When writing was magic
I am big! It's the books that got small.
The Book:
Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt
By Geraldine Pinch
Oxford University Press
2002
The Talk:
In her 2002 book Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt, Oxford Egyptologist Geraldine Pinch provides a lucid introduction to the main themes and figures of Egyptian mythology.
It’s a far more challenging task than you would think. One, because the immense amount of time—over 3,000 years. How would you describe “what people believed” from 1000 BCE to 2000 CE? Two, it’s challenging because there was no formal dogma or orthodoxy. Each region had its own stories, symbols, and divinities that would sometimes blur into other divinities. The same stories would be told with different gods. Multiple gods would be associated with the same ideas.
It’s one reason why Egypt is so ripe for wild conspiracy theories and why they must all necessarily be false. You can say “Egyptians believed X” and find evidence for it. But what they believed was not the same in every region of Egypt and was constantly changing with each new dynasty. There is no “pure” Egyptian belief system, just generalizations.
But what intrigued me most was the interesting way that writing played such an elevated role throughout Egyptian history, and the way literacy wove through their understanding of justice, death, destiny, religion, and magic.
To spell a spell
Writing and architecture in ancient Egypt, like writing and visual art, blur together. Gods and men known for writing and record keeping are also patron saints or gods of architecture as well. Writing was used to plan and execute architecture, and it was used in architecture itself, adorning walls of temples and burial sites.
Writing was also used on objects to enchant them. Spells were written on upright slabs of stone called stela. A person would pour water over the stone and the water would become enchanted by the spell written on it, and you could drink or bathe in the water to receive its protection.
And that’s all before we get to the book-scrolls, which have delightful names like the Book of Breathing, the Book of Nut, the Book of the Mounds of the First Time, and the Book of the Heavenly Cow.
Books were closely held secrets, and they were often copied for a person’s most important part of existence—their soul’s day of judgement and the journey through the afterlife. A dead king would be placed inside a room completely surrounded by magical texts on the walls, and they would also have copies of underworld “guidebooks” that would give them advice for navigating the geography of the dead.
Some of these books may, in fact, be reports of individual spiritual experiences or a kind of survey of induced psychic or near-death experiences. Pinch writes:
The Book of Two Ways has been described by Erik Hornung as representing “the results of government-funded research into the hereafter,” but research maybe too academic a word. The extraordinary visual detail in which the afterlife is presented has a hallucinatory quality similar to that of the “spirit voyages” induced by shamans in many cultures.
The reader-magicians of Egypt
Heroes in Ancient Egyptian mythology were more likely to be readers than warriors. Lector priests had a very particular set of skills—reading and writing—that endowed them with superhuman powers. Pinch tells the story of chief lector priest Webaoner who, finding out his wife has a lover, uses a magic scroll to create a small wax crocodile, which he throws into a lake, and it turns into a giant crocodile. The crocodile seizes the lover and and drags him down to the bottom of the lake for seven days.
In real life, the most famous non-royal ancient Egyptian is likely Imhotep of the 27th Century BCE, remembered as Egypt’s wisest sage, known for his writings and inventing stone architecture, and represented with an open book-scroll on his lap.
The founder of Greek medicine, Hippocrates, is said to have been inspired by books kept in the temple of Imhotep at Memphis. And a philosophical text known as the Ascelpius presents a dialogue between Imhotep and Thoth, one of the foundational esoteric works of Western heremetic (Hermes = Thoth) tradition (i.e. magic).
Thoth and Seshat, divine writer-librarian duo
According to ancient Egyptians, the god Thoth was the inventor of writing, wisdom, and secret knowledge. Among all the Egyptian gods described by Pinch, Thoth seems the most noble—known for his “humility, cunning, and perseverance.” (Good writer traits.)
Thoth was said to observe and write down everything that happened and report it to Ra each day. And when the heart of a dead person was weighed against a feather, Thoth dutifully recorded the divine judgement. All funerary spells were considered to be written by Thoth. Pinch writes:
A tradition grew up that Thoth had written forty-two books containing all the knowledge needed by humanity. Some of this was occult knowledge to be revealed only to initiates who would not misuse the power it gave them.
Late Hellenistic-Egyptian hermetic texts claimed to pass on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, which is Greek for Thoth the Thrice-Great. These hermetic texts (like the Asclepius) form the foundational texts of Western esotericism.
Most Egyptian gods had both a male and female aspect. The female counterpart of Thoth was Seshat, or Sechat, known as “she who is foremost in the library.” She was the keeper of royal annals and genealogies. In the Coffin Texts, Thoth and Seshat bring written spells to a man in the underworld to help him become a powerful spirit.
Together Thoth and Seshat knew all the past and the future. “They inscribed a person’s fate on the bricks on which their mother gave birth and the length of a king’s reign on the leaves of the ished tree,” writes Pinch.
The baboon in the moon
Thoth is often shown with an Ibis-head—that’s how I’ve always recognized him—but he’s also commonly represented as a baboon, especially when he is being associated with writing and scribes. Pinch speculates that this is “perhaps because a baboon’s dexterous hands resemble those of people. In a tale from the Greco-Roman Period, a magician makes two wax baboons come to life and write down thirty-five good stories and thirty-five bad stories.” 😂
Another god, a moon god named Khonsu (you might know him from Moon Knight) was also presented in baboon form as the Keeper of the Books of the End of the Year, books that contained the names of those who would die each year.
Baboons were associated with secret knowledge as well. They were kept as sacred animals in Egyptian temples, and some believed that “the most learned Egyptian priests understood the secret language of baboons. This was thought to be the natural language of true religion.”
The Egyptian “man in the moon” was a white baboon. And Thoth (along with Khonsu) was associated with the moon as well. In one myth, Thoth was given his baboon-moon form to rule the night sky “so humanity need not fear the dark.” Pinch writes, “In the Book of Two Ways, the spirits of the dead strive to join Thoth in the Mansion of the Moon.”
This doesn’t directly connect to writing, except insofar as Thoth was considered the inventor of the lunar calendar (another record-keeping activity). But one little factoid from Pinch’s book stood out to me: Egyptians are famous for domesticating cats, and it was believed that cat behavior was influenced by the lunar cycle. It’s interesting to consider the connection of cats to Egypt and the moon (Thoth)—and their later association with both witchcraft and writers.
Indistinguishable from magic
My big takeaway from Pinch’s book is that when we look at ancient Egypt everything is blurry. It’s kind of like looking back at the beginning of the universe, when everything that we think of as distinct was all smushed together. Today we have discrete disciplines and specializations. But if we go back in history, science merges with philosophy, art merges with architecture, religion merges with magic, politics merges with economics.
And if we go back even further, philosophy and religion merge together, and art merges with religion, and science and technology are impossible to unthread from religion and art and government.
Eventually, magic = science = philosophy = religion = technology = art = politics = economics.
An Egyptian holy day where statues are paraded through the city is read by modern eyes as a political event, an economic event, a religious event, an artistic/entertainment event, that also relates to the natural world, astronomical cycles, as well as showing off architecture that requires mathematical knowledge as well. Thus, an ancient Egyptian lector priest (to our modern eyes) was a religious-philosophical-magical-governmental-artistic identity.
Today we see ourselves much differently. Government has lost its religion. Religion has lost its science. Science has lost its philosophy. Philosophy has lost its literature. And literature has lost its magic. The perennial allure of the ancient is, I think, the longing for a cultural unity we feel we’ve lost, a loss that has left every field of endeavor more dry, less meaningful, riddled with blind spots, and lacking in direction. The hungered work is the work of repair.
Related:
How to survive in ancient Egypt
Apotropaic Wand (The Met)
Meditation-Induced Near-Death Experiences: a 3-Year Longitudinal Study (PubMed)
Spelling Out the History of 'Spell' (Merriam-Webster)