Greek Magical Papayri substitutions

[PelagicMind]

I know a lot of the different ingredients can be pretty tough to find and relatively obscure (strip of cloth off someone whose died a violent death) and quite frankly in this case not the kind of materials I’m interested in working with. My question is, what kind of substitutions, if any, can one do in these types of rituals and spells (from the PGM specifically) are there more common items one can substitute and achieve the same effect, for example something with a correspondence to the original ingredient?

 

[Robert Ramsay]

(strip of cloth off someone whose died a violent death)

You could kill a fly with a t-shirt and use that

 

[HoldAll]

In "Ritual Embodiment in Modern Western Magic: Becoming the Magician", scholar Damon Zacharias Lycourinos describes some rituals he witnessed personally. In the chapter "The Apollinian Invocation" (PGM I. 262–347), he writes on p. 96:

Instead of the lamp requested in the spell, he dug a deep fire pit due to the rationale that he was to daimon of Hades with the fire pit being a representation of the river Phlegethon – a river of fire that coils round the earth and flows into the depths of the underworld. For an altar he used some flat sea rocks instead of the head of a wolf, but the Theurgist had constructed a small wolf’s head from clay to at least represent the correspondence to Apollo as slayer of wolves.

I think I've read about this modern custom to substitute animal sacrifices with clay figurines before, and I'm not sure some recipes calling for live ingredients weren't in fact blinds anyway, such as the very first spell in the Betz translation requiring the killing and mummification of a falcon - there's a story where a Roman legionnaire in Egypt killed an animal sacred to a god by mistake, and the angry crowd just tore him to pieces. Obtaining a live falcon was and is hard enough, killing it difficult what with that these talons and the sharp beak, and if anybody found out in those times… it's interesting though that he replaced the lamp (which would have been readily available) with a firepit, it must mean that he was very confident his ritual would work anyway and probably felt that it just made more sense to him, so you have your correspondence (lamp => river Phlegethon => fire) right there. Perhaps you could take some graveyard dirt (most authors insist showing respect to the spirits by leaving a small payment!) instead of that strip of cloth; coffin nails are probably equally hard to obtain.

There was a forum thread once where a member asked a similar question about substitutions, this time a grimoire spell calling for mole blood. I suggested beetroots because they grow underground, just like moles living underground, and their juice is blood-red.

So Apollo was known as a slayer of wolves, and the ritualist was well aware of the correct correspondences, sticking to the wolf head's ingredient, if only symbolically.

 

[Grayhoss]

Also, there's the possibility of the ingredients being 'code' for other things, of which the 'common knowledge' key has been lost.
Consider the three witches of Shakespeare's 'Scottish Play': The gory list of ingredients they toss in their cauldron are all, in reality, various folk terms for common herbage of the period.
Shakespeare's period audience would have well known it, just by cultural osmosis..

 

[PelagicMind]

You could kill a fly with a t-shirt and use that

I like this a lot actually. Way more my speed

Post automatically merged: Today at 5:56 PM

In "Ritual Embodiment in Modern Western Magic: Becoming the Magician", scholar Damon Zacharias Lycourinos describes some rituals he witnessed personally. In the chapter "The Apollinian Invocation" (PGM I. 262–347), he writes on p. 96:

Instead of the lamp requested in the spell, he dug a deep fire pit due to the rationale that he was to daimon of Hades with the fire pit being a representation of the river Phlegethon – a river of fire that coils round the earth and flows into the depths of the underworld. For an altar he used some flat sea rocks instead of the head of a wolf, but the Theurgist had constructed a small wolf’s head from clay to at least represent the correspondence to Apollo as slayer of wolves.

I think I've read about this modern custom to substitute animal sacrifices with clay figurines before, and I'm not sure some recipes calling for live ingredients weren't in fact blinds anyway, such as the very first spell in the Betz translation requiring the killing and mummification of a falcon - there's a story where a Roman legionnaire in Egypt killed an animal sacred to a god by mistake, and the angry crowd just tore him to pieces. Obtaining a live falcon was and is hard enough, killing it difficult what with that these talons and the sharp beak, and if anybody found out in those times… it's interesting though that he replaced the lamp (which would have been readily available) with a firepit, it must mean that he was very confident his ritual would work anyway and probably felt that it just made more sense to him, so you have your correspondence (lamp => river Phlegethon => fire) right there. Perhaps you could take some graveyard dirt (most authors insist showing respect to the spirits by leaving a small payment!) instead of that strip of cloth; coffin nails are probably equally hard to obtain.

There was a forum thread once where a member asked a similar question about substitutions, this time a grimoire spell calling for mole blood. I suggested beetroots because they grow underground, just like moles living underground, and their juice is blood-red.

So Apollo was known as a slayer of wolves, and the ritualist was well aware of the correct correspondences, sticking to the wolf head's ingredient, if only symbolically.

Thanks, that’s super helpful, that example with the beet roots really had it click for me, it’s all just a matter of getting creative with it and finding the corresponding materials among items that we can logically and relatively easily obtain. I know for anything involving coins I’ll just use normal Pennies or dimes or quarters, I mean, it’d be insane to try and find like actual period coins unless you have the resources to do so.