100 Naked Objects: 1. The Amulet

How I started doing what I do now

Hello! Last week I mentioned that I was going to start this project, but it’s taken me all that time to get going. I had various ideas for the first object, but decided in the end to begin at the beginning, so to speak, and tell the story of how I came to study ancient magic, rituals, and objects in the first place.

The whole thing was a glorious series of accidents and coincidences. To tell the story, I have to wind back to the point in 2014, when I enrolled on a Masters course at the University of Manchester. I had no idea that you could study magic in the ancient world. I had decided to do a Masters in Classics because I was recovering from an illness that had destroyed my life for five years. I love research, teaching, and learning, and decided that since I had loved doing a PhD before, I would do another one.

That probably sounds weird to a lot of people. PhDs are deeply stressful things. Why would somebody so ill want to make their life so difficult? Well, I decided I’d do something that I loved, and see if that helped. If I could get up every day, or nearly every day, with the knowledge I was working on something deeply enjoyable, that might help.

The first few weeks of the Masters were rather odd. I was a stranger to Classics. It’s a huge field, with so many sub-disciplines, very much like my first discipline, Geography, which also tends to absorb everything else into it. Classics takes everything else and asks what that was like in the Ancient World.

We had a core seminar each week that introduced us to various sub-disciplines, from narratology to textual criticism to fragments. By the end of week 6, I was struggling to work out what I wanted to do. Nothing really plucked at my imagination, and I felt swamped.

Then we did epigraphy, and my world started to change.

Epigraphy is the study of writing on things. Mostly stone, sometimes pottery, occasionally wood if it has survived. In class, we looked at stone inscriptions, and were introduced to some basic texts. I had to find a book to review as a formative assessment piece, so I took a look at the epigraphy one.

Which is where I found the curse tablets.

Curse tablets are small pieces of pottery, tin, gold, silver, anything really, where somebody has written or drawn a spell intended to bind somebody else. Some of them are pleas for justice in law cases, or demands for a certain lover (usually somebody married to somebody else). They feature names, pictures, incantations. Magic.

Now I had something to focus on. A whole new world opened up.

At about the same time, my future supervisor presented an unusual find from the papyri collection held at the John Rylands Library. A scrap of papyrus, featuring Christian text on one side and a tax receipt on the other. I knew that materials were often re-used in the ancient world, so I suddenly found myself asking a really important question:

How do you make something magical?

A tax receipt isn’t magical. A series of Biblical quotations, inscribed on a piece of papyrus and folded into a cylinder to be worn is, however. I was curious: which came first, and how did a series of quotes become efficacious?

That was the subject of my Masters thesis, completed back in 2017. Out of that, I came to the world of magical objects and things.

Fast forward a little. At the same time as I was writing up my Masters thesis, I was applying for funding to do a PhD. I wanted to look more deeply at how objects worked in rituals, not just how they became magical, but how they stayed magical, and what they did for people using them.

At the end of April, I got two offers of funding. I was actually going to be doing a PhD in ancient magic.

Fast forward to now. I work with a whole host of objects from curse tablets to gems set into rings or worn as amulets, to statues of gods and figurines of humans. I’m fascinated by how we think about things, how we use them, how we relate to them, and what they mean to us.

There’s nothing more thrilling than stepping into a museum study room and spending time working with things that were first made and used 2000 years ago. Taken out from behind glass, held in our hands, the scrape of terracotta, tiny particles of dust on white latex gloves. This is how we reconnect with our past, in a moment when you hold something that was held, used, looked at in some significant way once. We can’t talk to the people who made and used these things, but there is something deeply magical about that tiny thread of communication.

So that is how I came to do what I do now. It is a strange world, constantly opening up new frontiers and ideas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share some more of them soon.