Apollonius of Tyana’s Great Book of Talismans

Abstract

The Great Book of Talismans (MS Paris BnF Ar. 2250) composed by Apollonius of Tyana is one of the Greek texts that have reached us in its Arabic recension. The Arabic not only preserves a part of the text lost in Greek, but it may bear witness to a more ancient layer of the textual tradition than the Byzantine one, along with the clues to a refined intellectual operation to recontextualize the whole work in the cultural milieu of reception. The kind of public talisman prepared by Apollonius – a metallic plaque or statue inscribed with magical names, either buried or placed on an elevated spot, sometimes protected by a shrine – became a model for talisman making. Some of Apollonius’ talismans, moreover, circulated as erratic textual blocks, entering the Arabic Hermetic literature and, more generally, texts on natural sciences and the technical literature. This paper reconstructs the transmission of the Great Book of Talismans, and offers an anthology of the talismans that Apollonius realized for a number of Near Eastern cities (Alexandria, Antioch, Emesa, Ephesus, Edessa), along with three comparanda that concretely exemplify the fluidity in the transmission of these materials.