Stephen Davis finds a significant intersection between memory, body, and gender in the magical papyri of Greco-Roman Egypt.
He begins by contextualizing this finding within ancient cultural assumptions about “the malleability of memory.” This is illustrated on one hand by Aristotle’s correlation of memory with physiology, and on the other by ancient rhetoricians’ assumptions that memory can be enhanced by engaging in particular practices.
He proceeds to show that these broad assumptions are also reflected in the ancient magical papyri, where mnemonikai spells prescribe a variety of practices designed to enhance the memory - practices that routinely include taking ritually generated substances into the body.[754]With this broad cultural context established, Davis turns to his primary interest: a group of spells he assembles and identifies, somewhat playfully, as “forget-me-not” spells. What interests Davis in these spells is their aim “to effect a state of forgetfulness or oblivion in a female victim with respect to all other social ties, and/or to cultivate memory in that subject only with respect to the spell-giver himself.”[755] Viewing these spells in light of broader Greco-Roman assumptions about memory and the body, he says, “tells us something significant about the construction of a particular kind of female subject” in them.[756] Specifically, Davis argues that here it is “the female subject” in particular - that is, in some contrast to the male - that is understood to be “a nexus of body and memory.”[757]
Davis has assembled a fascinating set of ancient ritual texts, and no doubt there is a certain logic to his interpretation of them. The link between memory and the body in the ancient world seems clear enough.[758] A special correlation between the female and the body too is not without attestation in the Greco-Roman era; elsewhere in Egypt, for example, Philo’s dualistic anthropology associated the mind (von$) and rationality with the male, while the body and sensual experience (aio0poi$) were linked to the female.[759] A further correlation of memory with the female body in particular might thus seem a short and somewhat natural step for the cultural discourse to take.
And yet in the interest of exegetical clarity with respect to the spells themselves I would like to press just a bit. Is a special correlation of the memory with the female body in particular really at work in these spells? To what extent is their anatomical focus actually related to the discourse of remembering and forgetting? Additional investigation suggests that the Greek love spells’ interest in the anatomy of their victims may be better understood in connection with their eroticism than with their references to memory. After a brief exploration of the issue, I will suggest that spells of this kind in any event greatly illuminate the charge of magic raised against Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and even against early practitioners of Christ devotion more generally.
A.