From The Times Literary Supplement
A Sorceress at Pompeii?
Mary BeardAugust 19, 2019
The recent discovery at Pompeii – of what was once a boxful of beads and amulets – is of course a great find. And it is starting to be written up as a “sorceress’s toolkit”. And so indeed it might be.
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| By courtesy of Cesare Abate from ANSA agency |
But my heart sinks a little as I foresee that all doubt will soon be left aside, and it will become simply “the sorceress’s kit from Pompeii” (in the usual way that archaeological hypotheses get more confident the further along the food chain they go).
Let me confess that I have had no more contact with this find than most of the rest of us, and am relying on the photos that have been released (one is at the top of this post). What we seem to have is a motley collection of beads, scarabs, skulls, a few willies and more. The wooden box they were kept in has “deconstructed” but the metal hinges attest that it was once there.
My problem is that what you call it makes a huge difference to how you think about it. I would be quite happy calling it someone’s precious box of charms – but there is, in our imaginations, a million miles between that and the “sorceress’s kit”. If you really want it to be the latter, you have to overlook the fact that a lot of the objects are plain ordinary beads AND you have to put a lot of weight on the “magical” properties of willies and scarabs and skulls. They may indeed have been “magical” (whatever exactly “magical” means) but they may also have been cheap exotic jewellery. (As for the scarabs, you only have to look at the Egyptian material from Pompeii more widely to see that some of it was heavily and “religiously” Egyptian and some wasn’t.) At first look, the jury’s out for me: somewhere between street magic and a slightly gothic jewellery box.
But sorceress? Now part of my heart leaps up to find a newly found object attributed to the ownership of a woman. But part of my heart leaps down at the sense that once again the only places we think of women are absolutely stereotypical “female” areas. (I get so fed up going into museums which genuflect to women in the ancient world with a case on cosmetics … apparently entirely forgetting that most women in the ancient world, like the modern, spent a lot more time working than primping. And some ancient men were well known to use “products” too.)
Now, one of the puzzles of such archaeological finds is that you almost never know who owned them, whether man or woman. (Even when you find material with identified skeletons in graves, you are not entirely certain that the dead person had been buried with their own possessions.) The bottom line is that we don’t know whose box of tricks this was. But the female “sorceress” line is not as certain as it is being made to seem. Part of it rests, I suspect, on the old stereotype of the witch (when we know that magic/fortune telling/sorcery was practised by men and women in antiquity). But part of it rests on trying to press the significance of the presence of amber in the collection, which it is said was connected with good luck in fertility and childbirth (hence a woman’s kit).
True, there is some evidence of that kind of connection, even if weaker than it is presented. (Much depends on such things as discoveries in Etruria where “fertility-like things” – a difficult category to define – have been found made in amber; one is a little figurine of a woman giving birth to a baby … or possibly to a monkey; people disagree!) But if you turn to what the elder Pliny has to say about the uses of amber in his ancient encyclopedia, you will find that he documents its use in treating problems with the throat, mouth and bladder; in his view, at least, it’s not just a women’s product. Some of the widespread evidence about amber is collected here. And it’s not all “medical” anyway.
So, “sorceress’s kit” this new find may be. But can we agree to keep the question mark in? It’s a “possible sorceress’s kit".
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