Venenum, nebo venenum? Tacitus, magie a větrné mlýny Dona Quijota. Několik poznámek k metodologii studia antické magie
| Title in English | Venenum or venenum? Tacitus, Magic, and Don Quijote´s Windmills |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2006 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Religio. Revue pro religionistiku |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Philosophy and religion |
| Keywords | Graeco-Roman Magic - Methodology |
| Description | The main objective of this study is to test the practical applicability of this set of data in the process of further defining of magic. The chosen test case, a passage of Tacitus (Annales 2.69) describing the circumstances of the death of Germanicus, adoptive son of the emperor Tiberius and the heir apparent, during his visit of Antioch, is considered to be a serious obsta-cle to these attempts. The emic approach aspiring to conceive magic in terms of the studied culture is for the interpretation of this incident utterly unpractical, since Tacitus uses for two different activities (a magical attack and an act of poisoning) only one word: venenum. Author of this study does not deny the usefulness of knowledge, which can be extracted from emic data. Nevertheless, he maintains that this knowledge by itself is completely unsuit-able to produce the solid base for constructing a scientific category of magic, because its exis-tence is a necessary precondition of any extraction of this sort. |