The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris

The Paris codex is best understood as a professional's shelf collapsed into one volume. It runs to several thousand lines and holds dozens of independent items with no argument connecting them: a procedure for a dream oracle sits beside a text for driving out a spirit, which sits beside an ascent narrative of real literary ambition. Some items carry their own titles and attributions, naming an earlier authority the way a cook's notebook names whose recipe it copied. Others break off. The hand is consistent enough to indicate one copyist working through material of very different origins and dates.

That structure is the reason the book matters. A single spell tells you what one person wanted. A handbook tells you what a practitioner thought was worth keeping, and in what order, and how he classified it. The Paris codex sets Greek divine names beside Egyptian ones and beside Hebrew forms such as Iao and Sabaoth, and it does so without visible embarrassment or explanation, which is itself the evidence: for whoever compiled it, these were not competing religious systems but a common stock of effective names.

The strings of vowels and unetymological words that fill the margins of this material, the voces magicae, are not decoration and not nonsense in the writer's terms. They are treated as language belonging to the powers rather than to people, and their consistency across separate papyri shows they were copied faithfully rather than improvised. What they meant to the copyist is a different question from what they meant to whoever first wrote them down, and neither is recoverable from the codex alone.

Nothing about the Paris codex is more consequential and less documented than its findspot. The papyrus reached the Bibliotheque nationale through Jean d'Anastasy, a merchant who served as consul of Sweden and Norway in Alexandria and who supplied European libraries and museums with Egyptian antiquities across three decades of the nineteenth century. Several other major magical papyri, now in Leiden, London and Berlin, came from the same hand in the same period.

Because the group shares a period, a range of contents and a supplier, scholars have long treated it as a single find and called it the Theban Magical Library, on the further assumption that the papyri came from a tomb or a house at Thebes. The consequence of accepting that is substantial: it would mean the codices were a working collection belonging to one person or one establishment, and it would license reading them against each other as a single body of practice.

The evidence for it is a dealer's report. There was no excavation, no findspot record and no controlled context. The atlas records the Theban attribution as unresolved rather than debated, because scholars have not divided into camps holding rival answers; the work was begun and could not be concluded on the available evidence. What would settle it is a documentary one: the correspondence and sale records of the collectors who bought from Anastasy, read against the acquisition registers of the receiving institutions, which have never been examined together for this purpose.