ABSTRACT
Late antique and medieval images of magic and witchcraft are influenced more by Greek and even more by Latin pagan literature than by any Biblical examples and texts. Female witchcraft, for instance, surprisingly is mentioned only rarely in early Christian narrative texts, though male sorcerers are quite common. Fear of witchcraft in a more general sense is well documented for Roman imperial society, however. Ideas about magic have changed to a large degree, and recent definitions of magic also differ widely and yield quite different histories of discourses on magic when applied to sources from antiquity. Ideas like a formal contract or pact with demons or the devil only much later become part of imaginations on magic. The gender constellation of male charismatic prophet vs. female diviner able to manipulate lives is of vital interest for discourses on “magic”.
