an early Coptic magical codex containing a prayer for power and favour
attributed to Seth, the son of Adam and Eve, one of the manuscripts the
team is editing for Coptic Magical Papyri volume 2.
The Coptic Magical Formularies project finished its first full year
in 2025, with some big changes. Former principal investigator Korshi
Dosoo started a new position at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) in France, but he will continue to work with the Coptic Magical Formularies project
as an external collaborator. Markéta Preininger will stay on as
principal investigator, and the team has grown bigger, as
Sophie-Charlotte Gissat has joined as a research assistant. Roxanne
Bélanger Sarrazin, currently a fellow on our partner project MagEIA has also joined as a collaborator, and will continue to work as a full member of the team after her fellowship.
With all of these changes, it’s been a while since our last database
update, but we have a big one in the works, with editions of most of the
main texts of two of the big surviving archives of Coptic magical
papyri, the British Museum Portfolio, and Michigan Wizard’s Hoard,
nearly ready. As often happens when we revisit texts first published
nearly a hundred years ago, these editions will substantially update and
correct the older interpretations; we have even managed to find and
decipher an encoded text previously misunderstood as meaningless magical
words! We are also working on updating the editions of papyri which are
already online so that they incorporate the corrections and fuller
notes found in the published Coptic Magical Papyri volume 1. All of this will be available in Kyprianos in early 2026.
Our project is also part of a larger network of international
projects exploring ancient magic and the Coptic language, and over the
last year these have been very active. In addition to working with our
sister project MagEIA in Würzburg, we are collaborating with the Coptic Scriptorium
to lemmatise Coptic magical texts, allowing them to be searched and
analysed for linguistic information. We are also working with the new Phoinix
project, which is digitising magical gems, to allow them to be searched
on both platforms. We are collaborating with our colleague Panagiota Sarischouli
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) on her newly-funded NOMINA
project, which will create an online database of voces magical (“magical
words”), first in Greek texts, but later including other languages,
including Coptic. Finally, we have been working with the Chicago-based Transmission of Magical Knowledge project on the publication of the second volume of the Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF), looking in particular at the ‘Old Coptic’
texts, some of the earliest surviving Coptic manuscripts, and evidence
for a syncretistic magical practice combining Greek, Egyptian, and
Christian influences.
In the last year, team members submitted a good many articles (and
even a book or two…), but only four appeared in print and/or online:
- Selerer Sarrazin, Roxanna. “Prayer of Mary at Bartos.” e-Key: Christian Apocrypha https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/prayer-of-mary-at-bartos/ (open access)
The
‘Prayer of Mary at Bartos’ is one of the most important healing prayers
in the tradition of the Alexandrian Church, preserved in many copies in
Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and a single Greek copy. This entry for the
online reference work e-Key: Christian Apocrypha of NASSCAL
(North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal
Literature) provides an overview of the prayer in its two major
traditions, and gives a comprehensive published and online bibliography
for the text and its manuscripts. - Dosoo, Korshi. “Magical Names: Tracing Religious Changes in Egyptian Magical Texts from Roman and Early Islamic Egypt”, Archive for religious history 26.1 (2024): 69–144. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/arege-2024-0005/html (open access)
Magical
texts from Egypt, written in both Greek and Coptic, provide us with a
view of religious practices in Egypt quite different from that found
either in canonical or documentary texts. This article explores two ways
in which the names they contain might help us to map the cultural
transformations of the fourth- through twelfth centuries. The first is
by looking at the names of gods, angels and other superhuman beings,
tracking the decline of the ‘pagan’ Graeco-Egyptian deities, and the
rise of the Christian pantheon, leaving with a few interesting holdouts.
The second is by looking at the names of the individuals mentioned in
magical texts – the clients for whom amulets were created, and the
victims targeted by love spells and curses. Do the onomastic changes in
magical texts follow the general trends of naming practices over this
period, or attest to a magical subculture with its own naming habits?
And do the religious contents of the magical texts correspond with the
implied confessional belongings of the people for whom they were
created? Did Christians use Christian magic, or do we find more complex
patterns – Christians using ‘pagan’ magic, or Muslims using Christian
magic, for example? - Preininger, Markéta. “Taxonomies of Illnesses and the Dynamics of Cursing and Healing the Body in Christian Egypt”, Trends in Classics 17.1 (2025): 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1515/tc-2025-0008 (open access)
The
Coptic magical corpus, a collection of manuscripts produced in Egypt
between the fourth and twelfth centuries CE for private ritual purposes,
provides a rich source concerning non-institutional and private healing
practices. Because the magical healing manuscripts from the corpus are
not self-reflexive, unlike Hippocratic writings, the work of
interpretation and reconstruction of the taxonomies of the healing
practices is left to modern researchers. The researcher has several etic
interrelated categories to understand and interpret: symptoms (i.e.,
tooth pain), causes (i.e., evil spirits), and treatments (i.e., binding
of an amulet to the forearm). In understanding the relationships between
these three categories, the modern reader might more easily comprehend
the logic of healing practices witnessed by the corpus. However, not
only healing texts provide an insight into the causes of diseases, but
also curses causing them (called here health curses). In this article, I
both of these corpora are discussed and compared, focusing especially
on lists of illnesses and agents causing them, as they appear in both
healing texts and health curses. - Dosoo, Korshi. “Gatherings of Words: Notes on Books of Magic from Roman Egypt”, West 86th 32.1 (2025) 31-38. https://doi.org/10.1086/737596
Unlike
modern depictions of magical books as inherently powerful objects,
handbooks from Roman Egypt are practical guides that can be fruitfully
explored by attention to their physical details. This study begins by
contrasting this material dimension with iconic-sacred, semantic, and
expressive-performative perspectives on manuscripts before exploring the
production and circulation of handbooks, starting from their basic
unit, the magical recipe, and discussing how these were built up into
larger collections.
As always, if you would like to read an article produced by a team member, but don’t have access to it, please feel free to contact us to receive an offprint.
In addition to these academic articles, we’ve started to get back
into the swing of blogging, with two new series of blog posts, Animals in Coptic Magic, and Three Healing Prescriptions from a Now-Lost Codex, which we’re planning to continue into 2026, and Korshi Dosoo has written a couple of guest posts on the MagEIA project blog, which you can read here.
In addition to our writing, the team members also took part in many
conferences and workshops, among them the second symposium organised by
our colleagues in the MagEIA project, which brought together specialists
on ancient and mediaeval Eurasian and African magic from around the
world. We also took some time out to promote the first volume of Coptic Magical Papyriwith New Books in Late Antiquity
host Lydia Bremer-McCollum kindly inviting us to an interview to
discuss the writing and contents of the volume. Volume two is well under
way, and we hope to soon be able to share more concrete news about our
plans. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who has reached out to us,
read our work, and supported us over the last year!
