Ancient Egyptian Demonology: Studies on the Boundaries between

the Demonic and the Divine in Egyptian Magic ed. by Panagiotis

Kousoulis (review)

Rita Lucarelli

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 8, Number 1, Summer 2013,

pp. 99-105 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/mrw.2013.0003

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v008/8.1.lucarelli.html

Access provided by Fondren Library, Rice University (21 Jun 2013 06:19 GMT)
 Reviews 99

republic. Dennis instead chooses to reinforce and slightly expand the existing
interpretations. Given the tendency for witchcraft studies to rework historio-
graphical shibboleths in interesting ways, this may amount to a missed
moment for American witchcraft studies.
Dennis is on firmer ground elsewhere in the volume, in his lengthy discus-
sions of gender and power in the Quaker missions among the Seneca, or the
way in which the Seneca in 1821 defended Tommy Jenny in an effort to
defend their own sovereignty in the face of Indian Removal. Seneca Possessed
is at its best when comparing the complexities of a witch-murder to the
complexities of Indian territorial struggles of the early republic. In that sense,
this volume is very much a book for Americanistsbroader witchcraft schol-
ars will scan the footnotes in vain for references to any European historiogra-
phy not written by Keith Thomasand it tries to fit witchcraft into the
preexisting historiographical schemes of the early American republic. Yet
Seneca should resuscitate interest in Handsome Lake and Indian witchcraft in
the early republic, and if so, Iroquois magic may yet unmake some of the
older assumptions about Indian America in the early republic. Denniss book
should mark good starting point for a historiographical debate. Handsome
Lake certainly deserves one.

adam jortner
Auburn University

panagiotis kousoulis, ed. Ancient Egyptian Demonology: Studies on the Bound-

aries between the Demonic and the Divine in Egyptian Magic. Orientalia Lova-
nensia Analecta 175. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2011. Pp. 192.

This volume collects the papers presented at a symposium on ancient

Egyptian demonology held in Rhodes in 2003. Despite the publication delay,
the assembled essays deal with still up-to-date issues in demonology and
magic. As mentioned in the introduction (xv), the two sections of the book
reflect the two main thematic sessions of the symposium: the first one
(Demons and Personification) dealing with a theoretical discussion on the
nature and function of demons in society and religion, with the second one
focusing on magic and rituals. This second section would perhaps have been
better placed at the beginning of the book in order to serve as general intro-
duction on magic before getting into the more specific topic of the ancient
Egyptian beliefs in demons and of the magical rituals directed to them.
The introductory essay has been written by Panagiotis Kousoulis, who is

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also the books editor and organizer of the symposium; his expertise in the
field of ancient Egyptian demonology is evident in the detailed and very
informative way he deals with the debated issue of definition of the demonic
versus the divine in the ancient Egyptian religion. It is indeed still an open
question whether demons really existed in ancient Egypt, since the ancient
Egyptian language lacks a proper generic term that may be properly translated
with the English demon. A few scholars prefer to speak of minor deities
or genii, considering the demonic as belonging to the same ontological
category of the divine. Kousoulis explores these and other issues in the inter-
pretation of the demonic within the religious studies of the ancient world,
with particular attention to the multifaceted concept of daimon/daimones in
ancient Greece. His main point, with which the reviewer fully agrees, is
that in order to discuss demons in ancient Egypt we should not look for a
homogeneous identity for each single demon, but rather focus on their
complex and ambivalent function according to their context of appearance
(apotropaic, ritual, funerary, etc.) and role (benevolent or malevolent) in
magical rituals.
Such a methodological approach is generally employed also by the other
contributors to the volume, beginning with R. Ritner and his essay on one
of the most popular demonic gangs occurring in magical and ritual texts from
the Old Kingdom to the Greco-Roman period, namely the xA(y)ty.w or
slaughterers. Ritner begins with a philologically based analysis of the col-
lective name of these demons, which he sees as originating from the root
xAwt (Demotic xyv, Coptic soeit). This term, first encountered in the literary
work of The Voyage of Wenamon (dating to the eleventh or tenth century
BCE), seems to describe a sort of divine ecstasy or possession. Ritner speaks
of a probable later folk-etymology between this term and the demons
name, which is fascinating, although not completely convincing, since it
loads the demonic epithet with a semantic value (that of ecstasy, fury) that
belongs more to the sphere of the gods and cannot be intrinsic in the demons
name, which moreover is of much older origin. Ritner actually also states
that, from the Eighteenth Dynasty onward, these demons are no longer dis-
tinguishable from the gods, although the only example that he can bring to
support this theory is the magical P. Leiden I 346, where 12 xA(y)tyw-
demons are mentioned beside a vignette showing instead proper deities such
as Khnum and Sekhmet. However, such a vignette may also be a representa-
tion of the gods who control the demons mentioned in the text and not the
demons themselves. Perhaps instead, for an etymological attempt to explain
the origin of the demonic epithet xA(y)tyw, we should refer to the ancient

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Egyptian concept of xAyt or HAyt, disease, malady of evil origin, since

these demons are especially known as plague-bringers.
The following article of P. J. Frandsen deals instead with the earlier corpus
of the Coffin Texts, and in particular with the concepts of bwt, intended as
impurity or taboo, and with what he calls reversal-texts, those texts that
describe actions occurring in the netherworld that are contrary to those
accepted on earth, such as being upside down, eating feces, and drink-
ing urine. These are indeed among the most popular mortuary spells con-
cerning the dangers that the deceased has to face during his journey in the
netherworld. They include the encounter and dialogue with demonic or
demonized inhabitants, elements such as the fishermen-demons who want to
trap the deceased in nets, the ravenlike god or demon Gebga, or the mysteri-
ous Iaau, described as having his tongue in his legs and his phallus in his
mouth. It is in reference to these kinds of supernatural creatures that Frandsen
raises the question of the definition of the demonic in ancient Egypt and
argues that it would be wiser to think of the divine having a dual personal-
ity instead of trying to distinguish a class of demons that is not attested as
such in the sources. The issue of the demonic aspects of many gods is indeed
a central one in the study of demonology and what makes it complicated to
distinguish gods from demons. The general criteria used for characterizing
gods (worship and cult, linguistic determinatives and iconography) are in
fact somehow uncertain especially when dealing with the inhabitants of the
netherworld and their multifaceted and ambiguous nature.
Kasia Szpakowskas essay deals instead with those hostile creatures mani-
festing in the sleep, such as nightmare-demons and malevolent dead. Espe-
cially interesting is her discussion of how dreams were personified and seen
as an external phenomenon, which allowed the dreamer to be suspended
between this and the other world, and to see the inhabitants of the beyond,
namely, gods and demons. Szpakowskas analysis draws not only from the
textual evidence of the magical spells against nightmares but also from those
apotropaic devices (cobras figurines made of clay, headrests, and magic
wands) that were most probably used in connection with the spells. In rela-
tion to the cobra figurines, whose function and ritual use is still debated, the
author gives us also an overview of the role that snakes and cobras have
within the religious and magical universe of the ancient Egyptian.
With the contribution of Penelope Wilson the focus shifts to the practice
of masking in ancient Egyptian rituals in relation to the social identity and
the transformation of status of those persons and ritual actors wearing masks.
The starting point of her analysis is the material evidence of those masks
found in archaeological contexts possibly used in ritual and funerary practices,

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in particular those masks depicting the face of Bes, of her female counterpart
Beset, and of the jackal god Anubis. The author speculates on the role
playing of the ritual actors wearing these kind of masks, who were then able
to be empowered with the same divine or demonic qualities of the gods that
the masks represent, at the same time sharing their hybrid (human and ani-
mal) nature. In particular with the Bes-like masks, their use may have been
connected to the strong apotropaic and demonic nature of this god,1 which
would serve to avoid dangers during the ritual, where participants acted in a
liminal world infested by demonic powers. The ritual protection in the limi-
nal state between this and the other world was also ensured by the Anubis
masks, in light of the role of Anubis as embalmer and protector of the human
body after death. The mask becomes, therefore, a metaphor for the author-
ity of the supernatural world or myth (81). An interesting related issue raised
by the author is whether hybrid deities in Egypt (with animal head and
anthropomorphic body or vice versa) should be considered as masked enti-
ties. Although we do not have a definitive answer to such a question, the
author points out the archaeological and literary evidence of divine masks
used in temple rituals and in particular to the frontality of certain divine faces
such as Hathor, which may be an indication of a masked head. The hypothe-
sis of the existence of cosmetic masks is also interesting, given the importance
of cosmetic palettes from the Predynastic period. These masks were probably
used not only in magical contexts but also as marks of social status. As the
author notes, it would be interesting to study the masking customs in ancient
Egypt from a cultural anthropological perspective, since we do not know
much yet about the real function that various types of masks had within the
society.
The last article of the Demons and Personification series is by Alessandro
Roccati, exploring the nature of evil demons within the Egyptian society and
the central role that language and words had in magical spells directed against
them. A few passages taken from funerary and magical texts such as the Book
of the Dead and the Bremmer-Rhind papyrus are quoted. The author focuses
especially on the registers of language in the magical texts of the Ramesside
period, when popular speech (in Late Egyptian) no longer belonged only to

1. I would define Bes as apotropaic god rather than as a composite demon,

as proposed by the author at p. 80, since he was worshipped as protector of the
household and had a fixed iconography, differently from demons. See R. Lucarelli,
The so-called vignette of Spell 182 of the Book of the Dead, in R. Lucarelli,
M. Mueller-Roth und A. Wuetrich, Herausgehen am Tage. Gesammelte Schriften zum
altaegyptischen Totenbuch (Wiesbaden 2012), 7991, in particular 89.

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oral communication, but was also written down in literary form. While gods
are generally addressed in classical Egyptian, a colloquial register of language
is used when the magician has to call the demons. It seems that demons were
thought to be unable to understand a higher register of language, as if they
were considered a lower class of beings; moreover, in certain texts, they are
clearly characterized as foreigners to be addressed in a non-Egyptian lan-
guage. However, I think that one should leave out from this category of
lower-class demons the so-called guardians of the netherworld, namely,
those benevolent genii guarding certain regions of the netherworld, whom
the deceased addresses formally in Middle Egyptian.2
The second section of the volume, Magic and the Cosmicization of the
world, is opened by Alan B. Lloyd, with an essay on the influence of the
ancient Egyptian magic in Greek literature. It provides the reader with a
comprehensive study of this pivotal and much discussed theme within studies
of the ancient world and of the Egyptian-Greek religious syncretism. Lloyd
begins his analysis with a comparison of the Greek and Egyptian perceptions
of the divine world and of the role that magic plays therein. It is indeed true,
though often forgotten, that although our modern term magic derives
from the ancient Greek mageia, such a term has a completely different (and
more negative) meaning in relation to what the ancient Egyptians meant by
their own native word heka. The Greek mageia, which was not really defined
in texts before the fifth century BC, meant a morally condemned practice,
against the cosmic order and the gods, while the Egyptian heka was both a
deification of magic and a creative cosmological power. We are facing here a
problem of translation, of words that can be misinterpreted once rendered in
a different language, similar to what happens when Greek daimon is rendered
with the modern English demon, as discussed in the introduction to this
volume (see remarks above). In theory, I would agree with the author on the
principle of translating heka with ritual power instead of magic, since
heka always consisted of a series of ritual actions. However, I am convinced
that in fact it would be hard, if not impossible, to change such a long-standing
scholarly habit of referring to magic as a fundamental, complementary part
of the ancient religions (in particular of the ancient Egyptian one). The
author then proceeds with presenting a series of very interesting Greek liter-
ary texts on the reception of Egyptian magic and religion, from Homer to

2. On the guardian demons see R. Lucarelli, The guardian demons of the Book
of the Dead, British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 15 (2010). http://
www.britishmuseum.org/research/online_journals/bmsaes/issue_15/lucarelli.aspx.

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Herodotus, Plotinus, and Lucian, pointing out to the important role that
astrology played within Hellenistic Egypt.
Yvan Koenigs article starts from the evidence given by a few magical
texts, such as Turins magical papyrus (pTurin 1996) and an amuletic papyrus
from Deir el Medina (pLouvre E32308)3 to show that gods were considered
as dangerous as demons and evil dead in ancient Egypt. The focus of the
essay is then on the philological analysis of a few passages of a magical papyrus
kept in the Louvre, which are compared with parallels in the magical papyrus
of Turin. The author discusses the issue of so-called sacred philology and
sacred intertextuality on the basis of a few passages where it seems clear
that the author of pLouvre E32308 had as a point of reference the papyrus
from Turin. The author of this text did not pedantically copy the sacred
model, but rather reworked a few passages, providing new interpretations of
the archetypal text. This is a procedure already known from the funerary
corpora transmitted through the centuries such as the ancient Egyptian Book
of the Dead; however, when dealing with texts of daily magic the situation
becomes more complex since there was not a strong observance of an arche-
type to be reproduced traditionally and formally.
In Joachim F. Quacks essay, the reader is treated to an overview of an
important but often neglected category of ancient Egyptian magical spells:
the demotic magical texts produced in the Greco-Roman period. The spells
selected are those referring to the ritual practice of dream sending, which
are characterized by being, as Quack writes, egoistic spells aimed at getting a
personal profit for an individual by damaging another one. The author dis-
cusses in detail the contents and function of each of the spells taken from the
demotic papyrus Louvre E 3229. Moreover, he draws out a few contempo-
rary parallels, stressing the clearly Egyptian inspiration of these late rituals,
where the magician evokes a spirit who should appear in a dream as a god in
order to fool the dreamer and get him to act according to the desire of the
magician and of his client. The fact that some sections of these texts are
written in hieratic, and the kind of ritual elements and gods mentioned,
clearly speaks to an earlier Egyptian precedent (which, however, cannot yet
be identified, although a few attempts have been made in this direction by
scholars working on certain Coffin Text spells of the Middle Kingdom and
the so-called Oracular Amuletic Decrees of the end of the New Kingdom).
The authors hypothesis of a lacuna in transmission due to the illegal char-
acter of a category of texts that was not supposed to be kept in temple

3. This papyrus has been published in 2004 by Y. Koenig himself: Le papyrus de

Moutemheb, BIFAO 104 (2004), 291326.

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archives is a very sound one. It calls for new approaches to the study of
ancient Egyptian black magic and of the scribal traditions of nonofficial
origin.
The essay by Hedvig Gyory deals with a very popular theme within the
study of ancient Egyptian magic, namely, its influence on the medical sci-
ences. It is indeed well known from the so-called medico-magical papyri
that medical recipes very often included magical instructions and elements,
as many illnesses had supernatural causes and were personified as demons. In
this vein, the author mentions a few spells taken by the famous Ebers medical
papyrus and other medical and magical papyri of the New Kingdom and of
the Third Intermediate Period. Particularly interesting is the authors insight
into the ancient Egyptian ophthalmologic treatments of the so-called Ad(y)t-
desease, which probably corresponds to the modern pterygium, which was
cured with a series of prescriptions including magical and divine materials,
inspired by mythological backgrounds. The second part of the article focuses
on the use of Pataykos amulets, especially used in childbirth and against snake
bites, representing dwarfsor, more specifically, the apotropaic dwarf god
Bes. The author discusses their typology and function on the basis of both
textual and iconographical evidence, concluding that these amulets were
mainly considered as manifestations of the sun god Ra and later on replaced
by another popular typology of magical objects, namely, the Horus cippi.
Gyory points out the importance of studying and recognizing local medical
schools and traditions in order to understand the function and use of magico-
medical texts and objects. As a matter of fact, focusing on local religious
traditions has also turned out to be vital for the study of other categories of
magical texts, such as the mortuary spells of the Book of the Dead corpus. It
is a fact that the gods and their myths and manifestations do not have a
universal homogeneous meaning in either the whole ancient Egyptian terri-
tory or through the long time span of Pharaonic history. Rather, they were
interpreted differently according to the local geographical contexts and cults,
even as they were evolving through time.
The volume, which is completed by a comprehensive bibliography and a
general index including both ancient Egyptian and English terms, contains
much useful scholarship on ancient Egyptian magic and demonology; it
should be valuable and enjoyable reading both for an Egyptological and non-
specialist audience.

rita lucarelli
University of Bonn

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