Of Conjurers and Kings

Of conjurers and kings -- Magic in Ancient Egypt by Geraldine Pinch .Brier, Bob

. Natural History 104.4 (Apr 1995): 80

Magic and religion were inseparable in ancient Egypt, as Geraldine Pinch elucidates in her book, Magic in Ancient Egypt. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century scholars and anthropologists made distinctions between magic and religion, one scholar saying, "Magic, after all, is only the disreputable basement in the house of religion." Pinch, an Egyptologist at Cambridge University, is intrigued by the inseparability of the two realms. "The theory," she says, "that magic is always unorthodox and subversive, part of a religious and political counterculture, does not seem to apply in Egypt where ritual magic was practised on behalf of the state for at least three thousand years." Although lay magicians unattached to an institution existed in ancientEgypt, by far the most numerous were the trained priest-magicians from established temples, who were partof the orthodox hierarchy and whose job was primarily to be a stand-in for the pharaoh. Today we expect our clergy to have entered into their profession because of a deep religious commitment. In ancient Egypt, however, being a priest was merely a job, a means of making a good living and having status in the community. The rituals of the priest-magician still persist in Egypt, as I was to discover while doing research in Luxor about a dozen years ago. My stay coincided with the Festival of Abul Haggag, commemorating a nineteenth-century Muslim holy man buried among the 3,000year-old carvings of Egyptian deities inside the temple ofLuxor. On the fourteenth day of the Islamic month of Shaban, a twelve-foot boat is taken from its place in front of the Abul Haggag Mosque and, accompanied by an exuberant crowd, rolled on wheels through the streets of Luxor, northward to the temple of Karnak, two miles away. The assemblage, reminding me ofcollege students following a parade float, makes stops at the burial places of local saints along the route. They recite verses from the Koran before eventually returning to the temple of Luxor. Later I asked a well-known Luxor elder and antiquities dealer about the significance of the boat. He said that the answer was written in the carvings of the temples at Luxor and Karnak. So I took a closer look at the temple walls depicting the Festival of Opet, a yearly celebration when Luxor was the capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.). For the festival, the statues of the god Amon, his consort Mut, and their son, Khons, were taken from their shrines at Karnak, placed in model boats, which were carried onto barges decorated with gold and silver, and towed down the Nile to Luxor.

Statues of the gods had tremendous oracular powers for forecasting the future and dispensing divine guidance. An Egyptian papyrus, now in the British Museum, recounts how the statue of Amon solved a theft during the Festival of Opet. A local citizen named Amunemwia (the name means "Amon in the sacred boat") had five shirts stolen from a storehouse he was guarding. During the festival, as the priests paraded the statues in their boat shrines, the populace was permitted to approach and ask questions or dispensations ofthese oracles. Amunemwia asked, "My good and beloved lord, wilt thou give me back their theft?" According to the papyrus, the god "nodded very greatly." (Possibly the priests dipped the shrine they were holding?) Then Amunemwia began reading a list of suspects. When the name of a farmer was read, the statue nodded again. The culprit confessed and eventually returned the shirts. The statues were then transported back to Karnak in a procession that represented the ceremonial restoration of world order. Thus, in Abul Haggag's festival, I had witnessed the ancient ritual magic associated with the Festival of Opet incorporated into a Muslim religious celebration. In Magic in Ancient Egypt, Pinch wisely avoids overanalyzing and lets the practices speak for themselves. The reader is presented with the vast array of ancient magical procedures for every occasion, employed by ancient Egyptians from the top down. Since the gods dominated all aspects of ancient Egyptian life, the pantheon included the god of magic, Heka. But every deity and lesser supernatural being also had access to magical powers, called heka. A priest performed magical ceremonies as often as religious ones. (Pinch points out that because women were mostly illiterate, very little is known about priestesses' participation in ritual magic.) Perhaps the only real distinction for ancient Egyptians was that magical rituals were usually called upon for individual crises, while religious rituals were intended to benefit the common good. The book is more compilation than analysis, but I was happy to have it all in one place for reference. In her chapter, "Written Magic," Pinch elucidates the power of the written word. In magical texts, hieroglyphic images occasionally depict birds without feet and snakes cut in half because ancient Egyptians were afraid the images might come to life, run away, and spoil the spell. Wealthy people could have a magical spell copied, then dissolve the copy in beer and drink it up, hoping to imbibe the magic. As Pinch points out, "drinking your way through twenty metres of The Book of the Dead would take quite some time and determination." A spell to cure a snake or scorpion bite involved the patient's licking off three magical images drawn on his hand. Physical contact with the words enhanced the magical protection.

The most significant chapter is "Magical Techniques," in which the reader is shown the essentials of rituals. Pinch notes, for example, the use of elaborate purification rites. Officiating priest-magicians were required to rinse out their mouths with a solution of water and natron--the salt compound used in mummification. Areas were fumigated with incense smoke to kill insects, and linen clothes and sandals made from reeds or palm fibers were worn instead of wool and leather, which were considered impure. Head and body hair was shaved to get rid of lice. The list was extensive but usually practical. Using "the principle of similars"--that is, treating like with like--ancient Egyptians made extensive use of blood and excrement as medicines; because many problems were digestive, they reasoned that such potions might enable putrefying food inside the body to come out. Fly and ostrich dung were among the more exotic remedies that Pinch cites, although she suggests that they may be merely descriptive names for herbs or other substances. "Stress on the significance of similarities in name or appearance," says Pinch, "sometimes led to treatments that were actually harmful, but it would not have been easy for the Egyptians to pinpoint the causeof failure " Amulets, small objects the ancient Egyptians wore for protection, still exist by the millions. Often they were small figures of the gods similar to Catholics' Saint Christopher medals, but many had no immediate association with deities: two fingers (used in funerary rites to bring speech and breath to a mummified body), papyrus columns (for stability and strength), and lotus flowers (for rebirth). The color of an amulet was more important than the substance from which it was made. A spell might require that an amulet be made of the red carnelian stone: however, it was the very powerful color red (representing the blood, magic, and power of the goddess Isis) that gave the amulet its value, not the stone. The famous gold mask of Tutankhamen, for example, was inlaid with paste imitating lapis lazuli, again because the power of the mask resided in the color blue-probably associated with the sky and resurrection. One of the most common amulets was the scarab, which remained a powerful image for thousands of years. Unfortunately, Pinch does not include one of my favorite scarab spells (elaborated in the Leiden-London magical papyrus) designed to make a woman fall in love with a man. The instructions are too complex to include in full (which may explain why Pinch leaves it out) but involve reciting incantations over many days; cutting the scarab in half and taking its right half and the nail parings of the practitioner's right hand and foot and cooking them in a new pot with vine wood; then repeating the spell seven times while making the woman drink the wine:

Take away her sleep by night; give her lamentation and anxiety by day; let her not eat, let her not drink, let her not sleep, let her not sit under the shade of her house until she follow [?] him to every place in which he is. In the final act in this drama, the other half of the scarab, with nail parings from the practitioner's left hand and foot, is tied in a strip of linen along with myrrh and saffron around the man's arm while he sleeps with the woman. With such intensive persuasions-not to say brainwashing--what woman could resist the spell? One of Pinch's most interesting chapters is "Medicine and Magic." Most of the medical papyri include magical spells, an exception being the fascinating Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (written circa 1600 B.C., with some parts that probably date back to the third millennium B.C.). The nearly purely clinical text describes a series ofinjuries from the head downward and tells physician how to examine and treat them. Because the injuries involved trauma, and the causes of the problems were known, the treatment was straightforward and governed by systematic scientific principles. In one instance, the physician was even instructed how to probe the brain and remove cranial splinters. But when the cause of an illness was unknown--what we would recognize today as those diseases caused by microorganisms such as bacteria or viruses--ancient Egyptians mobilized magical spells, rituals, and potions to treat the mysterious infections. Often, especially in funerary rites, they assigned a deity to various parts of the body to protect the healthy or to prevent an illness from spreading. One spell in Papyrus Leiden I 348 names the particular gods responsible for the specific parts of the patient's body: The solar eye of Ra-Atum, the creator, protects the patient's right eye; the lunar eye of Horus, representing the force of order, protects the left; the earth god, Geb, oversees the back; the sky goddess, Nut, the belly; their children Isis and Nepththys watch over the thighs; the baboon god, Baba, guards the penis; and Shu, associated with powers of renewal, guards the feet. Magic was widely used during epidemics, which were on the increase by the second millennium B.c. due to greater contacts and trade outside of Egypt. The plague, an evil wind thought to be carried on the breath ofemissaries of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, was treated on a national scale. Some time during his reign, Amenhotep III erected a pair of giant lioness-goddess statues for every day of the year in a temple at Thebes; this was an appeal for Sekhmet's protection in warding off plague and disaster. Pinch suggests that, unfortunately, even royal intervention proved no match for the plague, and it is thought to have terminated this pharaoh's line by the end of the fourteenth century B.C.

The subject of magic is so rich in ancient texts and images that I missed not having more elaboration of someof the marvelous particulars of practices, potions, spells, and incantations. But although Magic in AncientEgypt is not a book that readers will breeze through, it is a thorough and thoughtful treatment of a world in which science, magic, and religion coexisted. Bob Brier is chairman of the philosophy department at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He is the author of Ancient Egyptian Magic and Egyptian Mummies. Word count: 1943 Copyright Natural History Magazine, Inc. Apr 1995