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For the Roman author Claudius Aelianus (Aelian, ca. 175–235 CE), intercourse is not a simple issue for animals. In his book On Animals, Aelian introduces the tortoise as follows: “Tortoises are the most lustful land animals but the males only, the females do not willingly mate.” Luckily, nature offers a solution to this dilemma. Male tortoises, Aelian states, use a plant to stimulate an appetite for sex in reluctant female tortoises. Christopher Faraone, in a sophisticated analysis of the anecdote, considers it evidence of “love magic.” He connects the anecdote with much earlier Greek rites via their standard classification in this category. Ancient Greek love magic includes agape-inducing formulas/rites used by men to turn women into passionate lovers and philia-inducing formulas/rites used by women to attract men. The category “love magic” is widely used to evaluate and classify rites, adopted recently by Radcliffe Edmonds. Evidence includes the use of lead tablets with cursing formula (fourth century B.C.E.), rites related to intercourse or sexuality found in the Greek papyri (first-fourth centuries C.E.), and numerous Greek and Roman literary anecdotes about goddesses or women who poison or attempt to poison men for marital or love interests.
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The Dodekaoros is an astrological system based on twelve symbolic animals, each one representing a form of the Sun when approaching a particular constellation and zodiacal sign. This system was used for horoscopes. Its origin has no certain chronology and is known from the late Hellenistic Age thanks to the Babylonian astrologist Teukros. Nevertheless, the system was probably older and seems to be rooted in the Egyptian speculations about the different forms of the Sun God. Its use in some magical papyri and gems is studied here by taking also new data into account. In particular, we will review the Papyri Graeca Magica (thereafter PGM) IV, 1644-1649, XXXVIII, 1-26, reporting the Dodekaoros with an orientation (with the cat in S-E), and III, 500-535, where καν[θάρου should be read and not καμ[μάρου. Two features will prove particularly useful in our research: the orientation of the system and the nocturnal part of the animal series. Several animal forms of the Dodekaoros also appear on magical gems, where they are placed in the cardinal points. In PGM II, 103-40 and on a magical gem, the Sun has 4 four forms in the different quarters of the sky and – this system can be understood only if we remember that these forms depend on the Dodekaoros and if we place one half the forms beneath the Earth, during the night; moreover, in PGM VIII, 6-11 four animals of the Dodekaoros are displaced into the four cardinal points. Some series of magical gems represent five animal forms of the Dodekaoros repeated thrice in order to depict the lower, the middle, and the upper parts of the world. These iconographies were aimed to represent the solar god in his variety of forms with his related influences over the world. This chapter will first study the meaning of the Dodekaoros, then its descriptions in magical papyri with or without orientation, and finally it will analyze several magical gems.
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This chapter analyses the self-styling of Porphyry and Iamblichus as Priestly-Philosophers and divine theurgists who were competing against the ritualists of the so-called magical papyri. Using an anthropological perspective and a close reading of the relevant texts, this study establishes that knowledge of daimones was unequivocally tied up in the production and negotiation of power relations in late antiquity. This chapter will demonstrate the striking similarities between Neoplatonic daimonic theories and the magical papyri. This chapter is also the first serious attempt at looking at the practical aspects of late antique demonology in pagan writers.
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The Middle Ages are often associated with credulity, especially toward magic, compared to modern Western society, which is often regarded as thoroughly disenchanted. Yet not all medieval people believed unhesitatingly in all magical practices. The early ninth-century Carolingian archbishop Agobard of Lyon described a remarkable system of weather-magic widely believed by people in his diocese of which he was completely skeptical. He justified his disbelief through references to biblical texts, but this study argues that his disbelief was grounded in his own encounters with and investigations of these magical practices, and focused only on certain elements within them.
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Among the texts of Old High German literature, two alliterative spells, the Merseburg charms, contained in a tenth-century liturgical manuscript, show some analogies with Christian prayers. This chapter focuses on the role of Christianity in the literary production of medieval Germany, with special regard to magic formulas. Attention is drawn on the manuscriptʼs paleography and contents, and it continues with the magic “genre” and the study of spells. Then, the Merseburg charms are analysed on the basis of content, structure, language, and parallels with other texts. The purpose of this study is to show the analogies between Christian prayers and heathen charms with regard to their allusions to the divine and the fulfillment of performative acts.
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This paper investigates the perception of witchcraft and magic in three Latin literary sources that were written or circulated in twelfth century Britain. The study focuses on both historical and narrative aspects, stressing how the approach to witchcraft can be influenced by the different purposes of the texts. The analysis of the texts will prove how very often behind the images of women endowed with supernatural powers or learned in magical arts lies a warning against potentially dangerous cultural and religious ‘othernesses’.
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This article examines four late medieval Scandinavian manuscripts (ca. 1400-1500 AD), namely three leechbooks and a collection of charms, with the aim of investigating the still remarkable importance of sympathetic magic in Christian times for practitioners of both magic and medicine. Particular attention is paid to the role of graphophagy, that is, the practice of eating or drinking written formulas so as to absorb their powers. The sources show that modern distinctions between magic, religion, and science are unsuitable to describe the mindset of their authors. On the contrary, these sources shared the ancient belief that written formulas (whether Christian or not) could be literally taken via ingestion.
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This essay examines Cornelius Agrippa’s understanding of magic and magical ritual, which was profoundly religious, albeit not in line with mainstream Christian theology. Through a textual analysis, I scrutinize the Neoplatonic roots of Agrippa’s theory of magic and suggest that he viewed a properly executed magical ritual as resulting in a state of rapture, or an altered state of consciousness. As part of the analysis, I explore tempting textual parallels between the suggested notion of magical rapture in Agrippa and similar concepts found in the New Testament, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
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In this chapter, I argue that the Weird Sisters in Macbeth influence him to pursue rational deliberation, a key facet of humanist moral philosophy, wherein people make decisions that serve an individual good rather than a universal morality. I conduct a literary analysis of the play to demonstrate how Shakespeare parallels the witches and Macbeth by highlighting their linguistic similarities and shared propensity for rhetorical, and by extension, psychological manipulation through rationalization. In so doing, Shakespeare reveals that the potential for the abuse of reason towards individual gain is an innate part of a flawed human nature which people, particularly those who make up larger religious and political institutions, seek to deny by displacing that internal threat onto external forces in an attempt to ignore their own moral fallibilities. I end the chapter with a brief look at Thomas Middleton’s The Witch and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens to demonstrate how other early modern English playwrights complicate the relationship between witch and human characters to demonstrate how closely related the two are.
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In the last decades, historians of science have developed a substantial interest in experiments and their role in creating scientific knowledge. Among the relevant aspects that came into the focus of the analysis were skills andperformative aspects involved in scientific experimentation. This led to some methodological problems, as the respective traces are difficult to find in classical sources. One methodological approach that addresses these aspects is the replication method, which is not limited to redoing historical experiments, but also includes the reconstruction of the historical apparatus as well as the contextualisation of the experiences made during this process.
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This article aims to investigate the role played by various missionaries of the Society of Jesus in the development and spread of European scientific and mechanical knowledge in China in the XVIth century and specially by Johann Schreck (1576–1630); Chinese name Deng Yuhan). Schreck was a jesuit with a wide range of interests and vast scientific and literary culture. He studied in Germany, France and Italy, where he became a disciple of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).
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We shall here review some of the insights about the structures of geometry of spacetime implied by gravitational physics. In the early 70s Jürgen Ehlers (1929–2008), Felix A. E. Pirani and Alfred Schild (1921–1977) proposed an interpretational framework for relativistic theories, which suggests to revise thestructure of gravitational theories. We shall review a proposal for classifying extended theories of gravitation and consider some examples and applications.
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In this paper, we are mainly concerned with the contributions of French engineers, mainly Lazare Carnot (1753–1823) general theory of machines, and Gaspard–Gustave de Coriolis (1792–1843) who wrote the first textbook on applied mechanics: Du calcul de l’effet des machines (1829). These two books have in common the use of the concept of work as a fundamental step to build a general theory of applied mechanics within the framework of Rational Mechanics. Carnot started to develop his theory of machines applying d’Alembert (1717–1783) principle. Coriolis, in his book, develops Lazare Carnot’s project and uses extensively the concept of work associated to the new mathematical formalism.
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The Livio Gratton is a small size Planetarium (40–seat capacity) located in Latina (near Roma, Italy); it belongs to the Scientific High School G.B. Grassi since its construction in 2003. In less than eighteen months of activity the number of admissions has been superior to 4000, but the situation was rather different previously, when the almost absolute lack of information about the structure and the few visitors induced the headmaster to accomplish a managing, cultural, educational and scientific valorization policy. Such galvanizing experience is worthy to be described from the discouraging premises till the positive response from audience and critics.
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We present the first results of a project of digitization of the whole Historical Archives of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Bologna. The original documents are being digitized both at low and high resolution and stored as metadata. The watermarked low–resolution images are being published online, so that researchers can easily preview the original and largely unpublished archival materials.
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Karl Ernst Ludwig Max Planck (1858–1947) suggested the quanta through a long series of calculations aimed at solving the problem of black–body radiation. These calculations are easily divided into six groups. It is shown that each group is disconnected from any other group. Planck’s successful results are justified as either lucky calculations or retrospective calculations from the Wien’s experimental law. Several scholars pointed out strong theoretical reasons for considering them insufficient to provide a correct notion of quanta of energy. By applying an operative definition of incommensurability, it is proved that they are insufficient because Planck ignored the mutual incommensurability in therelationship between the classical theories and the new theory.
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Ilya Prigogine (1913–2003) discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into complex systems could reverse the maximization of entropy rule imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. Beginning from a sketch of what a complex system consists of and some epistemological consequences, I will show which instances of process approach are able to give some preliminary ontological basis for a more adequate understanding of nature with its own indeterminacy, surfaced as empirical evidence inner non–linearthermodynamics. The idea is to connect these issues for reinterpreting the verification principle in experimental method, avoiding Popper’s criticism to it and in agreement with falsification procedure.
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Ludwik Silberstein (1872–1948) was the Polish–American scientist who worked in many branches of physics, but he is remembered mainly due to his work in general relativity. We present the influence of Ludwik Silberstein when staying as libero docente (in Italy until 1970, private docentship) in Bologna and Rome Universities (1899–1904, 1904–1920 respectively) on his scientific development and further career.
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