Wednesday, September 07, 2016
Botokudenphilologie
William M. Brashear (1946-2000), "Out of the Closet: Recent Corpora of Magical Texts,"
Classical Philology 91.4 (October, 1996) 372-383 (at 372):
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The final decades of the nineteenth century saw the publication of most of the ancient magical handbooks preserved on papyrus, and the turn of the century witnessed a flurry of activity in the field of ancient magic. Wilamowitz, however, scornfully repudiated Hermann Usener and his student, Albrecht Dieterich, as "Verehrer des Aberglaubens," and archly dismissed their research as "Botokudenphilologie,"2 thus setting the tone for the vast majority of classical scholars to follow for years to come.
2. Quoted by F. Pfister, ARW 35 (1938): 183. The Botocudes are a now extinct tribe of eastern Brazil. Their name obviously represented for the scion of a turn-of-the-century German Junker family all that was foreign, barbaric, and abhorrent.
