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MAGIC

Sources of Magical Traditions

The historical source situation to magic in Ancient Egypt is various. Besides archaeological evidence, from which we can deduce today, how the Ancient Egyptians performed magical acts, we have much textual evidence. These are not only inscriptions on material legacies. Written evidence even provides us with an extensive repertoire of magical spell literature, partly in the form of individual spells and comprehensive collections of spells on papyrus.

These texts concern different recipients and pursue other goals. However, categorizing the texts into protective spells, defensive spells, healing spells, and so on can be problematic. It can happen to all historical evidence that we try to put into a system according to our current standards. The Ancient Egyptians did not think in such black and white categories. They were aware that the development of their lives and the events they experienced were always linked to higher powers. And these powers, be they positive like the well-known deities of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon or harmful like demons, could be and were addressed on several levels: through physical actions and treatments, invocations, and prayers. And so, it is not surprising that healers also applied magical formulas cumulatively. But to make the complex world of Ancient Egyptian magic and medicine comprehensible to us today, we can certainly categorize certain spells for our orientation.

We have texts that support the process of transfiguration. In Ancient Egypt, transfiguration was an essential part of their faith. Sakhu is the Ancient Egyptian term and stands for the transformation of the soul of a deceased person into an Akh, the light-filled ancestral spirit. This is the time of a dead person’s ascension to the stars.

Other texts describe the transformation of the form of a deceased person into the manifestation of a God, animal, or plant. Other spells aimed to provide nourishment for the dead person in the afterlife. As you can see, these are mainly spells from the funerary realm. They were often used in a funeral ceremony to support the safe passage of the deceased into the afterlife and provide his life with everything he needed on the other side.

Powerful spells could also be love spells to manipulate someone into falling in love with the spell-caster or another person. Even unpleasant neighbors or personal enemies could become the targets of particular spells, similar to the African voodoo tradition. However, these classical damage spells, which we can assign to the black magic, are relatively rarely documented in Ancient Egypt. These are often spells against intruders or enemies of the country or potential grave robbers who could disturb the passage of the dead into the afterlife. These execration texts, the technical term for this is the German word Ächtungstexte, are therefore often found in the context of burials.

The large group of protective spells also includes those healing spells specifically directed against an illness or a condition for which a demon is held responsible, such as a fever demon.

Fig. 2.: Egyptian magical text on papyrus in coptic language.