KNOWLEDGE INTO PERFORMANCE

One of the older insights of materiality theory is that manufactured ob-jects are frequently important precisely because we do not see them but take them for granted, and thus also the way in which such objects, not merely tools, armaments, clothes and furniture, but also architecture,

68 Totelin rightly points out that oral recipes tend to differ markedly from written versions (2009, 18).

69 Pliny, HN 25.8; see also Kind 1922. This Metrodorus might be the man of the same name cited by Pliny at 20.214 as the author of an ἐπιτομὴ ῥιζοτομουμένων.

70 For books with magic, see also Bremmer, this volume.

71 For phylacteries, see also Dieleman, this volume.

vehicles, and media condition what we do and how we do it.⁷² Not-no-ticing is thus a form of naturalisation. Objects manufactured for largely non-utilitarian purposes such as religion, on the other hand, constantly call attention to themselves, through their aesthetic claims, the intrin-sic value of the materials they are made of, the modes of storage, care and presentation to an audience, or their palpable inutility for every-day pragmatic ends. In the case of Graeco-Roman magical practice, it is primarily the framing of such objects, though sometimes also their very manufacture, that simultaneously calls attention to the exceptional nature of the claims made for the knowledge that motivates their pro-duction, and the meaningfulness of that knowledge within the totality of knowledge-claims on offer. We may take two examples to illustrate the point.

In 2005 a Roman cellar dating from the Flavian period was dis-covered by chance in the centre of Chartres (Roman Autricum/Lud-gunensis), and turned out to contain 424 separate objects.⁷³ The house belonged to a man of unknown social status (Roman citizen? Libertus?

Junian Latin?) named C. Verius Sedatus. Some of the objects found were quite unremarkable, fragments of local coarse-ware pottery, for ex-ample, glass-ware, or the nails, hinges and other attachments from a small wooden chest and a larger but portable cupboard.⁷⁴ Some others – a (sacrificial) knife, 68 animal bones, a few lamps – might point to ritual activity (pl. 6).⁷⁵ Much more unusual were the remains of three round-bellied vessels with suspension loops, which were decorated with moulded snakes, stereotyped ivy-leaves and supernumerary kernos-type receptacles (“coupelles”) at the mouth-rims.⁷⁶ They look very exotic, but

72 Miller 2005, 5.

73 On the circumstances of the find and the location in Chartres, see Joly 2010, 126–135; for the fire that destroyed the house at the end of I^p, but saved the objects by covering them with layers of ash and débris, ibid.137–140.

74 Ibid. 140–155 (chest, cupboard); 189–196 (coarse-ware); 199f. (glass).

75 Ibid.187f. (knife); 189 (bones, 51% pig); 196–199 (lamps). It is undecidab-le whether the bones derived from sacrifical meals. Since they were found in a cellar, it is possible that carcases were simply hung there. Knives of this type were used for slaughtering, skinning and for cooking.

76 Dimensions: c. 16 cm high and 21–23.5 cm wide at the broadest point.

1 The ceramic turibulum of C. Verius Sedatus, showing the text Oriens

5 10

Oriens Vos rogo omnipot[e]n- tia numina ut omnia bona conferatis Verio Sedato quia ille est

(flange) vester custos EcharAha BruStna BrosDru Chor[Dr]a$x

Cos (flange) Halcemedme Halcehalar Halcemedme

5 10

Meridie<s> Vos rogo omnipotentia numina ut omnia bona conferatis C(aio) Verio Sedato quia ille est (flange) vester custos EcharAha BruStna BrosDru ChorDrax

Chos (flange) Hal

cemedme Halcehalar Halcem(e)dme

5 10

Occidens Vos rogo omnipotentia [n]u- mina ut omnia bona conferatis C(aio) Verio Sedato quia ille est (flange) vester custos EcharAha BruStna BrosDru ChorDrax

[Ch]os (flange) Halcemedme Halcehalar Halcemedm[e]

5 10

Septemtrio Vos rogo omnipotentia nu- mina ut omnia bona confe- ratis C(aio) Verio Sedato quia ille est vester custos (flange) EcharAha [Br]uStna [Bros]D ru [ChorD]r ax

[Chos] (flange) Hal

cemedme Halcehalar Halcemedme 2 The four texts of the turibulum (= AE 2010: 940) set out in columns (created by K. Meinking)

their glaze is characteristic of local wares, so that they were probably made in the neighbourhood of Chartres.⁷⁷

The most interesting object, however, was a small ceramic turibulum (fig. 1) which had been carefully inscribed while wet with four short vir-tually identical prayers, prefaced by the four cardinal points in the nomi-native: Oriens, Meridies, Occidens and Septentrio (see fig. 2).⁷⁸ Presumably the turibulum played a rôle in private rituals whose nature is unknown.

The prayers request blessings (vos rogo …) from the omnipotentia numi­

na, omnipotent powers, upon Verius Sedatus on the grounds that he is their guardian (quia ille est vester custos). These powers are then listed, to the number of twelve: the first nine names are monosyllabic, the final three quadrisyllabic (Halcemedme / Halcehalar / Halcemedme); the pho-netics are all deliberately non Latinate and exotic. Such a request seems to be unparalleled, so we may conclude that Sedatus was a religious bri-coleur, creating his own personal ritual idiom from a variety of sources and inspirations.

Three features of the prayers suggest some connection with the ritu-al-magical procedures known to us mainly from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri.⁷⁹ First, Sedatus must have considered the unintelligible

‘words’ that follow vester custos to be the secret or powerful names of the omnipotentia numina. Second, claiming that one deserves to be listened to because one is the ‘guardian’ of such powers is a version of a basic claim in the magical papyri, that knowledge of onomata barbarika gives power over the divinities addressed, or at any rate the right to claim very special consideration. Third, the four cardinal directions are invoked in some Graeco-Egyptian prayers to provide, as here, concrete blessings.

In these cases however the addressee is invariably the Agathos Daimon of Alexandria. If Sedatus’ prayer is indeed linked to the magical papyri, it is an exceptionally early appropriation; and, as we would expect, it shows no proper grasp of the relevant invocatory techniques, so that he

77 Ibid. 175–187. None of the vessels adduced by Dominique Joly as com-paranda seem very similar, at any rate to my eyes. The closest are perhaps the vessels from Augst and Avrenches, though their overall shape is quite different, being inspired by the wine-krater.

78 Well described and illustrated in Joly 2010, 155–165. The texts are most easily consulted in Année Épigraphique 2010: 940. Two small fragments of similar vessels with virtually identical, albeit incomplete, texts were also found in the débris (AE 2010: 941, 942).

79 See my remarks in Joly 2010, 168–175.

was probably relying on hear-say rather than on some sort of text.⁸⁰ The onomata barbarika, in particular, are extremely primitive.

Without the four prayers, we would never have known that Sedatus had devised a ritual practice that ensured him special divine favour by virtue of his knowledge of arcane ‘names’. The remains in the cellar would have simply been evidence for household or private religion. But thanks to the inscribed prayers, i.e. the framing, it is clear that the tu­

ribulum was an essential prop in a private ritual, oriented towards the cosmos as a whole, whose repeated performance underwrote the validity of Sedatus’ claim to know.⁸¹ Moreover, the strange initial choice of words in each case, e.g. ORIENS / VOS ROGO OMNIPOTENTIA NVMI-NA … , may intimate that it is the cardinal direction itself that speaks,⁸² and that the turibulum itself has agency, inasmuch as it is to waft the messages via the rising scent of incense into the other world where the all-mighty powers dwell.

The second example is the group of objects found, probably by Turk-ish treasure-hunters, somewhere in the lower town at Pergamum in the Roman province of Asia, and given (or sold) to the German excavators of the Upper City, led by Alexander Conze, at some point between 1886 and 1898.⁸³ They were published as an ensemble by Richard Wünsch in 1905, who dated them roughly to II/III^p.⁸⁴ The group consisted of ten objects, seven of them of bronze, while three were amulets sawn from the same small black stone. The bronze objects include a small triangular stand

80 There seem however to be some hints of an awareness of Graeco-Egyp-tian ‘practical theory’ of magic claims (compulsion or piety?) in Lucan’s presentation of the witch Erictho (BC 6.443–48; 492–999).

81 At any rate, as long as he continued subjectively to receive omnia bona.

Presumably the disastrous fire put an end to these beliefs.

82 In our earlier readings, William Van Andringa and I proposed, since it seemed most natural that Sedatus himself was the subject of rogo, a full-stop after the name of each cardinal point, thus treating it as a kind of label or heading grammatically separate from the prayer. This is the text that appears e.g. in AE 2010: 940.

83 The origins of the group of objects are shrouded in mystery; it is not even sure that they were found in the Lower Town, or even that they were originally found in Pergamum. Although it is highly unlikely that the Tur-kish authorities would have permitted their export had they known about them, Conze promptly removed them to Berlin, where they remain. For magicians’ toolkits, see also Curbera, this volume; Bremmer, this volume.

84 Wünsch 1905.

3 Part of the diviner’s ensemble from Pergamum, including the three amuletic stones (front and back), the two rings, the surviving plaque, the nail, the disc and the table (the latter as displayed in the Museum). This image was created on commercial software, so that the rings are shown far too large in relation to their actual size, thus permitting a view of the charaktêres

with an image of Hekate at each angle, a somewhat concave disc with a handle, two rings and a nail (fig. 3).⁸⁵ All were distinguished from utili-tarian objects by being inscribed with charaktêres, signs that do not obey the normal rules of local orthography and are therefore unrecuperable by those who are in the ordinary sense literate.

Wünsch, delighted at finding a report by Ammianus Marcellinus (29.1.30), based on a confession extorted by torture, of the ‘divination of AD 371’, which his reconstruction followed closely, argued that they were all intended for sessions to acquire alphabet-oracles (p.47f.): he imagined the ‘magician’ standing on the stones, driving the nail into a rafter and suspending the smaller ring by a string over the concave disk, which, he thought, was placed on the triangular stand. The ring was then supposed to produce the oracle by moving among the fields of the disk and so producing words. For him it was a coherent ‘Zaubergerät’. This scenario is extremely implausible, not least because the charaktêres on each of the items are all different, which implies that they were not designed as a coherent set, but had different ritual purposes. Nor is it at all clear why the disc is concave if it was intended to be placed on the triangular table, why it had a handle, or how the 74 charaktêres on the disc could possibly have been used to produce alphabetic oracles.⁸⁶

It is not to my purpose here to speculate on the different possible uses of the items in the ensemble.⁸⁷ My only point is to emphasise how the engraving of charaktêres even on the rings and the nail (fig. 4) cre-ates a quite different sense of the agency of these objects vis-à-vis the

85 Wünsch 1905, 10–17. There were also two bronze plaques, the larger mea-suring 16 × 5 cm. The other, which was somewhat smaller, was lost before the objects reached Berlin, though a drawing was made of it beforehand.

86 Cf. Gordon 2002, 189–191. Wünsch refrained from telling his readers quite how many charaktêres there are on the disc, contenting himself with observing that there are 24 compartments in the three outer rings. The remains of a wire handle, clearly reproduced – indeed completed – in Wünsch’s drawing (fig. 3), were still attached to the disc when it reached Berlin. In order to make Wünsch’s scenario more plausible (the table is on show with the disc on top, as in the collage), the museum has removed this handle – a victory of ideology over empirical evidence.

87 See recently Mastrocinque 2002; Jackson 2012. The most plausible use for the nail is sphallomancy (divination by direction of fall of a long thin object), for the triangular table, as a miniature altar for incense, statuettes etc.

spirit world, within their appropriate contexts of use.⁸⁸ The theory of charaktêres assured their immediate recognition in the spirit-world as valid communicative powers.⁸⁹ At the same time, the charaktêres serve as a powerful framing device, setting these objects in a different category from every-day items.⁹⁰ Finally, the different forms imply the construc-tion over time of a ritualised body, habituated to the performance, in specific contexts, of different means of acquiring rare, privileged infor-mation about the past, present and future of clients, but also privileged information for his own practice – the revelation, say, of the true or proper form of charaktêres or onomata barbarika.