20 XI 2025: Roxanne Bélanger-Sarrazin (Universität Würzburg), Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy: The Multiple identities of Coptic Prayers in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt

“This is the 21st prayer (that) Mary the Virgin spoke the day of her dormition. It restrains all the powers of the Adversary; it cures every disease and every sickness. In peace, amen.”

The prayer introduced by this title, commonly known as the “Prayer of Mary at Bartos”, is but one example of a corpus of Coptic prayers for exorcism, healing, and protection against diseases, demons, and other dangers, preserved in manuscripts from Late Antique and early Islamic Egypt (4th–13th centuries). These texts are structured like liturgical prayers, including core structural elements such as the Pre-Sanctus and Sanctus, but also present elements such as charakteres (“magical” symbols), voces magicae (or nomina barbara), and drawings of the celestial entities invoked. Most prayers also contain elaborate narrative or descriptive sections, incorporating biblical and apocryphal material. Furthermore, several manuscripts bearing these prayers are palimpsests, reusing codices that originally contained biblical, apocryphal, and other literary texts, and likely belonged to monastic or ecclesiastic libraries. Other manuscripts present material and paratextual features likewise pointing to production and use in monastic or ecclesiastic contexts. Drawing on the sociological concept of multiple identities, this paper will explore how these prayers can, from an etic, scholarly perspective, be described as “magical”, “liturgical”, and “apocryphal”. This approach will, in turn, allow us to better understand how these prayers might have been conceptualized and used by people in Late Antique and early Islamic Egypt, and the role they played in the elaboration of Christian identities.

 

Image credits: Angel Drawing, Rossi’s Tractate, p. 22 (tracing from Francesco Rossi, “Di alcuni manoscritti copti che si conservano nella Biblioteca nazionale di Torino,” Memorie della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino 44 [1894] p. 43).