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orion magic at Qumran
On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Jim West wrote:
> Was magic practiced among the Qumran covenanters?
Yes.
I understand "magic" as a word for illegal or private religious procedures
(prayers where you really expect to get something, exorcisms, divination),
often found in the mouths of practicioners of legal or public religious
procedures. There's a very thoughtful article by H.S. Versnel "On the
Relationship 'Magic-Religion'" in Numen 38 (around 1991) that explores
this.
Others can fill in details or disagree, but the community who gathered
together the DSS and wrote some of them were definitely interested in
driving out demons and becoming angels (demons: michael Wise in JBL 1995
or so; angels: devorah dimant in Berlin, ed. _Religion and Politics in
the Ancient Near East_; on a related note,James Davila in RdeQ 1996 [Fs.
Milik]), and the early jewish mystics who continue many of the
scroll-collectors' interests were sometimes magicians too (Schaefer in JJS
1990).
Seth L. Sanders
Dept. of Near Eastern Studies
The Johns Hopkins University