Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
Speaker 2: are kicking off our spooky content today. I guess we
Speaker 2: already kind of kicked this off with Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 2: but at this point we are definitely sliding into October,
Speaker 2: and if you've listened to the show before, you know
Speaker 2: that this is a time for us to get into
Speaker 2: a lot of horror themed content, Halloween e content, and
Speaker 2: that includes episodes of Weird House Cinema, that includes short episodes,
Speaker 2: and of course it includes core episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind. So that's going to be the course
Speaker 2: for the month. On the whole, there is going to
Speaker 2: be our fall break week as usual, in which we'll
Speaker 2: have reruns, but guess what, all of those reruns are
Speaker 2: going to be Halloween content as well, so we will
Speaker 2: keep the Halloween train rolling. Oh.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's more frightening than a visitor from the past.
Speaker 2: There you go, There you go. That kind of ties
Speaker 2: into some of what we'll be talking about here today,
Speaker 2: because in today's episode, we're going to dive into the world.
Speaker 2: We're going to return really to the world of ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptian curses. We've touched on some of this before when
Speaker 2: we frequently come back to Egyptology related content, either talking
Speaker 2: about archaeological finds, the history of ancient Egypt, we're talking
Speaker 2: about something in ancient Egyptian religion that's really fascinating, or
Speaker 2: of course anything and sort of in the realm of
Speaker 2: Egypt Domania. You know, this long lasting fascination that other
Speaker 2: cultures have had with the culture and the ideas and
Speaker 2: even just the look and the feel of ancient Egypt.
Speaker 2: So in this episode, we're going to talk about it,
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptian religious practices, ancient Egyptian magic. We're going to
Speaker 2: also look at this idea of the curse in ancient
Speaker 2: egypts and with some specific examples I think, mostly related toombs.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about twentieth century myth making about
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptian curses. And finally, we're going to look at
Speaker 2: a case from outside of Egypt that has, I don
Speaker 2: know it lines up in rather interesting ways with some
Speaker 2: of the ideas that have been generated about ancient Egyptian curses.
Speaker 2: Within the twentieth century. All right, and before we jump in,
Speaker 2: I want to mention too that last Thursday I attended
Speaker 2: an online class by egyptologist and former guest on the
Speaker 2: show Colleen Darnell, titled Curse of the Pharaohs. I found
Speaker 2: it super insightful and the information and sources presented in
Speaker 2: that class were part of my initial research for this episode.
Speaker 2: She does these classes on different egyptology topics each month.
Speaker 2: I highly recommend them. You can learn more about them
Speaker 2: at Colleen Darnell dot com. So I'll refer back to
Speaker 2: some of her ideas and content, as well as some
Speaker 2: other sources once we get into it. But let's get
Speaker 2: down to brass tacks here. Let's talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about Egyptian magic.
Speaker 3: Indeed, let's talk about Egyptian magic. I think this is
Speaker 3: a good groundwork to lay because curses, of course, are
Speaker 3: not the only kind of magic that was practiced in
Speaker 3: ancient Egypt. They're a particularly savory, delicious kind of magic
Speaker 3: from a modern sensibility to understand. But yeah, I think
Speaker 3: it's good to understand the general context of Egyptian magic
Speaker 3: a little bit better before we narrow in on curses themselves.
Speaker 3: So to better understand ancient Egyptian magic. I turned to
Speaker 3: a there's a really good overview in a book by
Speaker 3: Geraldine Pinch called Magic in Ancient Egypt, published by the
Speaker 3: University of Texas Press nineteen ninety four. Geraldine Pinch is
Speaker 3: an Egyptologist we've referred to on the show plenty of times.
Speaker 3: Born nineteen fifty one. She is affiliated with the University
Speaker 3: of Oxford, and I mainly want to in this section
Speaker 3: talk about some distinctions and frameworks that Pinch invokes in
Speaker 3: the first chapter of this book to give a way
Speaker 3: of the land about how the ancient Egyptians viewed and
Speaker 3: used magic. And at the beginning here it's worth noting
Speaker 3: the long and varied textual and archaeological record of magic
Speaker 3: and ancient Egypt. While magical amulets and other objects go
Speaker 3: back into prehistory, magical texts from ancient Egypt are found
Speaker 3: from like the late third millennium BCE until about the
Speaker 3: fourth century CE, So it's more than three thousand years
Speaker 3: worth of texts concerning magic, many of which are written
Speaker 3: records of spells themselves, like we have the primary documents
Speaker 3: we have thus spells. That's pretty cool, not just people
Speaker 3: talking about magic, but we have like the recipes, and
Speaker 3: in this chapter, Pinch identifies sort of three main categories
Speaker 3: of magic. You've got funerary magic, that's what concerns death
Speaker 3: bear in the afterlife. You've got temple magic, which is
Speaker 3: ritual magic performed in temples by priests or religious authorities,
Speaker 3: often aimed at various forms of public welfare outcomes that
Speaker 3: concerned lots of people at once. And then finally, you've
Speaker 3: got personal or everyday magic, the spells and rites used
Speaker 3: by individual people for help in situations that they faced personally.
Speaker 3: Funerary magic is arguably the class that we know the
Speaker 3: most about, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was the
Speaker 3: most important. It obviously was very important, but the fact
Speaker 3: that we know so much about it seems to be
Speaker 3: in large part related to what type of evidence was
Speaker 3: preserved and passed on down to us. A lot of
Speaker 3: our best preserved evidence from ancient Egypt comes from tombs,
Speaker 3: so it's kind of natural that we just know a
Speaker 3: lot about funerary and funerary practices and things having to
Speaker 3: deal with death in the afterlife. There are two Egyptian
Speaker 3: words used most often to refer to magic. One of
Speaker 3: these words is Heca or Hika, usually spelled in English
Speaker 3: h e Ka, which is also the personal name of
Speaker 3: an Egyptian god. The god Heca was usually depicted in
Speaker 3: human form, but the word Heca was also used to
Speaker 3: refer to not just this god in personal form, but
Speaker 3: to a type of energy or force used by the
Speaker 3: creator deity to create. So in the Egyptian creation myth,
Speaker 3: you usually have some form of there's this primordial water,
Speaker 3: this abyss of chaotic water is known as the nun
Speaker 3: or noon in u n and then out of this
Speaker 3: abyss comes a mound of dry land upon which creation
Speaker 3: can take place. And Heca here is related to this
Speaker 3: spirit of creation that takes shape here, and this association
Speaker 3: continues throughout Egyptian history with the power of magic or
Speaker 3: heca often understood as a as a type of creative spark,
Speaker 3: a power to make and to mold. So it's this
Speaker 3: interestingly loaded concept there. In some literal sense, it did
Speaker 3: refer to magical power, but you could also think of
Speaker 3: it in weird ways as being similar to like the
Speaker 3: idea of will or will power. You could think of
Speaker 3: it in some ways as being similar to like creativity
Speaker 3: or energy. Yeah, yeah, Interestingly pinchnotes that the god Heca
Speaker 3: did not have any major temples devoted to him, despite
Speaker 3: his important role in Egyptian mythology and religious practice. There
Speaker 3: is some evidence of, like maybe some minor cultic activity
Speaker 3: concerning Heca, but the god was not like the the
Speaker 3: patron deity of any of the big state temples. Hekka
Speaker 3: in the sense of magical power, was also a personal
Speaker 3: attribute that was believed to be in some limited sense
Speaker 3: by all beings, but especially by certain beings. There were
Speaker 3: beings additionally endowed or especially endowed with heca. So gods
Speaker 3: and supernatural entities obviously had heca. Ghosts and the dead
Speaker 3: had heca. Kings had heca. People who were foreign or
Speaker 3: were physically atypical in some way, such as dwarfs, were
Speaker 3: sometimes said to have heca, and so Pinch says, basically,
Speaker 3: anything that the ancient Egyptians regarded as strange, exotic, or
Speaker 3: ancient might be thought of as possessing special measures of
Speaker 3: heca beyond just what anyone else would have. And it's
Speaker 3: interesting how much I think that kind of associative tradition
Speaker 3: carries through even until today, that authors and storytellers, even
Speaker 3: up until up in the modern era often think about
Speaker 3: magic is something that doesn't seem to emanate, especially from
Speaker 3: the people that the author views as typical. There's it's
Speaker 3: like people who are different in some way, or people
Speaker 3: who are from another place, or who look different, or
Speaker 3: who are very old, maybe ancient, or have some connection
Speaker 3: to something ancient, that that's where the magic is stored.
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, and yeah, we still kind of engage
Speaker 2: in this a little bit, right, I mean when we
Speaker 2: just think of like what does a magician look like,
Speaker 2: or a wizard or any kind of like magic user,
Speaker 2: like you want, you don't picture just the person next door.
Speaker 2: You picture somebody who stands out, who has that weirdness
Speaker 2: about them.
Speaker 3: So that's heka. The other big Egyptian word for magic
Speaker 3: pinch says is aku akhu, usually in English, sometimes translated
Speaker 3: as enchantments or spells, but some sources emphasize really the
Speaker 3: idea of power or effectiveness at the core of this concept,
Speaker 3: the power to bring change or to cause things to happen,
Speaker 3: so it might be best translated as something like effective
Speaker 3: words or effective spells. This one seems to be associated
Speaker 3: especially with gods and other deities with stars, which had
Speaker 3: a special kind of effectiveness about them or power, and
Speaker 3: really especially the honored or blessed dead. Now here's a
Speaker 3: really key thing to understand about ancient Egyptian magic. Both
Speaker 3: heca magic and aku are widely characterized as morally neutral
Speaker 3: in themselves. They are neither inherently good nor inherently evil,
Speaker 3: and in fact, they can be used for either good
Speaker 3: or evil. They are simply types of power, creative and
Speaker 3: efficacious energy which can be used to heal or to harm,
Speaker 3: to defend or attack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this comes back to something we've talked about in
Speaker 2: the show before, of course, the importance of mat in
Speaker 2: ancient Egypt. That even above of the gods to a
Speaker 2: large degree, you have this idea of cosmic order and
Speaker 2: balance that is MOT. And yeah, if something unbalances things,
Speaker 2: then yeah, then it's you could think of it more
Speaker 2: as is evil, I guess or chaotic, But MOT is
Speaker 2: like the most important principle.
Speaker 3: Right, And we'll actually come back to that because magic
Speaker 3: factors into the preservation of MOT in many ways. But yeah,
Speaker 3: MOT is sometimes translated as justice, as order, as harmony.
Speaker 3: It is the right way for things to be. Right Now,
Speaker 3: after this basic discussion of terminology in this chapter, Pinch
Speaker 3: gets into some different scholarly frameworks that have been used
Speaker 3: by anthropologists over the years to understand what magic is,
Speaker 3: and then she talks about the extent to which these
Speaker 3: frameworks do and do not accurately describe the examples of
Speaker 3: Heca and aku in ancient Egypt. So one idea she
Speaker 3: gets into is James Fraser's distinction between magic and religion,
Speaker 3: made famous in his highly influential work on the anthropology
Speaker 3: of religion called The Golden Bough. We've talked about this
Speaker 3: work many times on the show. Before You Know. Fraser
Speaker 3: is a great read, but many of his ideas are
Speaker 3: no longer considered like the best way to think about
Speaker 3: anthropology of religion by anthropologists today. It's kind of like
Speaker 3: it's still a great book to read in many ways
Speaker 3: to understand its place in the history of scholarship, and
Speaker 3: it's very interesting, but many of its theories have been superseded.
Speaker 3: So Fraser says that a key difference between magic and
Speaker 3: religion goes like this. Magic is when a human expects
Speaker 3: that the right sequence of words or ritual actions will
Speaker 3: compel supernatural beings to bring about a desired result automatically
Speaker 3: or ineluck Blee, whereas religion is a bit more oriented
Speaker 3: around the free will of the deity. Religion is when
Speaker 3: a human hopes they can persuade a deity to grant
Speaker 3: their prayer or request through supplication and offerings. In other words,
Speaker 3: with religion, you come to the God's temple, you might
Speaker 3: make an offering, and you beg hoping that God will
Speaker 3: take mercy and help you out. With magic, you enact
Speaker 3: a spell designed to command or coerce a supernatural being
Speaker 3: to cause something you desire to happen. So, within this framework,
Speaker 3: Fraser characterized magic and religion as distinct and in some
Speaker 3: ways opposite phenomena, even though they sometimes invoked the same deities.
Speaker 3: He saw magicians and priests as fundamentally different and as
Speaker 3: natural rivals. But as we just mentioned a minute ago,
Speaker 3: anthropologists of religion have in many cases moved away from
Speaker 3: Fraser's frameworks as being too simplistic, and it seems the
Speaker 3: case of ancient Egyptian magic is sort of the perfect
Speaker 3: example of how Fraser's categories don't exactly hold up when
Speaker 3: applied to some major real world traditions. They might better
Speaker 3: describe some other traditions, but this doesn't really work very well.
Speaker 3: Pinch argues with Egyptian magic because she says, while you
Speaker 3: see examples both of what Fraser would call magic and
Speaker 3: religion in ancient Egypt, they substantially blur together and are
Speaker 3: performed in the same settings and by the same authorities.
Speaker 3: So in ancient Egypt, a lot of rituals which were
Speaker 3: meant to manipulate and automatically compel action by supernatural beings
Speaker 3: were performed in temples by the priesthood. The kind of
Speaker 3: spells you might imagine a you know, in a difference setting,
Speaker 3: like a witch performing binding a demon to do her
Speaker 3: bidding or something like that. In the case of ancient Egypt,
Speaker 3: you could get stuff like that in a temple, done
Speaker 3: by a sanctioned priest who was you know, considered in
Speaker 3: the good graces of the king. So it would not
Speaker 3: be impossible or even necessarily unusual in ancient Egypt to
Speaker 3: have a pious priest practicing spells that explicitly commanded or
Speaker 3: attempted to coerce action from deities by, for example, threatening
Speaker 3: the deities or threatening to commit dangerous and sacrilegious acts
Speaker 3: against them if they did not obey. There are actually
Speaker 3: spells that do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'll come back to a specific example of this
Speaker 2: related to a curse in a bit. Yeah, And we
Speaker 2: have to remind ourselves again about mot being important overall.
Speaker 2: And you can if you I mean, obviously you need
Speaker 2: to know what you're doing within you know, the framework
Speaker 2: of the Egyptian religion here, but you could kind of
Speaker 2: like go over the god's heads by invoking MOT, which
Speaker 2: is very's there's a legal sense to it, you know.
Speaker 2: Like one of the things called now stresses is that
Speaker 2: the ancient Egyptians loved litigation, and you see that in
Speaker 2: some of their magic. You know, they are they're litigating
Speaker 2: when they're casting a spell.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting way of thinking about it. I think
Speaker 3: we'll come back to that in a minute too. So
Speaker 3: another common distinction that has historically been made between magicians
Speaker 3: and priests is that while priests have a congregation over
Speaker 3: whom they have a responsibility for guidance and moral instruction,
Speaker 3: magicians have only clients with whom they can you know,
Speaker 3: it's a much freer kind of relationship with whom they
Speaker 3: can pursue an a moral transactional kind of interaction. But
Speaker 3: Pinch says again this distinction doesn't really work for ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: Ancient Egyptian priests were usually not expected to be moral teachers.
Speaker 3: There might have been some cases where they were, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't seem to be a general understanding of them.
Speaker 3: They were paid specialists in ritual and rituals and spells.
Speaker 3: They had expertise in spells, and they could offer whatever
Speaker 3: kinds of spells, defensive or offensive, were needed for the occasion,
Speaker 3: much like the aforementioned understanding of a magician. And yet
Speaker 3: at the same time, priests in ancient Egypt were not
Speaker 3: at all considered subversive, illicit, or illegitimate. They were the
Speaker 3: temple priests, allied with kingly power, and they practiced what
Speaker 3: often looks like ritual magic on behalf of the state.
Speaker 3: So that's the thing again that just, you know, in
Speaker 3: a modern i guess mainly Christian influenced religious culture, it's
Speaker 3: hard to make that just doesn't fit with our idea
Speaker 3: of like how magic works. I'm trying to imagine if
Speaker 3: in the US, if like Nixon had hired a bunch
Speaker 3: of witches to cook up a potion to guarantee victory
Speaker 3: in Vietnam, you know, but also those witches were like
Speaker 3: mainline Christian denominational preachers.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. Yeah, researching this episode time and
Speaker 2: time again, like compared, tried to compare anyway what I
Speaker 2: was reading or listening to about the relationship between these
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptians and their priests and their gods with how
Speaker 2: like contemporary Christians think about their God. And yeah, it
Speaker 2: often doesn't line up because depending on exactly how you're
Speaker 2: framing the Christian God, you may be framing the Christian
Speaker 2: God is more like a loving personal God, or on
Speaker 2: the other end of the spectrum, you know, this vengeful god,
Speaker 2: the God of Alukardo that is going to you know,
Speaker 2: send you to hell. But in either case, like you
Speaker 2: wouldn't litigate against this god because on one hand, he's
Speaker 2: your friend or your your he's like your family, he's
Speaker 2: your father. You don't sue your father under most circumstances,
Speaker 2: I guess. But then the other end of the spectrum,
Speaker 2: you don't sue the like the all powerful entity that
Speaker 2: has you like in the grip of his clause or
Speaker 2: what have you. You know. So it's it's just such
Speaker 2: a different framework.
Speaker 3: It is so interesting to think about, well, the similarities
Speaker 3: and the differences to whatever religion we're more familiar with anyway.
Speaker 3: But so coming back to these these frameworks for understanding
Speaker 3: magic versus religion, another framework that Pinch discusses in this
Speaker 3: chapter is a framework for understanding magic coming from the
Speaker 3: Polish anthropologist A. Bronislaw Malinovsky. A few points from Malinovsky here,
Speaker 3: he argued that the purpose of ritual magic is to
Speaker 3: solve problems that are beyond the limits of what a
Speaker 3: society can do with technology, can do with it the
Speaker 3: technology available to it. And that's one of those things
Speaker 3: that there's so many there's so much stuff like this,
Speaker 3: you know, anthropology of religion. You hear it. That just
Speaker 3: sounds intuitively true. Yeah, that sounds right. But Pinch argues
Speaker 3: once again that when you try to lie this up
Speaker 3: with what we know about ancient Egyptian magic, it doesn't
Speaker 3: fit the case very well. Like we know for a
Speaker 3: fact that the ancient Egyptians used magic to get desired
Speaker 3: outcomes that they were practically and technologically capable of achieving
Speaker 3: bi conventional means, for example, recovery from medical problems for
Speaker 3: which they actually had effective practical treatments, and assuring military
Speaker 3: victory over enemies that they were perfectly capable of crushing
Speaker 3: in battle. So you might think of magic instead of
Speaker 3: being exclusively the domain of problems we can't actually solve
Speaker 3: under our own power, a kind of second line of
Speaker 3: attack on problems, a parallel approach to solving problems that
Speaker 3: you would often pair with a practical approach to the problem.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's like some of the magic in
Speaker 2: Dungeons and Dragons, right is it? If I remember I
Speaker 2: never play a cleric, But it's like blessing or bless
Speaker 2: right y via that extra D.
Speaker 3: Four increase your chance of success.
Speaker 2: It's like I'm rolling at D twenty. There's a an
Speaker 2: I already have a modifier in that I can totally
Speaker 2: hit this. I might even score a crit But am
Speaker 2: I going to say no to the D four? Of course?
Speaker 2: Now that could make all the.
Speaker 3: Difference exactly right. Yeah, So maybe that's a better way
Speaker 3: of thinking about it, and people will still do this
Speaker 3: with forms of prayer today, prayer for prayer for success
Speaker 3: in situations where out with the outcome is not guaranteed,
Speaker 3: even if you do presumably have the power to achieve
Speaker 3: the outcome yourself, you just don't know if you're going
Speaker 3: to be able to do it. So yeah, so instead
Speaker 3: of magic taking over when practical and tech technological solutions
Speaker 3: fall short, I think it was normal for ancient Egyptians
Speaker 3: to attack the same problem simultaneously with practical efforts and
Speaker 3: ritual magic. Pinch also cites both Melinofsky and another anthropologist
Speaker 3: named Misha Ta Tiev, who made the point in different
Speaker 3: ways that a key distinction between really religion and magic
Speaker 3: is the timing and nature of the problems they seek
Speaker 3: to address. So I think this was especially to Tiev's
Speaker 3: idea that religion is calendrical, meaning pertaining to the calendar.
Speaker 3: It follows a regular, seasonal or yearly pattern of rituals
Speaker 3: that occur on a set schedule, and the problems it
Speaker 3: tries to solve are public problems. It is for the
Speaker 3: common benefit of the community or the state. And magic, meanwhile,
Speaker 3: according to Tatiev's framework, is critical It is used to
Speaker 3: solve a specific crisis that arises unexpectedly, often a personal
Speaker 3: or individual matter, and Pinch argues that this one is
Speaker 3: sort of half correct when it comes to ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: The rituals performed in ancient Egyptian temples were primarily aimed
Speaker 3: at what were thought to be public goods. They were
Speaker 3: for the benefit of the state or the society at large,
Speaker 3: and this was done through regularly occurring rituals and seasonal festivals.
Speaker 3: But Pinch says the principle of responding to crisis with
Speaker 3: magic was actually woven into the very fabric of Egyptian religion.
Speaker 3: One really interesting example is that within Egyptian myth and religion,
Speaker 3: some regularly occurring rituals were thought to be responses to
Speaker 3: a crisis, to an ongoing crisis. It was just like this,
Speaker 3: you know, never ceasing cosmic crisis that would occur over
Speaker 3: and over, even every single day. The example she gives
Speaker 3: is the ritual to protect the sun god Raw at
Speaker 3: sunset every night. The Egyptians believed that every night Raw
Speaker 3: had to make a perilous journey through the underworld in
Speaker 3: which it was a possibility that he could be killed
Speaker 3: during his nightly battle with the serpent of chaos Apophus.
Speaker 2: That's right, the soul or barge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so priests had to perform protective magic magical
Speaker 3: interventions to make sure Raw would survive his journey and
Speaker 3: the sun would rise again every morning. So it's like
Speaker 3: it has more the flavor of responding to a crisis,
Speaker 3: but it's a crisis that happens every single day and
Speaker 3: you have to keep responding to it.
Speaker 2: I think I think most contemporary listeners can can feel
Speaker 2: that it does feel like there's a crisis every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then beyond that, Pinch mentions that the exact
Speaker 3: same priest who is going to be performing regular calindrical
Speaker 3: rituals at a state affiliated public temple might also be
Speaker 3: a vendor of private magic spells to solve your personal crisis,
Speaker 3: maybe for a fee. And what were these private crises
Speaker 3: that would have people seeking magical aid or protection. Well,
Speaker 3: they're probably what you would imagine. They're all kinds of things.
Speaker 3: Health issues seem to be a really big one, like illness, injury, infection,
Speaker 3: things relating to childbirth are very common reasons to seek
Speaker 3: the intervention of a priest or to try to use
Speaker 3: a magical spell, but also to just solve all kinds
Speaker 3: of personal problems, injuries committed, you know, offenses committed against
Speaker 3: you by others, just problems people would face in their lives. Also,
Speaker 3: it's worth thinking about how a lot of magic in
Speaker 3: ancient Egypt was to use a medical term preventative care.
Speaker 3: So you might, in fact, not just might, people often
Speaker 3: did do magical spells not to solve a problem that
Speaker 3: had already happened, but to protect against problems that could
Speaker 3: potentially arise.
Speaker 2: And obviously, as we've discussed in the show before, we
Speaker 2: see examples of this from all around the world as well.
Speaker 2: Preventative magic, magic to keep evil away and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, now here's one another area. There are many
Speaker 3: of these where a person who grew up thinking about
Speaker 3: magic and religion and say a primarily Christian context and
Speaker 3: thinking about magic along the lines of witchcraft. You know,
Speaker 3: whether way witchcraft is viewed in European Christianity. The question
Speaker 3: is was magic seen as anti social or harmful or
Speaker 3: wicked in ancient Egypt, the way witchcraft is viewed in
Speaker 3: most historical Christian societies. The answer is, for the most part, no,
Speaker 3: especially in the period before Egypt was absorbed into the
Speaker 3: Roman Empire. Now there are some nuances to this, because
Speaker 3: evil magic was absolutely thought to exist, but evil magic
Speaker 3: or wicked sorcery was usually attributed to foreigners, not other Egyptians.
Speaker 3: So there was wicked sorcery, but most of the time
Speaker 3: There are exceptions here. Most of the time it was
Speaker 3: thought to be coming from somewhere else, somewhere outside of Egypt. Again,
Speaker 3: that's the broad trend. There are exceptions to this in
Speaker 3: some texts that maybe specify certain punishments or prohibitions against
Speaker 3: illicit sorcery. But this just seems to be mostly not
Speaker 3: how Egyptians viewed magic done by other Egyptians. Usually that
Speaker 3: was not thought of like Christians thought of witchcraft. Here's
Speaker 3: another question about magic. Did ancient Egyptians believe their magic
Speaker 3: to be the command of an impersonal force in nature,
Speaker 3: as in the Christian concept of natural magic, You're just
Speaker 3: sort of commanding about a general, disembodied power. Or was
Speaker 3: it thought to be the invocation of the powers of
Speaker 3: specific supernatural beings or entities, as in the Christian concept
Speaker 3: of demonic magic. Again, though it would not have the
Speaker 3: negative connotations of Christian demonic magic, the invocation of powerful
Speaker 3: supernatural beings was the standard mechanism described by Egyptian priests
Speaker 3: and spells. You were maybe calling somebody up from the
Speaker 3: underworld or from some other plane to take care of
Speaker 3: a little something for you. There were a few mechanisms
Speaker 3: of magic and Egyptian thought that were more impersonal, one
Speaker 3: that Pinch describes as essentially working by the principle of analogy,
Speaker 3: and this would be based on the subtle associations between things.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read from Pinch's description here to get
Speaker 3: the idea of how this impersonal magic worked.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: The magician also strove to discern the true nature of
Speaker 3: beings and objects and the connections between them. These connections
Speaker 3: were created by shared properties such as color or the
Speaker 3: sound of a name. Similarities which seem irrelevant to our
Speaker 3: classification systems, were considered significant by the Egyptians. Once a
Speaker 3: pairing had been established, it was thought possible to transfer
Speaker 3: qualities from one component to the other, or to produce
Speaker 3: an effect on the one by actions performed on the other.
Speaker 3: Heca was the force that turned these connections into a
Speaker 3: kind of power network.
Speaker 2: HM. Fascinating.
Speaker 3: So you've got both kinds of magic. You've got like
Speaker 3: natural magic based on things like this sort of associative power,
Speaker 3: and then you've also got just calling up other worldly
Speaker 3: entities to do your bidding for you. Now, finally, I
Speaker 3: want to elaborate one thing that Pinch gets into that
Speaker 3: I thought was really interesting, which is further subdividing the
Speaker 3: question of what people believed magic could do for them.
Speaker 3: I already mentioned a minute ago that people thought it
Speaker 3: could solve problems for them. That's the more obvious answer.
Speaker 3: You know, it could help you achieve a goal that
Speaker 3: was either outside of your personal power or in which
Speaker 3: success by normal means was not guaranteed. But the less
Speaker 3: obvious and very interesting answer is that magic also helped
Speaker 3: people identify the cause of a problem. Why did this
Speaker 3: happen to me? Why did this bad thing occur? Why
Speaker 3: did my child get sick? Why did my crops with
Speaker 3: her pinch runs through a list of common explanations that
Speaker 3: would be given in spells for the answers to these problems.
Speaker 3: Maybe a God is wrathful at you, Maybe a foreign
Speaker 3: wizard has cursed you with evil magic. Maybe a ghost
Speaker 3: or a demon is maliciously persecuting you. And whereas in
Speaker 3: the religious context of modern Christianity, the answers are more
Speaker 3: often things like, well, you might get a kind of
Speaker 3: non answer in the form of God works in mysterious ways.
Speaker 3: We can't know why this happened, which many people do believe,
Speaker 3: but also people often report finding unsatisfying or get you
Speaker 3: can get answers like you have sinned and you are
Speaker 3: being punished. Strangely, you do still hear this a lot,
Speaker 3: even though in multiple stories from the Bible, Jesus explicitly
Speaker 3: rejects this reasoning, Yeah, you know, I guess it's like
Speaker 3: in the story of the you know, the Man Born
Speaker 3: Blind and the Gospel of John, he's like, that's not
Speaker 3: how it works. Though I guess some people interpret Jesus
Speaker 3: in stories like that to be more narrowly referring to well,
Speaker 3: he's just saying it's not how it works in this case.
Speaker 3: Maybe God does punish people for sin in other cases.
Speaker 2: It's a worldview that can be very difficult to shake,
Speaker 2: even if you have a logical or even you know,
Speaker 2: a doctrine based reason or even a scripture based reason.
Speaker 2: As we're disgusting to reject it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I want to be fair. Obviously,
Speaker 3: I don't find that point of view highly sympathetic, but
Speaker 3: I will will at least be fair and say that
Speaker 3: I think you could have legitimate theological reasons for saying no, no.
Speaker 3: People are misinterpreting those stories in the Bible where you know,
Speaker 3: and Jesus did just mean, this guy wasn't born blind
Speaker 3: because of sin. Maybe other people are anyway. Sorry that
Speaker 3: was a tangent, but yeah, So those are the kinds
Speaker 3: of things you would more often get in modern Christianity.
Speaker 3: Ancient Egyptian magical texts would often be able to say
Speaker 3: in contrast to that, they say, yes, we can absolutely
Speaker 3: identify these specific source of your problem, but the spell
Speaker 3: or the ritual does not assert that the misfortune is
Speaker 3: your fault. You get an answer about the cause, and
Speaker 3: you can believe that you are, in fact an innocent
Speaker 3: victim being attacked by powers beyond your control. And now
Speaker 3: that you have consulted a priest with the proper magical arsenal,
Speaker 3: or now that you've got this magical papyrus in your hands,
Speaker 3: and you can put together a counterspell to identify your
Speaker 3: oppressor and heal or protect you without assigning yourself any
Speaker 3: blame for the problem. So that covers most of the
Speaker 3: framework that Pinch gets into in this chapter. But I
Speaker 3: just want to emphasize a few themes at the end
Speaker 3: to really hammer them home. One of the main ones
Speaker 3: is to say, again, in ancient Egypt, magic and religion
Speaker 3: were not separable and rival institutions. They were fully ed
Speaker 3: entwined with one another, and the boundaries between them are
Speaker 3: quite fuzzy. And the other idea is that magic was
Speaker 3: an all pervading force that affected even the gods. It
Speaker 3: wasn't just us, affected even the gods, and in fact,
Speaker 3: the gods needed magical help of their own. On that
Speaker 3: last point, there's one very interesting feature of ancient Egyptian cosmology,
Speaker 3: which is that the creation story in ancient Egyptian cosmology
Speaker 3: the creation of the ordered world out of the primeval
Speaker 3: waters of chaos. Some authors have talked about how in
Speaker 3: Egyptian thinking, this was not a single event that took
Speaker 3: place in the past at the beginning, the way we
Speaker 3: think of the creation narrative in many other religions. An
Speaker 3: Egyptian myth, creation was an ongoing process that required continual
Speaker 3: daily effort by the creator deity and by the other
Speaker 3: gods allied with order. So humans with their rituals had
Speaker 3: to perform magic invoking the power of Heca to aid
Speaker 3: the gods and sustain the creation of the world every day.
Speaker 3: So the ordered world was very fragile, and if the
Speaker 3: process of creation through Heca through magic was not sustained
Speaker 3: every day by these efforts of the Creator spirit and
Speaker 3: by the efforts of gods and you know, the order
Speaker 3: gods and humans. The ordered world could well collapse back
Speaker 3: into the abyss of chaos and the world could be unmade.
Speaker 3: So I feel like this really provides some scope on
Speaker 3: how how important Heca magic was. It was incredibly important,
Speaker 3: and the problems it addressed were so wide, so different,
Speaker 3: you know, Heca magic was. It's how you find out
Speaker 3: that your cow is sick because it has been attacked
Speaker 3: by a ghost or cursed by a foreign sorcerer, And
Speaker 3: it is how you invoke a divine shield of protection
Speaker 3: and healing over your cow. And it is also how
Speaker 3: the priesthood keeps the state secure, keeps the king enthroned,
Speaker 3: aids the Sun god and his battle against the serpent,
Speaker 3: and keeps the world from sinking into a dark ocean
Speaker 3: of nothingness.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, this is uh, this is such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2: You know, it reminds me of our past episode on
Speaker 2: the inundation of the Nile, and you know how you
Speaker 2: have the seasonal flooding of the Nile that's responsible for
Speaker 2: basically sustaining life along the Great Nile river, and and
Speaker 2: you can also point to various examples in any given
Speaker 2: culture where like there's there's a definite uh, there's there's
Speaker 2: a definite knowledge that there are seasonal things that have
Speaker 2: to happen in order for life to continue, be it,
Speaker 2: you know, even as simple as the return of spring,
Speaker 2: you know, out of the winter and so forth. But yeah,
Speaker 2: this idea that that the world is fragile and you're
Speaker 2: not in the in the case of the ancient Egyptians,
Speaker 2: you're not even guaranteed tomorrow unless the prayers are there
Speaker 2: to support the solar barge in its journey, well said.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but anyway, So yeah, I guess that's the basic
Speaker 4: framework about magic in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: And from here I want to briefly look to the
Speaker 3: idea of curses in a summary way, because of course,
Speaker 3: Heca was not only capable of healing and protecting. As
Speaker 3: we mentioned earlier, Heca had the power to weaken, to sicken,
Speaker 3: to harm and cut off, and even to kill. In fact,
Speaker 3: not just to kill, to attack you in the afterlife,
Speaker 3: to attack your potential for the afterlife. And this brings
Speaker 3: us to the role of curses in ancient Egyptian magic.
Speaker 3: To start off, I just wanted to mention a few
Speaker 3: basic types of curses we might think about in ancient Egypt,
Speaker 3: maybe going from the most familiar types in our context
Speaker 3: to the least familiar. And here I'm going to make
Speaker 3: some generalizations obviously across the thousands of years and the
Speaker 3: millions of lives in questions, and there will be some exceptions.
Speaker 3: I'm just trying to capture some main patterns. But none
Speaker 3: of this is the case in all cases. So the
Speaker 3: first category I want to mention is personal curses. In
Speaker 3: later magical papyri from Egypt, we see all kinds of
Speaker 3: run of the mill curses designed for regular people who
Speaker 3: want to harm rivals or enemies. Did somebody steal from you,
Speaker 3: did somebody speak ill against you or hurt someone you
Speaker 3: care about, Well, you can address this. You can consult
Speaker 3: a priest or, you can open up your magical papyrus
Speaker 3: and curse that person. You can make them fall sick
Speaker 3: and die, you can make them tormented with madness and pain.
Speaker 3: And I want to be clear here, it seems that
Speaker 3: there's more evidence for this kind of personal individual cursing
Speaker 3: against enemies from later periods of Egyptian history. It may
Speaker 3: have become more common as time went on, especially in
Speaker 3: the Greco Roman period. The existence of this type of cursing. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: it might seem to be at odds with a claim
Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier from Geraldine Pinch, the claim that most
Speaker 3: of the time ancient Egyptians did not view the practice
Speaker 3: of magic as evil or subversive, and more often attributed evil,
Speaker 3: dangerous magic to foreign sorcerers from other countries. I was
Speaker 3: trying to reconcile these and I was thinking, obviously, wouldn't
Speaker 3: the Egyptian victim of a curse cast by another Egyptian
Speaker 3: be tempted to view that as evil magic, as wicked sorcery. Well,
Speaker 3: they might well see it that way, But it does
Speaker 3: seem my best understanding, based on what I could piece
Speaker 3: together here, is that there was probably some distinction between
Speaker 3: what we're seen as legitimate curses and illegitimate, harmful magic,
Speaker 3: much in the same way that people might think about
Speaker 3: physical violence today, where it is permissible to use violence
Speaker 3: in self defense or in some cultural contexts if it's retaliatory,
Speaker 3: but not permissible if it is against a random or
Speaker 3: innocent victim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this kind of comes back to what I was
Speaker 2: talking about earlier about litigation, like thinking of it as litigation,
Speaker 2: Like you might seek litigation if you have been harmed,
Speaker 2: have you been in an accident, you know, call such
Speaker 2: and such number, get the fighting lawyer on your side,
Speaker 2: because that lawyer or in this case, you know, a
Speaker 2: priest or a magician is going to is going to
Speaker 2: restore mott, is going to restore balance. Right At the
Speaker 2: same time, you use the legal comparison, Yeah, you can
Speaker 2: very much go out there and hire a lawyer to
Speaker 2: go after somebody for illegitimate purposes like nuisance lawsuits and
Speaker 2: so forth. You know, you can formulate an entire list
Speaker 2: there in your own head. But but yeah, we often
Speaker 2: think about like, oh, I need to lawyer up because
Speaker 2: I have been wronged or I'm about to be wronged.
Speaker 2: I need to count the evil of others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's true that even the fairest and most
Speaker 3: just system is always going to be in some way
Speaker 3: subject to abuse. So there's like, you know, or some
Speaker 3: people are going to feel like they're getting the short
Speaker 3: end of the stick about it. So, yeah, you can't
Speaker 3: ever prevent that entirely from happening. But this seems to
Speaker 3: be generally how people thought that the system worked when
Speaker 3: it was working correctly according to them, So that's personal curses,
Speaker 3: Like when it came to cursing Egyptians, could you know,
Speaker 3: you could go to a priest or you could privately
Speaker 3: read a magical papyrus to harness the morally neutral power
Speaker 3: of heca to harm a legitimate enemy. And it seems
Speaker 3: like this sort of thing was viewed basically as fair play.
Speaker 3: But if magic was used to torment an innocent person,
Speaker 3: that's probably attributable to chaotic wizardry performed by evil foreigners,
Speaker 3: you know, not somebody who would be working with a
Speaker 3: legit Egyptian temple priest. Yeah, another kind that is going
Speaker 3: to be more familiar to us, and this will factor
Speaker 3: in majorly in the rest of the series. His funerary curses.
Speaker 3: One of the most famous varieties of Egyptian magic, the
Speaker 3: curse that seals a tomb and punishes defilers or grave robbers.
Speaker 3: And while we can later discuss ways that the reality
Speaker 3: of this type of curse has been twisted somewhat in
Speaker 3: popular retelling, these kinds of curses absolutely do exist, and
Speaker 3: private tombs from Egypt are sometimes inscribed with offensive magic
Speaker 3: calling down injury, death, and even I thought this was
Speaker 3: pretty wicked, that the punishment of the soul and denial
Speaker 3: of an afterlife upon anyone who would disturb the sanctity
Speaker 3: of a tomb or steal its contents.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 3: And then after those categories you start getting into some
Speaker 3: types of curses that I think it would be less
Speaker 3: familiar in our modern understanding of witchcraft and magic. One
Speaker 3: of them is political curses. This is a bit like
Speaker 3: the idea I mentioned of Nixon getting witches to do
Speaker 3: something so he could win in Vietnam. Like, the king
Speaker 3: and the state have enemies, and the enemies must be destroyed.
Speaker 3: These enemies could be rival kingdoms, or the princes of
Speaker 3: foreign nations, or the leaders of revolts and rebellions. The
Speaker 3: enemies of Egypt and the king would often be cursed
Speaker 3: to destruction in official temple rituals. A common way of
Speaker 3: describing this as execration rituals, where maybe an effigy or
Speaker 3: a clay pot on which there has been established a
Speaker 3: symbolic link between the pot and the person in question.
Speaker 3: These objects would be ritually smashed or otherwise destroyed. Okay,
Speaker 3: and then finally, I think the most interesting type of curse,
Speaker 3: religious or cosmic curses. Remember how I mentioned a minute
Speaker 3: ago that most ancient Egyptian cosmologies held that the gods
Speaker 3: themselves were to some extent affected by heckamagic and that
Speaker 3: the divine forces of order needed the help of temple
Speaker 3: based rituals in order to prevail. That help could well
Speaker 3: involve curses to help the gods and the divine forces
Speaker 3: of order when victory continually over the monsters and the
Speaker 3: spirits of chaos, Egyptian priests would perform sort of smiting
Speaker 3: curses against the divine and cosmic enemies of order, much
Speaker 3: like they would against the earthly enemies of the kingdom.
Speaker 3: And of course it's a this is a very loose analogy,
Speaker 3: but imagine if daily worship in a Christian church also
Speaker 3: involved witchcraft that would invoke death curses against the devil.
Speaker 2: Oh, well, that's an interesting topic unto itself, right, because
Speaker 2: you can you can look at various examples of historic
Speaker 2: individuals kind of having their own personal war against the
Speaker 2: devil or demons, you know, cursing them back, telling you know,
Speaker 2: depart evil doer and do everlasting fire and so forth.
Speaker 2: And then also so many I think of various like
Speaker 2: folk songs and bits of folk art where the devil
Speaker 2: is tricked, smashed over the head with something herded by
Speaker 2: cowboys and so forth. There is so many different examples
Speaker 2: poked with a hat pin, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Oh like in the Santa Claus movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: That Santa Claus definitely invokes death curses against the devil.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, yeah, I wanted to. I want to
Speaker 2: expand a little bit on the topic of the funerary
Speaker 2: curses because this was this was part of the of
Speaker 2: of what Colleen Darnell talked about in her presentation, and
Speaker 2: she used to There were a couple of Egyptian words
Speaker 2: that she focused on here. One is the word for curse,
Speaker 2: which is usually a verb but is also sometimes a
Speaker 2: now which is sewer, not quite sewer, but you know,
Speaker 2: similar to that like suewear. And then there's also a
Speaker 2: word shin wit, and this means incantation, but depending on
Speaker 2: the context, could also definitely mean a curse. So just
Speaker 2: some more specific terminology for what was invoked here. And
Speaker 2: so a lot of her talk centered around like evidence
Speaker 2: that we have for or against the idea of ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptian curses on people entering tombs or certainly defiling them
Speaker 2: in one way or another. So one of the important
Speaker 2: facts that she pointed out is that in general, the
Speaker 2: upper part of a tomb was generally a public space
Speaker 2: for visitors with good intentions, so family members and the like,
Speaker 2: and people visiting the tomb. It might line up with
Speaker 2: certain festivals and so forth, and so there would never
Speaker 2: be a blanket curse against visiting a tomb space. And
Speaker 2: this is interesting too. She pointed out that sometimes graffiti
Speaker 2: in the form of writing your name was encouraged, as
Speaker 2: it was with certain temples voted inscriptions, where if you
Speaker 2: would be the honorable thing to do, just scratch your
Speaker 2: name on the wall. Again in antiquity, not today.
Speaker 3: Oh well, that just reminded me of something we talked
Speaker 3: about years ago. We did some episodes on the Colossus
Speaker 3: or Colossi or Colossus of Memnon. There were multiple of them, Colossie,
Speaker 3: the Colossi of Memnon, which not in our modern times,
Speaker 3: but in ancient times to us were visited by tourists
Speaker 3: who wrote graffiti on them, like Romans would write their
Speaker 3: names on these, you know, great monuments whatever.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Marcus was here, Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I thought of that
Speaker 2: as well when this came up. She also stresses that
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptian curses, when they were used, they tended to
Speaker 2: have a dual formation, a dual formulation rather a blessing
Speaker 2: on positive actions and then a focused threat against negative actions.
Speaker 2: And again a lot of this comes back to the
Speaker 2: importance of MOTT. You know, you got to have both energies,
Speaker 2: you got to have bad balance, and therefore a negative
Speaker 2: action is not just a transgression against the king or
Speaker 2: even a god, but against cosmic balance itself. Of course,
Speaker 2: she as I mentioned earlier, she made the She stressed
Speaker 2: that the ancient Egyptians were very legalistic and that the
Speaker 2: cursed language typically invokes this, speaking to litigation against the
Speaker 2: defiler of the tomb in the afterlife. Like some of
Speaker 2: these basically read like and if you do X, Y
Speaker 2: or Z, I will see you in ghost court. You
Speaker 2: will be judged and I will be there for it
Speaker 2: because there is like a legal proceeding that will follow.
Speaker 3: It's like one of those scary letters you get from
Speaker 3: a lawyer.
Speaker 2: To exactly yeah, It's like this is the scary letter
Speaker 2: essentially from a priest. She also pointed out that ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptian curses tend to follow the same formulations as pure
Speaker 2: laws that were written for the living, and the idea
Speaker 2: here too is that a real world prosecution and punishment
Speaker 2: would kind of be the first stop, and then this
Speaker 2: would be augmented by supernatural prosecution and punishment, kind of
Speaker 2: coming back to that whole the D twenty plus D
Speaker 2: four situation we were talking about, Like, ideally, if you
Speaker 2: rob this tomb, you know we're going to catch you
Speaker 2: and there'll be some sort of real world punishment. But
Speaker 2: in addition to that, or instead of that, if we
Speaker 2: can't catch you, there will be litigation and punishment in
Speaker 2: the afterlife.
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean, this is another example of what we
Speaker 3: were talking about earlier, where you attack the same problem
Speaker 3: with multiple solutions, one magical and one practical.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. One example that she pointed to and bring
Speaker 2: up a couple here is the Tomb of Many from
Speaker 2: the Sixth Dynasty, and it includes this example where the
Speaker 2: writing is basically saying, look, I paid everyone who worked
Speaker 2: on this tomb. It was fair, but if you damage
Speaker 2: my tomb quote, A crocodile be against him in the water,
Speaker 2: a snake be against him on the earth. And essentially
Speaker 2: saying the Great God, generally a cyrus or a local deity,
Speaker 2: will be the one to judge you. Another example of
Speaker 2: litigation in one of these inscriptions. She pointed to the
Speaker 2: inscription of Idu from the sixth Dynasty quote as for
Speaker 2: any man who will take my grave from me, my
Speaker 2: claim will be litigated with them by the Great God,
Speaker 2: again like le Osiris or another like local deity. So
Speaker 2: threat of legal action, if not in this world, then
Speaker 2: at least in the next. She points out that there's
Speaker 2: no curse against an individual or visitor to a tomb
Speaker 2: in any of the royal tombs that we know of
Speaker 2: and have access to, and that it would have gone
Speaker 2: without saying that you shouldn't enter a burial chamber, like
Speaker 2: no signage is required there. I imagine it's sort of
Speaker 2: like it's just it would be known to everyone involved.
Speaker 2: Anybody who could read the text, you would know not
Speaker 2: to go into the burial chamber.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And I think I mentioned this earlier, but
Speaker 3: I remember reading that the most common places where these
Speaker 3: funerary curses are found or in private tombs.
Speaker 2: She also points to something from the Pyramid text that's
Speaker 2: a cursed template for a deceased king, not against mortals
Speaker 2: but against the gods. Getting back to what we were
Speaker 2: talking about earlier about how magic could be used essentially
Speaker 2: against the gods in defense of Mot. And this is
Speaker 2: I believe spell for eighty five, and it essentially says, look,
Speaker 2: bulls will be slaughtered for any god who takes this
Speaker 2: king to heaven. But if you don't take this king
Speaker 2: to heaven, you're not going to be honored. That's obvious
Speaker 2: to it. And so yeah, this apparently factors into a
Speaker 2: lot of Egyptian magic. You know, if something violates Mot,
Speaker 2: it kind of goes above the heads of the gods
Speaker 2: because they are bound to Mont as well.
Speaker 3: Feels bold, strong arming the gods like that, but you
Speaker 3: can admire it.
Speaker 2: She also brings up a couple of cases involving grabbing
Speaker 2: someone's neck like a bird or wringing their neck like
Speaker 2: a goose. So there's one from ones from twenty three
Speaker 2: hundred BCE from the tomb of Cantika of Sakkara, and
Speaker 2: my apologies that may be hitting these pronunciations wrong, but
Speaker 2: this one says, as for any person who shall enter
Speaker 2: my tomb in a state of impurity, not having purified
Speaker 2: themselves according to the manner of entering a temple. I
Speaker 2: will be judged with them about it in the west,
Speaker 2: in the court of the Great God, and I will
Speaker 2: wring his neck like a goose. So this one again,
Speaker 2: it's like saying I will see you in court. You know,
Speaker 2: you will be judged. I will be there. But then
Speaker 2: I adding this extra bit, I will bring your neck
Speaker 2: like a goose. And we see that again. There's another
Speaker 2: example she brings up twenty This is from twenty two
Speaker 2: hundred BC from the Tomb of Ninki. As for any noble,
Speaker 2: any official, or any person who will destroy any stone
Speaker 2: or any brick in this tomb, I will be judged
Speaker 2: with him by the Great God. I will seize his
Speaker 2: neck like a bird. So again I like how this
Speaker 2: one seems to be translated as I will be judged
Speaker 2: with you by the Great God, which very much brings
Speaker 2: this idea of like, there's a court proceeding, I'm going
Speaker 2: to bring this charge against you and let it be decided.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to win. The implication, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems to be the main implication of the
Speaker 2: ringing the neck like a goose. But this too is
Speaker 2: also interesting because apparently this is referring to sacrificial killing
Speaker 2: of a duck or a goose that would have been
Speaker 2: done like by a priest. So there are you know,
Speaker 2: inscriptions there images of this of Akanatin sacrificing a duck.
Speaker 2: You can look this up. I believe this is in
Speaker 2: the collection of the Met Museum from between thirteen fifty
Speaker 2: three and thirteen thirty six PCE, and it's you know,
Speaker 2: here's a figure ringing the neck of a goose. So
Speaker 2: you know, this seems to largely refer to that. One
Speaker 2: thing that Darnell stress is that, you know, there were
Speaker 2: definitely some sort of real world punishments, but we don't
Speaker 2: necessarily know all of the details on what those were,
Speaker 2: so I don't know. Does this possibly also refer to
Speaker 2: some sort of like real world punishment that would be
Speaker 2: dished out in this life. We don't know for sure.
Speaker 2: But also it's kind of a this is another potential
Speaker 2: connection here birds offered for sacrifice and temples, a connection
Speaker 2: between like the magist and the magic and the religious
Speaker 2: rituals that were being carried out, you know, in both
Speaker 2: cases by the priests. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's interesting the way I don't know the
Speaker 3: different feelings that can be created by the threats in
Speaker 3: these curses. Some of them have this more legalistic or
Speaker 3: more directly physically violent analogy in them, like wring your
Speaker 3: neck like a goose, or the crocodile will get you
Speaker 3: in the water, though that may have other implications that
Speaker 3: you know, but at least to me, conjures this idea
Speaker 3: of physical violence attacked by an animal or by another person.
Speaker 3: And then there's a way in which, at least to me,
Speaker 3: an even colder implication is made by these tomb curses
Speaker 3: that threaten your existence in the afterlife, like you will
Speaker 3: not receive an honorable burial, you will not go to
Speaker 3: the afterlife, you will get nothing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean coming back to the crocodile. This
Speaker 2: reminds me of the of of Omit, the devour of
Speaker 2: the dead, that if memory serves like his role in
Speaker 2: the judgment of the dead is like he consumes you
Speaker 2: and brings on annihilation if you are not worthy to
Speaker 2: pass on. So, yeah, that's quite a that's quite a
Speaker 2: threat to impose. But you know you can you can also, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can understand it, like first first saying you know
Speaker 2: you will be you will be litigated. You will be
Speaker 2: tried in this world in addition to or instead of that, though,
Speaker 2: you know, watch out in the afterlife, because charges will
Speaker 2: be brought against you and you may might just be
Speaker 2: annihilated altogether. All right, Well, looking at the clock here,
Speaker 2: we're about out of time. So what we're going to
Speaker 2: do is we're going to break and come back with
Speaker 2: this topic on Thursday. We have much more to discuss.
Speaker 2: We're going to get into the twentieth century myth of
Speaker 2: the Pharaoh's curse, where that comes from, how it shakes
Speaker 2: out when you look at it, and we'll also look
Speaker 2: to an example outside of Egypt that aligns with some
Speaker 2: of the ideas there, and then we'll have more to
Speaker 2: discuss about Egyptian magic and Egyptian curses in general. In
Speaker 2: the meantime, we would remind you that Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
Speaker 2: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on
Speaker 2: Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 2: and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to blow
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