Ancient Egyptian Magic

A Hands-on Guide

Christina Riggs

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780500775752
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

In the ancient world the magicians of Egypt were considered the best. But was magic harmless fun, heartfelt hope, or something darker? Whether you needed a love charm, a chat with your dead wife, or the ability to fly like a bird, an Egyptian magician had just the thing. Christina Riggs explores how the Egyptians thought about magic, who performed it and why, and also helps readers understand why weve come to think of ancient Egypt in such a mystical, magical way in the first place.
br/>This book takes Egyptian magic seriously, using ancient texts and images to tackle the blurry distinctions between magic, religion and medicine. Along the way, readers will learn how to cure scorpion bites, why you might want to break the legs off your stuffed hippopotamus toy, and whether mummies really can come back to life. Readers will also (if so inclined) be able to save a fortune on pregnancy tests by simply urinating on barley seeds, and learn how to use the next street parade to predict the future or ensure that annoying neighbour gets his comeuppance.

1

MAGIC WORDS

The phrase djed medu may not trip off the tongue, but it takes us to the heart of ancient Egyptian magic: speech. The expression, which translates literally as ‘the words to be said’, is used to mark the start of a spell in magic manuals. For all that magic needed special ingredients, and a magician who knew how to use them, it also required the right words, recited in the right way and under the right conditions.

There were three key components to any magic rite: a speech act, a physical gesture or action, and some kind of physical object that brought speech and action together. In ancient Egypt, words were powerful things, both in writing and when spoken out loud. The act of speech – to djed (‘speak’) the medu (‘words’) – was at least as important in practical magic as anything that was written down, painted, or carved in material form. But the spoken performances that brought alive the words written on papyri, artefacts, and works of art are impossible for us to observe from our vantage point thousands of years later. A little imagination helps – along with some judicious comparisons to other cultures around the world and over time, since some form of magic can be found in every society.

Magic supported the state, in the person of the king, and was at the heart of the religious rituals carried out in every temple, pilgrimage site, or household shrine up and down the Nile valley. Magic helped babies be born and the dead be reborn. It healed the sick, or tried to, and it offered some sense of calm and control when everything in the world seemed to be going wrong. The paradox is that while magical practices were part of everyday life, magic did its work by reaching beyond the everyday to access another realm entirely. We may have only silent objects to work with from the ancient past, or written instructions that seem obscure or incomplete. But ancient texts and artefacts help us build up a picture of how magic, and magicians, worked in ancient Egypt. From hieroglyphic inscriptions that hint at spells even older than the invention of writing, to wax figures that have melted away, much of our evidence for Egyptian magic can only ever show us the part of a rite that survives in some physical form. To hear the words that went with the rites would require time travel. For now, just read on with an open mind – we’ll get to time travel in Chapter 2.

Talking the talk

Magic permeated every aspect of ancient Egyptian culture and every layer of its society. Starting at the top, there was nothing higher than the pyramids – and the kings who were buried in them. From the 5th Dynasty, elaborate hieroglyphic inscriptions covered the walls of the burial chamber and corridors deep inside the structure. These texts, which Egyptologists call the Pyramid Texts, are the oldest known religious texts in the world: they first appeared in the pyramid made for King Unas, who reigned around 2350 BCE. That doesn’t mean that they were composed at this time, however. Their old-fashioned grammar indicates that these texts had much earlier roots, perhaps first having been written on materials that haven’t survived, like linen shrouds or wooden coffins. The structure of the inscriptions offers another possibility: each fresh passage starts djed medu, which tells us that they were recited by a priest during the king’s funerary rites. They may have been passed down through generations as an oral tradition, not unlike the poetry of Homer or the tale of Beowulf, before they were committed to stone inside pyramids.

Magic rituals for King Unas, carved inside his pyramid at Saqqara.

On the back of this mummy mask, each hieroglyphic text begins with djed medu.

Egyptologists have published thousands of pages trying to translate and analyse the Pyramid Texts, whose language can seem obscure today, and was even archaic at the time they were first chiselled into walls. But they seem broadly to be poetic expressions with a magical force, aimed at ensuring the king’s rebirth among the gods as a glorified being known in Egyptian as an akh, a sort of light-filled, eternal spirit. ‘Recitation [djed medu]’, starts a typical text from the pyramid of King Teti (r. 2323–2291 BCE), which continues: ‘Greetings, Teti, on the day when you stand opposite the sun as it rises in the east, dressed in your finery as an akh.’ On and on the texts run over the walls, elaborating a world of gods and divine blessings that await the dead king in the afterlife, as well as the dangers that he will have to overcome – with, of course, the help of magic.

Over centuries of Egyptian history, parts of the Pyramid Texts found their way out of the pyramids and into the tombs of Egypt’s ruling classes and provincial leaders, in which they were often painted on coffins or other pieces of funerary equipment. The medium might have changed, but the method for activating their protective potential stayed the same; namely, a spoken performance by a priest-magician. The all-important act of reciting the right words in the right way was meant to help the deceased attain their desired end: eternal existence as an akh.

Although the context of these particular recitations was funerary, focused on ensuring the safe passage of the dead to the afterlife, we know that djed medu was an important part of other rites, too. The same phrase appears in the pictorial imagery that became standard on temple walls, for instance, and from there it found its way onto statues and other memorial monuments. A column of hieroglyphs next to a god or goddess often begins with djed medu, followed by the divinity’s name. The words thus ‘said’ by Isis or Horus (to take two possible examples) had their magical potential made available for as long as the temples and monuments endured. Sometimes, where space was tight, only djed medu and the god’s name would fit. Writing down exactly what the gods said seems to have mattered less than indicating that they would say something, forever – and that they would say it for you.

When it came to writing on scrolls of papyrus, scribes used a cursive script known as hieratic instead of the pictorial hieroglyphs we see on tomb and temple walls or painted and carved on works of art, like statues. Hieratic was easier and faster to write with the instruments available to scribes in ancient Egypt: a thin reed stem chewed at one end to make a brush, and two shades of ink, black made from carbon (charcoal) and red made from iron ore (also known as haematite or ochre). Djed medu and similar phrases were often written in red ink to mark the beginning of a new section of the text. In papyri devoted to magic spells or medical prescriptions (often one and the same), red marked lists of ingredients that needed to be gathered to perform the spell or mix up the recipe. Red lettering also gave the reader instructions as to what to do and say, or sometimes warned the reader of the need for secrecy, since some magic spells were so powerful that no one should be allowed to witness them. The incantations to be spoken out loud then followed in black. If you knew how to read and write in ancient Egypt – and very few people did – you understood this system of colour-coding, the same way we understand headings and paragraphs in a printed book.

Remembering just how limited literacy was in ancient Egypt is key to understanding its social structure, as is true of many other ancient societies. The best estimates are that only 2–3 per cent of the population could read and write. That percentage represents almost exclusively men of the upper echelons of the social hierarchy, who would have been schooled from childhood in both hieroglyphic and hieratic writing. That illiteracy was so widespread helps explain how religion and its counterpart, magic, were woven right through Egyptian life, from the top level of society down to its humblest members. Being able to read and write hieroglyphs must have seemed like its own kind of magic to most people in ancient Egypt – the farmers and fishermen, weavers and market-stall sellers, craftspeople and labourers about whom so little survives in written records or works of art.

At the same time, we shouldn’t over-emphasize writing as the only way to know or remember something. Certainly writing was important, and all the more so for being restricted to a small sector of society. But literacy isn’t black and white (or black and red, for that matter). People who were not fully literate could still have had some grasp of common hieroglyphic symbols. Oral traditions were vital for learning, sharing information, and passing down knowledge, stories, and histories. Talking mattered, or else there would have been no need for those red-letter warnings to magicians, reminding them to protect their secrets from pricked-up ears as well as prying eyes.

What’s in a name?

Magic and mystery go together like papyrus and ink, or poison and snakes. It may seem counterintuitive, but shrouding something in secrecy was a good way to advertise it. The more a magician could claim that only he knew what to do and how to do it, the more special his help would seem – and the more tempting his cure for what ailed you. In any case, every society needs secrets. Secrecy is a way to create, organize, and reinforce power, whatever form that power takes. Revealing or concealing secrets is effective at defining who is part of the ‘in’ group, as well as creating a sense of shared responsibility within that group, to use its secrets as a force for good.

In ancient Egypt, power over the natural and the supernatural spheres often came together in the world of the temple, its priests, and its libraries of written records, with the hallowed secrets they were said to contain. Ancient Egyptian myths grew out of this world and reflect the wider concerns of Egyptian society. Therefore it’s no surprise to find secrecy featuring heavily in mythology, and especially in myths that involve the goddess Isis, who was often known by her soubriquet Weret Hekau, ‘Great Lady of Magic’. One myth that explains how she came by her incredible talents gives us an insight into the power of both secrets and names.

Preserved in similar versions on several papyrus rolls dating from the 19th Dynasty (1292–1189 BCE), the story tells how Isis used her cunning and powers against the sun-god Ra. The sun was the central focus of Egyptian religion, but the sun-god himself took many forms and had many names – including a secret one. Isis encounters Ra in his doddering old age, before the nighttime journey that will see him born anew at dawn. She gathers some of the saliva dribbling out of his mouth, mixes it with clay, and shapes it into a snake. Using her magic, Isis transforms the clay model into a real snake and places it on the path along which the elderly sun-god is shuffling. The snake bites him, and venom begins to spread through Ra’s already weakened body.

Isis appears in the nick of time, promising to use her magic to heal Ra, on one condition: that he tell her his secret name, which will make her the greatest magician in the world. Ra resists. Even to a fellow deity, he has no intention of giving away such a potent piece of information. As the poison reaches his eyes and strikes him blind, however, he relents. The secret name of the sun-god is…

Well, wouldn’t that be nice to know. Unfortunately, some secrets are too sacred to commit to papyrus. According to the story, Ra’s secret name passed directly from his body to hers, an ancient Egyptian mind-meld that made Isis the master of the universe where magic was concerned. Ra recovered to rise again the next day, even if we’re still in the dark about the name he was hiding.

The name of a person captured something of their essence – or essences, plural; Egyptian gods, goddesses, and supernatural beings often appear under a dizzying number of different names and epithets. If a name is a powerful thing, after all, then having more of them can only be good news. Isis is a case in point. Her Egyptian name probably sounded something like Aset, the ‘s’ at the end of ‘Isis’ having come to us through the ancient Greek spelling of her name. Egyptologists debate the meaning of the name Aset, which may have the same root as the word was, or ‘power’. Whatever its origin, since Aset is written with the hieroglyph representing a throne, it seems to refer to Isis’s role as a support for the king of Egypt: she is literally his seat, his place in the universe.

Isis was both the wife and the sister of the divine king Osiris, who ruled on earth in the days of the gods. His brutal murder by their brother, the usurper Seth, was one reason Isis needed to maximize her magic, the better to seek revenge and see her son Horus back on Osiris’s rightful throne. Seth, the god of trickery, deception, and disaster, destroyed Osiris’s body, some say by chopping it into pieces and scattering it throughout the land, and Isis had to travel far and wide, mourning her husband as she collected all the pieces of his corpse. Making the body whole again was the responsibility of the jackal-headed god Anubis, creating an origin-story for mummification. The cycle of myths around Osiris and Isis, Isis and Horus, and Horus and Seth forms the backbone to Egyptian magical practices. Almost literally, in fact, since the hieroglyphic sign for ‘stability’ (which, coincidentally, is pronounced djed) may represent the spine of Osiris. The matching symbol for Isis, called a tyet, was a knotted cloth the colour of blood. Its shape echoes the symbol for life, an ankh hieroglyph. Together Osiris and Isis, the djed and the tyet, combined the male and female elements needed for human creation, overcoming death to conceive their son Horus.

Isis then hid her young son in the Delta marshes, and raised him in secret, using her magical skills to protect him from the perils there. Only when Horus reached adolescence and manhood could he challenge Seth, sparking off a series of battles and confrontations between uncle and nephew. Ultimately, a council of gods declared Horus triumphant, and in his falcon-headed form, he was hailed as the avenger of his father’s murder and the rightful heir to the throne of Egypt. Osiris himself stayed firmly put in the Duat, presiding over the judgment of new arrivals and daily reigniting the sun’s fire to maintain the cycle of cosmic renewal. Stories and spells place more emphasis on Osiris in matters of mummification and burial, and on Isis and Horus when it came to everyday concerns like health; together, Osiris, Isis, and Horus are a mythological theme that runs right through Egyptian magic.

Alternating djed-pillars and tyet-knots on the largest burial shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Isis certainly put her own hard-won magic to good use. Her title Great Lady of Magic, Weret Hekau, shows that not only did Isis have magic, she had it in spades: the spelling puts heka in its plural form, hekau, which English can’t easily convey (‘magics’). The concept of heka is older than the pyramids; in the Pyramid Texts, heaven groans and the earth trembles in the presence of heka, the force – the magic – that impels the creation of the world. In this cosmic sense, magic is older than the gods, and even has more power than they do. As we saw in the story of Isis and Ra, gods need magic. They thrive on it, and it was by calling on divine beings like...