The Greek Magical Papyri

The Greek Magical Papyri are ritual handbooks from Roman Egypt. One praxis for a paredros daemon tells you to take two of your own nails and all the hair from your head, deify a hawk in the milk of a black cow mixed with Attic honey, bind it in an undyed rag, write the vowel-pyramid on a slip with myrrh, and drink the milk before sunrise. Call Agathos Daimon as Harponknouphi, holy Orion who rolls the Nile into the sea. The daemon will dine with you, sleep with you, fetch gold and silver, open doors, quench light, transform you into bird or snake, and after death carry your ψυχή into the air so it does not go to Hades. Hide the praxis; keep from a woman seven days.

Other recipes in the same corpus: invisibility with a night-raven's eye; a memory drink from seven springs; an Apollonian invocation with a seven-leaved laurel, a wolf's head lamp-stand, and a hymn that names Iao, Michael, Gabriel, Abrasax, and Adonai.

Preisendanz and Henrichs printed the corpus in the second edition of the PGM (Stuttgart, 1973–1974). The texts are ritual handbooks; no magician's biography stands behind them.