Ebook: Ancient Pathways and Hidden Pursuits: Religion, Morals, and Magic in the Ancient World

"Ancient Pathways and Hidden Pursuits collects essays by classicist Georg Luck, published over the years in periodicals and handbooks. They deal with the various aspects of Greco-Roman life and thought, especially with religious beliefs, occult practices, psychology, and morals. The book is a companion to Luck's Arcana Mundi, an annotated translation of ancient texts on magic and the occult."--BOOK JACKET

Excerpts from preface: »It is impossible to understand Greek and Roman culture without paying attention to its various forms of religious experience and what is usually called “superstition.” Magic doctrines and occult practices are endlessly fascinating, because they reveal so much that is human, all-too-human, about people. To ignore these dark sides and only to see the luminous qualities of ancient thought would be a mistake.

To help the general reader understand the extraordinary complexity of occult science in antiquity, I wrote Arcana Mundi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), which has since appeared in German, Spanish, and Italian. [...]

This collection of articles and reviews written over the last four decades may be useful as a companion volume to Arcana Mundi. Almost all of them have been published before; those that originally appeared in German have been translated into English by the author. Very few changes have been made.

There has been an almost dramatic revival of interest in ancient magic during the last ten or twenty years, largely due, I think, to the English translation of the Greek Magical Papyri, with commentaries and an excellent introduction, edited by H.D. Betz (Chicago, 1992; 2d ed.). I hope that at least some of the pieces in Ancient Pathways and Hidden Pursuits will be helpful in taking the reader back to the sources where work inevitably must begin.

In recent years, there has also been a good deal of important research on the use of hallucinogenic drugs in magic and religion. Among the many psychotropic substances known today, there are quite a few that could explain magical phenomena, and others that may produce religious experiences if they are applied in an appropriate manner. For the second group, the term entheogens has been proposed. Naturally, a sharp distinction between the two is difficult, just as it is difficult to differentiate clearly between religion and magic. A great deal can be learned from Entheogens and the Future of Religion (San Francisco, 1997), edited by Robert Forte, with contributions by Albert Hofmann, R. Gordon Wasson, and others.

As I returned once more to the material collected in the following pages, it struck me that hallucinations may very often be at the basis of magical experiences. Another key to occult phenomena may be hypnotism and suggestion, techniques that were almost certainly known to the priests of ancient Egypt and Greece and apparently never quite forgotten in the West. These two explanations were not as evident to me at the time I wrote the following pieces, but I would urge the reader today to keep them in mind.«