Notes on Magick in Egypt

Magic in Ancient Egypt
Geraldine Pinch
Papyrus Jumilhac
The Coffin Texts,
Book of Overthrowing Apep.
Book of Breakthing
Book of the Heavenly Cow
Papyrus Jumilhac
Turin Magickal Papyrus
The Book of Two Ways
The Brooklyn Magical Papyrus
The Contending of Horus and Setti
The Books of the End of the Year
The Book of the Last Day of the Year
Papyrus Westcar
Papyrus Lee
Papyrus Rolliri
Papyrus Vandief)
Papyrus Westcar
Bremner-Rhind Papyrus
ChesterBeatty
Papyrus Ebers
The Book of Two Ways







Heka could be identified with the creator himself, particularly when
the latter appeared in child form to symbolize the emergence of new life.
Heka is also described as the ba (the soul or manifestation) of the sun
god. He was the energy which made creation possible and every act of
magic was a continuation of the creative process.


Some Egyptian deities were merely personifications of abstract concepts
or natural phenomena and were never the focus of cult worship or
private devotion. No major temples were built for Heka, but he did have
a priesthood and shrines were dedicated to him in Lower (northern)
Egypt. There was also a goddess called Weret Hekau 'Great of Magic'.
Originally this was just an epithet, applied to a number of goddesses. As
a goddess in her own right, Weret Hekau was usually shown in cobra
form. She was one of the goddesses who acted as a foster-mother to the
divine kings of ancient Egypt and she was the power immanent in the
royal crowns. The snake-shaped wands used by magicians probably
represent her (fig. 3).
All deities and lesser supernatural beings, including the forces of
chaos, had their own heka. It was considered as much a part of them

The evil manifestations of
Seth are shown on a tiny scale compared with the commanding figures
of the god Horus and his mother Isis (fig. 6). From the artistic point of
view, the effect is ridiculous, but good had to be shown as triumphant.
Evil had to be shown as bound to fail. Reducing the power of the enemy
by reducing his scale was a magical technique as well as an artistic
convention.

'One is able to work magic
for a person by means of their name'. Blustering Seth calls himself by
grand names belonging to other deities. He claims to be 'Yesterday and
Tomorrow' and 'Pot of milk that flows from the breast of Bastet'. Horus
dismisses these and other names. Eventually, Seth admits that his name

is 'the evil day on which nothing can be conceived or born'. This name
expresses Seth's true nature, so Horus can then work his magic.
The spell requires the human patient to be identified with Seth, in
spite of this god's bad reputation. Seth was a force of chaos, but it was
not until a late stage in Egyptian culture that he was seen as totally evil. In
the Underworld Books, Seth defends Ra against Apep. One badly
preserved myth tells how the strength and cunning of Seth were needed
to save the goddess Astarte from a sea god who was demanding her as
tribute.

One of the basic principles of Egyptian
magic was that like should be fought with like.

R.o. FAULKNER The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts Oxford, 1969.
R.O. FAULKNER The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts 3 vols. Warminster,
1973 /1977/1978.
R.O. FAULKNER & C.ANDREWS The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead London,
1985.
M. LICHTHEIM Ancient Egyptian Literature Vols. I—II, Berkeley, 1973/1976.
H. TE VELDE Seth, God of Confusion Leiden, 1977

(The Contending! of Horus and Setti), Osiris threatens to send demon messengers from the Duat into the
realm of the gods if his son Horus is not made king of Egypt. This seems
to reflect an ancient view of Osiris as the grim ruler of a demon host
which posed a threat to the living.

The Book of the Heavenly Cow refers to chaos snakes living in the earth as
a danger to gods and humanity.

In magical papyri dating to Roman times, Anubis acts as the main enforcer of curses

These wands
are flat, curved objects usually made of hippopotamus ivory. They are
decorated with some of the earliest representations of a whole range of
supernatural beings and divine manifestations (figs 19, 20, 38, 70).
These objects are sometimes called magic knives, but they are nothing
like the knives held by protective deities. The shape may be derived from
a type of throwstick used against birds. Flocks of wild birds were a
symbol of the forces of chaos in Egyptian art, so the throwsticks used to
kill or stun them, or the clap-nets used to catch them, could symbolize
the victory of order over chaos. In private magic they were emblems of
the control a magician hoped to exercise over demons.

They describe how the donor has been 'made to see darkness by day' after offending a deity

demons with foreign
names are quite common in Egyptian magical texts. They are usually
hostile beings who have no useful function and must be driven away.
Nubian, Libyan and Syrian magicians are mentioned in spells, but
foreign demons nearly all have names derived from the Semitic
languages spoken in Syria-Palestine. A class of samana demons was
blamed for various types of sickness, particularly fevers and infectious
diseases. Knowledge of foreign myth and magic may have come to
Egypt with immigrants and captives from Syria-Palestine.

the word akh had become a
general term for demon. Earlier, it referred mainly to dead people who
had acquired the status of a transfigured spirit through the use of
funerary magic


The intervention of the dead in the affairs of the living was not always
benevolent. Letters to the dead sometimes accuse akhu of causing
sickness, legal problems, and other disasters. Emotional as well as
physical problems might be blamed on supernatural beings. One text
implies that akhu might be the cause of discord in the home by
possessing people and making them bad-tempered and quarrelsome.1

Another Egyptian word for the dead, mut, nearly always seems
to refer to jealous and dangerous ghosts. Many magical spells promise
protection against any male or female dead person who might try to
inflict harm. The female dead seem to have been particularly feared.

there was nothing heretical about believing in demons and
hostile manifestations of deities.

J. BORGHOUTS 'The Evil Eye of Apopis.'Journal of Egyptian Anhaeo/ogy 59,
1973.

A story in Papyrus Jumilhac (c. 300 BC) explains the custom by relating
how Seth once turned himself into a panther after attacking the body of
Osiris.3 Anubis captured and branded the panther, creating the leopard's
spots. The jackal god decreed that leopard skins should be worn by
priests in memory of his victory over Seth.

A few personal letters from the late second millennium BC
preserve references to women who were called rekhet— 'knowing one'.5
These wise women were consulted as seers who could get in touch with
the dead. A magical text of the late first millennium BC features a wise
woman who is able to diagnose what is wrong with a sick child (see
Chapter Ten). The idea seems to be that the woman can sense which evil
spirit or deity is responsible. These wise women may have taken on the
role of 'seer' after their childbearing years were over.

A.M. GARDINER 'Professional Magicians in Ancient Egypt.' Proceedings of the
Society for Biblical Archaeology 39, 1917.
P. GHALIOUNGI The Physicians of Pharaonic Egypt Cairo/Mainz 1983.
M. LICHTHEIM Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol. in Berkeley, 1980.
S. SAUNRRON 'Le monde du magicien egyptien.' in Le monde du sorcier Sources
Orientales 7, Paris 1966.
S. SAUNERON (trans.A.Morrissett) The Priests of Ancient Egypt New York,
1960.

In another part of the rite, the names and forms were copied onto
papyrus before being sealed in a box and buried. This method of control
seems to be a forerunner of the Islamic tradition of sealing a djinn in a
Bottle

The modern superstition
that you can harm or even kill someone by writing their name on a slip of
paper and shutting it in a drawer is in the same tradition.

Wax figures were made of Apep and of the enemies of Egypt who
were held to be his associates. The humans figurines had their hands tied
behind their backs with red or black thread. The wax models were spat
on, trampled, stabbed with an iron weapon and burned. A similar fate is
shown for models of Seth and his followers in another magical papyrus
in the British Museum (fig. 30). Any remains were pounded in pots of
urine, which was both polluting and destructively acidic.


spell to counter the
poisonous efflux of a demon or ghost also uses a whole range of magical

It evokes the protection of Mafdet, a ferocious feline goddess,
and alludes to a myth in which Horus evaded the sexual advances
of Seth. The names of the supernatural enemy and his parents are to be
uttered, if known, in order to bring them under control. The rubric is
obscure, but it seems that the spell is to be said over a phallus-shaped
loaf inscribed with the names of the enemy. This loaf is to be wrapped in
fatty meat and given to a cat. As the cat devours the loaf so, on the
supernatural plane, the goddess Mafdet will destroy the enemy.


The rubric describes how the magician is to put a particular sort of
black Nile fish into the rose-scented oil. The fish is to be hung up for
some days and then placed in a glass vessel with some kind of plant that
was linked with Isis. The pounded flesh is mixed with the oil and an
incantation is to be said seven times over the mixture at dawn for seven
days running. The magician was to anoint his head with the oil when he
wanted to sleep with the woman he desired.
The remains of the fish were to be embalmed with myrrh and natron
and buried in the magician's house, or in any secret place. Burial of
magical objects or ingredients was a common method of perpetuating
the power of a spell in a particular place. An alternative was to bury the
magical objects or ingredients among tombs, or near a sacred place, so
that the heka of the supernatural beings who dwelled there could
continue to reinforce the spell.

divination through dreams or
manifestations of deities — the elaborate preparations seem designed to
put the magician's assistant into a trance.
In one such spell in the London-Leiden Papyrus, the magician is to take a
bronze bowl engraved with a figure of Anubis, fill it with water and cover
the water with a film of oil. The child medium is to be made to lie on four
bricks with a cloth over his head. The magician lights a lamp on one side
of the child and a censer on the other. He is then to burn exotic incense
and chant an invocation to Anubis over and over again. It is hardly
FURTHER READING
R.O. FAULKNER 'The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus i-iv.' Journal of 'Egyptian
Archaeology 22—24, 1936—38.
F. LEXA Magie dans I'Egjipte antique Vol. i, Paris 1925.
M.J. RAVEN 'Wax in Egyptian Magic and Symbolism.' Oudheidkundige
Mededelingen het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te I^eiden 64, 1983.
R.K. RITNP;R The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice Chicago, 1993.
89

Among the most sinister objects from the ancient world are
figurines in human shape which were used to cast a spell on the
people they depicted. Such objects only survive when they were
buried as part of the rite, usually in the vicinity of tombs. The British
Museum has a small figurine made in dark wax which dates to the period
when Egypt was under Roman rule (figs 46,47). It has strands of human
hair pushed into its navel and a scrap of papyrus inserted in its back. The
hair would transfer the essence of the person it belonged to into the
figurine. Rites performed over the figurine would then affect the owner
of the hair. In the Graeco-Egyptian papyri, some curse spells recommend
mixing the hair of the intended victim with the hair of a dead
person. The scrap of papyrus which contained the written component of
the spell is now unreadable, so the exact purpose of this wax figurine
remains unknown.
A more gruesome figurine, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, is in the
form of a woman with her arms tied behind her back (fig. 48). Nails have
been driven deep into the clay body of the woman. Drawing on parallels
from European witchcraft or Caribbean voodoo, the obvious assumption
is that this figurine was intended to kill the woman depicted or to
cause her severe pain. However, written sources prove that figurines
were used in variety of ways in Egyptian magic. Objects found with the
Paris figurine make it clear that infliction of physical harm was not the
intention.1


The Paris figurine was buried inside a clay pot together with a lead
lamella inscribed with a love charm in Greek. The charm invokes Thoth,
Anubis, Antinoos (a lover of the Emperor Hadrian who was deified after
drowning in the Nile) and the spirits of the dead. Several spells in the
Graeco-Egyptian papyri for gaining the love of a man or woman
describe just this type of procedure. A magical papyrus in the Louvre
directs the magician or would-be lover to make a figurine in the form of a
kneeling woman with her hands tied behind her back. The names of
powerful demons are to be written on the woman's limbs. Possibly the
Paris figurine conceals a scrap of papyrus with such names written on it.
The lover then pierces the body with thirteen needles or nails, saying
each time 'I pierce the stomach or throat [etc.] of X, that she may think
of no-one but me'.

An invocation to deities, demons and spirits was to be written on a
lead tablet and tied to the figurine with a knotted cord, or buried close to
the figurine in a graveyard. If possible, these objects were to be buried in
the grave of someone who had died young or through violence. Such
spirits were more likely to linger on earth and show malice against the
living, so they could be manipulated by the magician. The only pains to
be inflicted by the needles were the pains of love. The magician intended
to make his victim wild with desire.

Nectanebo is said to have repelled invasions by making wax
models of his own ships and men and those of the invaders. After
placing them all in a bowl of water, Nectanebo would wave his ebony
rod and invoke gods and demons to animate the wax models and sink
the enemy ships. This caused the real enemy fleet to founder, until the
day when the gods decreed that his reign should come to an end and
Nectanebo was forced to flee to Macedonia

In
The Book of Overthrowing Apep, wax models are made of current enemies of
the state, as well as of the eternal forces of chaos. These enemies were
identified by the use of their names and then destroyed in a variety of
ways. Similar rituals are known from other sites, such as the temple of
the goddess Mut at Heliopolis and the temple of Osiris at Abydos
(fig. 30). Magic of this kind can be traced back at least as far as the late
third millennium BC.
A spell in The Coffin Texts refers to the breaking of pots and figurines.
Archaeologists have found the remains of such rites at the royal cemeteries
of Giza, Saqqara and Lisht, and at several Egyptian forts in Nubia.
Broken pots and clay or stone figurines are inscribed in the hieratic script
with lists of the enemies of Egypt. The body of the figurine may be
flattened into a tablet shape to give more space for the text. On the back,
the arms, or the arms and the legs, are bound together. In the more
detailed examples, the heads display foreign features and hairstyles.

The Execration Texts provide valuable information on the foreign
enemies of Egypt, but the lists soon became fixed. Names were
repeated, sometimes in garbled versions, long after an enemy had ceased
to be a physical danger. The spirits of defeated enemies or executed
traitors were probably regarded as a continuing supernatural threat,
which needed to be met with magic. Some of the Execration Texts end
with a section mentioning every evil word, thought, plot or dream. The
wording is similar to that of contemporary spells on papyrus which
promise to protect against the malice of demons and ghosts. The
Egyptians named in the Execration Texts are referred to as mut, the same
word used of the troublesome dead in protective spells for private
persons.
The red pots on which execration texts were written were ritually
broken as part of the cursing ceremony in order to smash the enemy's
Power

There were various magical techniques for disabling the enemies
represented by such figurines. Some crude mud execration figures from
a cemetery at Lisht were found in a model sarcophagus (outer coffin).
The Cairo Museum has several boxes containing clay 'captive figurines'.
The Book of Overthrowing Apep also mentions burying figurines, or figures
drawn on papyrus, in boxes. This was presumably done within the
temple precincts where the gods could guard the boxes. The most
graphic ritual was the burning of wax figurines in special furnaces.
Traces of melted wax were found beside the skull of the sacrificed
Nubian at Mirgissa, and some magical papyri show the burning of
enemies in furnaces or cauldrons (fig. 30).

The principle of transference is sometimes mentioned in the rubrics
to spells. A spell to relieve stomach-ache in a papyrus of the late second
millennium BC: is to be said over a 'woman's statue of clay'. The rubric
goes on to explain that the affliction would then be sent down into the
'Isis statue'.


but the standard practice
was probably to absorb the statue's magic by touching it, or by drinking
water poured over it. One of the inscriptions describes the king as the
lion who chases away all (hostile) gods and spirits. The whole monument
seems to be emphasizing that it is the king who is providing this magical
service for his workforce and protecting the cities of Egypt from
incursions by desert creatures.

Temple statues of priests and officials also provided a public service.
To set up a statue of yourself in an Egyptian temple was a privilege
confined to temple personnel or granted to important officials as a mark
of royal favour. Such statues were thought to provide an alternative body
for the person's ka. The ka became a resident of the temple and could
share in the offerings made there to the gods. Temple statues of the early
part of the second millennium BC often have inscriptions which address
the staff of the temple, promising good fortune for them and their
descendants if they will make offerings to the statue-owner. Similar
inscriptions are found on the outer areas of tombs and are based on the
belief that the dead could act on behalf of the living, particularly in
celestial courts of justice

Texts of this era begin to describe the use of specific amulets. Some of
the passages in The Coffin Texts which mention amulets seem to be
adapted from everyday magic. A papyrus now in Berlin describes how to
make an amulet (wedja) for a baby. The spell is to be said over gold and
garnet beads and a seal with the image of a hand and a crocodile.4 Such
seals do survive. The hand and the crocodile will slay, or drive off, any
hostile spirits who approach the baby. The seal and the beads are to be
strung on linen thread and hung at the baby's throat. Many of the strings
of beads and seals found in children's graves had probably been used in a
spell of this sort, but with tragic lack of success.

Some amuletic jewellery of this era shows the same range of creatures
and symbols as the apotropaic wands. A gold and silver ornament,
perhaps designed to be placed around a child's neck, is decorated with
baboons, hares, hawks, snakes, a turtle, two finger amulets, the symbol
of the goddess Bat, wedjat eyes and ankh and djed signs (fig. 57). Its
purpose was probably to place the wearer within a protective circle.

The child is promised long life, good health and ample
possessions. Such things might be requested of a god in any religious
text, but the amuletic decrees also portray the dark and dangerous
aspects of the Egyptian pantheon. They promise to protect the child
against harmful manifestations of deities such as Isis and Thoth, as well
as against demons, foreign sorcerers and the Evil Eye. Particularly
dreaded were Sekhmet and her son Nefertem. The amuletic decrees
claimed to be able help their owners to cheat fate. Any divine messengers
coming to kill or injure the owner of the amulet would be
persuaded or tricked into attacking a substitute.

Some present-day Indian temples contain stelae to
cure snakebite, just as Horus cippi were set up in Egyptian temples

One spell in Papyrus
Leiden 1348 offers protection from head to foot. Each part of the body is
assigned a deity who will be its protection (so). The deities chosen may
evoke particular mythical events or images, transforming the patient's
body into a kind of cosmic map.
The patient's right eye is identified with the solar eye of Ra-Atum and
his left eye with the lunar eye of Horus (see Chapter Two). His back is
Geb and his belly is Nut (see fig. 9). His penis is the baboon god Baba, his
thighs are Isis and Nephthys, and his feet are those of Shu. The text ends
by promising that there isn't a single part of the body which has not been
sealed by a deity. The rubric reveals that all this protection was against
sickness inflicted by hostile ghosts, particularly female ones.

To drive a person mad, it was only necessary to tie a hair
from the victim to a hair from a corpse and fasten them both to the body
of a hawk. A noble spirit might be summoned by invocations from the
necropolis to haunt the dreams of an enemy of the magician. Letters
were written to the dead in order to compel, rather than request, them to
carry out the magician's will

In one example, a curse against a man or woman is written on papyrus
and bound with an iron ring. The papyrus is to be buried when the moon
is waning, in the grave of someone who has died an untimely or violent
death. This gives the victim into the power of the dead person, so that
the latter will enforce the curse. The openly expressed malevolence of
these spells seems unEgyptian, but similar desires may lie behind some
of the earlier letters to the dead. These do not specify exactly how the
akhu are to deal with the writer's enemies.