost like a mic drop moment there. What is the utilization of this technology? What are these rituals tell us about the everyday person? OK, so now that you drop that quote, I do have to address it. The first thing is when you hear most people, when you hear anyone, academic and non-academic, he is saying most people. That's basically an attempt to create the impression of authority. But from a research point of view, it's absolutely worthless because it's, you know, who's most people? And in terms of magic or the study on research and ancient magic, we don't know about most people and we don't know even most people about most people in antiquity, especially in terms of ancient magic. So what Betts is trying to do here is to I think he's he is to address the the turn of approaching of how scholars approach magic. But still, you know, if you if you study ancient magic and if you really want to go into the meta and understand it, you have to be critical of what you read. The other point is the eighties and nineties where what Betts or the definition of magic here that Betts says, well, you know, there is not this hard water and religion basically is for most people is some kind of magic. That approach is typical for the eighties and nineties. It's an entirely doomed to fail approach to have the discussion into the direction of saying it's all the same. So religion and magic, you know, is more or less the same. When the goal actually would be to understand the magic of papyri and ancient beliefs, thought and actions better, because in the moment you say, well, it's more or less the same or magic is is much like religion. You put it all in one pot. The reality is if you look at the Greek magical papyri, they are so diverse and so complex in thought, in belief, in however you want to define religion. But in terms of the classical gods, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, it's they are all there. So you can't just say it's it's it's mad magic is like religion. Because if you look and you can say generally if the Greek magic papyri is all the classical gods and then there's some demons and the ritual practices, you know, sacrificing, offering invocation, whatever. That's that's very similar to religious practices. But if you look into the details so that the technical aspects are very similar. But if you look into the details, like how belief is expressed and what's actually the underlying thoughts of individual rituals and how they work, I don't know if you have ever had a discussion about magical theory, a theory of magic, but it's so diverse. There's so much different kind of ideas or magic works, you know, a discussion you don't have in classical religion. You don't discuss how a power, how God can do what he or God is what she can do. But you do have that in the in the magic of papyri. You do have explanations or you can see them when you read them, the text, the ideas and the approaches to explain how things work, how power works, how magic works. And that that's different to what Beth says. So I had to address this because we are we are slowly heading into this direction to say, OK, religion and magic is not in terms of religion is good, magic is bad, but it's also not in terms of it's more or less the same. And it's I think it's really it's much more important. It's really important to to open this door in scholarship much more to talk much more about this, that we're now at a point where we scholars accept that magic is not necessarily low level. And we are at a point where we see, OK, no, no, we should kind of level that in terms of our attitude towards it with religion. But now we can safely say religion and magic is not the same without saying magic is bad and religion is good. Just if we get back to it, like I think the only thing I'd add there is you're absolutely right when we put things into boxes that are needs like that, like religion and magic. We we tend to look at it from a standpoint where we don't recognize the diversity within those boxes. We tend to put a lot of diverse voices into this false sense of everything is the same when, like you said, there's conversations going on even within theories of magic and the Greek magical papyri about how things work, the theories in practice. It's very important to recognize that. Thinking about magic and what magic is, and especially if you look at the original terminology in the magic of papyri, it's it's like there is so many new doors that open up compared to the to the translation. The imagination and the the the underlying concept, the concept of the ancient people who practice magic or who wrote the magic of papyri is so so rich and complex. It shows so many various explanations. Just look at divination practice and how many different ways you you you can achieve a divination. It becomes absolutely clear that these people were in stupid. Certainly they were in frauds. I mean, there were as everywhere in every business. There were frauds, too. But the majority of the people and people who wrote the magic of papyri, they were really intellectually high level. You know, it's the highest grade of knowledge and very educated. These religious specialists, they weren't they weren't like charlatans. They they were people living in a very dynamic, cosmopolitan milieu. You had to be familiar with many different traditions, right? You had to be familiar with your own native Demotic traditions. You had to be familiar with the Greco-Roman traditions, that the Hebrew traditions, the Christian traditions, etc. These were very well learned people, especially if you if you keep in mind that it was still not easy to get access to books or to scrolls. It's not that everyone had the had the the financial means to own books or to own papyrus papyrus scrolls. Papyrus wasn't an expensive material and not everybody learned to write. You had to have access to not only the literature, but also to teachers, to, you know, to schools. And it's not something everyone had the chance to do. The other thing is when we look at the time, the majority of the Magical Papyrus dated around the third and the fourth century, 80. This is a time when more and more pagan temples, pagan, pagan temples get closed. By the Romans. So the question is what happens to the priests? And we know that, you know, in larger temples and temple complex, there could could have been 50, 100 or even more priests working there, living there. So what happened to them? How did they make their money when the temples were closed? I think that that the people who wrote the Magical Papyrus and who practiced magic, basically for what you said earlier, everyday people, you know, not only kings and royalty and for everyone who could afford more or less, these were very likely, at least in parts, partially priests. So extremely educated people, the intellectual elite in Egypt. This is something we should keep in mind, you know, who were the authors of these texts? Who could have had the knowledge that is preserved in the Greek Magical Papyrus? But not knowledge that is restricted to leadership elide, but or rulership elide. But that becomes accessible to a broad audience in terms of more people can participate in the benefits of this knowledge. I love what you just mentioned there about the disenfranchised Egyptian priests. This this is a very interesting parallel with Hermeticism. A scholar named Christian Bull recently wrote a book about who wrote these texts that we find on the Corpus Hermetican. He came much to the same conclusion that you did. These were disenfranchised Egyptian priests who were creating these texts. So a very interesting parallel there. Yeah, I mean, and it would all check out, wouldn't it? These these are ritual specialists. They're familiar with many different philosophical and, quote, unquote religious concepts. It would just make sense that they're playing their trade just in different ways, like in one sense with the Hermetica and in another sense with these magical inscriptions and rituals. And you also mentioned like the importance of the Pidea. Pidea was not Pidea in education. It was not an inexpensive venture for any family in this period of time and even access to a library involved, even in somebody's house involved, much access to access to much means you would have to put into that. I think the next part I wanted to talk about, just to have a little fun, fun here. I wanted to talk about some of your favorite rituals in the Greek Magical Papyri. I have a couple of favorites of my own. For instance, I really like the Invisibility Spell one twenty one two twenty two through two thirty one. And I like the Personal Diamond Spell. And of course, the very first spell and bets text, you know, where you create your personal diamond assistant and it just does everything for you. So I didn't know if you could mention maybe a couple of your favorites. That's difficult. So with the Invisibility Spells and the Personal Diamond, who's basically a Piedros, and this is the Piedros is one of the most common rituals in the in the in the Greek Magical Papyri. And a lot of people like or love exactly these two kind of or kind of spells. I think my favorite it's not that I could say it's this spell or that spell. It spells that provide in in in mostly in in in a site sentence, some personal information, you know, or some more personal information about the people writing down the instruction or making an artifact or what I totally love is when you see that someone writes down a ritual and then crosses a whole line out. And then the next line is almost identical. It's just like two words that are a bit different or the spelling of the secret name. You know, it's just one one letter is different. And you can literally imagine you can see the person sitting there writing and then swearing because something was misspelled. Or when when when he called, you know, you have an example in PGM seven where you get the impression that the scribe actually copied from from from from a sheet he had and then misread the line. You know, you slipped in the line, you know, you started the wrong line and then copied the wrong line and had to cross it out and then had just had to copy the right line. You can literally imagine how the people sit there like like we today, you know, but, you know, then you couldn't just, you know, you didn't have a computer, you had to start all over. And I also love the I love cryptography and and steganography and everything that has to do with encoding. So I especially love the ones like the Eighth Book of Moses. Everything at the beginning of the Eighth Book of Moses is, I think, steganography, you know, where where information is hidden. Normally, steganography is is not encrypted writing, but hidden writing. So we know it mostly of from from hacking and from from our technologies, where you hide information in an image. But the Eighth Book of Moses at the beginning, the secret, the whole Eighth Book of Moses ritual is basically about gaining knowledge of the secret name of of a very powerful God. And when you know the secret name, you can perform a lot of short rituals, which are very efficient. The description of the ritual starts with images, with literal images, not with painted images, but images painted by words. They are, I think, steganographic. There is the real name is hidden in there. And the the way the there is an artifact that has to be inscribed. And the the the description of what has to be inscribed is basically encrypted with words, but not in terms of a code, but a picture painted by words. And this is what I utterly love. And we have one ritual manual. It's the first century currently it's dated to. It's the one with the first mentioning of characters of magic science. That has been entirely written in code. It's a monoalphabetic substitution code. So each letter of the alphabet is written with a different letter. So it's it's not really a high-tech cryptography, but it's absolutely awesome. If you think that a person wrote an entire ritual manual encrypted. This is what I love. And I think it's pgm 12 where we have the encryption of ingredients. You know where it said that when it's the eye of a snake or was basically it's mostly it's it's animal parts, parts of animals. And then it says what it really means is and then you get plants, plant parts. I talked about that before. I did the fascinating thing about this is that we have a lot of ritual instructions up until the middle ages and today which claim to you derive from ancient traditions and they use animal parts and blood especially blood, blood of snakes, blood of whatever. The encrypted Greek magic papyrus says that these were actually codes for plant ingredients, plant-based ingredients. So that I wonder how much of these animal sacrifices and blood and things that are used, you know, that are described in ritual instructions were actually code for plant ingredients. We don't have all the plain text, all the explanations for the codes. It's really interesting because, you know, at this point in time in history in antiquity, mysteries and secrets have a kind of social capital, right? It gives the spells, it gives the traditions a kind of prestige, right? Basically, the secrecy is fundamental existential fear. I could say an expression of fundamental existential fear because the ancient belief towards magic or in terms of magic is that it's not something you are gifted, you have to be gifted to perform. But the ancient idea is that magic is entirely based on knowledge so or can be learned from everyone. Keeping your knowledge secret was fundamental to ensure that you keep your clients. If everyone gets access to your knowledge, everybody can use your knowledge and, you know, can offer your knowledge. So you have this all over the magic, the magic papyrus where the author says, well, keep that secret, make sure you keep that secret, don't share that, only share that with your first son or something like that. So it was just a very pragmatic approach towards knowledge. I also wanted to get back really quickly to what you were saying, what you enjoyed about the human aspect of looking at these spells. I was reminded of one of the texts in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Prayer of Thanksgiving. It's this really lofty prayer and then at the end, you have the copyists writing out, I have copied this one of his discourses, a great many have come into my hands, but I have not copied them because I thought they were already in your possession. I even hesitate to copy these things for you, since perhaps you may already have received them and the matter may annoy you for that person's discourses that have come into my hands are many. It's like you have this really lofty ritual invocation, right? Then you have like this dude pretty much just like writing to the other guy, okay, I wrote it out, but I'm not sure if you have this, maybe you have it, maybe you don't. It just gives it a very human dimension that I love. Exactly, because you have the best points. You have this real person, we actually do have real letter preserved that tell us, the magical pirate tell us that this is a letter from, or I got this, I sent this to you, I had this sent to you, so that we learn that the knowledge was exchanged, among other things, through letters or by letters. People actually put, when we have one letter with a texture artifact, where the texture artifacts is described, so we know this is the way the knowledge was exchanged and that is not really very mysterious. And it's not a secret cult or something like that. This is really between two people, likely practitioners, who are in exchange or who met, and then decided to share their knowledge, often studies archaeology is very distant. But here you all of a sudden, like you said, you have an invocation or prayer there, and then all of a sudden I said, hey dude, I love the dude, hey dude, it draws you right into the past and into the person, you know, you really, it's so real and close all of a sudden. You're not distant to some people, you don't know their faces and you don't know who they are, right there. Hey dude, hope you like it. All of a sudden, like in the middle of your invocation to Toth or whatever or whoever you're talking, you know, it's just some guy like, hey, I got this really deep cut you might be interested in. With the ritual manuals or the magic books, you basically have the handbooks, the instructions of how to create, for example, artifacts or textual artifacts, inscribed artifacts. And we do have on the other side, thousands of magical artifacts in the Archaeological Record. I wrote my PhD about the making and use of ancient magical artifacts as they are described in the Egyptian, Greek, magic or papyri. So when I studied the instructions, the artifacts described in there, in the manuals, how different they are compared to the Archaeological Record, but different in terms of, in so many terms actually, I have to give you a brief overview there. The Archaeological Record is like roughly between, depending on what kind of artifacts you count with. So if you count the demon boats too, we're dealing with between eight and 10,000 artifacts from the time span of the Greek magical papyri. So yeah, it's still difficult because the largest group are the magical gems. There are numbers estimated between about three and a half and 5,000, but it's still difficult and it's still a huge topic actually in research, how many are actually ancient and how many are cost antique. It can be that not as many as 5,000 magical gems are actually ancient. On the other side, we do have other ancient sources that haven't been really researched by now in detail in terms of the textual artifacts in there, like the ancient Greek lithica. This is just a rough estimation, but if we go there, we can see that the Archaeological Record, the largest group of magical artifacts is definitely gems with around three and a half to 5,000, followed by the cursed tablets between I think currently the Greek and Latin together about 1800. For a long time, there's nothing, and then we have about a bit over 160 currently lamelles. So that's gold, silver, tin, basically tablets, inscribed smaller tablets, and a papyri about the same amount. Basically, we have gemstones, lead, and then is papyrus and precious metals. Precious metals. Precious, precious. Okay. What we have in the ritual manuals is very different. We have descriptions for about 300 textual artifacts in there, and 268 were good enough that you have more or less the whole procedure, materiality, or the purpose, or the inscription. Most artifacts are made of papyrus, followed by tin, and then linen and laurel leaves. So very different from the archeological record. What we do have, for example, in the archeological record, with all the lead tablets, there are a lot of, the vast majority is actually connected to erotic and love. And a lot of spells of attraction are written down, or we know as cursed tablets are labored as cursed tablets. But the ones, the lead tablets we do have in the ritual manuals, they are not actually addressing this kind of attraction. They deal with love and erotic, but not with this, you know, drawing a woman or a person towards you. I think we have 10 or 12 lead tablets that are described in the ritual manuals compared to like 1800 in reality. You can't say that 12 and 1800, I don't compare the numbers directly, but I mean like, from all the 300 texture artifacts that are preserved, only 12 are made of lead. So this is a very small group, and in the archeological record, the lead tablets are the second largest group. So this is really different. I wonder if that has to do with that all the magical papyrus we have are actually from Egypt, but the cursed tablets and the gems, of course, we find them all over the Roman Empire. So you have them from Great Britain down to Egypt, then from Western Africa and Spain to Crimea and further to the east. So if this is because the manuals are all from Egypt, actually we don't have many cursed tablets from Egypt, maybe that specific preferences of clients were very different in Egypt compared to other Roman provinces. Another thing that's really interesting and a difference between the archeological record and the Greek magic papyri is the purpose of the artifacts or the purpose in general that we can see in the rituals and in the artifacts. The purpose that occurs most of the time, so that's protection. It's amulets, and you know, we should think, okay, that's, you know, we have a lot of amulets in the archeological record. Many gems do not explicitly say, protect me or protect the wearer, but we assume that they were used for protection. And in the ritual manuals we learned that the vast majority of the amulets was created for the magician to protect the magician during the practice. There is not a lot of amulets, very few amulets that were made for the client and then usually in context of an exorcism, you know, when there was an exorcism and then the client gets an amulet to protect him that he doesn't get possessed again. Most of the protective artifacts are actually for the practitioners themselves. And then really interesting questions and most of the instructions do not provide us with an answer is, could you reuse an amulet? You know, when you perform a ritual and you need an amulet, because when you call upon God or demons, you want to be sure that you get out there safe. But when the ritual is over, do you have to craft a new artifact when you perform the ritual again or can you use it? When the amulet is made of gold, you can assume that it can be reused, but we still don't know if you have to do like special prayers or invocations over this artifact. You know, you speak over the artifact. Do you have to repeat this? And especially when you have artifacts, protective artifacts that are made from organic material, can you reuse them? And then next question, if you can't reuse them and with some it's clear in some cases the ritual says it's one time performance kind of. What do you do with the artifacts? I mean, you know, they're usually inscribed with the names of higher powers and they were created in a context of ritual manual in which higher powers were involved. Can you just throw them away? I guess it might be a question going back to, you know, the needs of the clients, like the spells are geared towards certain clients and especially artifacts. The artifacts that can be reused might be for a certain clientele versus, you know, one use artifacts, you know, something to explore there, I'm sure. All right. You know, you actually, it doesn't just apply to the artifacts that the practitioner crafts for himself or herself, but also for the clients. That's true. I haven't heard about that. Yeah. And it's very interesting just hearing that these amulets were mostly for practitioners. It kind of reminds me of that whole period of time when the teachers getting back to Pidea for a second, like the teachers would often accuse each other of sorcery and like binding their tongue, each other's tongues, because, you know, being a rhetorical master was very important. And, you know, we have lots of these reports of like them trying to protect themselves from the sorcery of another rival. What we do have in terms of the archaeological records, it really seems that Egypt is the only game in town just by nature of the climate and how it preserves the papyrus versus other areas. So it really, it might be a skewed record, but we have to take in, we always have to take that into consideration that just due to climate, Egypt is going to be where the majority of these discoveries are going to be made. My experience is that there's a lot of people who actually are not really aware in terms of, because you don't think about it, if you don't have to, that actually all the magical papyrus, we have like the Greek magical papyri and the Egyptian magical papyrus, they originate all from Egypt. There is no magical papyrus from, and we do have papyrus from Italy, but there is no magical papyrus so far, or so far I know of, from Italy. They are also, the published ones in Paisenanism Bets, they are all from Egypt. And when you read studies and research about the engine magical papyri, it always seems so, you know, especially the Greek magic of a papyrus, it's so Greek. And you think, well, it's maybe, maybe it is not all that fascinating or mysterious that there are so many Egyptian terms in there, not only gods, but, but language, when you consider that it's actually, they are from Egypt, you know, even if that's, if it's Greeks that, that wrote them, they still lived in Egypt and it's very likely that, you know, they, they heard Egypt, the Egyptian language, basically every day and they saw the Egyptian temples and monuments every day and hieroglyphs, the inscriptions every day, they were all around them. It's sometimes that I myself have to have to remind me and say, well, yeah, they are from Egypt, from all over Egypt, you know, it can be from some Egypt as well, you know, and not only Alexandria, everybody who is really interesting in the study of engine magic, don't study only the papyri. It's, it's, it's, it's handy because you have the translations, but take a look at as many archaeological artifacts as well, because they literally are from all over Europe. At the beginning of scholarship, it was like, oh my God, look here, we haven't, we have an inscribed lamella we found in Great Britain and it's inscribed in, in, in Hebrew. Oh, wow. And then, you know, you start thinking, okay, wait, yeah, we have the Romans and they had their armies and, you know, they were permanently on wall. They traveled a lot and of course they, they transported a lot of information and a lot of knowledge and traditions, not only people and, and food and, and trade in terms of material trade, but also the immaterial goods that, that, that were traded. If you're interested in engine magic, really, really look at the artifacts and most of the artifacts we have, we know that, that they are magic is because they are inscribed. So read them. It's, it's awesome. You get a much better picture. When you study engine magic, everyone is all the Greek magical papyri, the Greek magical papyri. And yeah, it's, it's the best known body of texts. But actually, it's just a very, even as Egypt, but it's very local, very small source for the study in ancient magic. And once you, you don't only know that, but you, you've become familiar with the, with the artifacts. You know, you, it's like this, you're in a house with a lot of locked windows and doors. And the more you learn, the more you see from the ancient source, from primary sources, actually, it's like each artifact opens a window. And, and you know, you at some point, the walls fall and, and you just see how many people, how much knowledge, how much stuff actually got in this ancient magic. And it's not this, it's not just the magic of papyri, really important and, and tremendous source because, because of the manuals. But still it's just, it's really basically a small, a small slice of cake. The archaeological record, just looking at it, aside from the manuals that we find in Egypt, it really fills in a bigger picture, like you were saying, it's like having one piece of the puzzle versus the whole picture. And, you know, you can make a, an analogy to when somebody's reconstructing like a, an authoritative text. Dr. Dr. Suiza, if you could tell us a little bit about your Patreon and your book projects. Thank you for giving me the chance to, to introduce my, my new Patreon to your audience or to our audience. It's ancient magic. It's patreon.com ancient magic. You can support me on, on Patreon by in, in sharing my research, in doing the research and in sharing the research with a broad audience. Be the videos, you can become a video patron, you can become a magic science patron, help me, especially support me, especially in research and ancient magic science. Or you can become a creator patron and you kind of support all the stuff I'm doing and sharing. Be the videos, be it on Twitter or on, on, on Instagram. And I'd love to see you there. Yes, everyone go check out Dr. Suiza on Patreon, check out her projects, check out her YouTube channel. Thank you so much, Kristen. This has been fascinating, brilliant, as always. I hope to talk to you soon. Until next time. Thank you. You're welcome.