with rose-oil, and he will see clearly, so that you marvel. Greater than this operation I have not found in the world. Ask the god what you wish, and he will give it to you. The encounter with the great god is this: taking the kentritis, the aforesaid

For one line the manual drops its impersonal voice and the practitioner speaks in the first person, amazed at his own craft: toútou meîzon' ouch heûron en tôi kósmōi pragmateían — 'a greater working than this I have not found in the world.' It is the sentence of a man who has actually done the thing and is telling you it works. These books were not theory; they were a working magician's field-notes, and now and then the wonder breaks through the recipe. And the promise is total: aitoû… ha boúlei, 'ask whatever you wish, and he will give it.' The rite that began by begging immortality 'for an only child' has become, in the practitioner's hands, an all-purpose oracle — a god on call. The technical name for what has been built is sýstasis, 'the encounter': the theurgist's word for being brought face to face with a god, stood in his presence. Everything — the elements, the bellowing, the scarab, the herb — has served this one end: not to command a god from afar but to be introduced to him, and then simply to ask.