Houses and the Conceptualization of Domestic Vulnerability and Misfortune

The house, then, is a place in which one pays attention to spaces, entrances, and exits. More than the theater, the shop, the agora, or the baths, the house protects and materializes the fortune of the family. It thus becomes a place of ritual focus, from formally invoking St. Leontius’s blessing on staying put, to the multiple ways that inhabitants engage in domestic ritual practices: lamp lighting, the hanging of apotropaic symbols, feasting, and all the verbal and gestural expressions through which dwellers forged festal bonds with neighbors, cultivated beneficial spirits and ancestors, and repelled negative spirits. These are all ritual expressions, not because they involve repetition or sacred structures, but in the sense that they involve focused attention to spaces, activities, and calendar.⁴

There is a sizable record of these domestic ritual expressions in archaeological remains like figurines, lamps, and the occasional documentary papyrus.⁵ But one can also see these expressions and gestures in the protective amulets, incantation manuals, and binding spells preserved in Greek and Coptic from the fourth through about the tenth centuries. Generally, these texts function to convey material efficacy in situ—through their deposit or their verbal performance (gesture, incantation) in a particular place. And in this chapter, I use these texts to look at the conceptualization of supernatural danger to the domestic sphere: to houses and households. How do “magical” texts imagine demonic and malevolent human access to the house and its inhabitants?⁶ And how is the domestic sphere itself imagined spatially in relationship to the apotropaic—and also subversive—goals of such texts?

The magical texts of the Christian Period cumulatively represent the craft services of literate specialists within the broad penumbra of the Christian institution: monks, scribes, shrine attendants, and the occasional bishop. But their actual compositions represent a negotiation between the liturgically imbued scribal world of monks and scribes and the particular demands and feelings of lay clients. In this way we model ritual expertise—the providing of various ad hoc ritual services in the local milieu as well as to outsiders in a more exotic vein—not as the pretentious deceptions of self-appointed, freelance wizards, but rather in terms of preexisting social roles. As Egyptian priests had once served primarily in this role, mediating the symbolic (including writing) systems of the temples for practical, often healing purposes,⁷ so in the Christian Period it was predominantly monks and clergy who did so, likewise conveying the material efficacy of the religious institution in practical assemblages for everyday use.⁸ This model obviously cannot exclude the activity of independent ritual experts, unaffiliated in any sense with a religious institution or status, but it recognizes the deep affiliation of the media and language of magic, especially in the Christian Period, with those of the Christian institution, its liturgical expressions, and its charismatic roles.⁹ In addition, one can detect influences from prevailing oral traditions as well as traditions of conveying verbal power maintained in scribal subcultures (e.g., ancient priestly milieux) over the longue durée.

The materials I will be discussing concern in the broadest sense the “demonic”: a broad, unsystematized category for what afflicts the domestic sphere from the outside, disrupts fortune, and occasions popular diagnosis and discussion.¹⁰ A common formula used in erotic binding spells, for example, charges a daimon, often the restless spirit of a local corpse, to “go into every place, into every quarter, into every house, and bind” a particular woman with lust only for the spell’s client, suggesting that restless, ambiguous spirits were regularly shooting through neighborhoods and into homes, chaotically inflaming women.¹¹ But even in these cases, the demons are directed by nefarious conspirators in the community. Thus the “demonic” should properly cover not only supernatural beings but also the evil eye, the focus of many domestic apotropaia in ancient Rome, as well as sorcery—that is, aggressive or malevolent ritual acts, whether real or imagined in social (not supernatural) terms, and of course various dangerous fauna, like serpents.¹² The demonic is not a system of thought—a “demonology”—but a tradition of conceptualizing vulnerability, misfortune, and the potencies of the liminal in consultation with a ritual specialist, such as a monk or shrine attendant.¹³ Both the deployment of routine apotropaia (like Bes heads or figurines) and the placement of exorcistic or protective devices in the event of particular concerns (such as many of the Babylonian incantation bowls) involve extensive consultation and craft strategies to identify demonic forces, portals of domestic vulnerability, and the best ritual assemblage to resolve concerns and allay anxieties.¹⁴ During such consultations, a ritual specialist will express his authority in naming demons and developing the precise language to keep them away. For example, two amulets prepared to protect individuals from headless demons—in one case, a headless dog—likely follow such individual consultations as well as the independent (and innovative) discernment of a particular ritual specialist, who may have drawn on earlier Egyptian traditions of epithets for Osiris.¹⁵

My basic assumption here is that, unlike (e.g.) Babylonian incantation bowls, there was no established demonology surrounding domestic misfortunes and afflictions in late antique Egypt, but rather, flexible traditions that could be drawn into an appearance of precision and certainty through the authority of a ritual specialist.¹⁶ At the same time, as we will see, the house itself, its boundaries and portals, provided a relatively consistent framework for conceptualizing threat, protection, and the ritual performances to express them both. For example, as Sabine Huebner has found, the wooden doors used to close off the typical mud-brick houses were of such value for their locks and general craftsmanship that they were occasionally stolen themselves. We should thus presume these doors’ material potency extended in many ways beyond the practical function of opening and closing spaces, to signifying—even conveying agency in the guarantee of—safety and security within.¹⁷

Conceptualizing Vulnerability in the Late Antique Egyptian Home

The Aramaic incantation bowls from late antique Babylonia provide a rich and essential comparison to the amulets and spells considered in this chapter, since they are meant to be placed on the floor in one or more particular rooms in the house, and they draw on an extensive tradition of naming demonic beings: shed spirits, dev spirits, idol spirits, male and female liliths, Ashtarot, Satans, and so on.¹⁸ Moreover, when they mention interior spaces of vulnerability, they focus on the nature of the spaces rather than points of entry, protecting “his house, with its four b[orders and with] its f[ou]r c[orn]ers” or listing the demons “who reside in the inner room, and in the vaulted chamber, and in the hall, and in the whole dwelling.”¹⁹ By comparison, most of the late antique Egyptian protective amulets focus predominantly on points of access to the people within. In the following text, from the sixth century, the demons are already within the house, lurking in the shadows:

I adjure [you], unclean spirits, who do wrong to the Lord: Do not injure the one who wears these adjurations. Depart from him. Do not hide down here in the ground; do not lurk under a bed, nor under a window, nor under a door, nor under beams, nor under utensils, nor below a pit.

…

And now I adjure all of you spirits who weep, or laugh frightfully, [or] make a person have bad dreams or terror, or make eyesight dim, or teach confusion or guile of mind in sleep and out of sleep.²⁰

These demons afflict sleep itself, a sensitive condition in the course of the day, although usefully receptive for divination when performed at one of the many incubation shrines in late antique Egypt.²¹ The interior of the house is imagined as harboring demons in crevices and corners—demons as, virtually, coresidents in the house with the family. The demonic is likened to vermin—dangerous insects and creatures that invade the house—except the affliction lies not in bites but in dreams and general anxiety. The elision of dangerous vermin and the demonic emerges more vividly in two amulets meant to protect the interior of a house from the “Artemisian scorpion”:²²

Both texts are conscious of the house as a human enclosure into which venomous beings can enter, yet both imagine the demonic object of the charm, the Artemisian scorpion, as encompassing both reptiles and broader dangers—in the second, sorcery as well: that is, the harm that nefarious and jealous humans might bring against the occupants. It is the literate expert’s ingenuity to combine various evils in the repelling of the Artemisian scorpion.

Among the most elaborate protective invocations is a large amulet (136 lines; 37.5 x 23 cm) directed at a pregnant woman:

Watch and protect the 4 sides of the body and the soul and the spirit and the entire house of N daughter of N and her child who is in her womb, as well as every child born to her. Bring them to life [or keep them alive] yearly without any disease.²⁶ Cast from her every evil force [energia]. Never allow them to approach her or any of her children until she bears them. Cast forth from her every doom and every devil and every Apalaf and every Aberselia and every chill and every fever and every trembling. Restrain them all. Cast them away from her and away from all her children until she bears them and away from all her dwellings, immediately and quickly! Do not permit them ever to visit her or the child with whom she is pregnant for approximately two hundred miles around [na-shēt milion ep-kōti].²⁷

This adjuration is repeated several more times in slight variation throughout this extensive amulet. The key features in every case consist, first, of the listing of esoteric demonic powers that might afflict an infant. Many amulet texts (especially those among the Jewish corpora) strive for a comprehensiveness in covering afflictions and their agents, a comprehensiveness achieved through the form of the list. As scholars of early writing systems have noted, the list is one of the most basic and most distinctive uses of writing, insofar as it extracts items from their contextual environments and collects them according to class or purpose.²⁸ Thus an Aberselia demon, as above, may well be imagined or adjured only in the context of children’s illness, but here it is listed along with chills and with devils to make a comprehensive list of dangers to mothers and infants. In other texts, we will see, the list is used to collect parts of the house—walkways, doors, thresholds—rarely imagined together, but enumerated in such a way as to “fix” each component as protected. Indeed, listing in these contexts carries an illocutionary function, in the sense that the writing of the list and its comprehensive picture of coverage ritually effects that very comprehensive coverage.²⁹

The second key feature of this last amulet, perhaps most importantly for the conceptualization of domestic space, lies in the elision this adjuration makes between the mother’s body and the house in which she dwells. She is imagined, in a way, both in and as a house. That is, the language of spatial protection applied to this woman’s body comes from the language of domestic apotropaia—“4 sides of the body … and the entire house of”—yet also conceptualizes maternity in terms of the house it should fill. As a model of vulnerability, the domestic structure is thus an extension of the maternal body itself, and the amulet extends the zone of domestic safety to “two hundred miles around.”

A different construction of domestic spatial boundaries emerges in a Coptic handbook for apotropaic ritual (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Like several other such handbooks, this one opens with a long invocation to heavenly powers and then lists a variety of material applications of this invocation, for healing specific ailments, for resolving social crises, and

For your house, and your sheep enclosures, and all that belongs to you: recite [the formula] over some water and sprinkle your house and every place that belongs to you, [and] no evil will overtake you.

…

For the safety of your house and the walkways by your door: recite it over some torrential water and sprinkle your house and the walkways by your door, and it will guard you from every pharmakia, and [will] heal every disease, and [guard you from] every demon and every evil eye; and it also will not allow estrangement to occur in your house, nor [any] trouble [at all].³⁰

This manual not only shows the imaginative elision of demonic and social threats (evil eye, pharmakia) to the domestic sphere, it expands the sites of invasion and zones of domestic vulnerability to walkways and sheep enclosures. Another Coptic codex (sixth century CE), a compendium of different kinds of formulae and spells, employs the list form to detail the full range of interior and exterior vulnerabilities—indeed, one might say, the very components of the late antique house (or at least a large one):

You must guard the entrance and the exit,³¹ and all his dwelling places, and his windows, and his courtyards [aulē], and his bedrooms, and his open rooms [ma etčolep], and the lands which belong to him, and his foundations, and his orchards, and his wells, and his trees that bear fruit, and those that do not bear fruit.³²

The dangers envisioned here for the intended (and presumably wealthy) client—one with extensive lands and multiple courtyards—come not from the realm of demonic spirits but from social threats: sorcery, especially foreign-borne sorcery:³³

I invoke you, God of Gods, king of all powers, the one who sits over the cherubim [and] the seraphim, that you do away with all violent deeds [that] are directed against [every] place where this prayer will be uttered, … if someone has bound a place by having put bonds of deceit in it, hidden in its foundations, or in its open places, …

You violent deeds, all that have happened or are destined to happen, I adjure you … that you be undone and withdraw from every one near whom this prayer shall be recited, or every place where it will be deposited and all those who belong to it, and each of you descend upon the head of the one who sent you to perform these abominations … whether the person is a stranger or a boss of those belonging to him, or is one who leads, or is a servant, or is a free person or is a magos or a female magos, or is a male Persian or a female Persian, or is a Chaldean or a female Chaldean, or is a Hebrew or a female Hebrew, or is an Egyptian or a female Egyptian, in general, whoever it is.³⁴

Danger—that is, sorcery, subversion of the domestic sphere—is enumerated in list form in an effort to be comprehensive and “complete,” as we saw above with the listing of demons; but here the multiplicity of threats is imagined in terms of foreigners and their ambiguous powers. This is also a common theme in the social mapping of danger, perhaps making more sense for a client whose domestic spaces include “open rooms,” courtyards, and orchards, and who might thus fear the envy and malevolence of others most of all.³⁵ In other cases, we have seen, demonic and social agents of misfortune are combined or elided: “If someone writes these glorious … words upon the gates of his house: [series of numerical cryptograms], no temptation of the Adversary will enter that house nor will plots of evil men be able to prevail over it.”³⁶ We might say that the popular conceptualization of threats to the domestic sphere in late antique Egypt was as acutely conscious of social dangers as it was of the range of demons—scorpion- and snake-shaped, dream-entering, child-killing.

And yet it is important not to ascribe this conceptualization simply to general “beliefs” in the culture as a whole. The move to cast danger in terms of demons, evil eye, and specific constructions of social threat and sorcery—or to stress one type to the exclusion of others—must be attributed to the scribal expert, the composer of the incantation or charm, who draws on local consultations as well as local (monastic?) traditions and personal intuition into social tensions and human nature.³⁷ Variations may reflect the class of the client, the type of domestic structure or holdings, and gender (what types of dangers might preoccupy men versus women?), but generally it is the scribal expert who lays out in potent written formulae a conceptualization of domestic threats.

In this way the process of securing the house through apotropaia might be analogized to a kind of therapy, although externalized to specific threats deemed concrete and resolvable through ritual, material methods. Furthermore, while in many cases such protection is deployed as a pro forma response to vulnerable or anxious states of family members—pregnancies, infants—anthropologists have noted that in some cases the very mobilization against demonic powers that family members undertake can have stabilizing, empowering corollary benefits, as those individuals rise up to defend themselves.³⁸

Conceptualizing Vulnerability: Targets and Access Points for Sorcery

It is not just protective charms that reveal the sense of the domestic sphere as vulnerable, but also the instructions for and artifacts of sorcery³⁹ and binding spells: that is, ritual acts designed to afflict, subvert, or manipulate members of households.⁴⁰ For example, a lengthy incantation in the Macquarie University collection (seventh to eighth century CE) is followed by a list of ways to direct the powers the incantation constructs: for instance, to bind someone annoyed at you, bury the inscribed formula at his door; to keep a “brother [pson]” (presumably a monk) from coming into your house, inscribe the angelic name Eremiel and put it on the door-hinge; to bind someone, speak the incantation over two nails and drive them into the victim’s doorpost; while a charm to protect a business requires that angelic names be written on potsherds and buried in each corner of the interior and exterior, and then the incantation is spoken over water and splashed “inside and outside and in front of you.”⁴¹ Likewise, an inscribed erotic charm (sixth century CE) in the Ashmolean Museum begins with the formula “that just as I take you [i.e., the written charm] and put you at the door and the pathway of P-Hello son of Maure, (so also) you must take his heart and his mind; you must dominate his entire body.”⁴² Such texts reveal the corners, pathways, and doors of people’s houses to be actively targeted for purposes of erotic desire and control, not just protection.

But what misfortunes did people in late antique Egypt imagine might transpire as the result of such malicious ritual? P-Hello, son of Maure, so the Ashmolean charm above goes on to describe, might suffer insomnia and restlessness (to be soothed only in the presence of the ritual agent, Papapolo, son of Noe). But other protective charms show a greater range of domestic experience that sorcery might threaten. A parchment codex from Heidelberg addresses the situations of “one who is bound so he is unable to have sex with his wife” and “a herd of cattle, when sorcery has been performed against you” (i.e., the cattle owner).⁴³ The Michigan codex quoted earlier promises that its protective rites “will not allow estrangement [p-ōrj(?)] to occur in your house, nor any trouble [shtortr] at all.”⁴⁴ The late Byzantine Testament of Solomon attributes “divisions among men” and the subversion of households to the demon Lix Tetrax (7.5), and the desertion of houses to the demon Rhyx Miamet (who is repelled by inscribing the words “Melto Ardad Anaath” on the front entrance of the house, 18.40).⁴⁵ Thus multiple domestic conflicts, tensions, and disasters could be owed to supernatural interference.

Youssri Abdelwahed’s chapter in this volume (chapter 6) covers a range of violent and stress-inducing domestic situations that might well have been attributed to outsiders’ curses. In many cases the cause of domestic crisis is someone’s hybris, “insolence”; but why would someone develop hybris in the first place? An inscribed ostracon from second-century Oxyrhynchus designed to inflame a wife erotically, such that she leaves her husband for the client, actually specifies that she should gain hybris (as well as hatred and obnoxiousness) “until she departs the oikias of Apollonius!”⁴⁶

Other such curse spells imagine more elaborate misfortune in the homes of their victims: for instance, that two named women and a man “and their children, and everyone who resides with them—Amen!—[are hit] with any evil grief and every suffering and every unhealing pain”;⁴⁷ that there “be a great distress and outcry on [the victim’s] house and his wife”;⁴⁸ that the heavenly powers should afflict someone and “turn [?] the favor of his dwelling-place [charis epebma-nhe-maas] around with destruction, with hatred, with scattering, with reversal. The people among all these [who] dwell in it must not be able to look at him in any way.” This latter curse is meant to be materially enacted by means of wax dolls buried at the victim’s door.⁴⁹ A domestic division charm sent to a man in late fourth-century Kellis (at his request) invokes God to make a married couple’s “heart be black for each other … [to] wash (away) the desire which is between them for each other… . The house in which I place [this charm], do not come out of it without having instigated a dispute and a quarrel with thundering.”⁵⁰

Likewise, a number of curses focus on extensions of household property, much as some of the protective amulets above invoke protection over properties and fields well beyond the house. One elaborate assemblage, recommended in a fourth-century manual, consists of a frog, a lead lamella, and bat’s blood and is meant to cause the wasting of the victim; the manual instructs that this assemblage be placed “at the east of the property [tou chōriou].”⁵¹ A similar attack on a man’s property as the economic extension of his household is the subject of an official complaint in a farmer’s second-century letter to the Roman strategos. Twice, this farmer claims, his neighbor (along with the neighbor’s wife and friend) had approached him or his chief cultivator during the harvest and tossed a fetus (brephos) at him—doubtless a stillborn fetus prepared in some kind of nefarious assemblage—in order to “surround him with malice.” The farmer hopes that the strategos will intervene in this flagrant case of public sorcery.⁵² For us, the letter demonstrates that sorcery really did take place on the edges, not only the interiors, of domestic property. (A carefully wrapped stillborn fetus found in the roof-rubble of a late fourth-century house in Kellis suggests that the same malign “throwing-assemblage” could be used against central domestic spaces as well).⁵³

Thus a variety of social situations might be attributed to—or sought through—sorcery or unnamed demonic threats: mental stresses (insomnia, restlessness), domestic discord, sexual dysfunction, and—in the Heidelberg text cited above with the wax poppets—an individual’s humiliation in his own home.⁵⁴ As extensions of the household, cattle too (and sheep, in a protective charm quoted earlier) might fall victim to such threats. The house itself and its satellite buildings are imagined as structures that both enclose social actors and yet are riven with portals, access points, where hostile (or envious) people can place objects that bind or curse and through which the evil powers of demons and the evil eye can pass.

Ritual, Religion, and Agency

To the extent that the late antique (or, for that matter, Greco-Roman) Egyptian house was fundamentally a site of social and generative reproduction regardless of the specific relationships of the occupants, then it was also a site culturally attentive to the vicissitudes of fortune.⁵⁵ In one sense, the house could be a sanctuary secure from public gossip and the malevolent spirits of the landscape.⁵⁶ But in another sense we see that walls, especially exterior walls, and doorways could be points of supernatural vulnerability for a social site seeking a minimization of marital discord, the maintenance of hierarchy, the prosperity of infants, and the assurance of female fecundity. (Of course, these concerns may be perennial to premodern homes.) Liminal areas were also clearly points of attack when others sought to inflict sorcery: for instance, thresholds, walkways, and even fields.⁵⁷

The media by which aggressors attacked these sites consisted of magical assemblages, whose invariably weird and impure components (like fetuses) conveyed—at least to the perpetrator, whether or not they were found by the householder—a malevolent material agency. But the protection of the home from sorcery as well as demons involved such material assemblages as well—figurines, nails, eggs, among other things—and it can be difficult for the modern archaeologist to distinguish an apotropaic or fecundity assemblage left in a domestic site from one meant to bind or curse.⁵⁸

Much as Richard Alston has observed of the archaeology of the house itself, the primary texts used in this chapter cannot reflect on matters of socialization or of identity, generally vital to domestic life; however, they do reflect on domestic reproduction and on domestic economy, extending as this does to spaces beyond the house itself.⁵⁹ They reflect on the house as a materialization of domestic anxieties about procreation and harmonious hierarchy, and on the house and its portals as material extensions of the vulnerable bodies within. Although we may speak of these anxieties generally in terms of the demonic, the range of apotropaic and binding spells we have seen demonstrate a common perspective that supernatural beings might be “sent” by enemies, that the nefarious agency entering the house may well be sorcery of one kind or another, and that evils must be enumerated and repelled in all their forms, from scorpions to malevolent Persians.

Furthermore, these texts show not only the experience and exploitation of domestic vulnerability to supernatural threats; they also show the active and creative integration of Christian idioms, names, and liturgical phrases to lend authority to protective ritual or even curses. In fact, this integration of Christian elements is the only indication of historical development apparent among these materials, and then only as a development from the very different inscribed ritual corpora of an earlier period, like the so-called Greek Magical Papyri.⁶⁰ Domestic religion, broadly conceived, is remarkably consistent in its values and fears—certainly by the evidence of the texts in this study, which range over several centuries.⁶¹ While the Christianization of magical texts has been associated with a greater attention to the protective, the amuletic, and the therapeutic than in earlier times, the materials I have explored here reflect a wide range of aggressive as well as protective rituals, both oral and inscribed, which were apparently purveyed by the same types of specialists.⁶² These specialists were experts in liturgical and ecclesiastical lore, sometimes on the margins of institutional religious life and sometimes closely affiliated. Indeed, the very use of Christian symbols in these materials required the active mediation of such a literate ritual specialist, quite likely a monk, who was regarded (and regarded himself) principally as a master of the magic of the written word. We can see the agency of such experts in improvising liturgy, composing demonologies (with or without attention to social threats like evil eye), conveying the authority of comprehensive protection through writing, and editing charms into and out of codex collections.

But we must also infer the agency of members of households in appealing to such experts as representatives of Christian authority and efficacy, as well as in accepting the imaginative constructions of domestic vulnerability produced in consultation.⁶³ That is, people in their domestic spheres were clearly ready to think about demons, evil eye, and sorcery in ways that reflected Christian traditions. Likewise, the scribal agents behind the writing of these texts clearly respected the particular fears and zones brought to them by agents of the domestic sphere. The Christianization of responses to domestic vulnerability corresponds to broader Christian currents in Egypt, like the promotion of the cross itself as an apotropaic (as opposed to redemptive or narrative) symbol.⁶⁴

Notes

1Abbreviations: ACM = Meyer and Smith 1994; AKZ = Kropp 1931; PGM= Preisendanz 1973; CTBS = Gager 1992; GMPT = Betz 1986. This paper was presented at Ewa Wipsycka’s Late Antique Seminar, University of Warsaw, May 19, 2022.

2P. Ryl. Copt. 100 = ACM #65, tr. ACM, 125. On the cult of St. Leontius, see Papaconstantinou 2001, 137–38. On the ticket oracle tradition in Egypt, see Frankfurter 1998, chap. 4; 2005; 2017, 130–38.

3Huebner 2013, chap. 6

4On conceptualizing “domestic religion” in Roman Egypt, see Frankfurter 1998, 131–44; 2008; 2016, 2017, chap. 2, drawing on theoretical models by Bell 1992; Smith 2004; Hodder 2003. See now Abdelwahed 2016; Wilburn 2018.

5On figurines from the Christian Period as evidence for domestic ritual, see Frankfurter 2015a.

6For the purposes of this chapter, “magic” will signify areas of ritual that involve the materialization of power and the creation of material (including inscribed) assemblages, as well as texts that instruct in the preparation of such materials. See in general Frankfurter 2019a.

7See Koenig 1994; Frankfurter 1998, chap. 5; Dieleman 2005, 2019.

8See Richter 1997; Van der Vliet 2011; De Bruyn 2017; Frankfurter 2017, 189–211; Frankfurter 2019b.

9An alternative model of freelance (nonecclesiastic or temple-affiliated) literati is offered in Love 2016, 278–82. Van Minnen (1998) associates literary collecting and production in the earlier Roman Period also with temple priests. See also Frankfurter 1998, chap. 6.

10Frankfurter 2006a, chap. 2; see in general Stewart 1991.

11Suppl. Mag. ##47 (= CTBS #28), 6–7, 18–19; 48, J-K, 6, 20, 32; 49, 17–18; 50, 17–51.

12Evil eye: see Bailliot 2010; Dunbabin and Dickie 1983; Elliott 2016. Sorcery thus comprises acts of binding and cursing based on ritual expertise or consultation with ritual experts. Margaret Mitchell (2022, 135–39) offers an incisive analysis of a sermon by John Chrysostom in which the fourth-century Antiochene bishop recommends placing scripture amulets throughout the Christian house to protect inhabitants from malicious pornai.

13On demonology as the conceptualization of liminality, see Smith 1978. On the integral function of ritual specialists in assembling demonologies, see Frankfurter 2006a, chap. 2.

14On such external iconographic apotropaia see Mitchell 2007; Wilburn 2019, 572–84.

15Frankfurter 2018. Zellmann-Rohrer (2020) makes a compelling case that these amulets reflect a more elaborate mythology of fever healing in antiquity.

16Frankfurter 2017, 218–26; cf. Frankfurter 2007.

17Huebner 2016, 162–64; on the magic of portals in general, Wilburn 2019, 585–89.

18See the compilation of Naveh and Shaked 1985; Levene 2012; and, on the ritual use of these bowls, Frankfurter 2015b.

19JBA 57, 59, ed./tr. (Shaked, Ford, and Bhayro 2013, 254, 260). A parallel study to this one has been initiated by Mokhtarian 2022.

20Vienna G337 (Rainer 1) = ACM #20, ed. PGM P10, tr. ACM, 45.

21Cf. Michigan 593 = ACM 133, which includes an application “to cause a revelation to be given to you in a dream.”

22I have arranged the following two translations according to the line breaks in the original artifacts.

23tēn thuran tēn Aphroditēn, most likely an accusative of invocation (cf. Smyth, Greek Grammar §1596), where Aphrodite is associated with the door. I thank Fritz Graf for consultation (12/2018) on this odd phrase.

24P. Oxy VII.1060 = PGM P2 = ACM #25, tr. ACM, 49, translation emended. While I have reproduced the lines of the text the way they appear on the papyrus, it is clear that the receding letters of the name Aphrodite in the first lines—if laid out in a triangle—would produce a triangular klima design (as both PGM and ACM publications show). But the purpose of the klima is not clear: is the sacred name Aphrodite being expanded to gain graphic powers (see Frankfurter 2019c) or, conversely, is a nefarious name meant to be dissipated through the disappearing letters (Faraone 2012)?

25P. Oslo I.5 = PGM P3 = ACM #26, tr. ACM, 50, translation emended.

26neshēli tērou shasjpaou; touōnah ralamp ajen laouei shōni, implying that the amulet is meant to protect her for subsequent children, who (b1) should be kept alive as they arrive, or (b2) subsequent children should hopefully arrive yearly [ralamp, from rompe].

27Lond. Or. 5525 = ACM #64, ed. AKZ 1: 15–16, tr. ACM, 120–21. See also Crum 1905, 253.

28Goody 1977, 74–111.

29On the magical power of listing, see Gordon 1999; Frankfurter 2006a, 14–20.

30Michigan 593, 8–9, 10–11, ed. Worrell 1930, 248, 249 = ACM #133, tr. ACM, 306–7. See also Mirecki 1994.

31Cf. Ps 121: 8, a popular apotropaic phrase in late antiquity represented on lintel inscriptions in Syria.

32Leiden Anastasi 9, 1r-v = ACM #134; ed. Pleyte and Boeser 1897, tr. ACM, 314.

33See Boozer 2017, 178, on the status and location of the aulē in the Egyptian house.

34Leiden, Anastasi 9, 1v-3r = ACM #134, ed. Pleyte and Boeser 1897, tr. ACM, 315.

35See Brown 1970.

36British Library Or. 7029, f. 73a-b, ed. Budge 1915, 519–20; cf. Dongola Burial Vault T28, in Łajtar and Van der Vliet 2017, 72–74.

37Frankfurter 2017, 76–87; Brakke 2009.

38Favret-Saada and Cullen 1989; Favret-Saada 2015.

39Since some scholars of antiquity eschew “sorcery” for the term malign magic (see Eidinow 2019; Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 14, 2 [2019]), I will define it here as deliberate, historical efforts through ritual performance and material assemblage to subvert the agency, fortune, or life of another, often under the direction or expertise of a ritual specialist.

40See in general Wilburn 2019, 597–98.

41P. Macquarie 1, 1, ##3, 9, 12, 5, ed. Choat and Gardner 2013.

42Ashmolean Museum 1981.940 = ACM #84, ed. (Smither 1939), tr. ACM, 177.

43Heidelberg copt. 686, 15: #5; 16: #20 = ACM 135.

44Michigan 593, 11, ed. Worrell 1930, 249 = ACM #133, tr. ACM, 307.

45Lix tetrax: (McCown 1922, 29*; Duling 1983, 969); Rhyx Miameth: (McCown 1922, 59*)

46PGM no. O2 (2: 233–34) = CTBS #35.

47Oxford, Bodleian coptic ms. C.(P) 4 = ACM #91, tr. ACM, 192.

48Michigan 1523, ed. Worrell 1935, 3–4 = ACM #108, tr. ACM, 218

49Heidelberg copt. 679 (perhaps eleventh century CE), ed. Bilabel and Grohmann 1934, 410–14 = ACM #110, tr. ACM, 222.

50P. Kellis copt 35, ed./tr. Mirecki, Gardner, and Alcock 1997.

51PGM XXXVI. 240, tr. GMPT, 275.

52P. Mich. VI. 423–24; see Frankfurter 2006b; Wilburn 2012, 95–102.

53Frankfurter 2006b, 42–45.

54On the range of problems that afflict households in Roman Egypt, see Abdelwahed, chapter 6, this volume.

55See Alston, chapter 7, this volume.

56Pearce 2020, 484. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the witch Meroe is imagined as impervious to all such domestic boundaries, breaking into tightly secured rooms (I.11) and, on the other hand, using the security of doors and windows to shut in a whole village (I.10). Thus she is a nightmare beyond the capacity of any apotropaion to repel.

57Wilburn (2018, 105–8) interprets a small female figurine found in the basement of a house in Karanis as part of an erotic binding assemblage, but it may equally be a protective or fecundity object.

58See again Wilburn 2018; and especially on the archaeology of domestic magical assemblages, Hutton 2016.

59Alston 2007, 373–74.

60On the wide differences in genre and scribality between the two corpora see Dieleman 2019; Van der Vliet 2019.

61Features of domestic religion in Roman and late antique Egypt, see Frankfurter 1998, 131–42; 2017, 38–54.

62On the development of “magic” in Egypt as a function of Christianization, see Shandruk 2012 and now, especially, De Bruyn 2017.

63Frankfurter 2017.

64See Frankfurter 2004.

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