 Dr. Sledge, how are you? I'm doing very well, Jason. It's great to be back. It's a great honor to be on your channel. I really appreciate the work you're doing. Oh, the honors all mine. We talked a little bit about the apocalyptic elements of Poimandres. This time I wanted to talk about the Greek magical papyri. So if you could just kind of go over what the PGM are, just briefly think of it as like an introduction to somebody who isn't too familiar with it. So the Greek magical papyri are a collection of about 130 different magical texts that have survived from Egypt. Some of them are just scraps. Some of them are actual manuals that survive, for instance, the great magical papyri, PGM-6, currently housed in Paris. That's an entire magician's manual. They carried that around and worked on it. So imagine if all the magical stuff we survived that survived from ancient Egypt was sort of put into one book, that's what it is. It's not coherent. It's not systematic. It's just a grab bag of a Greco-Roman Egyptian Jewish you name it magic. And it covers a wide range of magical practices, everything from how to get your horse to win at a race to get some people to fall in love with you to using goat bile to keep insects out of your house. So it is an enormous range of magical texts. So things that are super useful in everyday life. Yes. I mean, hey, I don't want insects in my house. Goat bile does the trick and trust me, I want my horse to win too. So if I can go to a horse bile guy and a goat bile guy and a horse wing guy, I'm going to go to that guy. So it also contains some ritual texts like the Mithras liturgy, the so-called bornless or headless liturgy also is preserved in the text. So it's a kind of compendium of magical texts that are survived. Now what's important to know about the Greek magical pyrrhe is that we invented them, right? No ancient Egyptian Greek Roman person ever put them together that way. We collected them that way. And I think what's really great about a really great example of that is, for instance, all of the magical texts attributed to Christians are in a totally other volume, right? Right. There's Coptic texts by Meir. Coptic texts of power by Meir, yeah. Yep, by Meir. And so that is important, right? Because it's somehow, you know, we separate them off as if they're different, but they're not different. So we're talking about texts that survive from the period of roughly Roman-occupied Egypt up till, you know, 8th, 9th century of the common era. So that's roughly what they are. They're preserved in Greek. They're preserved in Aramaic. They're preserved in Demotic and Coptic, obviously. So that's what we have in the Greek magical pyrrhe. So some of the neat ones are actually preserved bilingually. There'll be a Coptic version and a Greek version right next to each other in that way. So that's what the Greek magical pyrrhe are. They're a collection of Greco-Egyptian-Jewish-Roman magic from the lay classical world. Right. That makes it sound so mysterious on like the term Gnostic gems. It's a neat collection of texts and it's really handily edited, you know, in the Betz edition. You really brought something to mind. Betz in his introduction really makes the point that the concept of magic and cult and religion, all these artificial divides didn't exist in antiquity. This is just how people lived their life. It was probably indistinguishable magical practices from religion. No, and not even a difference between religions, you know, like you have texts in this, these are highly syncretistic texts like many magical texts where, you know, you would invoke Yahweh and Toth and Jesus and, you know, just kind of a grab bag of gods and, you know, the idea was, you know, you don't, you don't, what sense is in there as they're narrowing down your attempt to get things done to one god? There might be, you know, it's like the radio, you broadcast to everyone, you get what you can get. And so there's a Moses, there's a Moses magical No, there is. Yeah, there's a Moses one. So yeah, the idea, right, is that these texts really invoke a wide range of gods. And I think that what's really cool about them is they tell us a lot more about what average people are up to. Because, you know, the religious authorities will tell you know, you should only believe in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the average person on the street, yeah, they went to the synagogue or to the temples or and they prayed and if their prayers didn't get answered, I can guarantee you their next stop was the amulet maker, the spell worker, the ritual expert. That's still true. I think one of my favorite modern day religions is religion, you know, just for lack of a better term is Santeria. Santeria really reminds me of all I think Paul would really be. I think if he would put it, was put in a time machine, he would kind of know about Christianity and he would just become like a Santeria pretty high priest or something very easy. This discussion really reminds me of a conversation I was having with Dr. Ligla the other night. You know, we were talking about dream divination, the, the religious specialist, the Onyer, Onyer Rappelos dream interpreter. They had specific clients held. And one thing I really liked about the PGM going through it was all these different, like you were saying, vast array of spells, like some of my favorites are the very first one actually, where you invoke the personal personal diamond to be your like assistant. And then I like the other one I like is PGM 1-2-2-2-2-3-1, the invisibility spell. Yeah, speaking of invisibility spells. I'm like Drax right now, you can't say. Can we glean about the hopes and fears of, you know, these, this clientele from looking at these texts like this? They're us. They're the same things we're, they're us. They're the same kinds of things that we hope and fear about. We want people to love us. We want, we want a horse to win. We want to win the power ball. We want to, we want to, you know, have powers that we shouldn't or don't deserve. At the end of the day, I think what the PGM reveals to us is that it's always the great things about the past that really are incredible is when we realize that people in the past are us. They're just normal people. And yeah, we want them, we want people to love us. We want, we want an assistant. Like who wants, who wants to spend all their time on email or, you know, on zoom calls? If you could summon your personal diamond to be on zoom calls for you, of course you would do that. And so I replaced me with a diamond. Of course I would love to have a diamond to like, you know, answer my emails or, you know, edit my, my YouTube videos. So it's just, it's just this kind of things that people cared about. And so what we see in the Greek magical of Hirey are, at some level, religion on the street. This is street level religion. And that's true of the Defixionis of the Roman period and over the, you know, Roman magic and things like that. It's not the high and mighty giving us a highly redacted, highly edited, you know, Torah version of what's supposed to be. It's, this is what survived. And this is pretty consistent of what we think people really were about in terms of their hopes and dreams and fears and desires. So in that way, I think the PGM is a better glimpse into the world of Eastern Mediterranean religious devotion than, you know, Philo or the New Testament or the Mishnah or whatever. Because those are incredible elites. Those are the, that's 1% of the 1% talking to each other. This is, you know, I love some of the Greek magical of Hirey too, because they're meant to be sold. So they'll copy out like six copies of the same spell and leave the space empty for the name to go in. And they just tore off the part that went to the person who like, yeah, go bury that in the graveyard or whatever. Yeah, that's awesome. That's like going to a, in Denver, there's a place called Casa Benita where you can get your, get your really bad Mexican food and watch people like dive off cliffs and stuff and get your customized shirts. It's, I imagine it's kind of like that. So yeah, in that way. So I think that's why the Greek magical of Hirey are so important. Also they preserve rituals that otherwise wouldn't survive. You know, the Mithras liturgy, the bornless headless liturgy. Those texts would not survive. We would not know anything about them. So they also give us a glimpse into the doing of these kinds of magical religious practices that otherwise we would, you know, they'd be totally lost. It's a great survival. We have some in Michigan here. I've seen them in person. Michigan, at the University of Michigan, yeah, they have an amazing peprological department and a chunk of them survive here. And so it is something really neat to be able to, you know, you can't lay your hands on them, but you can, I can lay my eyes on them. And I have laid my eyes on some of them, and it is really neat to see them in person. If you ever get the chance, if you're find yourself in Paris or at the University of Michigan, you can get your eyes on some of these. So they are quite impressive. I'm reading Achilles Tejas right now in book one. His slave is telling him about how the eyes are the windows through which beauty comes to the soul. No, and we should never forget that in the in the late classical world, there was still a debate about how sight worked, whether or not the eyes reached out or whether the light reached in. And I love the idea that, you know, Plato was in the minority, he really believed that light reached in through the sun. But many people believe that light reached out. I love the idea that your eyes are actually like feeling. It's fascinating. I love that theory of sight, that you're not seeing what you're feeling with your eyes. And that's a really, it's always struck me as a, we sometimes even talk about that, right? It's haptic sight. I always love that image of like haptic texture, that like, you know, that sight has texture too. And that image, that idea has always struck me as incredibly beautiful and useful. Thank you so much. We will definitely come back to the concept of sight in antiquity. Now I really want to do a deep dive now. Thank you so much. Everybody go and check out Dr. Sledge's amazing collaboration on neoplatonism he's doing with a bunch of other fantastic content creators like Angela Puka. Now, let's talk religion, the modern permeticist and others. I absolutely love to go and just interrupt you as Patreon and YouTube. Until next time, Dr. Sledge, thank you for joining me and you have a great evening. Thank you so much, Jason.