Relief from the temple of Hathor at Dendera – a woman squats to give birth, helped by two goddesses.
There was another kind of heartache magic promised to help with, too – good old-fashioned lovesickness. If you wanted to make someone fall in love with you, or stay in love with you, there was a magic spell for that. Likewise if you wanted to get even with someone who had spurned your affections, or the rival who had captured their heart. One magical handbook includes a recipe for making the hair of a hated woman fall out: boil the seeds of a blue lotus, steep them in vegetable oil, and find an excuse for rubbing it into her head. There seem to have been fewer options for magical revenge on fickle men. Ancient Egypt was a patriarchal culture, and male magicians, priests, and scribes were responsible for almost all the written records that survive. Let’s just hope that Egyptian women had other means of sharing effective curses with each other. A recipe to make a man go bald would certainly be a good start, although time often offers that particular salve.
We get a better idea of how women used magic when we look at fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for infants. Although the written evidence for these practices also comes from sources largely created by men, we know that it was women who assisted other women in childbirth, as documented in more or less every society through history. When goddesses gave birth in myths, they, too, had the help of other goddesses as midwives. A male magician might have been called in to administer a spell or offer some supernatural advice now and then, but the mysteries of conception and birth required women’s wisdom, passed down through time.
Relief from the temple of Hathor at Dendera – a woman squats to give birth, helped by two goddesses.
Paintings of marsh scenes refer to sensual pleasures and hidden dangers – here in the tomb of an official named Menna.
Childbirth was one of the most important events in most women’s lives, and one they might experience several times. The safe birth of a child wasn’t solely an individual concern but a social one, shared by the wider community. The expectant parents, their extended family, and their entire village or neighbourhood would have seen childbirth as part of the interlocking cycles of cosmic renewal, including the changing seasons of the year and the daily rebirth of the sun. The story of Isis and her son Horus was an important source of divine inspiration for pregnant women and new mothers, so much so that over time, the male-dominated world of the Egyptian temple started to include a dedicated mini-temple where the local goddess could magically, eternally give birth to the temple’s main god. Making love and making babies is what keeps the world turning.
With every potential renewal, however, came the worry that things might go wrong. A woman might not be able to get pregnant, or to carry a pregnancy to term. Giving birth was fraught with danger for both mother and child, and even after a successful delivery, the mother’s body needed to recover and an infant needed to be able to nurse, gain weight, and flourish. Small wonder that a host of magic spells, and charms, administered by wise women with the help of specialist demi-gods, existed to help ensure a successful outcome in the face of cosmic threats.
As the old jazz standard puts it, ‘I’ve got it bad, and that ain’t good’. This love song might be the ancient Egyptian equivalent:
For seven days until yesterday I have not seen my beloved. Illness has possessed me.
My limbs have become heavy, and I have lost all control over myself.
If the greatest of doctors came to me, my heart would not be satisfied with their remedies.
Even the reading-priests cannot find the way. My illness is not recognized.
Even the reading-priests – those experts on magical literature – seem to have floundered in the face of lovesickness. Magic was no cure for a broken heart, but some familiar magic symbols, such as watery realms and crocodiles, make an appearance in verses of yearning like these. Sensual, even sultry, love poetry often has a rhythm in the ancient language that suggests it was set to music – and music was one way to woo a lover and ‘enjoy a pleasant hour’, as the Egyptians would have put it, with a knowing wink.
The pleasures of love and sex were an important part of life, even if they sometimes led to heartache and betrayal – or even baldness, if that spiteful recipe for hair loss really worked. What emerges from the ancient love songs, which are often set among lush gardens, the life-giving marshes, or drunken festivals, especially in honour of Hathor and other goddesses, is a sense of playful eroticism. The poems – ‘sweet songs’, as one papyrus called them – praise the beauty of young women waiting to meet their male lovers, or vice versa, since male beauty was equally celebrated. ‘He offered me the charm of his loins’, one young woman declares, concluding happily with the observation that ‘it is longer than it is wide’.
Lovers often met on the banks of a river or canal in these poems, and one makes explicit reference to the water-spells that magically protected the couple from the animals who lurked in the waters. ‘A voracious crocodile was waiting on the sandbank,’ laments a young man trying to reach his girlfriend on the opposite side. Fortunately, her love is so strong that it enchants the crocodile and turns it into a mouse. Other songs were quite explicit about what would happen when the two lovers managed to meet: ‘Fill her gateway,’ one advised: ‘It will shake, and her arbour will overflow.’
Many objects and motifs in ancient Egyptian art complement the imagery of the love songs – and provide further clues that romance wasn’t the only magic at work in such couplings. Scenes painted on tomb walls during the New Kingdom show lush banquets where beautifully adorned guests drink wine while musicians and dancing girls perform. The atmosphere is intensely erotic, with incense, perfume, and flowers scenting the air. The guests and musicians wear floral wreaths, their best braids, and diaphanous clothing – or, in the case of the dancing girls, no clothing at all. Scholars have suggested that these scenes may represent religious festivals, in particular those in which drunkenness and music were meant to lure Hathor, the sun-god’s daughter, back to Egypt after she has flounced off in a huff. This, or a similar, festival may have been timed with the arrival of the flood at new year, with its promise of new life. Encouraging and celebrating human fertility was a natural counterpart to this natural process.
It also looks like it was a lot of fun. Certainly the ancient Egyptians themselves made ribald jokes and satirical sketches out of such occasions. A famous, if fragmentary, papyrus roll in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Turin has drawings of a religious festival in which animals take the place of the priests, followed by several explicit scenes that show beautiful, bored-looking young women having sex with balding, paunchy men, in absurdly acrobatic positions. There was a serious side to sexuality in a religious or magical context, though. The reason Hathor needed to return to Egypt, according to myths, was so that her health, wholeness, and beauty would encourage her father Ra to regenerate himself overnight; no less than the continued survival of the cosmos was at stake.
To us, the Turin papyrus may seem exploitative or pornographic, while the idea of a divine daughter using her beauty to entice or inspire her father is downright repugnant. But as we’ve seen time and again, myth and magic often operate on the edge of social taboos, or consciously subvert them. Moreover, the apparent objectification of beautiful adolescent females in art might well have appealed to women as well as men. Spoons for perfume oils with handles in the shape of nubile, nude girls were probably used by both men and women, as were small make-up vessels in the form of cheeky monkeys. The goddess Hathor – whom the Greeks equated with Aphrodite – had both male and female devotees, judging by offerings made in her honour at the temple of Deir el-Bahri on the edge of the Valley of the Kings. These included faience bowls, perhaps used for festive drinking or to leave offerings (or both), which were decorated with images such as tilapia (Nile catfish, another symbol of fertility, because of its observed behaviour of keeping its numerous young safe in its mouth), lotus flowers, or women strumming harps, reminiscent of the musicians in tomb paintings of banqueting scenes. Hathor and other goddesses, such as Isis, were also associated with a musical instrument called the shesheshat after the soothing, rattling sound it made, which has come down to us, via Latin, as a sistrum.
Wine, perfume, and lotus flowers lend a heady air to banquet scenes in New Kingdom tombs.
A rare painting on leather combines music with comic sexuality.
But what if you weren’t having any luck in love, even with the help of music and alcohol? There were magic spells to help a man attract – and keep – a woman, such as this one, which calls on the god of the evening sun and Hathor in her seven-fold form and was said to foretell the fate of newborn babies:
Hail to you Re-Horakhty, father of the gods! Hail to you, seven Hathors who are clothed in wrappings of red linen! Hail to you, gods, lords of heaven and earth! Let So-and-so [the desired woman] come after me like a cow going after grass, like a maidservant chasing after her children, like a herdsman looking after his cattle.
The magician concludes the spell by threatening to set fire to the ancient Delta city of Buto if it fails, but let’s hope it didn’t come to that.
Thwarted love and cheating lovers never did bring out the best in anyone. In the tales of magical exploits told to entertain King Khufu, prince Khafre offers the story of a chief reading-priest named Webauner who discovered that his wife had taken a lover, whom she liked to meet near an ornamental lake in their garden. Webauner made a wax crocodile, performed a spell over it, and gave it to one of his gardeners to place in the lake, where it promptly came to life and seized the lover. Webauner turned the crocodile back into wax, and sent his straying wife to the king for punishment. Needless to say, she was not met with much sympathy. Written by and for an elite male audience, ancient Egyptian stories like the Khufu tales often depicted women as scheming or unfaithful, such as the stunning priestess Tabubu in the stories of Setne.
The magical texts often reflect the same male-centred concerns, so it’s no surprise to find magical-medical prescriptions designed to inflame lust in a reluctant woman or to help a man get and maintain an erection. As a cure for impotence, one recipe suggested grinding acacia and Zizyphus leaves with honey, and applying the remedy to the unresponsive body part with a bandage. Attempts to improve male sexual potency were not just for recreation, but also for reproduction; the ancient Egyptians understood that male sperm was necessary for conception. And reproduction meant rebirth in a more mystical sense as well: a spell in the Coffin Texts promised that after death, the deceased would be able to have sex night and day, with as many women as he chose. A man was obviously the default setting for such funerary magic.
Men resorted to magic to win women over in life as well. Less appealing was a spell to try to make a woman fall in love – or lust – with you. It was written down in two forms of Egyptian, with some words spelled out in unusual ways, as if the scribe were uncertain or wanted to confuse anyone who might stumble across the papyrus and try to read it. The scribe also put some key words into cryptic characters, making the meaning even more difficult to decipher; these ultra-secret words are in boldface below:
To make a woman crazy [with desire] for a man. You should bring a live shrewmouse, remove its gall, and put it in one place; remove its heart and put it in another place. You should take its whole body and pound it carefully when it is dry. You should mix a little of the pounded remains with a little blood from your second finger and the little finger of your left hand; you should put this in a cup of wine and make the woman drink it. She is crazy for you.
The shrewmouse was sacred to the sun-god, which might explain its appearance in this recipe. Any woman who found out that pulverized shrewmouse and human blood had been added to her wine certainly had good reason to go crazy, but perhaps not in the way the magician and his scheming client had intended.
Attracting a specific woman was the intention of one of the most complete – and chilling – examples of ancient magical practice found in Egypt. Dating to the Roman period, the find consists of a ceramic pot that contained a clay figure and a tightly rolled sheet of lead. The clay figure represents a naked woman with carefully coifed hair, her knees bent and her arms behind her back, pinioned like a bound prisoner, while the lead sheet was incised with directions to the magician about how to make and use the figurine. The magician was to take thirteen copper needles and stick them into specific parts of the figure’s body, including the sensory organs, genitals, navel, hands, and feet, reciting each time, ‘I am piercing your ears, eyes, mouth [and so on], so that So-and-so [the woman] will remember no one but me’, ending each time with the name of the male client.
A clay figure pierced with needles matches the instructions in a curse tablet found buried with it.
The result is a well-made, fired-clay figure that looks like a voodoo doll, stuck through with thirteen needles – the holes for which had to be made before the figure went into the kiln, since fired clay is too hard to pierce. In a similar way to knots made in cords or strips of papyrus, the needles fixed the magical wish to the figure’s body, rather than harming the body of the actual woman the figure was meant to represent. In other words, it isn’t magic meant to cause harm or pain. Nonetheless, looking at this ensemble today, it seems like a rather extreme measure for trying to win someone’s love or loyalty. This is one of the ugly sides of Egyptian magic, and we can only hope that the woman in question found someone more deserving.
If your romance went smoothly – ideally without the need for impotence remedies, powdered mice, or figures to use as a pincushion – you and your beloved might find yourself in the family way. The sexual imagery of the love poems, banquet scenes, and decoration of more everyday objects, like cosmetic containers, all evoked the fecundity of the natural world and the fertility of human beings. While some magic clearly reflected specifically male concerns about sexual performance, on a cosmic level, it was in everyone’s interest to make love – and make babies.
Having children was the norm in ancient Egyptian society, but for some people, that was easier said than done. At the village of Deir el-Medina, a couple named Ramose and Mutemwia made several devotional offerings to divinities associated with fertility and childbirth, but they never seem to have had a child of their own. Of course, there were also women who wanted or needed to avoid getting pregnant, perhaps because they could not afford another child, or because they were having sex with someone other than their husband, or as a way to earn a living. Since the ancient Egyptians understood that male ejaculation led to pregnancy, inserting something into the vagina to try to block the sperm seemed worth the attempt, if you could stomach the pessary of sour milk, honey, and ‘crocodile dung’ (perhaps soil of some kind). Alternatively, you might brew up a herbal contraceptive recipe; one called for celery to be smoked with grains of emmer, then mixed with beer and vegetable oil, boiled, and taken for four mornings in a row.
In addition to using contraceptives, a woman might want a test to determine whether or not she was pregnant. One magical-medical text instructed a woman to fill one bag with emmer wheat grains and another with barley. By moistening each bag with her urine every day, she would soon have an answer: if both varieties of grain sprouted, a baby was on the way. A modern doctor in England put this ancient remedy to the test in laboratory conditions, but found that there was absolutely no correlation between seed sprouting and whether or not the urine sample came from a pregnant woman.
Staying pregnant was a worry, too, judging by spells that guarded against unexpected or heavy bleeding, of the kind a woman would experience during miscarriage. One such spell combines an incantation with the knotting of a cloth, to be inserted into the vagina to staunch the flow and magically try to stop it altogether:
Anubis has come forth to keep the flood from trespassing on what is pure: the land of Tait. Beware of what is in it. This spell to be said over the threads on the border of a textile, with a knot made in it. To be applied to the inside of the vagina.
Tait was the goddess of linen, which made her an appropriate focus of a magic spell requiring linen, and Anubis may have been invoked here because of his association with the sacred linen bandages used in wrapping the mummified dead. The spell calls for a strip of linen with a fringe on one edge, meaning that it came from the end of the cloth, where some threads had been left unwoven, as was sometimes done for decorative effect. Knotting the textile served both to ‘fix’ the magician’s words into it and to bulk up its absorbency. Heavy bleeding at the wrong time of the month was an alarming symptom at any time, but all the more so during pregnancy. The spell compares excess or ill-timed bleeding to a Nile flood that was higher than expected and thus destructive – another instance of a good, healthy, life-affirming thing, like a menstrual period, turning into a disaster, in this case a private and poignant one.
Once a pregnancy was safely established and starting to show, the inevitable questioning would start: what are you hoping for, a boy or a girl? The trusty emmer-and-barley pregnancy test promised a solution here, too. After an expectant mother had applied her urine to the bags of emmer and barley for several days, she should observe which sprouted first: if it was the barley, she would have a boy. If it was the emmer, prepare for a girl. No doubt older women in the household or community had their own opinions to share on this matter as well – predicting a baby’s sex seems to be a pastime as old as the pyramids. No one would really know whether a little Ramose or a Nefret was on the way until the mother was safely delivered of a healthy child. Giving birth – whether for the first time or the fifteenth – was a pivotal moment in the life cycle of a woman, her family, and the infant whose life hung in the balance. For childbirth was also mysterious, painful, messy, and dangerous: definitely something for which you’d want every kind of magic on your side.
Just as Isis and Horus, the archetypal mother and child, were a crucial reference point in Egyptian healing magic, so too did they provide a magical model for the safe delivery of a baby and its subsequent survival. Infant and child mortality was high (perhaps 10 to 20 per cent), as was the risk of a mother dying in childbirth, or shortly afterwards from infection. Similar patterns have been the norm in most societies around the world, and ancient Egypt was no different.
As the goddess of sexuality and fertility, Hathor was also invoked in protective magic for childbirth. In later periods of Egyptian history, Hathor was closely linked to the dwarf-god Bes, who was an important aid to women as they laboured. This animal–human hybrid was closely linked with the protection of newborn babies, and often appeared in Horus-on-the-crocodiles motifs, usually directly above the vulnerable Horus, as on the Metternich stela. His human body had the proportions of an achondroplastic dwarf, and his face was that of a lion’s, framed by a mane and contorted so that the skin creased, the eyes bulged, and the tongue protruded from an open mouth. His leonine face and exposed genitals frightened away evil spirits, and some images show him wielding a short sword or knife for the same reason. Bes was also prone to bursts of unrestrained dancing and musical performances; on his own or with the hippo-goddess Taweret, he can be depicted strumming a stringed instrument, shaking a tambourine, or banging a drum, although whether this was to frighten off spirits, celebrate the occasion, or (more pragmatically) cover the cries of the woman in labour, is difficult to say. But it was probably his human nature that invited his association with children; although it sounds like an insulting attitude to us now, in ancient Egypt a dwarf’s ‘childlike’ physical proportions suggested that he or she was eternally youthful – they grew without growing up.
Some magic spells that aimed to ease the pain of childbirth invoked the Isis and Horus story, Hathor, and Bes (or another dwarf deity) all at the same time. One such spell instructs the magician to place a plant-based poultice on the head of the suffering woman, while reciting this spell-within-a-story several times:
I am Horus. I was thirsty, and I came down from the mountain. I found someone calling out, weeping. His wife was nearing her time. I got him to stop weeping. His wife called out for an image of a dwarf, made of clay. Let someone hurry to Hathor, the lady of Dendera, to fetch her healing amulet, so that Hathor will make this woman give birth!
Figures of Bes flank Taweret on the arm of a chair from an 18th Dynasty tomb.
The magician identified himself or herself with Horus, and presumably came prepared with exactly the kind of clay dwarf figure called for in the spell, as well as the ingredients for the poultice (acacia leaves, perhaps; the writing is unclear). While we tend to assume that written, recorded spells like this one were intended for use by male magicians, we know that it was women who helped other women give birth. Therefore we should be open to the possibility that some midwives also knew how to use such spells, recipes, and images in their work.
A clay figure of a dwarf also featured in a spell that seems to encourage safe delivery of the placenta:
Come down, placenta, come down! I am Horus, the magician, and the woman who has given birth is already feeling better, as if she has finished her labour.…Hathor will place her hand on this woman as a healing amulet. I am Horus, who saves her!
This spell was to be recited four times over the clay figure before setting it at or near the woman’s head.
The placement of the figure near the new mother’s head suggests that by that point, she was lying down and having a well-earned rest. However, a seated or squatting position was the usual position in which women delivered their babies, as we know from some rare depictions of childbirth (not to mention human biology). Stacks of bricks made of sun-baked clay may have offered support for women to squat on or lean against as they laboured. Conventionally there were four of these birth bricks, the number associated with the four cardinal directions. The bricks were collectively given divine form in the goddess Meskhenet, whose name meant ‘bricks’. She is one of four goddesses who arrive at the house of Redjedet to help deliver her of triplets in one of the nested stories of magic told to entertain King Khufu. Meskhenet sometimes appears, in the form of a brick, next to the balance scales in the judgment scene from the Book of the Dead. Birth bricks were placed in the four walls of royal burial chambers during the New Kingdom, another example of the conceptual link between the birth of a child and the rebirth of the dead.
A rare example of a decorated birth brick was excavated at the site of Abydos in southern Egypt in 2001. It was made of mud, formed in a mould and dried in the sun and each external face preserves traces of colourful decoration. The short sides of the brick were painted with protective animals and demi-gods, while its largest preserved surface depicts an elegant woman, seated on a throne with an infant on her lap. Another woman stands behind her, and a third kneels in front of the throne. Each woman has blue hair. Blue was a special pigment both because it had to be created artificially (as opposed to organic white, black, red, and yellow) and because of its divine symbolism. Gods and goddesses were said to have hair made of lapis lazuli; therefore, colouring the hair of the female figures in blue suggests that they are meant to represent women of divine status. The emblems that frame the scene bear the cow-faces of the goddess Hathor, giving a further clue to the imagery evoked on this otherwise modest-looking object. Some of the protective figures on the sides of the brick have blue hair or bodies, too, including a lion-faced female holding snakes, who resembles the wooden figure found in the Ramesseum magician’s grave.
Mud brick painted with birth scenes – and perhaps used by women in childbirth.
Scholars have suggested several options for how these bricks might have been used, whether for women to squat or lean on during the delivery, or to help define a zone of protection around the labouring woman. Bricks could also be lined up to form a protective platform on which to place the newborn baby. Any or all of these are possible. Women seem to have retreated to a space set apart for birth, whether in their own household or somewhere nearby, and may have stayed apart from the normal routines of the community for several days or even weeks while recovering from the birth and nursing the infant. Many of the practices around birth will have depended on the social status of the mother and her family, of course. At Deir el-Medina, a village that housed the skilled artists who decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, several houses have elevated platforms in the front room, decorated with images of Bes and young female musicians. Some scholars have suggested that these offered a space for lovemaking and childbirth, but they may simply have served as places for prayers and offerings aimed at ensuring the health and wellbeing of the entire household.
Another suggestion is that an outdoor structure of some kind sheltered labouring women and new mothers. The idea of a birth arbour or bower comes from depictions of nursing women surrounded by vine-like plants and sitting under some kind of pergola, although whether such images should be taken to represent real spaces, or symbolic ones, is difficult to say. The vines may be birthwort, Aristolochia clematitis, a twining plant with heart-shaped leaves, the juice of which has been used in some cultures to induce labour, encourage sleep, and support the functioning of the womb. A coffin made for a woman named Isis, whose mummy does not survive, represents her in a splendid white robe holding stems of birthwort in her hands, inviting the question of whether she might have died in childbirth. The same plant may decorate the shrine or bower in which a statue of a princess named Meketaten is shown in a tomb for the royal family at the city of Amarna; the tomb scene depicts her funeral rites, which seem to allude to her having died after delivering a grandchild for King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti.
Regardless of where a woman gave birth, there was a time-honoured magical tool to protect her and her child: a wand made of hippopotamus ivory and incised with protective spirits and demi-gods, and sometimes the names of the mother and child. These birth tusks, as they have recently been termed, have usually been found in burials – including the Ramesseum magician’s tomb – but they were clearly used in life. Many have been repaired after a break, or show signs of wear and re-working along their sides and especially at their pointed ends. These well-rubbed ends may have been used to mark out a protective circle for any number of magic rites, especially those related to childbirth and children – the tusks are often associated in tomb scenes or burials with women identified as caring for children. We can easily imagine that such tusks were a valued part of a magician or midwife’s equipment.
Birth tusk, made of hippopotamus ivory and incised with magical figures.
The images incised onto the birth tusks were not for decorative purposes, but magic ones. They include animal figures from the magical menagerie, such as lions, baboons, and a lion-hippo hybrid, plus frogs, turtles, and a fantastic winged wildcat with a falcon’s head. Human figures with animal heads make an appearance too, notably the Bes-like figure sometimes named as Aha, and a similar figure with female breasts, usually grasping snakes in either hand and, therefore, more or less identical to the blue-painted figure on the edges of the Abydos birth brick. The similarity of such images, and the way they echo the forms and symbolism of other figures of similar date, suggests a coherent cosmic realm of protective forces on which magicians could call in the centuries around 2000 to 1500 BCE. And although much of this symbolism is connected to childbirth, we should not imagine that this restricted it to birthing events or to stereotypically ‘female’ concerns. Protection against harm was something everyone needed – starting with the smallest, and newest, members of the community.
Magical protection didn’t stop with the moment of birth. Newborn infants are entirely helpless, and if something had gone wrong during the pregnancy or birth, for instance malnourishment or the death of the mother, the risk to the newborn was considerable. Baby’s first amulet could be made as follows:
‘Are you warm in the nest? Are you hot among the bushes? Is your mother not with you? Is there no sister to offer a breeze? Is there no nurse for protection? Let there be brought to me beads of gold, beads of carnelian, a sealing-bead with a crocodile on it, and a hand-pendant(?) to slay and to dispel the female demon Mereret, to warm the body, to slay the male and female enemies in the West. You will break free!’ This is a protection [sa]. To be said over beads of gold and carnelian, a sealing-bead with a crocodile, and a hand-pendant. To be strung on a strip of fine linen, to be made into an amulet and applied to the throat of a child. Good.
What the spell instructs the magician to make sounds like a rather pretty beaded necklace, but this was not merely jewelry. Each bead had a particular magical meaning, giving the necklace the power to ward off any demonic threats to the child.
A mother’s own milk was the best and most obvious choice of nutrition for a newborn. Ancient Egyptian women were probably also aware that nursing could be a form of contraception, since it delays the return of ovulation in some women. The use of wet nurses seems to have been an established practice, whether because the mother had died, because she didn’t produce enough milk, or perhaps for reasons of preference or social status. Wet nurses themselves could be women of high status: several tombs honour women who had been royal wet nurses, or a high-status man might honour his wet nurse in his own tomb, as if she had become part of the family. A tiny faience feeding cup found in the village of Lisht in the Fayum has a spout small enough to drip milk or liquified food into an infant’s mouth. Depicted around the outside of the cup are protective figures similar to those incised on the birth tusks, as if imbuing the milk offered to the child with additional, magical nourishment. If the cup were used for an ailing infant, perhaps one whose own mother couldn’t feed him or her, there is an added poignancy and precariousness to the nourishment that child needed in order to survive.
Already at the moment of birth, the midwife’s action of clearing mucus from a baby’s mouth may have inspired the Opening of the Mouth ritual that sem-priests performed on newly-made statues and on wrapped mummies to make them fully alive and sentient. During this rite, the priest touched the mouth of the statue or wrapped mummy with an instrument known as the netjery (‘divine’) tool, in the shape of two small fingers – all that would fit into the mouth of an infant. The need to separate the infant from its mother’s body meant cutting the umbilical cord became part of the ritual as well. To do this, the midwife used a flint tool with a split blade at one end; its bifurcated shape was ideal for cutting through a tube or cord. This tool, called the peshes-kef, became part of the ceremonial equipment for Opening the Mouth. The priest also presented the statue, or wrapped mummy, with two jars called the breasts of Isis and Horus, which represent the nourishment of breast-feeding. Through these ritual gestures and recitations, the private act of giving birth was transformed into the cosmic act of being reborn after death, which connected pregnancy and motherhood to one of the greatest supernatural concerns that ran throughout Egyptian society.
Feeding cup in faience, circled with protective knives and animals.
Miniature column with Hathor-emblems, the same form favoured at temple birth-houses.
By the Late Period (c. 600 BCE), the cosmic connections of giving birth began to play a more prominent role in Egyptian mythology and temple ritual. The main god or goddess worshipped in a temple became part of a family group consisting of mother, father, and divine child. Every divine mother needed a safe place for labour and delivery, and as a result, shrines or small temples dedicated to childbirth began to be built. Known in Egyptology as mammisi (from a Coptic Egyptian phrase meaning ‘place of birth’), these birth temples were usually located just in front of the gateway to the main temple. The decoration of the birth temples included Bes, often with musical instruments, and goddesses to assist at the delivery. The main focus of the decoration was after the birth, when the divine child was breastfed by his mother and placed on his throne. Like Horus, every newly born deity was male and destined to be king. Birth temples could be seen as examples of what happens when high-status men take over an otherwise female domain, like childbirth, and turn it to their ends. Still, the goddess who gave birth to the divine child was there to protect and nourish him, as Isis had done for Horus – and as the Virgin Mary would do for Jesus not long afterwards, when early Christians turned to ideas of holy pregnancy and divine birth for their own supernatural superstar.