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But magic is no instrument, magic is the end
Tonight I heard Rita Lucarelli lecture on magic and demonology in ancient Egypt. I took so many notes my hand cramped.
I had intended just to listen. I was (am) very tired and had planned just to sit at the back of the free lecture and try not to fall asleep. But then in context of our ideas of magic versus magic in ancient Egypt, she said, "Magic is a god," and I sat up. Magic's name in Egyptian is Heka; she showed a slide of him on the boat of Ra, a rather ordinary-looking male human figure holding the tail of a serpent squiggling in protective waves all around the sun-god as he journeys through the underworld night. Magic is not trickery, blasphemy, a practice against the gods. Magic is an integral part of creation, of maintaining the world. It can be distinguished from religion, just as demons can be distinguished from gods. By humans, it's used for defensive, curative, and transformative purposes, with love-spells serving as a subset of that last; they are considered aggressive magic, forcibly changing a person. But there is no concept of black magic in ancient Egypt, though any spell practiced against the pharaoh can be banned. A magician is not someone secretive and strange but a priest, a doctor, a local scholar. Anyone who deals with the liminal world.
Which is where demons come in. We see them represented side by side with gods, but gods exist in the mythic dimension, it is their work to look out for the living and the dead, they have cults, shrines, are worshipped; demons are appeased. They protect, but they have to be asked to do it. But they are not figures of inherent evil, even though the word we use for them has picked up so many connotations of temptation, punishment etc. in its passage through Christianity from the Greek δαίμων; that is all irrelevant to an Egyptian demon. They don't possess people, either. The closest we get is the language of disease personified as a demon seizing a patient, which anyone who has ever spoken of being knocked on their ass by a cold can comprehend without needing to call in Father Merrin. Lucarelli likened them more to Plato's original definition of daimones, liminal messengers between the mortal world and the divine; she likes Gregor Ahn's term Grenzgänger, which he considers untranslatable and she thinks can be adequately rendered as "boundary-crosser." They do not polarize between good and evil as in ancient Greek religion, however; there is no such thing as an Egyptian agathodaimon. They can be either or neither or both; it can be a meaningless question. Seen in the underworld of the Book of the Dead, they are not devils of hell but guardians, protectors, dangerous only to those who approach them without the right spells. Many-named and nameless, Lucarelli called them; some have snake wands in their hands; one has a duck on his head. There is no one word for what they are.
I could not write fast enough by hand to take down the names of some demons she identified when I was also trying to copy their Egyptian names; the only one I got in full was "Face-downward, numerous of shapes" (sḫd-ḥr, ʿšȝ ir.w). Others translated to "Radiant," "Sad of voice," "One who stretches out his brow." The otherwise human-formed demon with four cobras quirked above his head like interrobangs is known as "He who protects his body," i.e., the body of the deceased: the body that is his to guard. The wooden figurine of a gazelle-headed demon twists as dramatically as a Fosse dancer, an aggressive pose, Lucarelli said; it's part of the same group, crumbling black with plastered linen, as the demon with a turtle for a head. They too are tomb guardians. To address the question of scary rather than protective demons, she called up a criminally cute cartoon of Anubis and the Devourer, whose name now appears to be rendered "Amemet." Certainly she looks like a monster to us, that hulking composite of hippo-crocodile-lion alertly poised ("She's ready to go!") to engulf the heart that drops truth's scales with its weight of sin, but in a culture that represents its gods therianthropomorphically, her hybrid nature is not intrinsically monstrous nor even necessarily ugly. The same goes for the crocodile-vulture demon with snakes in its hands, frightening off the nightmare demons—it's the ones you don't see that you should fear, the ones so bad they are never depicted, only written about, falling from the sky to fasten on the breast of the sleeper. They may be atypically represented in an image of crocodiles swarming a human form, but if so Lucarelli has never seen anything like the iconography again. More often they are the fill-in-the-blank in the oracular formulae of amulets: I/you/we shall keep him/her/NN safe from any kind of evil dead/demon . . . wanderers, disease-bringers, messengers, murderers. They can be subordinated to the goddess Sekhmet. Somewhere in here she introduced us to the headache demon Sehaqeq, scratched in black ink on an ostrakon—his name means "half-head" (shȝḳḳ), migraine. He looks like a young man with his arm flung over his face, as if he is having trouble bearing the light, but he has a tongue growing down his back. I would almost expect to find him in a collection of yōkai, but he's more than three thousand years old. It is still common to demonize illness, Lucarelli noted. Black dogs, brainweasels. It seems to help the patient. I had no idea that was what Tiny Wittgenstein was doing.
There is no formal demonology in ancient Egyptian culture as there is in Judaism. The demons in Mesopotamia seem to lean more toward the evil than the amoral. An incantation bowl is inscribed spiraling inward in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, an owl-like, bat-like demon at its center; it's Ashmedai, seen a beat later as Asmodeus in Collin de Plancy's nineteenth-century Dictionnaire infernal. (The bowls seem to have functioned as one-way fish-traps, drawing in the demon, containing it from moving around the house under whose threshold it was buried.) An amulet against Lamaštu depicts her trampling a donkey, overseen by her enemy Pazuzu, in nearly the same pose as the infant Horus trampling crocodiles under the approving eye of Bes: they look so similar and mean such different things. Everyone in the ancient world believed in demons, even if not exactly the same kind. It would have been strange only if the ancient Egyptians had not. The last slide was a modern photograph of a gazelle and a lizard hung apotropaically in the grate of a window. Demons and magic are still with us today.
There were questions afterward. Lucarelli pointed the audience toward the websites she's involved with: the interactive Book of the Dead in 3D, the snazzily named Demon Things. I tried not to mourn how badly my fast-penciled handwriting has disintegrated in the thirteen years since I was using it on the regular. The professor who had introduced the lecture wished everyone well on their way, safely protected by the right demons. I couldn't help noticing as I came home in the slushy black ice that I didn't have to wait for a bus once.
I had intended just to listen. I was (am) very tired and had planned just to sit at the back of the free lecture and try not to fall asleep. But then in context of our ideas of magic versus magic in ancient Egypt, she said, "Magic is a god," and I sat up. Magic's name in Egyptian is Heka; she showed a slide of him on the boat of Ra, a rather ordinary-looking male human figure holding the tail of a serpent squiggling in protective waves all around the sun-god as he journeys through the underworld night. Magic is not trickery, blasphemy, a practice against the gods. Magic is an integral part of creation, of maintaining the world. It can be distinguished from religion, just as demons can be distinguished from gods. By humans, it's used for defensive, curative, and transformative purposes, with love-spells serving as a subset of that last; they are considered aggressive magic, forcibly changing a person. But there is no concept of black magic in ancient Egypt, though any spell practiced against the pharaoh can be banned. A magician is not someone secretive and strange but a priest, a doctor, a local scholar. Anyone who deals with the liminal world.
Which is where demons come in. We see them represented side by side with gods, but gods exist in the mythic dimension, it is their work to look out for the living and the dead, they have cults, shrines, are worshipped; demons are appeased. They protect, but they have to be asked to do it. But they are not figures of inherent evil, even though the word we use for them has picked up so many connotations of temptation, punishment etc. in its passage through Christianity from the Greek δαίμων; that is all irrelevant to an Egyptian demon. They don't possess people, either. The closest we get is the language of disease personified as a demon seizing a patient, which anyone who has ever spoken of being knocked on their ass by a cold can comprehend without needing to call in Father Merrin. Lucarelli likened them more to Plato's original definition of daimones, liminal messengers between the mortal world and the divine; she likes Gregor Ahn's term Grenzgänger, which he considers untranslatable and she thinks can be adequately rendered as "boundary-crosser." They do not polarize between good and evil as in ancient Greek religion, however; there is no such thing as an Egyptian agathodaimon. They can be either or neither or both; it can be a meaningless question. Seen in the underworld of the Book of the Dead, they are not devils of hell but guardians, protectors, dangerous only to those who approach them without the right spells. Many-named and nameless, Lucarelli called them; some have snake wands in their hands; one has a duck on his head. There is no one word for what they are.
I could not write fast enough by hand to take down the names of some demons she identified when I was also trying to copy their Egyptian names; the only one I got in full was "Face-downward, numerous of shapes" (sḫd-ḥr, ʿšȝ ir.w). Others translated to "Radiant," "Sad of voice," "One who stretches out his brow." The otherwise human-formed demon with four cobras quirked above his head like interrobangs is known as "He who protects his body," i.e., the body of the deceased: the body that is his to guard. The wooden figurine of a gazelle-headed demon twists as dramatically as a Fosse dancer, an aggressive pose, Lucarelli said; it's part of the same group, crumbling black with plastered linen, as the demon with a turtle for a head. They too are tomb guardians. To address the question of scary rather than protective demons, she called up a criminally cute cartoon of Anubis and the Devourer, whose name now appears to be rendered "Amemet." Certainly she looks like a monster to us, that hulking composite of hippo-crocodile-lion alertly poised ("She's ready to go!") to engulf the heart that drops truth's scales with its weight of sin, but in a culture that represents its gods therianthropomorphically, her hybrid nature is not intrinsically monstrous nor even necessarily ugly. The same goes for the crocodile-vulture demon with snakes in its hands, frightening off the nightmare demons—it's the ones you don't see that you should fear, the ones so bad they are never depicted, only written about, falling from the sky to fasten on the breast of the sleeper. They may be atypically represented in an image of crocodiles swarming a human form, but if so Lucarelli has never seen anything like the iconography again. More often they are the fill-in-the-blank in the oracular formulae of amulets: I/you/we shall keep him/her/NN safe from any kind of evil dead/demon . . . wanderers, disease-bringers, messengers, murderers. They can be subordinated to the goddess Sekhmet. Somewhere in here she introduced us to the headache demon Sehaqeq, scratched in black ink on an ostrakon—his name means "half-head" (shȝḳḳ), migraine. He looks like a young man with his arm flung over his face, as if he is having trouble bearing the light, but he has a tongue growing down his back. I would almost expect to find him in a collection of yōkai, but he's more than three thousand years old. It is still common to demonize illness, Lucarelli noted. Black dogs, brainweasels. It seems to help the patient. I had no idea that was what Tiny Wittgenstein was doing.
There is no formal demonology in ancient Egyptian culture as there is in Judaism. The demons in Mesopotamia seem to lean more toward the evil than the amoral. An incantation bowl is inscribed spiraling inward in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, an owl-like, bat-like demon at its center; it's Ashmedai, seen a beat later as Asmodeus in Collin de Plancy's nineteenth-century Dictionnaire infernal. (The bowls seem to have functioned as one-way fish-traps, drawing in the demon, containing it from moving around the house under whose threshold it was buried.) An amulet against Lamaštu depicts her trampling a donkey, overseen by her enemy Pazuzu, in nearly the same pose as the infant Horus trampling crocodiles under the approving eye of Bes: they look so similar and mean such different things. Everyone in the ancient world believed in demons, even if not exactly the same kind. It would have been strange only if the ancient Egyptians had not. The last slide was a modern photograph of a gazelle and a lizard hung apotropaically in the grate of a window. Demons and magic are still with us today.
There were questions afterward. Lucarelli pointed the audience toward the websites she's involved with: the interactive Book of the Dead in 3D, the snazzily named Demon Things. I tried not to mourn how badly my fast-penciled handwriting has disintegrated in the thirteen years since I was using it on the regular. The professor who had introduced the lecture wished everyone well on their way, safely protected by the right demons. I couldn't help noticing as I came home in the slushy black ice that I didn't have to wait for a bus once.
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So, angels.
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My mother said the exact same thing. There's the angle from which I feel that by the time we get to angels per se there must be some justification for the two different words for malachim and sheydim, but there's also the angle from which I feel that the entities I heard described tonight could have been designated by either term depending on what they were doing at the time, so.
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wanderers, disease-bringers, messengers, murderers--angels. Love that.
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I loved it. I almost bailed from exhaustion at the last minute, but I'd been looking forward to it all week. I'm so glad I went.
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You're welcome! I had a wonderful time and I thought other people would like to know.
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It made me seriously happy.
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Asmodeus is an important character in Alan Moore's Jerusalem. There's an entire chapter from his POV, and he drives much of the plot in the rest of the book. He still bears a grudge against the exorcists of Ancient Persia, but apparently the Egyptians didn't cause him m much trouble :-)
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I thought so!
Asmodeus is an important character in Alan Moore's Jerusalem. There's an entire chapter from his POV, and he drives much of the plot in the rest of the book.
I'm partly copying myself from a post in 2012, but: I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but Ashmedai became a recurring figure in my personal demonology. I think it was almost completely because of his association with Lilith, the two of them the demonic rulers of di yene velt, the other world of Ashkenazi folklore—she leaves Adam because he will not lie beneath her in sex and on the shores of the Red Sea she finds Ashmedai who being a demon is apparently immune to human notions of heteronormativity and has no difficulties with a dominant woman and together they have about a zillion demon-children that die at a ferocious rate and cause every sort of problem from bedhead to sudden death and in the meantime everyone features in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. So if you find something to identify with in Lilith who chose God's judgment rather than conform, then Ashmedai becomes the partner who doesn't ask you to, there in exile on the wrong side of the mirror with you. They have both figured in multiple poems of mine ("Lilim, After Dark," "Postscripts from the Red Sea," "Madonna of the Cave," "Sheydim-tants," "Larva," "After the Red Sea") now. So far neither of them has made a direct appearance in fiction, but they're the kinky presiding spirits of "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?" The human protagonist of "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass" imagines them in their more stereotypically baleful aspects, but the demon she actually meets is a lot less clear-cut. On some level I want to blame Phyllis Gotlieb; after Eric Kimmel's Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins (1989), her novel A Judgment of Dragons (1980) was my formative image of Ashmedai even though he's not really the demon-king there, just a terrified nineteenth-century rabbi's only way of comprehending a time-traveling, shape-changing alien from seven hundred and fifty years in his future. It still stuck.
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You're welcome! I went in knowing some about Mesopotamian demons, but very little about Egyptian, and it only kind of helped. (Exorcism is a big deal in Mesopotamia.)
I particularly enjoyed that you had cause to write this sentence: "that is all irrelevant to an Egyptian demon". It made me smile.
I'm glad.
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You're welcome!
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DAMMIT IT'S TOO FAR TO TELL IF YOU SMELL LIKE DEMONS. I'LL HAVE TO ASK YOUR CATS.
(I'm very glad you went. It sounds amazeballs.)
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Autolycus thoroughly purred and kneaded me over when I got home, but that could mean anything.
(I'm very glad you went. It sounds amazeballs.)
(I had such a good time. I wish I'd taken better notes on the slides themselves—there were a lot of coffins and papyri.)
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You're welcome!
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You're welcome! It really seemed to want sharing.
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Nice! I have been coveting that from afar
I was pleased to note that the Assyrians had some rather splendid demons!
They did! My favorite is probably still Namtar, whom I eventually wrote a poem about.
(On the Babylonian side of things, I have been charmed for years by the existence of Šulak, the rābiṣu-demon who haunts the bathroom—the fifth-century exorcist-scholar Anu-ikṣur etymologized his name as "unclean hands.")
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I am delighted to enable.
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That's wonderful. Especially since Wepwawet showed up early in the lecture. Lucarelli had a lot of sympathy for him, being perpetually mistaken for Anubis.
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I wish I could find the Tumblr thread in which various people discuss whether Skittles could be used as bait for demon traps.
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You know, with absolutely no justification from the lecture, I assumed the text itself was the bait as well as the trap—that once you the demon start reading, you can't stop until you've followed the spiral all the way to the heart (and there you stay). I should find out how it was actually done.
[edit] So I got a hit on incantation bowls inscribed with formulae of divorce, which is sort of the opposite of entrapment, but it concludes with Jewish legal magicians. I hope someone's notified Max Gladstone.
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Those are **great** notes; I'm fascinated by what you write, and I love the demons' names.
Demons and magic are assuredly still with us.
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I mean, my feelings for Tiny Wittgenstein are sometimes affectionate as well as antagonistic and he's definitely been propitiated in addition to banished or bought off; I think he may really have graduated from personification to daimon. He's not getting a shrine, though.
Those are **great** notes; I'm fascinated by what you write, and I love the demons' names.
It was a fantastic lecture. I'm sorry I didn't catch more of the names! I bet you could find lists online.
Demons and magic are assuredly still with us.
I was just thinking of the way the typo demon has come around Tumblr lately.
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Somewhere in here she introduced us to the headache demon Sehaqeq, scratched in black ink on an ostrakon—his name means "half-head" (shȝḳḳ), migraine. He looks like a young man with his arm flung over his face, as if he is having trouble bearing the light, but he has a tongue growing down his back.
Well, that demon is for sure still with me. Where's a demon trap when you need one?
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You're welcome. I was out of practice but glad I could still do it.
Well, that demon is for sure still with me. Where's a demon trap when you need one?
I found an amulet against him, but the British Museum does not provide the text of it. You could see if leaving it lying prominently around helps anyway.
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I love scholarship that takes our modern associations with the terms and categories we use -- gods, demons, magic, the natural and the supernatural -- and says "okay, let's walk this back; let's see what we can learn about how they really saw this instead of assuming we already know."
(I've been on an ancient Egypt kick anyway, as I'm slowly working my way through John Romer's A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid, which I impulse purchased some time ago, and am loving it to bits. I've taken long enough in getting around to reading it that the second volume is now out, too! It's long and witty-but-dense, but I really really appreciate his commitment to reminding the reader of what we actually know, and what's only speculation no matter how compelling it sounds, and what we actually know about the Egypt of centuries later but in this period who knows what linguistic shifts have or haven't happened yet, and such.)
I ought to get an ancient history nerdery icon. This will have to stand in for the nonce.
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I'm glad to have been able to transmit them! I'm sorry I couldn't do the same for the images; I did not record the kind of data I would have needed to see if they were available online. The demon with a duck on its head appears to be totally unsearchable.
I shall have to look up Rita Lucarelli to see if she has a book that would make that possible, and check out those websites you mentioned.)
She has a book coming out. I want it.
I love scholarship that takes our modern associations with the terms and categories we use -- gods, demons, magic, the natural and the supernatural -- and says "okay, let's walk this back; let's see what we can learn about how they really saw this instead of assuming we already know."
Yes! That's the first and most important thing about the past. But it's amazing how many people think it's just now with funny hats on.
It's long and witty-but-dense, but I really really appreciate his commitment to reminding the reader of what we actually know, and what's only speculation no matter how compelling it sounds, and what we actually know about the Egypt of centuries later but in this period who knows what linguistic shifts have or haven't happened yet, and such.
That sounds great. Will you write it up when you're done?
I ought to get an ancient history nerdery icon. This will have to stand in for the nonce.
My sole classical icon is Derek Jacobi's Claudius. We're cool.
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You're still welcome! It was the kind of information I wanted to share with people, but I did not expect it to blow up.
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Nine
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Glad you enjoyed!