The creativity of the ritual practices found in the Graeco-Egyptian magical tradition, and its Christian successor, consistently and paradoxically represents itself as being based in an ancient and eternal knowledge, transmitted from the divine sphere to the human realm either temporally – through a series of “figures of memory” or across an ontological distance – by direct divine revelation. This study explores the tensions and contradictions in these two sources of “tradition” through two case studies, the so-called ‘Mithras Liturgy’ and the ‘Prayer of Mary in Bartos’, two ritual texts which at once represent themselves as the heritage of an ancient, and implicitly more divine, past, and promise direct access to the divine in the present.