Persuasion and Request
Third MagEIA Symposium | Würzburg 2-4 December 2026
We are pleased to announce the Third International MagEIA Symposium "Persuasion and Request" to be held in Würzburg on 2-4 December 2026.
The DFG Centre for Advanced Studies MagEIA at the University of Würzburg is dedicated to the interdisciplinary and comparative study of magical text traditions of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. It consists of a core team of scholars in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, and Comparative Philology as well as a Fellows Programme with a broader disciplinary scope. Each year of the MagEIA Centre is dedicated to an annual theme, which also informs the thematic focus of the annual symposium. In 2026 we want to focus on the legomena of ritual procedures and the use of language typical for magical texts.
Beside the detailed descriptions of preparatory steps, the material to be used and the procedure itself, in most traditions magical practices are accompanied by prescribed utterances vital for their successful execution, ranging from individual voces magicae and lists e.g. of divine names or body parts to hymns on supernatural beings. Like the preparation and execution of the individual acts, language use was required to be appropriate in order for the ritual to be effective, implying e.g. the knowledge of secret names, their correct pronunciation, the names of powerful beings in other languages, etc. As symbolic acts representing the desired effect itself and often replicating the corresponding ritual act, a part of the legomena of magical acts are often discussed as speech acts in the sense of Austin and Searle, applied for transforming not just social, but more often than not also psychic and physical reality. Other speaker attitudes found in magical texts beside such performative uses are, among others, entreaties and threats to supernatural beings if they fail to comply with the request.
We would like to invite papers from various disciplines addressing questions of language use in magical texts including e.g. the following:
- How does language use in magical texts differ from those of other types of ritual texts? What are specific features or “magical language”?
- What are the connections between the language of magical texts and other genres such as legal texts?
- How did the legomena change over time in different magical traditions?
- How have magical traditions in various languages influenced each other in terms of loanwords, calques or larger building blocks of ritual texts?
- How do the legomena interact with the other elements of magical practices such as the materia magica and the procedures?
The symposium will take place on December 2-4 2026 at the conference centre Burkardushaus in Würzburg. Papers should last no more than 25 minutes, with an additional 15 minutes planned for the discussion of each paper. We kindly invite you to submit abstracts with a maximum of 300 words by 30 April 2026. We will send notifications of acceptance by 31 May 2026.
