How It Became the Bornless Ritual

Charles Wycliffe Goodwin published the British Museum papyrus in 1852, three quarters of a century before Karl Preisendanz assembled the corpus, and his edition is how the passage entered English. In it the Greek akephalos was rendered in a way that produced the English word bornless rather than headless, and that word stuck. It is generally regarded now as a misreading. It is also the form under which the text became one of the best known items in modern Western magic.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took the passage up in the late nineteenth century and rebuilt it as a working invocation. Aleister Crowley carried the Golden Dawn version forward and placed it at the front of his edition of the Goetia as a preliminary invocation, which is where most later practitioners met it. The received English text is not a translation of the papyrus. It is a nineteenth century ritual composition with a fourth century ancestor.

That distinction is the reason this atlas holds the two separately. The papyrus is an attested text with a witness and a findspot. The Bornless Ritual is a modern practice with a documented history of its own, and the atlas records it as such. Treating the modern rite as the ancient text, which a good deal of popular writing does, hides the most interesting thing about either: that a short exorcism copied in Roman Egypt was still being performed a hundred and fifty years ago because a Victorian classicist made an error in a word.