Notes on Magical Papyri: Part i

Abstract

This article collects new proposals for the reading and understanding of two Greek magical formularies developed in work on the Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies: Text and Translation (GEMF): a narrative incantation motif involving Zeus and, as argued here, a personified part of the human body to be healed by the procedure (“Conduit”) in PGM IV (GEMF 57), and a witness to a complex of invocations of the god Bes in SM II 90 (GEMF 62).