Conclusions – Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods by Jason Mankey and Astrea Taylor
Where are the Byzantines? Llewellyn fails to apologize for historical misinformation and offending the Greek community.
At the onset of my review, I established the reason and objective for the review, which was to contribute towards understanding how Pagans and Witches use and misuse scholarship to create their religions and how Pagan/Witch authors present history in their work.
By the end of part 5 of my review of Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods, I thought I had said all I needed to say, but I was wrong. There is more to be said, namely, the kind of history the authors are building and the narrative they have constructed for their readers.
When I reviewed the “Timeline of the Greek Gods” in chapter two, the inaccuracies stood out to me. Upon a second review of the timeline, I noticed what was excluded. What was excluded from the timeline were important events in Late Antiquity, for example, Emperor Julian’s attempt to revive the traditional worship of the Gods, and second, and most important of all, was the exclusion of Medieval Roman (Byzantine) history, and in doing so, erasing one of the two pillars of modern Greek heritage/identity (classical being the other).
Why would Jason Mankey’s “Timeline of the Greek Gods” overlook and ignore centuries of history, crucial history that is relevant to the topic of the Greek Gods? Is the author simply uneducated in history, or did he know things about this history and decide to ignore it on purpose? I would love to know why a crucial part of modern Greek heritage is missing while the heritage of western Europeans is privileged.
I believe Medieval Roman (Byzantine) history is being ignored because it does not align with the narrative constructed in this book, a narrative designed for American Pagans/Witches of western European descent. I will explain this more toward the end of the review.
For now, I want to bring your attention to the evidence that Medieval Roman (Byzantine) history is missing. I reproduced one page of the timeline from the book; it can be found on page 23. The full timeline is from 21-23. This one page is of importance to my review.
· 380 CE: Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius I proclaims Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
· 390 CE: Christian zealots destroy the Library of Alexandria.
· 392 CE: Theodosius outlaws paganism and pagan rituals.
· 415 CE: The death of Hypatia. Hypatia, a pagan teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, is tortured and murdered by a mob of Christians. Her death is often seen as the end of the Classical period.
· 476 CE: The Eastern Roman Empire is conquered by the Germans.
· 608 CE: The Roman Pantheon is converted into a Christian church.
· 901-1000 CE: The Picatrix is written. The Middle East, and not Europe, ultimately preserved the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans.
· 1256 CE: The Picatrix is translated into Spanish.
· 1300-1600 CE: The Italian Renaissance. The gods of antiquity would feature prominently in art and literature during this period.
· 1374 CE: Petrarch's epic poem Africa sparks renewed interest in the Olympians.
· 1486-1750 CE: European Witch Trials. Magick was still popular during this period of time, but ignorance even more so.
· 1792 CE: Thomas Taylor's translation of the Orphic hymns is published.
· 1806 CE: William Wordsworth's poem "Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake" is published, starting over a century of Pan being England's most popular literary topic.
· 1867 CE: Bulfinch's Mythology is published.
· 1942 CE: Edith Hamilton introduces the Greek gods to a new generation in Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes.
· 1955 CE: Poet Robert Graves's The Greek Myths suggests that Demeter Persephone, and Hekate personify the maiden-mother-crone archetypes
· 2005 CE: Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, makes his debut in Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief.
Two particular items are completely historically incorrect in this timeline:
1. 476 CE: The Eastern Roman Empire is conquered by the Germans.
2. 901-1000 CE: The Picatrix is written. The Middle East, and not Europe, ultimately preserved the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans.
First, the western half of the Roman Empire was conquered in 476 by Odoacer, not the eastern part of the empire. However, that is not my main concern. My main concern is with the second, “[t]he Middle East, and not Europe, ultimately preserved the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans.” It is a common misnomer in the west that the classical texts of antiquity were lost and were only reintroduced to western Europe via the Arabic translations of the Greek and Latin originals.
Yes, Muslim scholars played an important role in the survival of ancient texts, but they had them, to begin with, because of trade with the ‘Byzantines.’ It is false, however, to say the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans were “ultimately preserved” outside of Europe. To quote Peter Adamson, “[w]ithout the efforts of Byzantine scholars and scribes we would not be able to read Plato today; ancient philosophy, indeed ancient literature as a whole, would barely exist anymore.” (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy, 93.)
While the western half of the Roman Empire broke into separate kingdoms and Latin slowly died as a living language, the eastern half thrived for several centuries until the 15th century and continued to speak Greek and transmit ancient texts down the generations.
The eastern half of the Roman Empire, while many call it Byzantium or Byzantine Empire, was, in fact, the continuation of the Roman state, res publica Romana in Latin. For academics, though, periodization helps with studying and giving boundaries for research. Depending on their reasoning, some scholars might start ‘Byzantine History’ in the late 200s, 300s, or 500s CE. The end is less controversial; the end of the Medieval Roman (Byzantine) Empire was largely agreed upon in 1453 when the capital, Constantinople, fell to the invading Ottomans. Sticking with the Romans’ timeline of history, the roman state was founded in 753 BCE. Thus, when Constantinople fell in 1453, a political institution over 2,200 years old ended, its last emperor being Constantine XI Palaiologo.
For the sake of this review, I will define Medieval Roman (Byzantine) history as beginning in 400 CE and ending in 1453. A little over 1,000 years of Medieval Roman history has been excluded by Jason in his “Timeline of the Greek Gods.” The only entries in Jason’s timeline from page 23 that fit my parameters of Medieval Roman history are the following:
· 415 CE: The death of Hypatia. Hypatia, a pagan teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, is tortured and murdered by a mob of Christians. Her death is often seen as the end of the Classical period.
· 476 CE: The Eastern Roman Empire is conquered by the Germans.
· 608 CE: The Roman Pantheon is converted into a Christian church.
· 901-1000 CE: The Picatrix is written. The Middle East, and not Europe, ultimately preserved the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans.
· 1300-1600 CE: The Italian Renaissance. The gods of antiquity would feature prominently in art and literature during this period.
· 1374 CE: Petrarch's epic poem Africa sparks renewed interest in the Olympians.
Is it not odd that the author takes the time to recount the destructive events occurring in the east and then jumps west to begin talking about revival? Why is Jason not exploring Medieval Roman history for evidence of where the Gods and classical culture persist? For him to write “[t]he Middle East, and not Europe, ultimately preserved the works and mythology of the Greeks and Romans,” demonstrates he likely didn’t do any research into the Medieval Roman history in search of what we call in academia classical reception. However, he does present examples of western European and American reception from the Renaissance onwards, including Percy Jackson.
Had Jason explored the Greek-speaking east, he would find evidence that expanded on and defeated his western-centric narrative that people in Middle Ages forgot what the Gods looked like. On page 32, Jason writes:
These clear descriptions of the gods of Olympus are in sharp contrast to how many of the gods were depicted in Europe during the Middle Ages. The names of the gods might have still been on everyone's lips, but not everyone remembered what they looked like Mars might be depicted as a knight fighting in the Crusades, and one of the oddest images of all shows Jupiter as a pleasantly plump Christian monk, complete with a goblet and a crucifix.
Due to the destruction and desecration of pagan statues, art, and worship spaces, there were few places to view the gods of Olympus as they had appeared in antiquity, so people depicted them in contemporary ways. If Jupiter is the king of the gods, why not depict him as a traditional European king?
While this may be the case for the west, we should expand our scope to be inclusive. When you include the Medieval Romans, you get a different picture. Below is a manuscript depicting the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. From the Monastery of Saint Panteleion on Mount Athos, 12th century C.E. Zeus is dressed as an Eastern Roman Emperor. Image: Credit: Antonio Guiomar.
Beyond this one manuscript image, looking into the east, in Constantinople in particular, the author would have learned that the city was filled with ancient statues that were displayed in public.
In Between The Pagan Past and Christian Present in Byzantine Visual Culture, Paroma Chatterjee opens with two eyewitness accounts of the fourth crusade (1202-1204) in which the western crusaders sacked Constantinople.
Because they were in want of money ... they covetously eyed the bronze statues and consigned these to the flames.... Thus great things were exchanged for small ones, those works fashioned at huge expense were converted into worthless copper coins.
- Nicetas Choniates, Annals
[There] were figures of men and of women, of horses and oxen, and camels, and bears, and lions, and many other kinds of animals, all made of copper, and all so well made and formed so naturally that there is no master workman in Heathendom or in Christendom so skillful as to be able to make figures as good as these. And formerly they used to play by enchantment, but they do not play any longer.
- Robert De Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople.
Here is a bit of what Paroma Chatterjee writes:
The first was scripted by a prominent Greek intellectual and native of the Byzantine capital; the second by a poor Latin knight from Picardy, France. Both individuals were supposedly eyewitnesses to the shocking events that unfolded during the city’s capture. Despite their obvious differences in style, language, and point of view, both accounts evince a common feature: a predilection for the statues that were so prominent a part of the capital and which were brutally destroyed during the sack.” (Page 1)
While it is common for people to strictly think of holy icons as the dominant art of Byzantium, classical statues out numbers icons in the city and were more visible as they were in public view, while icons were kept in churches or at home. “Even under as unbendingly Orthodox an emperor as Theodosius I, for instance, the Golden Gate of Constantinople is reported to have had crosses and the chrismon on it along with elephants, a statue of Theodosius, the Nike, the Tyche of Constantinople, and flying eagles, but no icons of Christ and others of the Christian pantheon.” (Page 3)
In the center of the Forum of Constantine, there was erected a massive porphyry column with a statue of Constantine himself in the form of the Greek God Apollo on top. In the forum, scholars have reason to believe the chryselephantine statue of Athena from the Parthenon in Athens was also in the forum on account of Byzantine theologian Arethas of Kaisareia (c. 860 – c. 939 CE). Paroma writes that there was either a “monumental statue of Amphitrite/Thetis (depending on the commentator) and seven “sirens” at the eastern end, each set upon its own porphyry column.” (Page 18).
Much more can be said. For your continued education, you can listen to her interview on this topic on Byzantium & Friends episode 79. The enduring power of ancient statues in Constantinople, with Paroma Chatterjee.
Jason’s statement about people in the Middle Ages not remembering what the Gods looked like is a western-centric perceptive. It does not consider Romans living during the same period in the east. Aside from visual art and returning to the main claim Jason makes in his timeline, Greek and Roman works and mythology was “ultimately preserved” outside of Europe. It should be enough to point to the Roman Empire's existence up until 1453, but for those who want to know more about the transmission of ancient texts, I will do my best to provide information.
In the Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, chapter 7, “The Reception of Classical Literature and Ancient Myth,” Anthony Kaldellis writes on pages 164-65
Our classical corpus comprises the texts that survive in the largest number of Byzantine manuscripts, have the most scholia, and are mentioned and alluded to most often by Byzantine authors. Among the poets were Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, and Aristophanes, along with Hellenistic poets whom we no longer have but who were read in Byzantium—especially in the early period (e.g., Kallimachos). Curiously, Sappho was treated as if her poems survived, when in fact they probably did not: her reputation persisted, but not her works. Likewise among the prose writers, the Byzantine list of ancient classics corresponds to our own. One index of this are the prose authors with whom Metochites engages in his 120 Sententious Remarks, an extensive attempt to come to grips with the ancient tradition and its implications. This overlap between Byzantine and modern preferences is not a coincidence, as the next section will argue. Yet classical authors— praised for their quality and the kind of attention they received—were a minority among the totality of the ancient texts preserved in Byzantium. In terms of volume, that totality tended to favor literature of the Roman imperial period. In other words, a few classical authors received the bulk of learned attention and were preserved in many manuscripts, but the majority of preserved ancient literature (in terms of word count) consisted of authors such as Ailios Aristeides, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, and Galen.
Jason’s timeline is full of destructive events and leaves little room for the reader to imagine a Christian society that ever made some level of peace with the classical past. So far, I have demonstrated the opposite by pointing to the statues in Constantinople and copying and studying of ancient texts, both Roman and Greek.
While the Gods were problematic for the Christians, they didn’t erase them out of their consciousness; though they were not being worshipped, the Greek-speaking Christian Romans found ways to fit the old into their world. Kaldellis writes:
…late Roman elites were not about to give up classical literature just because they were now Christian. Among other functions, classical literature reinforced exclusive class identities, and the gods could be seen as harmless fictions and delusions rather than as Satanic demons. What certain Christian readers effected in Late Antiquity was a paradigm shift in the reading of ancient texts as literature and the viewing of religious artifacts as art. This created a new context for its continuing preservation. Rather than being destroyed as the abode of demons, religious statuary could now be displayed in the streets and galleries of Constantinople. (166)
The Greek Gods were not just on people's lips; they were in the classrooms. Kaldellis writes:
Canonical texts continued to be studied in the classroom as rhetorical exemplars. They could even be invoked for the moral lessons that they imparted, though this worked better for the heroes than the gods, whose immorality was always condemned in Byzantium and remained the target of scorn. We might, then, say that this was when classical texts first emerged as “literature” to begin with. (166)
Byzantine intellectuals wrestled with the Gods, developing creative hermeneutical tools. Kaldellis writes:
In the eleventh century, more sophisticated hermeneutical tools were developed for coping with the gods in literature, precisely when interest in ancient texts was growing, along with a desire to recover and replicate its modes, tropes, and genres. Allegory was one option broached by Psellos (among others), typically through Neoplatonic sources. Psellos tried, where possible, to postulate equivalences between mythical entities and Platonic and Christian metaphysical concepts. This approach yielded strikingly different results from the polemical juxtapositions in homilies. (170)
In the twelfth century, Homer is still going strong. Greek speakers have been reading Homer and the Gods from ancient times up to Medieval Roman times. Kaldellis writes:
Tzetzes, a teacher of the classics who idolized Homer, deployed the full range of ancient allegoresis to extricate the poems from their (surface) pagan entanglements. He was asked to produce a summary of the Iliad for the benefit of the German wife of Manuel I (1143–1180) who needed to understand the literary traditions of her new home, and possibly to grasp the mythological allusions that were being directed at her at the court, as the culture of the time turned increasingly to mythological modes of expression. Tzetzes wrote an extensive, book-by-book verse summary of the plot of the Iliad (and subsequently of the Odyssey), which allegorizes he gods as natural or psychological forces, as rhetorical ways of expressing natural or human phenomena, or euhemeristically.
Eustathios, a teacher of rhetoric who became bishop of Thessalonike and the greatest Homeric scholar before the eighteenth century. He wrote two large line-by-line commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey which draw on the commentary tradition since antiquity, focusing on grammatical and rhetorical topics, narrative interpretation, and the allegorization of the gods. (171)
If you are a Pagan reading this and want to dismiss the Byzantines for engaging with the classical texts as literature and applying allegorization, but you are ok with Percy Jackson and other modern fictions, you may have a prejudice you need to explore. If modern fiction like Percy Jackson can make it on the “timeline of Greek Gods” but not Byzantine works like the allegories of the Iliad and Odyssey by John Tzetzes, that’s problematic.
Jason mentions the Italian Renaissance in his timeline.
· 1300-1600 CE: The Italian Renaissance. The gods of antiquity would feature prominently in art and literature during this period.
However, Jason excludes the ‘Byzantine’ contribution to the Italian Renaissance. As the Medieval Roman Empire slowly died, many intellectuals saw the writing on the wall, as it were, and many started moving westwards – towards Italy. Jonathan Harris writes:
By 1400 it must have been clear to most Byzantines that what was left of their empire was doomed. The advance of the Ottoman Turks had left the capital, Constantinople, an island under siege, with only the Peloponnese and a few other isolated areas still under Byzantine rule. Constantinople itself had fallen into a state of ruinous decay far removed from its former glory. Hardly surprisingly, many Byzantines began to look towards the Christian West as a possible escape route from the inevitable. Italy was not only the closest, but it also offered a vibrant and progressive atmosphere which many Byzantine intellectuals contrasted favourably with their own ancient traditions and civilization.
https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/late/laterbyz/harris-ren.html
At this point, I think I have made my point pretty clear and provided enough sources to back myself up. For those who want to research more on this topic, here are some resources.
Who preserved Greek literature? (Part 1)
https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2019/12/who-preserved-greek-literature.html?m=1
Who preserved Greek literature? (Part 2)
https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/06/who-preserved-greek-literature-2.html?m=1
Oliver Primavesi on Greek Manuscripts
https://historyofphilosophy.net/manuscripts-primavesi
Greeks Bearing Gifts: Byzantine Scholars in Italy.
https://historyofphilosophy.net/bessarion-trebizond
The Grand Narrative
The following are my final thoughts on what I think is the authors’ grand narrative and the purpose of this narrative. I believe the narrative that has been built within this book is a narrative that attempts to create a “historical” lineage of some sort and that bridges the present to the past. The modern Witch/Pagan that reads this book is meant to feel connected with the past; the timeline in the book and the narrative of Indo-Europeans I discuss in part 5 serve as a justification for why they should ‘work’ with the Greek Gods.
Yes, anyone can worship the Greek Gods; there are, however, wrong ways to approach this topic, namely the erasure of Medieval Roman (Byzantine) history, a pillar of modern Greek identity, to avoid the Greeks alive today who have grievances with the way the Pagan/Witch communities appropriate our identity. For this reason, I see the historical ‘bridge’ that has been built serves to (1) provide the reader a direct path to the ancient world, bypassing Greeks as irrelevant and disconnected from our past (as if we don’t have a direct path ourselves), and (2) to legitimatize their magick as connected to the past via the Picatrix and Greek Magical Papyri.
The absence of the Medieval Roman (Byzantine) Empire and anything relating to the Greeks after the classical period is telling, when combined with the Indo-European focus and western-centric timeline, creates a story in which the Greek Gods, through their agency, moved down from Eurasia, spent some time in Greece with the Greeks, had relationships with Greeks and disappeared in the east after Christianization, moved west and where the Gods remerge to have relationships once more but now with western Witches and Pagans in America.
The Greek Gods are for everyone to worship, but the exclusion of centuries of history and the removal of millions of Greeks from the narrative in this book is hurtful. The privileging of western European history also promotes white supremacy. All these issues need to be addressed in future publications if Llewelyn considers publishing books concerning Greek Gods, religion, and history.
Communication with the publisher
I emailed Llewelyn today, Friday the 20th, via email, asking for a comment concerning the misinformation printed in the timeline, specifically, the erasure of medieval Roman history and how this is insulting to the Greek community.
An apology has not been issued. The response to me from Marketing and Communications Manager was:
“ As you note, Llewellyn is not an academic publisher. Many of our titles are intended to appeal to readers interested in exploring modern Paganism and Witchcraft and our hope is that they inspire people to continue researching and exploring their spiritual path. I appreciate the attentive thoroughness of your review, and that you share related scholarship and different resources with readers. Please be assured that our editors and authors are aware of your comments and suggestions”
This is unacceptable.