Wooden headrest incised with an image of Bes to protect the sleeper.
Given how many things could go wrong in life in ancient Egypt, it’s no surprise that people looked for ways to try to predict or influence the future by supernatural means. Egyptian society valued order and predictability, summed up in the concept of maat – cosmic justice – and epitomized by the annual return of the Nile flood. But like the level of the flood waters, which priests monitored at measuring points known today as Nilometers, life did not always yield what you had hoped. If magic could give a hint at what was to come, or deliver divine advice, why not accept a helping hand from higher powers?
All magic tried to create an optimal outcome for the user, whether that meant flourishing crops, a healthy child, or a faithful lover. Predictive magical practices tried to stop a problem from arising in the first place, whether by seeking supernatural advice or identifying the most auspicious time to take a certain course of action. As we’ll see in this chapter, some predictions took place in a public forum. In small, close-knit communities, individual choices could have an impact on everyone, after all – and the priests who organized public predictions were undoubtedly aware of the potential ramifications. Other methods of predicting the future, or interpreting the gods’ advice, took place in private forms of consultation, where the role of the magical expert was to guide the inner reflections of the client.
Although we find no direct equivalent in Egypt for the ancient Greek concept of fate (embodied in the Greek goddess Nemesis), there was nonetheless an element of fatalism in ancient Egyptian thought. Living was tough and death was the only thing waiting at the end. No wonder it could seem as if the gods had it in for humankind, as if the course of life had been predetermined, set on a path entirely out of our control. Birth magic alluded to this idea in the form of the Seven Hathors, avatars of the goddess that were said to attend the birth of a baby and decide its fate. Yet the incredible array of magical practices in ancient Egypt make it clear that people hoped to have a hand in their own fate, too, even if the odds sometimes seemed stacked against them. When she was in a good mood, Hathor herself would certainly have agreed that hope springs eternal – and what could be more magical than that.
The ancient Egyptians saw sleep as a stage of consciousness in which meeting with a ghost or god, usually bearing a positive or helpful message from beyond, was possible. As a prince, the future pharaoh Thutmose IV fell asleep at midday in the shadow of the Sphinx at Giza, and dreamed the sphinx itself – embodiment of the god Horemakhet – asked him to clear away the sand that had drifted over it. This he did, and erected a 3.6-metre (12-foot) high stela between the paws of the Sphinx to record the episode.
But you didn’t need to be royal to receive messages in your sleep. At the village of Deir el-Medina, a scribe named Qenherkhepeshef owned a library of papyri that passed to his wife and her family after he died, during the reign of Ramses II (c. 1280–1210 BCE). Among them is the earliest known manual for the interpretation of dreams, which its owner might have used only for himself or to give advice to others. Dreams are always described as acts of sight, as if the sleeping person is having a vision, and symbols in dreams are treated as omens of what might come. The manual lists dreams in neat rows, using a formula that runs like this:
If a man sees himself in a dream, drinking wine, good, it means living according to maat.
If a man sees himself in a dream, seeing a crane, good, it means prosperity.
If a man sees himself in a dream, seeing a large tomcat, good, it means a large harvest will come.
For these dreams that give good omens, the link between what the dreamer sees and what it means is sometimes rather general (wine-drinking – positive!) and often based on wordplay. For instance, the Egyptian word for a crane, dja, echoed the sound of wedja, meaning prosperity. The ‘large tomcat’ in the last example may be the mythical cat that kills the evil serpent Apep, ensuring the renewal of the sun and life itself – including, logically, a good harvest.
Dreams that delivered bad news worked on similar principles, often alluding to social norms that became negative only in the context of the dream:
If a man sees himself in a dream, having sex with his wife during the day, bad, it means his god will see his crimes.
If a man sees himself in a dream, writing on a papyrus scroll, bad, it means his god will judge his crimes.
In the first example, it isn’t that making love by day was necessarily bad, but that it created the possibility of being caught in the act, just as the gods might catch out wrong-doing. Likewise, the act of writing was ordinarily very positive in ancient Egypt, but here, a dream about writing seems to evoke the judgment of the dead, where the god of writing, Thoth, recorded the outcome of the divine tribunal.
Wooden headrest incised with an image of Bes to protect the sleeper.
In addition to the divination of dreams, there were several magical measures sleepers could take to encourage good dreams and guard against nightmares. Spells against nightmares called for four clay cobras with fire in their mouths – possibly oil lamps – to be placed in the corners of the sleeping room (see Chapter 4). Sleeping on a headrest decorated with protective images, such as Bes figures, also helped ensure sweet dreams and an uninterrupted night.
Using dreams to predict the future or seek advice was a practice that continued into Roman times, with several dream manuals written in the Demotic Egyptian language and script that was used in later periods of Egyptian history. Magic could help someone invite a god to visit them in their dreams, as this spell explains:
O Isis, O Nephthys, O noble spirit of Osiris Wennefer, come to me, because I am your beloved son Horus. O gods who are in the sky, O gods who are on the earth, O gods who are in the primeval ocean, O gods who are in the south, O gods who are in the north, O gods who are in the west, O gods who are in the east, come to me in this night, instruct me about such-and-such a matter, about which I am enquiring. Quickly, quickly, hurry, hurry.
Words to be said over a benu-bird drawn with myrrh water, juice of any-wood, and black ink on your right hand and recite these writings to it in the evening, while your hand is outstretched opposite the moon. When you go to sleep, you put your hand under your head. Good, good, four times.
The title for this spells calls it a peh-netjer, or oracle, of Osiris, the idea being that it granted the sleeping person the chance to consult Osiris directly through the magically induced dream.
Another way to solicit a message from the gods is known by scholars as incubation, although this kind of incubation had nothing to do with hatching eggs. It refers to the practice of sleeping inside the accessible spaces of a temple, or in rooms specially designed for the purpose, in hopes that the god or goddess of the temple would appear in a dream. It isn’t clear if this practice was available to everyone equally, or if it required certain payments, preparations, or social status. In Roman Egypt, large temples had special sanctuaries set aside as sleeping quarters, and priests were probably on hand the next morning to help interpret what you had seen. The advice of a priest or magician was often necessary to decipher what the gods were trying to tell you; dream manuals seem to collect such advice for consultation either inside or outside the temple. If you could extract the messages from your dream, you might adjust your daily schedule according to what they advised, or shape longer-term plans to heed whatever warning, or encouragement, the dream had offered.
Another way to decide a propitious, or inauspicious, time for any activity you might want to undertake was to consult a calendar of good and bad days. These calendars probably originate in the temple sphere, where priests followed restrictions on certain festival days, but they seem to have circulated more widely too. The calendars use black ink to indicate good days and red ink for bad ones. Ignore the warnings and suffer death by crocodile. Some of the ventures warned against on specific days were building a house, setting off on a journey, or having sex. Many calendars prohibit particular foods or drink on certain days, another indication that these calendars might reflect priestly regimens. Day three of the first month of Akhet, at the start of the year, was a lucky day as long as you didn’t eat fish, while the next day was unlucky for anyone with heart trouble, who was sure to drop dead.
The worst possible time to start any new venture was during the demon days that fell at the end of the 360-day solar year and before the start of the flood season, normally in mid- or late July. As we have seen, these five ‘extra’ days, separating one year from the next, were dangerous times, requiring special amulets to protect against the violent forces sent out by an angry Sekhmet. A papyrus now in Leiden includes a spectacular spell to try, with the recitation first and the instructions afterwards:
Hail to you gods, murderers who stand in waiting upon Sekhmet, who have come forth from the Eye of Ra, messengers in every district who cause the slaughter, who create uproar, who race through the land, who shoot arrows from their mouths, who can see from afar! Be on your way, be distant from me. I shall not go with you. You shall have no power over me. You shall not throw your net over me, to catch me for the slaughter. You shall not cause me any bad luck this year, for I am Ra, who appears in his Eye. I have arisen as Sekhmet, I have arisen as Wadjet [the cobra-goddess]. I am Atum in the temple, the lord of mankind, who made the gods. I am the Powerful One, lofty and high!
Words to be said over a piece of fine linen. These gods are to be drawn on it, and it is to be knotted twelve times. Offer them bread, beer, and burning incense. Apply the amulet to a man’s throat. A means to save a man from the plague of the year; an enemy will have no power over him. A means to placate the gods in the retinue of Sekhmet and Thoth. Words to be said from the last day of the year to the first day of the new year.
The violent imagery of the spell brings the threat of the demon days vividly to life, countered by the magician who speaks in the voice of the gods – first Ra, then his daughters or ‘Eyes’, Sekhmet and Wadjet, and finally Atum, a creator-god of such potency and mystery that he was simply known as ‘the Powerful One’.
What a relief it must have been when New Year’s Day finally dawned. Festivals in every town and temple greeted the start of the new year, when all the demons were banished (at least for a little while). Special flasks holding sacred water were distributed at these events during the Late Period (c. 650–400 BCE). Made of pale-green faience, the flasks had to be formed and fired well before the festivals took place. Many are decorated with images of papyrus plants from the Nile marshes and floral wreaths around their necks. Hieroglyphic inscriptions wish the recipient of the flask a happy new year, or in Egyptian, wep-renpet nefer, literally, a good, beautiful, or perfect (nefer) repeating-of-the-year. We don’t know if the water inside the flasks was water that had been through some magical transformation, like the water poured over healing statues and Horus-on-the-crocodiles images. It’s a possibility, though, and the flasks demonstrate the close connections that temples created between priests, rituals, and the rhythms of everyday life.
New Year’s flask made of faience, inscribed for a priest named Amenhotep, son of Iufaa.
Dream manuals and the almanac-like calendars of lucky and unlucky days reveal how Egyptians tried to chart their course in life by optimizing what the future had in store for them. Thanks to the connections that existed between temples and their local communities, however, there was a more direct and public way to consult the gods as well. Egyptian oracles were very different from the oracles of the ancient Greek world, which could be contacted only at certain places (famously Delphi), via the person, often a woman, who served as the god’s mouthpiece. In contrast, in ancient Egypt consulting an oracle was a public affair that took place during festivals, when a processional statue of the local god or goddess was carried out of the temple and paraded through the streets, held aloft by priests. The Egyptians referred to these festivals as peh-netjer, meaning ‘the god’s arrival’, because they were among the rare occasions when people other than priests found themselves in the presence of a divine image – even if that image was shrouded and partly concealed inside a shrine, high up on the model boat in which it ‘sailed’ through the crowds.
Procession oracles worked by writing yes-or-no questions on pieces of papyrus or potsherds and leaving them in the path of the procession. The god steered its boat towards the correct answer, as the divine power magically moved the priests in one direction. (This worked especially well if the questions had been submitted to the temple ahead of time.) The opinion expressed by the god had the weight of a legal decision: ‘Is it So-and-so who has stolen this mat?’ might declare someone’s guilt or innocence. The gods were also asked for their advice on business matters: ‘Is this calf good so that I may accept it?’ Consulting the oracle was taken seriously – records from the reign of Ramses IX (c. 1125 BCE) show that a workman was granted time off to go and file a petition, perhaps in advance of a procession. In the 7th century BCE, fifty priests witnessed an oracle of Amun-Ra at Karnak in Thebes, after one of their members consulted the god for permission to transfer to the priesthood of a nearby temple in honour of the god Montu. Amun-Ra did grant his permission, and this momentous event was recorded on a papyrus more than 5 metres (16 feet) long, signed by each of the priests who witnessed it.
Unfinished stela of Amennakht, showing a sacred boat procession used as an oracle.
Oracles worked by magic, of course. Specifically, they worked by the force of heka that animated the gods and, thus, the priests and processions that conveyed their wishes. As the divine embodiment of magic, the god Heka was known as the ‘lord of oracles and lord of revelations, who predicts what will happen’, and his name could be written so that it looked like the expression for an oracle, peh-netjer. But oracles clearly played an important social role, as well as their divine one. The public forum in which they took place must have allowed the local priesthood to resolve local disputes and ease tensions, or conversely draw attention to unethical or illegal behaviour that was otherwise without redress. This put considerable power into the priests’ hands, and there must have been times when the movement of the oracle was picked over and debated like a close election result. Pride and property were often at stake.
In later periods of Egyptian history, when Egypt was embedded in the wider Mediterranean culture of Greece and Rome, priests and magicians developed further methods for soliciting a god’s opinion or forecasting the future. Not only could someone sleep in the temple and hope to see (and hear) the god in a dream, but magicians also began to use young boys as mediums to channel the words of a god directly. Magic manuals written in Demotic instruct the magician to have the child stare into an oil lamp, presumably to mesmerize him, or to stand facing the rising sun at dawn, with a similarly blinding effect. It was the magician’s role to interpret whatever messages the poor boy had to deliver. Magicians delved into divination by drawing lots as well: the client would toss a numbered die or chose numbered tickets, which the magician had to interpret; some numbered systems involved complex calculations, which no doubt ensured the result seemed especially mystical and reliable. Divination manuals dating to the early Roman era, written in Demotic, explained what certain numbers meant, sometimes offering encouragement to the diviner: ‘Be patient! This omen is hard at first, but in the end, it is good.’ Like the dream manual of Qenherkhepeshef, lists of omens collected formulaic observations that might also have been used in lot divination, or in everyday life. One example, from a village in the Fayum in the 1st or 2nd centuries CE, offered interpretations of animal behaviours to make predictions about business prospects, family life, or health. If a mouse touched a pregnant woman and it jumped away, she should beware the risk of miscarriage. Cows, donkeys, horses, scorpions, owls, and ants could all act as omens, but fate was never fixed in these manuals. Praying to the gods always offered a way to alter your destiny.
By the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE, some of the oracle rituals reminded the Greek visitor of the oracles he knew from his own culture. It seems that at some Egyptian temples, specific shrines or parts of temples had become places to consult the gods and receive an answer to requests. A priest conveyed the answers to the petitioner, but the words were said to come directly from the gods. Sometimes a ticket system was in operation, whereby petitioners submitted their question in written form on two pieces of papyrus, one expecting a ‘yes’ answer and the other a ‘no’. Whichever ticket came back to you gave you the answer.
Scholars debate whether small, concealed chambers in some temples allowed a priest to be the voice of a divine image, creating a talking statue that worked a little bit like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. Though we might view such a practice with some cynicism, if both the petitioner and the priest believed that the gods moved in mysterious, magical ways, there was no reason for this not to be a perfectly serviceable way to communicate with the divine. During the Roman period, an oracle of the dwarf-god Bes at Abydos was believed to speak to visitors. This ancient city was believed to be a gateway between this world and the next, which made it a particularly potent spot. The city was sacred to Osiris, and the desert cemeteries included the tombs of the first kings of Egypt and a vast temple built by King Sety I (c. 1290 BCE), which is where the Bes oracle took place. As late as the 4th century CE, petitioners sent letters to Bes or came in person, from all over the eastern Mediterranean to seek his guidance. Pilgrims who slept in the temple’s incubation chambers might receive a message from Bes in the night by following the instructions in this spell:
Request for a dream oracle of Bes: On your left hand, draw Bes. Wrap your hand in a dark cloth of Isis and go to sleep without speaking to anyone. Wrap the rest of the cloth around your neck. Keep a small table near you so that you can write down what he says, lest you forget it after going to sleep. Sleep on a reed mat, with an unbaked brick near your head.
The papyrus included a sketch of Bes to copy, and even a recommended recipe for making the ink. Some contemporary writers looked down on Bes and other oracles as superstitious. Even worse, there were worries that Egyptian oracles were potentially subversive elements against the rule of the Roman emperor; in fact, Constantius II ordered the closure of the Bes oracle in the year 359 CE. Even so, archaeological evidence and written sources indicate that the Bes oracle at Abydos was welcoming pilgrims a hundred years later.
Egyptian priests were keen observers of the night sky, using their knowledge of astronomy to plot out monthly and annual cycles of religious ritual, culminating in the new year marked by the rise of the river’s floodwaters. The alignment of the moon and stars was perceived as significant, and from as early as the Middle Kingdom there were priests who specialized in observing the movements of the heavenly bodies by night, perhaps from the rooftops of temple buildings. The moon, individual stars, and constellations of stars were associated with Egyptian deities and woven into myths and magical imagery: Thoth, the ibis-headed moon-god of writing and knowledge, the hippo-hybrid goddess associated with Ursa Major, and the dog-star Sirius (Sopdu, in Egyptian), which was identified with Isis, the Great Lady of Magic herself.
These hour-priests, as they were known, used their observations of the stars and knowledge of mythology to judge which days of a month or year were likely to bring good or ill fortune – the likely origin of the calendars of good and bad days. The rising and setting of constellations known as decans (because they were visible for ten nights) was linked to the mummification process, which lasted exactly as long as the seventy days required for the decans to reappear after their trip to the Duat. Observing the stars also led the ancient Egyptians to divide the night into twelve hours, which were sometimes represented as demi-goddesses with stars on their heads along the inside of a coffin lid. The interior of coffins and the ceilings of burial chambers were two of the first places where representations of the night sky appeared in Egyptian art, along with the five planets visible with the naked eye: Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Venus. Most of the planets were identified with forms of the god Horus. Mercury was sometimes identified with Seth, and Venus, ‘The Crosser’, could be depicted as a heron. Depicting the stars and planets on the ceiling of a tomb was a display of sacred knowledge, as well as connecting the deceased to the cosmos that he (and it was usually a he) was about to join.
Drawing of the night sky, from the ceiling of the tomb of Senenmut.
The ancient Egyptians clearly had a good grasp of astronomy and were interested in using it to inform day-to-day decisions. But they did not develop a form of astrology, that is, reading the position of the stars and planets at the moment of a person’s birth in order to gauge their character and life-course. The twelve signs of the zodiac that we know today grew out of astronomical observations and astrological ideas in ancient Babylonia (modern Iraq). From Babylonia, knowledge of astrology began to circulate in the Greek-speaking world, which, from around 400 BCE onwards, included Egypt. Astrology may have found a ready audience in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, given the ancient relationship between the night sky and Egyptian myth and magic. Casting horoscopes must have seemed like a logical next step, or at least a welcome novelty. The earliest horoscope found from Egypt dates to 37 BCE and was written in Demotic, as was typical at the time.
But Egyptian magicians may already have realized the potential of using the planets to predict someone’s future. A man named Harkhebi, who was both a scorpion-charmer and an hour-priest in the Delta city of Buto, is known from a statue that was set up in his honour in the 2nd century BCE. In the statue’s hieroglyphic inscriptions, Harkhebi presented his many accomplishments, which include his expertise in identifying snakes and healing snake-bites – and his ability to read the omens of the sun and the dog-star Sirius. It wasn’t astrology per se, but it does suggest that Egyptian thought was leaning that way. By the first or second century CE, a bilingual Greek and Demotic magic handbook did include instructions for casting a horoscope, which the scribe seems to have translated from Greek into Demotic as best he could. To top it off, he attributed the horoscope method to no less than Imhotep, the famous sage who had lived some three thousand years earlier. Hey presto, astrology had an Egyptian lineage.
The Egyptian priesthoods also embraced the zodiac with enthusiasm. A chapel at the temple of Hathor at Dendera had an elaborate ceiling of carved sandstone that showed the sky as a disc, held up at each corner by four goddesses and pairs of falcon-headed spirits. Thirty-six decan constellations surround the edge of the circle, equalling 360 days of the year, and the twelve signs of the zodiac are visible inside it as well, many in the familiar forms they take today: a scorpion for Scorpio, a crab for Cancer, a lion for Leo, a bull for Taurus, and the balance scales for Libra. Several other constellations adorn the sky, including our old friend the hippo-goddess, with a crocodile on her back.
In fact, the entire composition within the circle offers a map of the night sky at a specific point of time, which scholars can pinpoint to between 15 June and 15 August of the year 50 BCE. Included among the imagery are representations of a lunar eclipse (shown as an Eye of Horus) that took place on 25 September 52 BCE, and a solar eclipse (Isis holding the baboon of Thoth) known to have occurred on 7 March 51 BCE. These events must have been important enough in the life-cycle of the temple to merit recording them, along with the zodiac signs, in one of the rooftop chapels, perhaps right next to the roof space where such astronomical observations took place. The particular alignment of the stars in the summer of 50 BCE must also have been propitious to warrant its commemoration.
Early 19th-century engraving of the circular zodiac on the ceiling of the temple of Hathor, Dendera – now in the Louvre.
At the start of the 19th century, the zodiac of Dendera became famous in Europe thanks to drawings that were made by the French artist and diplomat Vivant Denon. Denon was among the artists and engineers brought to Egypt by Napoleon when he invaded the country in 1798, and although Napoleon’s troops were eventually defeated by the British, the work of Denon and other scholars lay the groundwork for a new European encounter with Egypt. Engraved and printed in Denon’s popular travel memoir, his drawings of the zodiac inspired theories about its age, its possible astrological meaning, and its religious significance. In 1821, a French engineer sawed and dynamited the zodiac out of the temple ceiling in Egypt and shipped it to Paris, where it entered the Royal Library and was later removed to the Louvre museum. That, alas, was a future that no Egyptian priest had ever foreseen.