Also called the Greek Magical Papyri often called by the acronym of their name in Latin PGM. I found the texts in Swansea University library when I had first developed a serious interest in the occult in 2005. I was so excited to find them written in what I thought was Coptic. It was a Greek Script, but not like the Greek we had seen in Maths. Karl Preisendanz bound copies of the Greek spells in multiple volumes bound in orange hard back covers. This was a mystery to be solved. What was this magical hidden thing I had discovered.

One of the problems that we have today is we have a large number of people trying to find and recreate some ancient form of magic. As if the older the magic is, the more authentic it is and as if more authenticity seems to offer more power or spiritual development. The difficulty is much of what exists today is not old. Often it’s made between 1880 and 1980, from quarter calls, to rainbow chakras, to rune magic. Therefore people that think age is what determines authenticity would find this magic to be less authentic and therefore they assume it to be less powerful and/or to offer less spiritual development. Unfortunately many falsely claim that their magic is ancient denying this recent origins to try and claim authenticity, which is untrue. Their practices are based in a Christian practice born out of masonry and the grimoire tradition. Sadly there is nothing pagan about it as much as many falsely claim it to be so.

The PGM is one of the few exceptions. It is one of the most ancient collections of surviving notes of the practice of magic that predates Christianity. A true pagan magic. This is unlike other forms of magic. It shows influence from Greek pagan magic and Egyptian pagan magic and often throws in Jewish and Gnostic god names for added power. Most of the text that make it up are from 1st – 4th century EV.

In his Encyclopedia Goetia, Jake Stratton-Kent attempts to show a connection between the pagan practices as indicated in the PGM and the technique in some grimoires, effectively rewriting the history of the transmission of Hermetics, through Theurgy to alchemy and viewing many of the grimoires as aberrations of this. This reveals that even the practices stolen from Christian grimoires might have indeed had pagan roots which were lost a long the way. I would recommend his books Geosophia, Testament of St Cyprian the Mage and The True Grimoire. Stephen Skinner reveals much the same things in his works Graecae-Egyptian Magic and Solomonic Magic where the books look at the PGM and the grimoires respectively, but reveal many of the same techniques.

Thank you to Tom McArthur who’s talk given at the Centre for Pagan Studies sponsored by the Doreen Valiente Institute today on 9th August 2020, which inspired much of this article, because it helped me to bring my thoughts together and deliver a brief and quick article. Naturally, my own writing on this article would be extremely long having worked with it on and off for a number of years.

My second exposure to the Greek Magical Papyri came a year or so later when I no longer had access to the Swansea Library collection and I no longer had the opportunity to try my best at reading that mysterious Greek. I wanted interested in the magical practices of people who kept referring to a grimoire called the Lemegeton often mistakenly called the Goetia, which just means “the sorcery“. A version of it translated from French by Samuel Mathers had an added by Crowley called the preliminary work. It was a script that Aleister Crowley had supposedly used to summon his own Holy Guardian Angel which was taken from the PGM where it bares the title the Stele Jeu the Painter. I have written articles on this before and delivered them to fellow OTO members and occultists so I will try to find them again and post them here. But suddenly I was sent back to the PGM and did not quite appreciate what I had found and I’m not sure I even realised that it was the same as what I had previously seen in Swansea Library. Very luckily I soon found the English translation of the PGM and began to pursue work into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Thelema. Soon I was researching the Greek origin of the ritual since Crowley’s interpretation often rendered clearly obviously Jewish magical words as a construct of inaccurate single syllable Egyptian words. It made me think Crowley’s got it wrong and I wanted to get to the origins myself.

I soon found myself skimming through the Ancient Greek with a dictionary a keyboard with Greek letters on it and books on Greek grammar and I took up my own version of the ritual, full made as authentic as possible, for 6 months, but I struggled with some of the Thelemic words and symbols in it and whenever I asked for help I was told I was unworthy to practice it. Offended by those who sort to take to message boards which aimed to collect and provide information for the practice of magic, but who instead resigned themselves to stopping others I shied away from the boards. While I was coming to the end of the 6 months I was told it is actually supposed to be an 18 month ritual in the original, but that is some requirements set out in the translation of the German version of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage not something in the PGM.

Soon I had delved into the PGM for many rituals including rituals to try to summon a paredros as Stephen Skinner writes about in his book Graecae-Egyptian Magic. James MacArthur mentioned them a lot in his talk this afternoon mentioning that there is very little consensus as to what they actually are, just like many magicians cannot agree on what exactly the Holy Guardian Angel is. The sections which are often refered to as for summoning a paredros call it a servant spirit which eats, drinks and sleeps aside you. This is a key part which Jake Stratton Kent relates to the elemental which is summoned in the True Grimoire, which he prepared for scarlet imprint.

I also found my attention drawn to Selene because so often I found the moon occupied so much fantasy in the minds of wiccans that getting a genuine pagan ritual for summoning a moon spirit, or a hymn to a moon goddess was very difficult and this seemed like the most authentic way.

James MacAthur in his talk reminded us that of the rituals in the PGM involved mixtures of deities. The rituals I have used often used every powerful name they can think of that might be relevant, but he pointed out they also make statues of deities which combined multiple heads of multiple deities and feed from different god creating these strange mixtures and how this wasn’t too unusual given sometimes the Egyptians in writing to the Greeks referred to their own goddess Isis by the Greek name Aphrodite and the texts mention a Hermanubis which was a mixture of Hermes and Anubis both gods who acted as psychopomps guiding souls through the underworld, represented as Hermes, but with a jackal head in Greek white marble statue design. However what I take from this is what these people didn’t really care too much for the deities they were using. The relationship was more of being bossy with the gods instead of devoting to them. These were likely not the rituals of priests and priestesses, but of sorcerers who did not seek a relationship with the gods, but to use them.

In his talk, James MacAthur indicated the exception to using deities was in the Rites of Mithras that are included in the collection. These are what remains of initiation rites in to secret societies hidden in Roman society. Therefore they don’t use the god names like the other rituals.

Learning these rituals are a key to understanding our magical past. It’s important to understand that magic wasn’t always the high magic the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn practised. Magic wasn’t always as appears in Thelema or modern day Wicca and that actually this rituals are a more accurate portrayal of our pagan ancestry. These rituals have been growing in popularity recently and there’s good reason why. Study these rituals well. While you might not fancy drowning a falcon in honey-sweetened milk as might have been done 2000 years ago you at least know the seriousness and sacrifice with which a person undertook some of these rituals and perhaps our modern rituals, without hurting an endangered species a person would undertake the same seriousness of sacrifice.