A magician’s equipment? Line drawings of the magical objects found in a box in the Ramesseum tomb.
Sometime around 1650 BCE, in a tomb cut deep into the earth, an Egyptian magician was sent to the next life with the tools of his trade in this one: magic wands and figurines, and a box containing a bundle of reeds (spare pens) and his library of papyrus scrolls, in case he needed to check the exact wording of an incantation. Painted on the lid of the box was a hieroglyphic sign: a jackal stretched out on its belly, with its head high and ears alert. The sign meant ‘secrets’, perhaps labelling the contents of the box, or referring to the tomb-owner’s profession – one of the titles given to Egyptian priests who specialized in reading, writing, and magic was ‘master of secrets’.
Magic permeated the everyday landscape of life in ancient Egypt, but core to magic is its secrecy. Magic has to be mysterious in order to work. Otherwise, anybody could do it, and clearly not everybody can. If that might seem to dash the hope of trying out some ancient Egyptian magic, don’t worry. Thanks to discoveries like the magician’s tomb, we have a pretty good idea of how magic worked in ancient Egypt – and we can start to see why it mattered so much. The ancient Egyptians set great store by their magicians and the power of magic to make things happen. They had a word for magic – heka – and clear ideas about a magician’s responsibility to use heka to help those who were unable to help themselves. Though that’s not to say that magicians didn’t get up to other tricks as well, as we know from ancient adventure stories telling tall tales of their exploits.
This book takes ancient Egyptian magic seriously by taking it on its own terms. Within these pages, you’ll find spells to ease labour pains and headaches, spells for becoming invisible, and spells requiring magic wands, voodoo-dolls (sort of), and an Abracadabra. There’ll be tales of fantastic beasts, secret chambers, and trips to the underworld, as well as tips for predicting the future. There will be a pinch of salt here and there; after all, the salt compound natron was ancient Egypt’s best-performing detergent, and a crucial ingredient in mummy-making. Before we get carried away on a winged sun disk, though, let’s first look in a little more detail at the magician’s tomb, or what’s left of it. That will help us understand what we mean when we talk about magic in ancient Egypt, and what the ancient Egyptians themselves thought magic could do – and who could do magic.
When British archaeologists discovered the tomb shaft in the winter of 1895–96, they found that the two burial chambers at the bottom were empty of any inhabitant – no coffin, no mummy, and no hint of the occupant’s name. The reuse of tombs at this time was common, and faithfully buried mummies often found themselves evicted in later years. Only the box of papyri and the objects found around it offered a clue to the original owner’s identity. The shaft has become known as the ‘Ramesseum tomb’, because about four hundred years after the burial, a temple now known by that name was built above it in honour of King Ramses II (1304–1213 BCE). But it is also sometimes known as the ‘magician’s tomb’, because of the objects found within.
This 3,600-year-old magician’s kit contained a fascinating array of specialist equipment: wands made from curved hippopotamus tusks, incised with turtles, baboons, long-necked lions with wings, and knife- and snake-wielding demons; a bronze wand in the shape of a rearing cobra; and small figurines, including a lion and several baboons, one of the animals sacred to Thoth, the god of writing. There were beads and amulets, a little cup shaped like a lotus flower, and miniature models of food, including a melon or squash and a bunch of grapes. Three figurines in the form of naked women, made without any lower legs and feet, may have raised Victorian eyebrows at the time of the discovery. Similarly strange was a wooden statuette representing a naked woman whose face has the features of a lioness. She holds a miniature metal snake in each hand, resembling some of the figures incised on the ivory wands.
A magician’s equipment? Line drawings of the magical objects found in a box in the Ramesseum tomb.
This collection of artefacts makes more sense the more scholars have studied similar material from around the same period, as well as the texts written on the scrolls found in the ‘secret’ box. Many of the objects found in the Ramesseum tomb show signs of long use, wear, and repair. The wands had been broken and put back together in ancient times, and the wooden statuette with snakes in its hands had been adapted at least once, perhaps to fit a new plinth. Any or all of these objects may have been heirlooms, made more precious and powerful by being passed down from one magician to another, until finally the decision was made to inter them in the tomb. Perhaps there was no one left to inherit them, or perhaps this particular ‘master of secrets’ wanted to take them with him. Who was going to argue with a magician, even after he was dead? Or especially after he was dead, since magic could even be used to move between this world and the next.
The box vanished at some point after the discovery, before the papyri and objects were divided between several museum collections in England, and the scrolls had been crushed, meaning that they have had to be painstakingly reconstructed from fragments. There are some secrets we’ll never know. But there is quite a lot that we can piece together, like those fragmented scrolls. The papyrus was of the very best quality, and the texts were written in both hieroglyphic script and hieratic, a shorthand form of hieroglyphs that was easier and faster to use on papyrus. The box contained at least two dozen scrolls, representing a library built up over many years and perhaps handed down through generations, since, like many of the objects, some of the papyri had been reused and repaired over time. Among the many different texts written on them, there are hymns to the gods, ritual instructions for religious festivals, and classic works of Egyptian literature, including poems, adventure stories, and advice on living a good life. Magic spells predominate, though, from instructions for making amulets that can protect the body from harm to spells that call on the goddess Isis to help protect a house from any evil spirits that try to enter it. There are spells to ward off ghosts, snakes, and bad dreams; spells to drive away the demons that cause fever; and spells to guide a woman safely through childbirth and protect her newborn baby. Dealing with snakes, scorpions, and crocodiles was all in a day’s work, and that’s before we get to the ghosts and demons. You might still be baffled, for now, about the figurines of naked women or baboons, but perhaps you can start to see why a magic wand, or three, could come in handy.
A magician’s methods were top-secret, but what magicians were capable of doing was common knowledge in ancient Egypt. And that takes us to the heart of why magic mattered. Magic was not just a show for entertainment, nor was it surreptitiously used to strike out against the people who were in charge in Egyptian society. In fact, magic was used by the people in charge. It belonged to gods, kings, and priests, the latter of which is what our ‘master of secrets’ almost certainly was.
If that seems surprising, it’s because modern ideas of religious worship tend to treat religion and magic as if the two were opposites. Early scholars, like the archaeologists who found the Ramesseum tomb, considered religion a logical, orderly expression of belief in the divine, imposed on a populace and maintained by the top levels of society. They dismissed magic or witchcraft as mere superstition, a ‘folk’ practice that perverted higher ideas about divine presence by trying to influence and control divine power. Over the course of the 20th century, however, anthropologists and historians started to suggest other ways of thinking about magic. Among these was the proposition that if the people living in a given society themselves give great credit to magic and magicians, shouldn’t we take those people at their word?
That’s the approach that most Egyptologists take today, and it’s certainly the approach you’ll find in this book. By abandoning the attempt to categorize objects and practices straightforwardly as either ‘magical’ or ‘religious’, it becomes easier to consider magic in ancient Egypt from something closer to an ancient Egyptian point of view. Mysterious as magic was, it had its own logic and its own moral code. Through the work of priest-magicians, like the anonymous Ramesseum master, magic helped to maintain order in Egyptian society, whether that meant helping to settle disputes between neighbours, trying to heal the sick and reassure the worried, or, crucially, if more abstractly, keeping the cosmos in its correct alignment. The cosmos wasn’t considered supernatural. Far from it: it was as natural as breathing, and sunrise, and birdsong, and it was all the more precious – and vulnerable – because of it. Magic was a way to protect the world and everything within it.
A distinctive feature of magic is that it tries to bring about an observable or tangible effect – a change that bends a little bit of the cosmos in the magician’s favour. Some Egyptian magic had a clearly malicious intent, usually cursing an enemy, and some spells try to manipulate another person, such as bewitching a woman into falling in love. But the most common otherworldly intervention that most magic requested was simply a helping hand to survive. Life in the ancient world was tough, and most people had little control over their lives. They died of diseases we can cure with a pill today; families could be ruined by bad luck, or a blow to the breadwinner’s reputation. But magic might be able to restore the balance when the odds were stacked against you by invisible enemies. The more extreme your problem, the more perilous the effort of addressing it might be. Therefore you needed someone equipped to deal with the potential danger of bridging the divide between the visible and the invisible, a specialist who was trained to see the unseen and to speak the secret language of the world’s unfathomable forces. What you needed, in other words, was a little magic, and a magician to make it happen.
Magic could be used in the wrong way, too, of course – there was no doubt about that. Legal documents from the reign of Ramses III (c. 1175 BCE) show that one of his many wives plotted to have the king murdered, in order to manoeuvre her own son onto the throne. This conspiracy involved, as well as several government officials, at least five men who had knowledge of magic, according to their priestly titles. They were accused of using sorcery, magic potions, and wax figures to sway fate in the queen’s favour – but the plot backfired, and most of the conspirators probably met painful deaths. But magic itself was not vilified; the problem was using magic against the king, the pinnacle of Egyptian society and a person who, like the gods, had his own deep resources of heka on tap.
In this hands-on guide to ancient Egyptian magic, you can try to tap into a little heka for yourself. There will be potions to brew, wax figures to enchant, and plenty of wordy, worthy spells to recite. At worst, you’ll make a mess in the kitchen – or conjure someone up from the dead. At best, you can make yourself invisible and leave the cleaning-up (and the ghost) for someone else to deal with. Consider this a light-hearted look at a serious subject. Magic mattered to the ancient Egyptians, so it should certainly matter to anyone who has ever wanted to know more about them.