Foreign Magic in Imperial Rome

Roman ideas about witchcraft were often associated with distant regions, including India and the Kush kingdom in northeast Africa.

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Americans and Europeans interested in magic have long drawn on “exotic” foreign traditions. As historian Elizabeth Ann Pollard writes, this also happened in Imperial Rome. Roman concepts of witchcraft were often associated with foreign places, including India and the Kush kingdom in northeast Africa.

Pollard notes that travel between Rome and India or Kush was difficult enough that Romans couldn’t maintain regular diplomatic ties or trade bulk commodities with those societies. The goods that were worth shipping across such distances were highly valuable items like spices, gems, silk, gold, and exotic animals.

Trade between Rome and both India and Kush seems to have peaked in the first and second centuries CE. The relatinoship caused anxiety for some Roman writers, who worried about trading away gold for consumable luxuries like spices. This went hand-in-hand with the demonization of elite women and effeminate men, whose love of fine goods supposedly weakened Rome’s position in international trade. For example, in the first century, Pliny the Elder criticized Empress Lollia Paulina for excessive use of emeralds and pearls—both of which came from trade with India. Interestingly in 49 CE, Lollia was tried for alleged use of magic.

Yet, Pollard writes, during this time, Romans generally treated spices from India as ordinary, if expensive, culinary ingredients. She suggests that this changed in the Roman Empire’s later centuries. Political fragmentation at home, increasing Persian power, and epidemic diseases reduced the ease of long-distance trade in both goods and information. This allowed outlandish ideas about distant places to flourish and increased the sense of mystery around them.

Pollard quotes David Frankfurter, a scholar of religion, who, describing the movement of ideas from Egypt to Rome, wrote that “traditions that originally function in a total social and economic complex now become merely the hoary accouterments of a foreign magos; and a priestly literary culture…becomes the fascinatingly incomprehensible ‘wisdom’ of the eastern guru.”

In the third century, Roman writer Philostratus described journeys that the magic practitioner Apollonius of Tyana supposedly made to India and Kush centuries earlier. In this telling, Apollonius meets sages, encounters spices with magical properties, including cinnamon that causes goats to nuzzle your hand, and learns that griffins and phoenixes live in India.

Another story, by second-century writer and philosopher Apuleius, tells of a woman innkeeper named Meroe who could transform men into animals and prevent rivals from conceiving. Among the sins Apuleius attributes to her is using love spells to seduce “not just local inhabitants but also Indians and both kinds of Ethiopians [Kushites] and even Antichthones [people living on the other side of the earth].” Apuleius even named the witch after the capital of Kush.

Pollard writes that “Meroe’s name and her exotic choice of sexual partners seem to be a working out of tensions over a place that supplied much-desired goods and…a fall-off in the information network that would tell Roman consumers more about the place from which these goods came.”

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