ABSTRACT
In this introductory poem, the order is slightly di erent, and the ‘ re-dwellers’ have an odd position in the list, replacing the last ‘Markan’ category, the ‘lighthating’, which is presumably even deeper in the earth than the ‘sub-earthly’. e striking term misophaes had long been known to philologists, but only from the phrase ‘light-hating world’, quoted by the neo-Platonist Proklos ( h century), in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (III 325.32), as being from the Chaldaean Oracles ( rst or second century). en came the publication, in 1927, of a manuscript of exor cisms in Greek, copied in May 1710 and now preserved in the National Library at Athens (MS. 825).5 One of the exorcisms is labelled ‘Prayer of our holy father Ephrem of Syria’. is is the fourth-century saint whose feast the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates on 28 January. It is di cult to know how much, if any, of the exorcism is his own work, for he wrote only in Syriac, and also there is a reference to the seven ecumenical synods (fo. 31b), the last of which did not take place until 787. If the reference is a later addition and the language of the exorcism not Ephrem’s own, we may wonder whether much else is original. On fo. 29a, in any case, there is the phrase: ‘Drive from him every evil and unclean demon, be it airy or land-born (chersaion) or watery or ery or earthly or light-hating, and send it to places dry and trackless.’ e ‘places dry and trackless’ evidently belong to the same tradition as the ‘Headache Prayer’ discussed in Chapter 2, but the categories seem basically to match those of ‘Markos’. e correspondence is not exact, however: like the Orphic ‘ re-dwellers’, the ‘ ery’, here between the ‘land-born or watery’ and ‘earthly’, seems to be in the wrong place relative to ‘Markos’, and I assume that the ‘land-born or watery’ somehow corresponds to the ‘fresh-or salt-water’ of ‘Markos’. What shows that his and ‘Ephrem’s’ lists are no doubt from a single tradition is their use of the rare word ‘light-hating’. at tradition, whatever it was, poses an interesting enigma.
