A Magic Sphere and the Disappointment of Roman Magic

A new publication about this object has it back in the news, but it itself has been known for a long time. This sphere, 30 cm (one foot) in diameter, was found in 1866 during excavations at the Temple of Dionysus in Athens; it now resides in the Acropolis Museum. The sphere dates to the 2nd or 3rd century AD, when this area was used for games and competitions of various kinds, including singing, drama, and possibly gladiatorial battles.

The leader of that excavation was a notorious character who called himself Professor Athanasios Rhousopoulos, who seems to have done acceptable archaeology for the time but was not above dispersing his discoveries into the antiquities market. The stone was first carefully studied in 1913 by a Belgian named Armand L. Delatte, who concluded that it had been buried as a talisman for luck in the games.

As to what is on it, well, here is a summary of the new publication:

The sphere is dominated by four scenes, in which the first depicts the image of a man with a solar halo. Delatte interpreted the image to be Helios, the god and personification of the sun, often described as the son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, and brother of the goddesses Selene (the Moon) and Eos (the Dawn).

He is shown sitting on a throne beneath an arch, flanked by two dogs that could symbolise the sky’s bright “dog stars”: Sirius and Prokyon.

The second scene shows a circle containing five intersecting circles marked with the words: ΑΙΘΑΕΡ, ΑΝΑΒΠΑ, ΑΝΝΙΑΕΥ, ΕΔΕΒΩΠ̣Ι, and ΑΠΙΟΒΙ, whilst three of the intersecting circles are marked with ΕΥΠΑΡ̣ΕϹ, ΑΧΦΕΙ and ΑΘΕΛΑ. Underneath the circles are collections of letters arranged as ΧΧΧ, ΔΔΔΔ and ΗΗΗΗ.

The third scene shows a circle containing a triangle, in which the left angle has the letters ΑΔΑΞΑΞΒΕΝΒΕΝΒΛΩΘΝΩΜΑΖΟΜΟΗΡ, the second angle ΟΖΩΡΟΥΘΕΝΑΑΕΞΑΒΙΟΥΡΟ̣ΑΙΛΕΜΒΡΑΕΡ, and the base ΧΧΧ ΠΠΠΠ ΦΦΦΦ̣Φ̣ΦΦ̣ ΔΔΔΔ ΛΛΛΛ ΛΛΛΛ.

The last scene shows a large depiction of a lion, with ΘΑ̣Δ̣ΕΙΗΤ and ΠΔΔΔΔΔΗ inscribed on each foot.

The remainder of the sphere is filled with astral and geometrical symbols, a snake, numbers and incomprehensible inscriptions, with the only identifiable word being ΑΙΘΑΕΡ, the first of nature’s five elements (ether, earth, water, fire and air).

What does any of that mean?

Um. . . .

See, that's the problem with magic in the classical world. So far as I can tell, it means nothing at all. Long ago a naive youth who shares my name delved as deeply as he could into these mysteries in English and German, in search of the theory or at least mindset that lies behind this gobbledy-gook. What he found instead was a fascination with certain combinations of letters, which seem to have been chosen more for how they looked than what they referenced; a wish that certain coincidences be in some way profound; an empty-headed reverence for things that were very old, or believed to be very old, like stray bits of Egyptian or Babylonian imagery and nomenclature; a delight in things that were expensive and pretty, like carved gem stones; and a desperate thirst for the power to impose one's will on the world. 

Consider magic number squares, arrays of numbers that sum to the same number in every direction. This peculiar property of numerals has been doted on for at least 3,000 years, and you find them in all sorts of magical and alchemical manuscripts. They were believed to somehow represent the hidden order that underlies the visible chaos of the universe. Which, ok, there's a hint at some kind of philosophy, but so far as I can tell it never amounted to more than a hint.

People felt – a better word here than "believed", I think – that there were secret streams of power flowing through the universe, secret connections between disparate things, hidden forces at work, spiritual beings of numerous sorts, and maybe some sort of vast machinery of fate that was working its way toward a dark culmination. They thought the dead might not really be gone, but might at times walk among us. The main way people tried to access or know these secrets was through religion as it was practiced in temples, cults, and shrines. Philosophers – the only ones whose ideas we can see fully laid out – suspected that their religion was somehow debased or corrupted, but many of them did think that it provided glimpses into those hidden powers, and a way that we could show reverence to them.

Magic, as I would define it, was an attempt to find some kind of shortcut or back channel to arcane power. The magician had no time for the ordinary processes of prayer and sacrifice, which everybody knew did not always yield the desired result. He or she wanted some trick that would yield a definitive result, some lever that could be used to manipulate those fickle powers.

There were, so far as I can tell, no rules as to how this might work, no real theory behind the search for those levers. The really profound people knew it was all nonsense, knew that the universe has its own agenda and would only laugh at our feeble attempts to befuddle and divert it. So magic was left to ambitious fools. Those fools built us a vast cloud castle from their foolery, constructed of things that struck their fancy: pretty arrangements of letters, pretty stones, bizarre diagrams, pornographic icons, numerical patterns, things they saw in the temples of strange eastern deities. If you want a parallel in the modern world, the best one I know is art by mental patients.

At the end of all my prying into ancient magic I decided that the only reality is the wishes behind it. Ancient magic is human desire for wealth and power and revenge rendered in letters, numbers, and images. It is lust in metal and stone. If you study it, study it as a way to understand what people wanted, because the magical ways they went about trying to get it were just stray symbols floating in the culture that had long ago been stripped of any meaning they might have had.