Author: Daniel Ogden
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009
Price: £17.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780195385205

“Everything is, natur­ally, the supernatural” – Fort

Daniel Ogden may aim to usurp Georg Luck’s Arcana Mundi (1985, rev. 2006 – FT215:62), but he won’t. While sharing virtues and vices, they travel somewhat different routes to the same end, and are complementary if not always complimentary.

Ogden’s 340 annotated translat­ions run the ancient supernatural gamut, with alchemy and divination perhaps short-changed. Exotica include ‘arm-pitting’ (maschalismos – add Sophocles, fr623). Epigraphic and legal texts are a plus; however, stopping at AD 476 is an equal minus.

In this crowded field, Byzant­ine magic is usually omitted, and Ogden also omits a demonstration of how pagan practices did and did not influence the new Christian world. Do they fear to spoil a valuable gap by covering it?

After explicitly denying any overriding dogma, Ogden immed­iately contradicts himself by proclaiming (p5) “the centrality of ghosts to ancient magic”, part of his anti-Luck campaign and a gross exaggeration, belied by the proportions of his own compilation.

This inventory of classical texts contains some surprisingly outdated editions, often fails to indicate English translations, and comports some inaccuracy of detail. The fact that a 40-page bibliography is still vulnerable to charges of omission (eg David Katz’s The Occult Tradition, 2006) emits an odour of Yogi Berra’s déjà lu all over again.