Greek Magical Papyri (PGM): What They Actually Contain
This article explains, as a matter of sources, what the Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae, or PGM) are, how they survived, and what the texts actually contain. It is not a guide to reenacting ancient spells, and it does not claim that any of these recipes work.
Contents
The Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae, PGM) are not one ancient book but a modern edition of spell papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, written roughly between the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE, mostly in Greek with Demotic and Coptic passages. Many come from a single Theban tomb library that reached Europe through the diplomat Giovanni Anastasi. Karl Preisendanz edited them from 1928; the standard English translation is Hans Dieter Betz (Chicago, 1986). They contain love and binding spells, divination, protection, healing recipes and everyday tricks. Their value today is historical and structural, not as recipes.
Karl Preisendanz edited the Papyri Graecae Magicae in two volumes from 1928, with a revised second edition in 1973.
Source/tradition: Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae, Teubner 1928-1931; 2nd ed. 1973
The standard English translation, including the Demotic spells, is Hans Dieter Betz's edition published by the University of Chicago Press in 1986.
Source/tradition: Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, University of Chicago Press 1986
PGM IV, the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, is a codex of 36 leaves with 3,274 lines.
Source/tradition: Brashear, ANRW II 18.5 (1995); Betz 1986
A clay figure pierced with thirteen pins, now in the Louvre, matches a love-binding recipe in PGM IV.
Source/tradition: Musee du Louvre, Department of Egyptian Antiquities; Ogden, Night's Black Agents (2008)
Most scholars reject Dieterich's 1903 claim that the so-called Mithras Liturgy is a genuine cult text of the Mithras mysteries.
Source/tradition: Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie (1903); Frankfurter (ed.), Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic (2019)
Augustus had more than two thousand books of prophecy burned.
Source/tradition: Suetonius, Life of Augustus 31.1
Borrowing the ritual structure of the papyri (purification, stated purpose, closing) while dropping coercive aims is a common approach among modern practitioners.
Source/tradition: Temple of Desire editorial practice
The spells in the papyri produce the effects they claim.
Source/tradition: No controlled evidence exists
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
What the Greek Magical Papyri are, and what they are not
When people talk about the Greek Magical Papyri, they mean a modern collective label, not an ancient book. The Papyri Graecae Magicae, usually abbreviated PGM, are a twentieth-century edition of papyri with magical and religious content, written roughly between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. Almost all of them come from Greco-Roman Egypt. Most are in ancient Greek, but some passages are in Demotic Egyptian, Coptic and Hebrew.
That distinction is worth drawing right away, because it gets blurred constantly in occult literature and on social media. There is no single work called "the Magical Papyri" that some ancient master sat down and wrote. There is a scatter of scrolls and codices that happened to survive, which philologists numbered, transcribed and put into an order. What looks today like a closed body of scripture is really a pile of finds. That is exactly what makes it so revealing: we are not reading a polished doctrine, we are reading working papers.
The Theban library: one tomb, one diplomat, a lot of luck
Many of the most important texts originally belonged to a single ancient collection that scholars call the Theban magical library. It seems to come from a tomb on the west bank at Thebes, near modern Luxor, dating to the fourth or fifth century CE. Someone had deposited an entire working library there, or taken it with them into the grave: recipe books, formularies, instructions.
The first of these papyri reached Europe through Giovanni Anastasi (often written Jean d'Anastasy), a merchant and diplomat based in Egypt who served as Swedish-Norwegian consul and who collected and resold antiquities on a large scale between the 1820s and the 1850s. Through him, parts of the find went to Leiden, London, Paris and Berlin. That is why texts that once lay side by side in an Egyptian burial chamber are now spread across half of Europe. That they exist at all is owed to two things: dry desert sand and chance. Magic books were destroyed systematically in antiquity. The Roman historian Suetonius reports that Augustus had more than two thousand books of prophecy burned, and the Acts of the Apostles (19:19) describes converts at Ephesus burning their magic books in public.
Preisendanz and Betz: how scattered finds became an edition
The name Papyri Graecae Magicae goes back to the German philologist Karl Preisendanz, who published the texts in two volumes from 1928 on, with a facing German translation. A third volume was lost in the Second World War; a revised second edition appeared in 1973. Scholars have cited the papyri by Preisendanz's numbering ever since: "PGM IV 296–327" means papyrus number IV, lines 296 to 327.
For English readers, the standard work is American. Hans Dieter Betz, a New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, edited The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells (University of Chicago Press, 1986; second edition 1992). It is still the reference translation, and it includes the Demotic texts that Preisendanz left out. If you want to engage seriously with this material, you cannot get around these two editions, and you should know that nearly every popular account online draws on them at second or third hand. Most public and university libraries in the United States can get the Betz volume through interlibrary loan.
The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris: 3,274 lines
The centerpiece of the corpus is the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, numbered PGM IV and kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is a papyrus codex of 36 leaves written on both sides, 3,274 lines in all, one of the longest collections of spells to survive from the ancient world. It probably comes from Thebes too.
What makes it so valuable is not its length but the way archaeology backs it up. The papyrus contains a love-binding recipe that calls for two figures of wax or clay, one of which is to be pierced with thirteen needles. And such a figure has actually been found: a small clay woman pierced with thirteen pins, dated to the third or fourth century CE, found in a clay pot together with an inscribed lead tablet. It is now in the Louvre. Recipe and find fit together. It is one of the rare moments where an ancient instruction and an ancient execution can be matched directly, and it tells us something uncomfortable: these texts were not literary fantasies. People followed them.
What is actually in them: from invocations to flea powder
Anyone reading the papyri for the first time usually goes through disappointment first and fascination second. The disappointment: these are not deep mystery texts. The fascination: this is everyday life, in all its breadth.
The range runs from protective formulas against demons and exorcisms, through divination by trance, lamps, bowls and even skulls, to sending dreams, recipes for invisibility and memory aids. The largest single group is love magic: attraction spells, binding spells and separation spells, mostly carried out by men and, read today, the most disturbing genre in the corpus, because it ignores the will of the person targeted entirely. Alongside them stand remedies for fever, cramps, headaches and sleeplessness, spells to protect a house, instructions for catching a thief, and charms for luck at dice.
And then there are what the editions list as party tricks: how to pass off an egg as an apple, how to drink a lot without getting drunk, how to stop an "old woman" from chattering. PGM VII recommends wetting oleander with salt water, pounding it and scattering it against fleas and bedbugs. The largest surviving collection of ancient magic contains a bug remedy. That is not a flaw. It is proof that these books were used.
| Type of text | Examples | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Love and binding spells | Attraction, binding, separation; the pierced figure of PGM IV | The largest group, and the ethically hardest to read |
| Divination | Lamp and bowl divination, dream oracles, questions put to a spirit | Clients wanted answers before they wanted power |
| Protection | Amulets, house charms, formulas against demons | Fear of invisible harm was ordinary and constant |
| Healing recipes | Fever, headache, sleeplessness, scorpion stings | Magic filled gaps where medicine was out of reach |
| Everyday tricks | Flea powder, drinking without getting drunk | These were working manuals, not scripture |
| Ascent texts | The so-called Mithras Liturgy | A small but influential mystical strand |
Voces magicae: the language that is not a language
One of the most striking features of the papyri is the voces magicae, the "magic words": long strings of sonorous syllables with no translatable meaning, set right in the middle of a recipe and meant to be spoken aloud. Some of them are still familiar. The name Abrasax (in later spelling Abraxas) belongs here, and so does the palindrome ablanathanalba, which reads the same in both directions. Our pieces on Abraxas and its 365 heavens and on the origin of abracadabra follow two of these words further.
Scholars read the voces magicae in different ways: as garbled Egyptian or Semitic divine names, as professional jargon meant to signal expertise, or as deliberately unintelligible sound sequences whose force lay precisely in being unintelligible. What is certain is that they are neither noise nor copying errors. They form a system that held for centuries, and whose logic we can reconstruct only in part.
Syncretism: Egypt, Greece, Judaism and Christianity in one recipe
The papyri are the most vivid evidence of religious mixing to survive from late antiquity. The German scholar Theodor Hopfner described them as documents of a magical-religious syncretism of the third to fifth centuries CE: in one and the same text, Egyptian gods appear alongside Greek underworld powers such as Persephone, Hebrew divine names such as Iao and Sabaoth, and Mesopotamian figures such as Ereshkigal. Solomon himself turns up as an authority, a thread that later runs straight into the Solomonic grimoires of the Middle Ages.
Just as notable is what is missing: Latin texts and Roman gods. Although Egypt was ruled by Rome from 30 BCE, Roman religion left almost no trace in these papyri. Equally striking is how close they sit to practices that later became fixed parts of Christianity and Islam: fasting, anointing, abstinence, incense, purification rites, altars, calling on angels and intermediate beings. One passage in PGM IV even recommends abstaining from pork in order to command spirits, very likely a Jewish influence. If you want to see how that angelic thread developed, our explainer on the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses picks it up many centuries later.
 |
The seal the papyri already knew Seal of Solomon Candle Spell Kit, $36.95. Solomon already appears in the papyri as the king who commands spirits, and the interlocking seal attributed to him became the most durable protective figure of the grimoire tradition that grew out of this material. This kit gives you the hexagram cast in beeswax (3.5 inches, roughly six hours of burn) with herbs, an oil and written instructions. It is built for protection and for claiming your own authority, not for working on another person, which is exactly where we part ways with the old love spells. Burn it on a heat-safe dish and never unattended. It will not command anything for you; it gives your intention a closed, deliberate shape. |
The so-called Mithras Liturgy, and why it is disputed
One section of PGM IV has had an influence far beyond specialist circles: the text that Albrecht Dieterich published in 1903 as the Mithras Liturgy. It is an instruction for ascent and deification of real literary power. The practitioner breathes in the rays, looks up into the sky, sees doors open and stars descend toward him.
Dieterich's claim that this is a genuine liturgy of the Mithras cult, however, has been disputed ever since and is rejected by most specialists today. The text does name Mithras, but it stands inside a collection of magical recipes, not a cult book. If you come across it, and you will come across it often in esoteric literature, you should know about this caveat. It is a textbook example of how a powerful title can outlive an uncertain attribution.
What the papyri reveal about the people who used them
The most interesting yield of these texts is not their magic but their sociology. The papyri themselves give plenty of evidence that their users were convinced they held something effective. Phrases like "there is no greater practice than this" or "I found no stronger spell in the world" run all through the corpus. The books were inherited, passed down to children, even bequeathed to kings, with the request to keep them secret.
The picture that emerges contradicts the romantic cliché. These papyri did not belong to a secretive elite of mages. They belonged to practitioners who worked for clients. The tone is often more that of a craftsman than a mystic: precise, repeatable, with lists of materials. And if you lay the curse tablets, magical gems and amulet sheets of the same world beside them, a consistent pattern appears: people without police, courts or reliable medicine trying, with the means of their time, to get some grip on a precarious life.
What is left for today
As a recipe book, the papyri are no use for modern practice, not least because a large share of the recipes aims at coercing other people and so breaks any ethics worth taking seriously. We have written separately about love spells and consent for exactly that reason. What remains is something different and more valuable: the realization of how old the basic structure of ritual action is. Purification, marking off a space, invocation, a clearly stated purpose, a closing. That scaffold is in PGM IV just as it is in a contemporary ritual. What has changed is the direction: away from controlling others, toward clarity, protection and your own alignment. Our guide on how to write your own ritual builds on exactly that scaffold, and the history of grimoires and the Book of Shadows shows where the tradition went next.
From the practice
People who read the papyri for the first time in the Betz translation tend to say the same thing: they expected shivers and found shopping lists. That sobriety is the value. We see people at work, not people performing. Practitioners who read the corpus closely usually add a second observation: the structure is instructive, the content is often an overreach. Anyone who does not keep those two apart confuses the study of sources with permission.
What we don't promise
We do not offer a reconstruction of the recipes in the papyri, and certainly not of binding, attraction or separation spells. Practices aimed against another person's will are something we reject. We also do not claim that ancient spell formulas demonstrably work; there is no scientific evidence that they do. The medical recipes in the papyri are historical documents, not treatment advice. If you have a health problem, see a doctor.
In practice: how to work with this material
An editorial note, kept separate from the historical facts. If this corpus interests you, read it as structure, not as recipe. Three things can be taken from it for today without ethical trouble.
- Precision. The ancient practitioners named their purpose; they did not circle around it. Write your purpose down in one clear sentence before you do anything else.
- Sequence. Every usable text has a beginning (purification, space), a middle (the purpose) and an end (closing, thanks, leaving the space). A ritual without a closing stays open and keeps working on you in unpleasant ways.
- Direction. Change the target. Where the papyri say "bring that person to me," you write "I align myself with what belongs to me." The same energy, a different addressee: you.
- Read the real thing. Start with the Betz translation and its notes, not with a quote on a poster. Check any "ancient spell" you see online against the PGM number it claims.
Frequently asked questions
How old are the Greek Magical Papyri?
The texts were written down roughly between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. Most of the surviving material dates from the third to the fifth century CE.
Who edited the Greek Magical Papyri?
Karl Preisendanz published the standard Greek-German edition in two volumes from 1928, with a second edition in 1973. The standard English translation was edited by Hans Dieter Betz (University of Chicago Press, 1986) and includes the Demotic spells.
What does a reference like PGM IV 296-327 mean?
PGM stands for Papyri Graecae Magicae, the Roman numeral is the papyrus number in Preisendanz's system, and the other numbers are the lines. PGM IV is the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, with 3,274 lines.
What are voces magicae?
Long strings of sonorous syllables with no translatable meaning that were meant to be spoken aloud in the recipes, including familiar forms such as Abrasax and the palindrome ablanathanalba. Some can be traced to garbled Egyptian and Semitic divine names; others remain unexplained.
Is the Mithras Liturgy really a liturgy of Mithras?
That is disputed. Albrecht Dieterich published the section of PGM IV under that title in 1903, but most scholars today doubt that it is a genuine cult text of the Mithras mysteries.
Can you perform the rituals from the papyri today?
Technically much of it could be reconstructed, but ethically most of it argues against doing so, because a large share of the recipes aims at influencing other people against their will. As material for learning how rituals are structured (purification, purpose, closing), they are very instructive.
Sources and further reading
- Karl Preisendanz (ed.), Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri, 2 vols., 1928–1931; 2nd ed., Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973.
- Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; 2nd ed. 1992.
- William M. Brashear, "The Greek Magical Papyri: an Introduction and Survey," in ANRW (Rise and Decline of the Roman World) II 18.5 (1995).
- David Frankfurter (ed.), Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, Leiden: Brill, 2019, including Jacco Dieleman on the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri.
- Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, Leipzig 1903.
- Daniel Ogden, Night's Black Agents: Witches, Wizards and the Dead in the Ancient World, London 2008.
- Suetonius, Life of Augustus 31.1; Acts 19:19.
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