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• Magic in the Cosmopolis of Rome

  71–97.

  Richard Gordon

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  1

  Using examples from anthropological studies of radical shifts in the imaginaire of magic in modern African and Asian societies, this paper outlines the consequences both for small time ritual practitioners themselves and for the stereotypes of a specifically urban magic that followed the decision to move to the megacity of Rome, taken as emblematic of the case with other large cities in the ancient Mediterranean world. Given the highly dispersed nature of religious authority in the Greek and Roman political formations, and the attraction of religious entrepreneurship in hierarchically-organised societies with very limited social mobility, the religious field of larger conurbations was characterised by competition for social and religious capital between official and unofficial ritual practitioners, whereby the former were in a position to dominate the relevant discourse in their own interests. This domination produced new accusations of misuse of religious symbols associated with specifically urban magic, focused on the manipulation of emotions, child-snatching, and the use of human body-parts for nefarious ends. Historically, however, the major significance of the transition from the rural to the complex urban world was increased competition between practitioners, leading to innovation in methods and media, above all in the production of new types of protective amulet, and recourse to textuality.

• The rules of the game: constructing power in rhizotomic practice

  45–68

  Richard Gordon

  Views:

  209

  The growth of contemporary interest in ethnobiology and -botany legitimates an attempt to historicise the activities and claims of ancient rhizotomists, ‘root-cutters’, i.e. individuals who made themselves specially knowledgeable about the medicinal and other values of plants (mainly wild) and animal-parts. These men and women hardly formed a coherent group in fact, but may be treated as such for heuristic purposes. One model for historicising them is to locate them between family or household medicine on the one hand, and the increasingly complex market in health-care that developed in the Greek world from the fifth century BCE, and continued to grow in complexity throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. We can suggest two ways in which rhizotomists responded to this market pressure: experimentation and the construction of the marvellous through complex rules of collection. These rules covered gathering, body movements, offerings to the herb or the earth, addresses to the herb, and close temporal specifications – these latter lent themselves in turn to exploitation by literate rhizotomists in terms of occult schemes. We may use Searle’s distinction between regulative and constitutive rules to interpret these moves.