An onyx intaglio in The Met with charaktêres alongside Greek letters

Charaktêres (singular: charaktêr) are letter-shaped signs lacking both semantic and phonetic correlations, which were used as magic signs in ancient literary documents.[1]

Forms and use

In her 2013 thesis Kirsten Dzwiza studied 94 magical texts and recorded 699 different charaktêres occurring over 943 times.[2] The character forms are mostly nonsensical and may include ring-letters, balls, points, closed elements, separate strokes, linear elements, small element, and hieroglyphs.[2] The most common forms consists of asterisks and configurations of straight lines with small circles at their ends.[3]

The signs appear mostly on apotropaic spells and phylacteries, but also on a few ancient curse tablets.[1] They may appear as loose groups of characters on a magical gemstone or spell to large groups alongside other figures on a magical text or table.[3] They are often used alongside comprehensible arcane words, like the voces magicae in the texts of the Greek Magical Papyri.[4] Charaktêres were not intended as an alternative-alphabet or code - they were usually used only once or twice in the context of a single spell.[5]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 György Németh (2020). "Charaktêres on Curse Tablets In the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire". In Gordon, R.; Marco Simón, F.; Piranomonte, M. (eds.). Choosing Magic: Contexts, Objects, Meanings: The Archaeology of Instrumental Religion in the Latin West. De Luca Editori d’Arte. pp. 125–138.
  2. 1 2 Kirsten Dzwiza (2013). Schriftverwendung in antiker Ritualpraxis anhand der griechischen, demotischen und koptischen Praxisanleitungen des 1. - 7. Jahrhunderts (Thesis). Universität Erfurt.
  3. 1 2 Frankfurter, David. "The Magic of Writing in Mediterranea Antiquity". Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic. Brill. pp. 626–658.
  4. ↑ Edmonds, Radcliffe G. (2019). Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World. Princeton University Press. pp. 337–338.
  5. ↑ Gordon, Richard (2014). "CHARAKTÊRES BETWEEN ANTIQUITY AND RENAISSANCE TRANSMISSION AND REINVENTION". In Dasen, V.; Spieser, J.-M. (eds.). Les savoirs magiques et leur transmission de l'antiquite a la Renaissance. pp. 253–300.


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