This article explores a cluster of late antique Coptic magical papyri commonly referred to in scholarship as “spells for a good singing voice.” Based on detailed analysis of the discursive practices, gestures, and material media employed in their ritual procedures, I argue that these texts emerged from monastic contexts. References to visionary-apocalyptic motifs, as well as to preparatory acts designed to facilitate communion with divine intermediaries, support this claim. The ritual mechanics of these spells hinge on the invocation of celestial beings upon a chalice infused with a concoction of potent substances (e.g., water, oil, honey). This ritual dynamic bears striking affinities to the Eucharistic epiclesis, the central prayer of the Christian liturgy, while also drawing upon ritual strategies operative in the Graeco-Egyptian “rituals of apparition.” The latter involve summoning supernatural intermediaries to assist practitioners in obtaining certain benefits, either through human intermediaries or material media such as lamps, bowls, or similar vessels. On these grounds, the article argues that the “spells for a good singing voice” reflect the creativity of monastic ritual experts that adroitly navigated the intersections of magic and liturgy, adapting elements of the Eucharistic epiclesis to preexisting ritual frameworks concerned with divine manifestation. As a result, these spells illustrate the creative ways in which Christian ritual experts engaged with inherited ritual technologies and readapted them to the emerging Christian discourse. By situating these spells within the broader cultural landscape of Egyptian monasticism, this study aims to contribute to broader discussions on the complex interplay between liturgy and magic in Late Antiquity.
This article attempts to explain why the Muslims of the first two hijri centuries came to view as martyrs those who died of a mysterious illness that they called the Stabber (al-ṭāʿūn). It finds the answer to that question at the intersection of the unique social pressures attendant on the Arab conquests, the presence of endemic Yersinia pestis in Greater Syria, the prior inheritance of Jewish and Christian ideas about the meaning of disease, and the distinctive view of salvation history found in the Qurʾan. Early Muslims simultaneously affirmed the ancient Jewish and Christian theory of epidemic disease as divine punishment and gave it a separate meaning for their own community, as a martyrdom and a mercy, which set the conquering minority of Muhajirun apart in death as well as in life. In illuminating this process, the article writes a new cultural history of epidemic disease in the late antique world and revisits some of our fundamental assumptions about retrospective diagnosis and the discourse of disease in premodern culture. Its findings should be relevant to scholars of Christianity and Islam, to Syriacists, scholars of premodern disease, and to anyone invested in the current conversation about Yersinia pestis, epidemic disease, and environmental history in Late Antiquity.
