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The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris and Two Texts Drawn from Its Tradition

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The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris and Two Texts Drawn from Its Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Magical Papyrus gathers three of the atlas's texts from the corpus of Greek and Egyptian magical papyri, one the great compilation itself and two passages embedded within or descended from that tradition.

The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris is the longest surviving magical handbook from the ancient world, a bound Greek codex with passages of Old Coptic, a working compilation of dozens of separate procedures copied from older material by someone who expected to use them; its interest lies less in any single procedure than in the book itself, evidence of a late antique Egyptian practitioner treating Greek, Egyptian and Jewish divine names as interchangeable sources of power. The Mithras Liturgy is embedded within that same papyrus, a first person ascent text in which the speaker is carried up through the elements and granted sight of a supreme god; it is the most studied passage in the whole corpus because it reads as a description of religious experience rather than a procedure with an outcome, though its title and its attachment to Mithras are both modern, not the manuscript's own.

The Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist is a shorter exorcistic text from a different papyrus, framed as the stele of a figure expelling a demon from a sufferer; its importance is out of proportion to its length because it is the one passage of the ancient magical papyri that entered modern Western occultism as a working text and stayed there, known today as the Bornless Ritual, a title belonging to its nineteenth century English afterlife rather than to the papyrus itself.

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Sources
Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri
Karl Preisendanz (editor), B. G. Teubner, Leipzig, 1928
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