What is magic and how do scholars of religion study it? Dr. Henry from Religion for Breakfast joins me to discuss this popular subject.
I invited Andrew on to talk about magic in the ancient Greek and Roman world, both from the academic side and exploring the internal perspective within the Greek and Roman worlds.
Andrew Henry is a scholar of religion focusing on early Christianity and the religions of the late Roman Empire. He earned his PhD in 2020 from Boston University.
Andrew launched Religion for Breakfast in 2014 during his PhD studies when he realized that religious studies content was almost completely lacking on YouTube. Religion for Breakfast aims to remedy this by publishing introductory videos on a variety of topics related to religion. Visit Andrew’s website here https://www.youtube.com/@ReligionForBreakfast to learn more about him and his work.
You can support Andrew’s work on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/religionforbreakfast and by sharing his excellent videos with your family and friends.
“Academics over the past few decades have been debating: can we use ‘magic’ as an etic term at all? Should we only use the indigenous terms that people used back in the Greco-Roman world? So we have terms like ‘mageia’ which we translate these days as magic, there’s terms like ‘pharmaceia’, there’s all these different indigenous terms that describe different types of ritual practices, and they don’t map perfectly onto the 21st century English word ‘magic’. And there’s always this slippage, where we’re trying to tie these things together. So I have been very careful along with many of the scholars–it’s not just me–to not map the English word ‘magic’ onto those indigenous terms because they are used in many different ways, they refer to things that we don’t think we would refer to today as magic.”
– Dr. Andrew Henry
Hellenismos heute 