Around the twenty-fourth century BC, the builders of the pyramid of King Unas, at Saqqara, carved more than two hundred spells in hieroglyphs on the walls of the burial chamber. They were meant to help the dead king ascend to the sky and live for ever among the gods. Today these texts are called the Pyramid Texts, and the Egyptologist Geraldine Pinch, in Magic in Ancient Egypt, presents them as the oldest surviving collection of funerary literature. Many of them, according to her, must already have had centuries of use when they were carved in stone.
Egypt holds a central place on the map of this series, presented in Magic and spirituality in ancient civilisations: a map to get started. Few cultures left so many texts about gods, rituals and life after death.
A land made by the river
Ancient Egypt lived by the annual flood of the Nile. The water rose every year, covered the banks and left a fertile silt that made it possible to plant in the midst of the desert. The Brazilian historian Ciro Flamarion Cardoso wrote an introduction to this history in O Egito Antigo.
Pharaonic civilisation lasted about three thousand years, Cardoso explains, from the unification of the country, around 3000 BC, to the Roman conquest in 30 BC. In that time, religion changed a great deal. Even so, some ideas ran through every period.
Further east, in Mesopotamia, another civilisation was also arising beside rivers and also recording its incantations in writing. The two cultures knew each other, exchanged goods and, at certain periods, went to war.
Maat: the order of the world
The most important idea for understanding Egyptian religion is maat. The word gathers truth, justice, balance and order. Maat was also a goddess, represented as a woman with an ostrich feather on her head.
The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, in The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, describes maat as the principle that links the gods, the king, society and nature. Its opposite was isfet, chaos. For the Egyptians, the order of the world was not guaranteed for ever. It needed to be maintained every day, by the rituals of the temples and by the correct behaviour of people.
The pharaoh had a central role in this. He was the intermediary between the gods and humankind and, in theory, the sole priest of every temple. In practice, priests officiated in his name. Each morning, in the sanctuaries, the statue of the god was washed, dressed and fed with offerings.
Many gods, many forms
The Egyptians worshipped hundreds of gods. Ra was the sun, Osiris reigned over the dead, Isis was the wife of Osiris and a great knower of magic, Thoth was the god of writing and wisdom, Anubis cared for the dead and for mummification. Richard H. Wilkinson, in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, gathers the images and myths of each one.
Many appear with an animal’s head: Horus with a falcon’s head, Anubis with a jackal’s head, Sekhmet with a lioness’s head. Erik Hornung, in Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, explains that these images showed a quality of the god, without intending to depict his real appearance. Hornung also shows that the same god could have several forms and names, and that two gods could unite as one, as in Amun-Ra.
There was one famous exception. In the fourteenth century BC, the pharaoh Akhenaten gave a unique place to Aten, the solar disc, and set aside the cult of other gods. After his death, traditional religion returned. Hornung dedicates part of the book to discussing whether this phase can be called monotheism.
Heka: magic as a force of the universe
The Egyptian word we usually translate as “magic” is heka. According to Pinch, heka was an energy that the creator god used to make the world, and every act of magic was a continuation of creation. Heka was also a god, represented in human form.
The Egyptologist Robert K. Ritner, in The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, shows that the earliest mention of the god Heka is in the funerary temple of King Sahure, of the 5th Dynasty, where he leads a procession of offerings. Ritner’s central thesis is that, in Egypt, magic was practised by priests as the technique of religion itself. The Western separation between religion and magic, he says, does not serve to describe Egyptian practice.
Pinch reaches a similar conclusion. Rituals that today we would call magic were carried out chiefly by priests, and ritual magic was practised in the name of the state for at least three thousand years.
One of these specialists was the lector-priest, who recited the sacred texts in the temples and at funerals. Ritner shows that the title ḥry-tp, of the chief lector-priest, became in Demotic the word for “magician” and passed into Hebrew as ḥarṭummîm, the magicians of Pharaoh in Genesis and Exodus.
Magic was also part of daily life. Pinch describes healing spells in which the physician-magician identified the patient with the child Horus, who in the myth suffered and was healed by Isis. By repeating the story, he hoped that the forces of the cosmos would act for the sick person as they had acted for the god. Amulets, such as the Eye of Horus and the scarab, protected the living and the dead. Some plants and resins used in these rites appear in our text on the sacred herbs of the gods.
Life after death
The Pyramid Texts were reserved for kings. In the Middle Kingdom, similar spells began to be written on the coffins of elite people, and for that reason are called Coffin Texts. In the New Kingdom, from about 1550 BC, there appeared the papyrus rolls we know as the Book of the Dead. The Egyptians called them “formulae for going out by day”.
The most famous spell is 125. In it, the dead person is brought before Osiris and 42 judges, declares that they have not committed a series of faults, and their heart is weighed on a balance against the feather of Maat. If the balance remained even, they were declared “true of voice” and went on to eternal life. If not, a monster with a crocodile’s head, a lion’s forequarters and a hippopotamus’s hindquarters, called Ammit, would devour the heart. Jan Assmann, in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, analyses this judgement as the meeting between the morality of life and destiny after death.
The body also needed to be preserved. Mummification, the amulets placed among the bandages and the offerings in the tomb served so that the person might continue to exist in the beyond.
The next posts in the series look more closely at heka, the Egyptian gods, Isis, the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead and the Egyptian sky [coming soon]. Before Egypt, the series visits Göbekli Tepe.
Questions answered
Did the Egyptians separate magic from religion?
According to Ritner and Pinch, not in the way we do today. Heka was practised chiefly by priests, inside and outside the temples.
Was the Book of the Dead a single book?
It was a set of spells copied on papyrus rolls, and each roll carried a different selection, made for one person.
Why do the gods have animal heads?
According to Hornung, the animal head showed a quality of the god, such as the strength of the lioness in Sekhmet.
Mini-glossary
- Maat: the just order of the world, which gathers truth and balance; also the name of the goddess who represents it.
- Isfet: chaos and disorder, the opposite of maat.
- Heka: the creative force used by the gods and by priests, translated as “magic”; also a god.
- Lector-priest: priest who recited the sacred texts in the temples and at funerals.
- Book of the Dead: papyrus rolls with spells to guide the dead in the beyond, used from the New Kingdom onwards.
Bibliography
ASSMANN, Jan. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
ASSMANN, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
CARDOSO, Ciro Flamarion. O Egito Antigo [Ancient Egypt]. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982. (Tudo é História). In Portuguese.
HORNUNG, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Trans. John Baines. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
PINCH, Geraldine. Magic in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 1994.
RITNER, Robert K. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1993. (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, 54).
WILKINSON, Richard H. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.