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The spectacular discovery of the Derveni papyrus over forty years ago has provided scholars with a number of puzzles, not the least of which is to figure out who or even what kind of a person the author of the papyrus was. While a variety of names have been mooted, based mostly on the similarities of the author’s physical theories to those of other Presocratic thinkers, the recent publication of the first seven columns of the papyrus has focused attention on the Derveni author as a religious figure, a ritual specialist concerned not just with a text of Orpheus but with the performance of sacrifices and the consultation of oracles. How then shall we understand the Derveni author As a selfprofessed expert on the text of Orpheus, the Derveni author has been called an Orphic, but as an expert on rituals performed by the magoi, he might just as well be called a magician. In one of the columns of the fragmentary papyrus preceding his references to Orpheus, the Derveni author compares the ritual acts of the mystai to those of the magoi, “Mystai make the preliminary sacrifices to the Eumenides, in the same way as the magoi.” Scholars have produced widely varying answers, however, on what the Derveni author means here by the terms mystai and magoi, from Eleusinian initiates to Orphic devotees, from Persian priests to itinerant charlatans. Such disagreement stems not merely from the difficulty of the Derveni text, but from problems inherent in the modern scholarly categories of Orphism and magic. The Derveni papyrus thus provides an opportunity for a reexamination of both ancient and modern categories, magic and Orphism as well as mystai and magoi. Through his text, the Derveni author distinguishes himself from the magoi but portrays himself in terms that would make his contemporaries identify him as an Orphic, that is, the kind of person associated with Orpheus and his texts. The Derveni author’s ways of defining himself and his religious authority in contrast to his rivals show how the ancient categories were articulated and point up the flaws in the modern constructions of magic and Orphism, particularly those that take as central particular doctrines about the nature of the soul or of the gods. A better understanding of the nature and interrelation of the ancient and modern categories will help us better to comprehend the evidence, not just from the Derveni papyrus, but from the many sources for ancient Greek religion.