Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity

Magic in History

by Naomi Janowitz

In the waning years of the Roman Empire, Jews, Christians, and pagans alike used rituals to bridge the gap between the human and the divine. Depending on one’s point of view, however, such rituals could be labeled negatively as "magic" or positively as "theurgy." This has led to numerous problems of interpretation, including marginalizing certain ritual practices as magic or occult while privileging others as genuine or orthodox. In Icons of Power , Naomi Janowitz sifts through the polemics to make sense of the daunting mosaic of religious belief and practice in Late Antiquity. From rabbis who ascended to heavenly places, to sorcerers seeking to harm enemies with spells, to alchemists working metals to purify the soul, Janowitz reveals how ritual practitioners held common assumptions about why their rituals worked and about how to perform those rituals. Indeed, such assumptions were so much a part of the inherited mentality of the age that they were, for the most part, never explained―and this is precisely what Janowitz accomplishes in Icons of Power . By shifting the discussion out of the rhetoric of "magic" or "mysticism" and describing the mechanisms of ritual with semiotic terms, she moves us beyond the value-laden terminology of ancient polemicists and modern scholars so that we can better see how these rituals worked and how they affected the social identities of their followers. Janowitz recovers a lost world of religious expression that has been clouded by misinterpretation for many centuries. In the process, Icons of Power makes an important contribution to our understanding of society in Late Antiquity.

Genres: Occult

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2002

Reviews

[Mateusz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The volumes of other academics I read on this topic makes this book all the less spectacular. The author was honest about her intent - to delineate Jewish magic of late antiquity. It has elements of Christian magic, while Heathen (non-Abrahamic) traditions are grossly misrepresented, so far as to claim Master Iamblichus' snobbism in the tradition of whiggism (interpreting the past from the current perspective. I understand that Janowitz flirted with Jewish magic to no effect herself and thus with no success discarded all the traditions as a whole with a rather half-hearted approach to the represented topic. Now, I prefer to read scholars that live up to the task - for example Hans Lewy and "Chaldean Oracles". Iamblichus was in a neoplatonic underground, as all theurgists and hieratics, Plotinus was primarily a philosopher, but also of excellent daimon. Gematria is misrepresented, it was a Greek invention (trivia, the Star of David, hexagram, was belonging to Pythagorean Corporae of Symbols, not a Jewish one). The dating of most of the texts of Jewish provenance is inadequate, Enoch lived in 3rd century B.C.E, the traditions of mystic books and the Jewish gnosis started circa 2nd century B.C.E. However, what I owe to the author is one trivia: I had no idea what Targums were, now I know. Generally a good read for those well-versed enough in traditions of middle and late Antiquity to discard the pickiness of the author. Thank you.

[Ocean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not exactly what I was looking for, but had a ton of useful and neat information