Ancient Egyptian Curses, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the idea of Egyptian tomb curses, how they actually factored into ancient Egyptian practices and where the myth of the Pharaoh's curse meets reality.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
are kicking off our spooky content today. I guess we
already kind of kicked this off with Weird House Cinema,
but at this point we are definitely sliding into October,
and if you've listened to the show before, you know
that this is a time for us to get into

(00:33):
a lot of horror themed content, Halloween e content, and
that includes episodes of Weird House Cinema, that includes short episodes,
and of course it includes core episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. So that's going to be the course
for the month. On the whole, there is going to
be our fall break week as usual, in which we'll
have reruns, but guess what, all of those reruns are

(00:54):
going to be Halloween content as well, so we will
keep the Halloween train rolling. Oh.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
I mean, that's more frightening than a visitor from the past.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
There you go, There you go. That kind of ties
into some of what we'll be talking about here today,
because in today's episode, we're going to dive into the world.
We're going to return really to the world of ancient
Egyptian curses. We've touched on some of this before when
we frequently come back to Egyptology related content, either talking

(01:23):
about archaeological finds, the history of ancient Egypt, we're talking
about something in ancient Egyptian religion that's really fascinating, or
of course anything and sort of in the realm of
Egypt Domania. You know, this long lasting fascination that other
cultures have had with the culture and the ideas and
even just the look and the feel of ancient Egypt.

(01:46):
So in this episode, we're going to talk about it,
ancient Egyptian religious practices, ancient Egyptian magic. We're going to
also look at this idea of the curse in ancient
egypts and with some specific examples I think, mostly related toombs.
We're going to talk about twentieth century myth making about
ancient Egyptian curses. And finally, we're going to look at

(02:08):
a case from outside of Egypt that has, I don
know it lines up in rather interesting ways with some
of the ideas that have been generated about ancient Egyptian curses.
Within the twentieth century. All right, and before we jump in,
I want to mention too that last Thursday I attended
an online class by egyptologist and former guest on the

(02:29):
show Colleen Darnell, titled Curse of the Pharaohs. I found
it super insightful and the information and sources presented in
that class were part of my initial research for this episode.
She does these classes on different egyptology topics each month.
I highly recommend them. You can learn more about them
at Colleen Darnell dot com. So I'll refer back to

(02:50):
some of her ideas and content, as well as some
other sources once we get into it. But let's get
down to brass tacks here. Let's talk a little bit
about Egyptian magic.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Indeed, let's talk about Egyptian magic. I think this is
a good groundwork to lay because curses, of course, are
not the only kind of magic that was practiced in
ancient Egypt. They're a particularly savory, delicious kind of magic
from a modern sensibility to understand. But yeah, I think
it's good to understand the general context of Egyptian magic

(03:24):
a little bit better before we narrow in on curses themselves.
So to better understand ancient Egyptian magic. I turned to
a there's a really good overview in a book by
Geraldine Pinch called Magic in Ancient Egypt, published by the
University of Texas Press nineteen ninety four. Geraldine Pinch is

(03:45):
an Egyptologist we've referred to on the show plenty of times.
Born nineteen fifty one. She is affiliated with the University
of Oxford, and I mainly want to in this section
talk about some distinctions and frameworks that Pinch invokes in
the first chapter of this book to give a way

(04:05):
of the land about how the ancient Egyptians viewed and
used magic. And at the beginning here it's worth noting
the long and varied textual and archaeological record of magic
and ancient Egypt. While magical amulets and other objects go
back into prehistory, magical texts from ancient Egypt are found

(04:26):
from like the late third millennium BCE until about the
fourth century CE, So it's more than three thousand years
worth of texts concerning magic, many of which are written
records of spells themselves, like we have the primary documents
we have thus spells. That's pretty cool, not just people
talking about magic, but we have like the recipes, and

(04:50):
in this chapter, Pinch identifies sort of three main categories
of magic. You've got funerary magic, that's what concerns death
bear in the afterlife. You've got temple magic, which is
ritual magic performed in temples by priests or religious authorities,
often aimed at various forms of public welfare outcomes that

(05:13):
concerned lots of people at once. And then finally, you've
got personal or everyday magic, the spells and rites used
by individual people for help in situations that they faced personally.
Funerary magic is arguably the class that we know the
most about, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was the

(05:33):
most important. It obviously was very important, but the fact
that we know so much about it seems to be
in large part related to what type of evidence was
preserved and passed on down to us. A lot of
our best preserved evidence from ancient Egypt comes from tombs,
so it's kind of natural that we just know a
lot about funerary and funerary practices and things having to

(05:56):
deal with death in the afterlife. There are two Egyptian
words used most often to refer to magic. One of
these words is Heca or Hika, usually spelled in English
h e Ka, which is also the personal name of
an Egyptian god. The god Heca was usually depicted in

(06:19):
human form, but the word Heca was also used to
refer to not just this god in personal form, but
to a type of energy or force used by the
creator deity to create. So in the Egyptian creation myth,
you usually have some form of there's this primordial water,

(06:41):
this abyss of chaotic water is known as the nun
or noon in u n and then out of this
abyss comes a mound of dry land upon which creation
can take place. And Heca here is related to this
spirit of creation that takes shape here, and this association

(07:01):
continues throughout Egyptian history with the power of magic or
heca often understood as a as a type of creative spark,
a power to make and to mold. So it's this
interestingly loaded concept there. In some literal sense, it did
refer to magical power, but you could also think of

(07:21):
it in weird ways as being similar to like the
idea of will or will power. You could think of
it in some ways as being similar to like creativity
or energy. Yeah, yeah, Interestingly pinchnotes that the god Heca
did not have any major temples devoted to him, despite
his important role in Egyptian mythology and religious practice. There

(07:43):
is some evidence of, like maybe some minor cultic activity
concerning Heca, but the god was not like the the
patron deity of any of the big state temples. Hekka
in the sense of magical power, was also a personal
attribute that was believed to be in some limited sense
by all beings, but especially by certain beings. There were

(08:07):
beings additionally endowed or especially endowed with heca. So gods
and supernatural entities obviously had heca. Ghosts and the dead
had heca. Kings had heca. People who were foreign or
were physically atypical in some way, such as dwarfs, were
sometimes said to have heca, and so Pinch says, basically,

(08:31):
anything that the ancient Egyptians regarded as strange, exotic, or
ancient might be thought of as possessing special measures of
heca beyond just what anyone else would have. And it's
interesting how much I think that kind of associative tradition
carries through even until today, that authors and storytellers, even

(08:52):
up until up in the modern era often think about
magic is something that doesn't seem to emanate, especially from
the people that the author views as typical. There's it's
like people who are different in some way, or people
who are from another place, or who look different, or
who are very old, maybe ancient, or have some connection

(09:13):
to something ancient, that that's where the magic is stored.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Right right, Yeah, and yeah, we still kind of engage
in this a little bit, right, I mean when we
just think of like what does a magician look like,
or a wizard or any kind of like magic user,
like you want, you don't picture just the person next door.
You picture somebody who stands out, who has that weirdness
about them.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
So that's heka. The other big Egyptian word for magic
pinch says is aku akhu, usually in English, sometimes translated
as enchantments or spells, but some sources emphasize really the
idea of power or effectiveness at the core of this concept,
the power to bring change or to cause things to happen,

(10:00):
so it might be best translated as something like effective
words or effective spells. This one seems to be associated
especially with gods and other deities with stars, which had
a special kind of effectiveness about them or power, and
really especially the honored or blessed dead. Now here's a

(10:21):
really key thing to understand about ancient Egyptian magic. Both
heca magic and aku are widely characterized as morally neutral
in themselves. They are neither inherently good nor inherently evil,
and in fact, they can be used for either good
or evil. They are simply types of power, creative and

(10:45):
efficacious energy which can be used to heal or to harm,
to defend or attack.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, this comes back to something we've talked about in
the show before, of course, the importance of mat in
ancient Egypt. That even above of the gods to a
large degree, you have this idea of cosmic order and
balance that is MOT. And yeah, if something unbalances things,
then yeah, then it's you could think of it more

(11:14):
as is evil, I guess or chaotic, But MOT is
like the most important principle.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Right, And we'll actually come back to that because magic
factors into the preservation of MOT in many ways. But yeah,
MOT is sometimes translated as justice, as order, as harmony.
It is the right way for things to be. Right Now,
after this basic discussion of terminology in this chapter, Pinch

(11:41):
gets into some different scholarly frameworks that have been used
by anthropologists over the years to understand what magic is,
and then she talks about the extent to which these
frameworks do and do not accurately describe the examples of
Heca and aku in ancient Egypt. So one idea she

(12:01):
gets into is James Fraser's distinction between magic and religion,
made famous in his highly influential work on the anthropology
of religion called The Golden Bough. We've talked about this
work many times on the show. Before You Know. Fraser
is a great read, but many of his ideas are
no longer considered like the best way to think about

(12:24):
anthropology of religion by anthropologists today. It's kind of like
it's still a great book to read in many ways
to understand its place in the history of scholarship, and
it's very interesting, but many of its theories have been superseded.
So Fraser says that a key difference between magic and
religion goes like this. Magic is when a human expects

(12:48):
that the right sequence of words or ritual actions will
compel supernatural beings to bring about a desired result automatically
or ineluck Blee, whereas religion is a bit more oriented
around the free will of the deity. Religion is when

(13:08):
a human hopes they can persuade a deity to grant
their prayer or request through supplication and offerings. In other words,
with religion, you come to the God's temple, you might
make an offering, and you beg hoping that God will
take mercy and help you out. With magic, you enact
a spell designed to command or coerce a supernatural being

(13:32):
to cause something you desire to happen. So, within this framework,
Fraser characterized magic and religion as distinct and in some
ways opposite phenomena, even though they sometimes invoked the same deities.
He saw magicians and priests as fundamentally different and as
natural rivals. But as we just mentioned a minute ago,

(13:55):
anthropologists of religion have in many cases moved away from
Fraser's frameworks as being too simplistic, and it seems the
case of ancient Egyptian magic is sort of the perfect
example of how Fraser's categories don't exactly hold up when
applied to some major real world traditions. They might better
describe some other traditions, but this doesn't really work very well.

(14:16):
Pinch argues with Egyptian magic because she says, while you
see examples both of what Fraser would call magic and
religion in ancient Egypt, they substantially blur together and are
performed in the same settings and by the same authorities.
So in ancient Egypt, a lot of rituals which were

(14:36):
meant to manipulate and automatically compel action by supernatural beings
were performed in temples by the priesthood. The kind of
spells you might imagine a you know, in a difference setting,
like a witch performing binding a demon to do her
bidding or something like that. In the case of ancient Egypt,
you could get stuff like that in a temple, done

(14:57):
by a sanctioned priest who was you know, considered in
the good graces of the king. So it would not
be impossible or even necessarily unusual in ancient Egypt to
have a pious priest practicing spells that explicitly commanded or
attempted to coerce action from deities by, for example, threatening

(15:20):
the deities or threatening to commit dangerous and sacrilegious acts
against them if they did not obey. There are actually
spells that do this.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah. I'll come back to a specific example of this
related to a curse in a bit. Yeah, And we
have to remind ourselves again about mot being important overall.
And you can if you I mean, obviously you need
to know what you're doing within you know, the framework
of the Egyptian religion here, but you could kind of
like go over the god's heads by invoking MOT, which

(15:51):
is very's there's a legal sense to it, you know.
Like one of the things called now stresses is that
the ancient Egyptians loved litigation, and you see that in
some of their magic. You know, they are they're litigating
when they're casting a spell.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
That's an interesting way of thinking about it. I think
we'll come back to that in a minute too. So
another common distinction that has historically been made between magicians
and priests is that while priests have a congregation over

(16:28):
whom they have a responsibility for guidance and moral instruction,
magicians have only clients with whom they can you know,
it's a much freer kind of relationship with whom they
can pursue an a moral transactional kind of interaction. But
Pinch says again this distinction doesn't really work for ancient Egypt.

(16:49):
Ancient Egyptian priests were usually not expected to be moral teachers.
There might have been some cases where they were, but
it doesn't seem to be a general understanding of them.
They were paid specialists in ritual and rituals and spells.
They had expertise in spells, and they could offer whatever
kinds of spells, defensive or offensive, were needed for the occasion,

(17:13):
much like the aforementioned understanding of a magician. And yet
at the same time, priests in ancient Egypt were not
at all considered subversive, illicit, or illegitimate. They were the
temple priests, allied with kingly power, and they practiced what
often looks like ritual magic on behalf of the state.

(17:35):
So that's the thing again that just, you know, in
a modern i guess mainly Christian influenced religious culture, it's
hard to make that just doesn't fit with our idea
of like how magic works. I'm trying to imagine if
in the US, if like Nixon had hired a bunch
of witches to cook up a potion to guarantee victory
in Vietnam, you know, but also those witches were like

(17:58):
mainline Christian denominational preachers.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
That's a good point. Yeah, researching this episode time and
time again, like compared, tried to compare anyway what I
was reading or listening to about the relationship between these
ancient Egyptians and their priests and their gods with how
like contemporary Christians think about their God. And yeah, it

(18:25):
often doesn't line up because depending on exactly how you're
framing the Christian God, you may be framing the Christian
God is more like a loving personal God, or on
the other end of the spectrum, you know, this vengeful god,
the God of Alukardo that is going to you know,
send you to hell. But in either case, like you
wouldn't litigate against this god because on one hand, he's

(18:45):
your friend or your your he's like your family, he's
your father. You don't sue your father under most circumstances,
I guess. But then the other end of the spectrum,
you don't sue the like the all powerful entity that
has you like in the grip of his clause or
what have you. You know. So it's it's just such
a different framework.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
It is so interesting to think about, well, the similarities
and the differences to whatever religion we're more familiar with anyway.
But so coming back to these these frameworks for understanding
magic versus religion, another framework that Pinch discusses in this
chapter is a framework for understanding magic coming from the

(19:27):
Polish anthropologist A. Bronislaw Malinovsky. A few points from Malinovsky here,
he argued that the purpose of ritual magic is to
solve problems that are beyond the limits of what a
society can do with technology, can do with it the
technology available to it. And that's one of those things

(19:49):
that there's so many there's so much stuff like this,
you know, anthropology of religion. You hear it. That just
sounds intuitively true. Yeah, that sounds right. But Pinch argues
once again that when you try to lie this up
with what we know about ancient Egyptian magic, it doesn't
fit the case very well. Like we know for a
fact that the ancient Egyptians used magic to get desired

(20:11):
outcomes that they were practically and technologically capable of achieving
bi conventional means, for example, recovery from medical problems for
which they actually had effective practical treatments, and assuring military
victory over enemies that they were perfectly capable of crushing

(20:31):
in battle. So you might think of magic instead of
being exclusively the domain of problems we can't actually solve
under our own power, a kind of second line of
attack on problems, a parallel approach to solving problems that
you would often pair with a practical approach to the problem.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, you know, it's like some of the magic in
Dungeons and Dragons, right is it? If I remember I
never play a cleric, But it's like blessing or bless
right y via that extra D.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
Four increase your chance of success.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's like I'm rolling at D twenty. There's a an
I already have a modifier in that I can totally
hit this. I might even score a crit But am
I going to say no to the D four? Of course?
Now that could make all the.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
Difference exactly right. Yeah, So maybe that's a better way
of thinking about it, and people will still do this
with forms of prayer today, prayer for prayer for success
in situations where out with the outcome is not guaranteed,
even if you do presumably have the power to achieve
the outcome yourself, you just don't know if you're going
to be able to do it. So yeah, so instead

(21:36):
of magic taking over when practical and tech technological solutions
fall short, I think it was normal for ancient Egyptians
to attack the same problem simultaneously with practical efforts and
ritual magic. Pinch also cites both Melinofsky and another anthropologist
named Misha Ta Tiev, who made the point in different

(21:57):
ways that a key distinction between really religion and magic
is the timing and nature of the problems they seek
to address. So I think this was especially to Tiev's
idea that religion is calendrical, meaning pertaining to the calendar.
It follows a regular, seasonal or yearly pattern of rituals

(22:20):
that occur on a set schedule, and the problems it
tries to solve are public problems. It is for the
common benefit of the community or the state. And magic, meanwhile,
according to Tatiev's framework, is critical It is used to
solve a specific crisis that arises unexpectedly, often a personal

(22:42):
or individual matter, and Pinch argues that this one is
sort of half correct when it comes to ancient Egypt.
The rituals performed in ancient Egyptian temples were primarily aimed
at what were thought to be public goods. They were
for the benefit of the state or the society at large,

(23:02):
and this was done through regularly occurring rituals and seasonal festivals.
But Pinch says the principle of responding to crisis with
magic was actually woven into the very fabric of Egyptian religion.
One really interesting example is that within Egyptian myth and religion,

(23:24):
some regularly occurring rituals were thought to be responses to
a crisis, to an ongoing crisis. It was just like this,
you know, never ceasing cosmic crisis that would occur over
and over, even every single day. The example she gives
is the ritual to protect the sun god Raw at
sunset every night. The Egyptians believed that every night Raw

(23:48):
had to make a perilous journey through the underworld in
which it was a possibility that he could be killed
during his nightly battle with the serpent of chaos Apophus.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
That's right, the soul or barge.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Yeah, And so priests had to perform protective magic magical
interventions to make sure Raw would survive his journey and
the sun would rise again every morning. So it's like
it has more the flavor of responding to a crisis,
but it's a crisis that happens every single day and

(24:20):
you have to keep responding to it.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I think I think most contemporary listeners can can feel
that it does feel like there's a crisis every day.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah. And then beyond that, Pinch mentions that the exact
same priest who is going to be performing regular calindrical
rituals at a state affiliated public temple might also be
a vendor of private magic spells to solve your personal crisis,
maybe for a fee. And what were these private crises

(24:51):
that would have people seeking magical aid or protection. Well,
they're probably what you would imagine. They're all kinds of things.
Health issues seem to be a really big one, like illness, injury, infection,
things relating to childbirth are very common reasons to seek
the intervention of a priest or to try to use
a magical spell, but also to just solve all kinds

(25:14):
of personal problems, injuries committed, you know, offenses committed against
you by others, just problems people would face in their lives. Also,
it's worth thinking about how a lot of magic in
ancient Egypt was to use a medical term preventative care.
So you might, in fact, not just might, people often

(25:35):
did do magical spells not to solve a problem that
had already happened, but to protect against problems that could
potentially arise.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
And obviously, as we've discussed in the show before, we
see examples of this from all around the world as well.
Preventative magic, magic to keep evil away and so forth.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, yeah, now here's one another area. There are many
of these where a person who grew up thinking about
magic and religion and say a primarily Christian context and
thinking about magic along the lines of witchcraft. You know,
whether way witchcraft is viewed in European Christianity. The question
is was magic seen as anti social or harmful or

(26:19):
wicked in ancient Egypt, the way witchcraft is viewed in
most historical Christian societies. The answer is, for the most part, no,
especially in the period before Egypt was absorbed into the
Roman Empire. Now there are some nuances to this, because
evil magic was absolutely thought to exist, but evil magic

(26:44):
or wicked sorcery was usually attributed to foreigners, not other Egyptians.
So there was wicked sorcery, but most of the time
There are exceptions here. Most of the time it was
thought to be coming from somewhere else, somewhere outside of Egypt. Again,
that's the broad trend. There are exceptions to this in

(27:04):
some texts that maybe specify certain punishments or prohibitions against
illicit sorcery. But this just seems to be mostly not
how Egyptians viewed magic done by other Egyptians. Usually that
was not thought of like Christians thought of witchcraft. Here's
another question about magic. Did ancient Egyptians believe their magic
to be the command of an impersonal force in nature,

(27:29):
as in the Christian concept of natural magic, You're just
sort of commanding about a general, disembodied power. Or was
it thought to be the invocation of the powers of
specific supernatural beings or entities, as in the Christian concept
of demonic magic. Again, though it would not have the

(27:51):
negative connotations of Christian demonic magic, the invocation of powerful
supernatural beings was the standard mechanism described by Egyptian priests
and spells. You were maybe calling somebody up from the
underworld or from some other plane to take care of
a little something for you. There were a few mechanisms
of magic and Egyptian thought that were more impersonal, one

(28:15):
that Pinch describes as essentially working by the principle of analogy,
and this would be based on the subtle associations between things.
I'm going to read from Pinch's description here to get
the idea of how this impersonal magic worked.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
The magician also strove to discern the true nature of
beings and objects and the connections between them. These connections
were created by shared properties such as color or the
sound of a name. Similarities which seem irrelevant to our
classification systems, were considered significant by the Egyptians. Once a
pairing had been established, it was thought possible to transfer

(28:54):
qualities from one component to the other, or to produce
an effect on the one by actions performed on the other.
Heca was the force that turned these connections into a
kind of power network.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
HM. Fascinating.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
So you've got both kinds of magic. You've got like
natural magic based on things like this sort of associative power,
and then you've also got just calling up other worldly
entities to do your bidding for you. Now, finally, I
want to elaborate one thing that Pinch gets into that
I thought was really interesting, which is further subdividing the
question of what people believed magic could do for them.

(29:33):
I already mentioned a minute ago that people thought it
could solve problems for them. That's the more obvious answer.
You know, it could help you achieve a goal that
was either outside of your personal power or in which
success by normal means was not guaranteed. But the less
obvious and very interesting answer is that magic also helped
people identify the cause of a problem. Why did this

(29:58):
happen to me? Why did this bad thing occur? Why
did my child get sick? Why did my crops with
her pinch runs through a list of common explanations that
would be given in spells for the answers to these problems.
Maybe a God is wrathful at you, Maybe a foreign
wizard has cursed you with evil magic. Maybe a ghost

(30:21):
or a demon is maliciously persecuting you. And whereas in
the religious context of modern Christianity, the answers are more
often things like, well, you might get a kind of
non answer in the form of God works in mysterious ways.
We can't know why this happened, which many people do believe,
but also people often report finding unsatisfying or get you

(30:44):
can get answers like you have sinned and you are
being punished. Strangely, you do still hear this a lot,
even though in multiple stories from the Bible, Jesus explicitly
rejects this reasoning, Yeah, you know, I guess it's like
in the story of the you know, the Man Born
Blind and the Gospel of John, he's like, that's not
how it works. Though I guess some people interpret Jesus

(31:04):
in stories like that to be more narrowly referring to well,
he's just saying it's not how it works in this case.
Maybe God does punish people for sin in other cases.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
It's a worldview that can be very difficult to shake,
even if you have a logical or even you know,
a doctrine based reason or even a scripture based reason.
As we're disgusting to reject it.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I want to be fair. Obviously,
I don't find that point of view highly sympathetic, but
I will will at least be fair and say that
I think you could have legitimate theological reasons for saying no, no.
People are misinterpreting those stories in the Bible where you know,
and Jesus did just mean, this guy wasn't born blind
because of sin. Maybe other people are anyway. Sorry that

(31:46):
was a tangent, but yeah, So those are the kinds
of things you would more often get in modern Christianity.
Ancient Egyptian magical texts would often be able to say
in contrast to that, they say, yes, we can absolutely
identify these specific source of your problem, but the spell
or the ritual does not assert that the misfortune is

(32:06):
your fault. You get an answer about the cause, and
you can believe that you are, in fact an innocent
victim being attacked by powers beyond your control. And now
that you have consulted a priest with the proper magical arsenal,
or now that you've got this magical papyrus in your hands,
and you can put together a counterspell to identify your

(32:26):
oppressor and heal or protect you without assigning yourself any
blame for the problem. So that covers most of the
framework that Pinch gets into in this chapter. But I
just want to emphasize a few themes at the end
to really hammer them home. One of the main ones
is to say, again, in ancient Egypt, magic and religion
were not separable and rival institutions. They were fully ed

(32:51):
entwined with one another, and the boundaries between them are
quite fuzzy. And the other idea is that magic was
an all pervading force that affected even the gods. It
wasn't just us, affected even the gods, and in fact,
the gods needed magical help of their own. On that
last point, there's one very interesting feature of ancient Egyptian cosmology,

(33:17):
which is that the creation story in ancient Egyptian cosmology
the creation of the ordered world out of the primeval
waters of chaos. Some authors have talked about how in
Egyptian thinking, this was not a single event that took
place in the past at the beginning, the way we
think of the creation narrative in many other religions. An

(33:40):
Egyptian myth, creation was an ongoing process that required continual
daily effort by the creator deity and by the other
gods allied with order. So humans with their rituals had
to perform magic invoking the power of Heca to aid

(34:01):
the gods and sustain the creation of the world every day.
So the ordered world was very fragile, and if the
process of creation through Heca through magic was not sustained
every day by these efforts of the Creator spirit and
by the efforts of gods and you know, the order
gods and humans. The ordered world could well collapse back

(34:24):
into the abyss of chaos and the world could be unmade.
So I feel like this really provides some scope on
how how important Heca magic was. It was incredibly important,
and the problems it addressed were so wide, so different,
you know, Heca magic was. It's how you find out
that your cow is sick because it has been attacked
by a ghost or cursed by a foreign sorcerer, And

(34:48):
it is how you invoke a divine shield of protection
and healing over your cow. And it is also how
the priesthood keeps the state secure, keeps the king enthroned,
aids the Sun god and his battle against the serpent,
and keeps the world from sinking into a dark ocean
of nothingness.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Absolutely, yeah, this is uh, this is such a fascinating topic.
You know, it reminds me of our past episode on
the inundation of the Nile, and you know how you
have the seasonal flooding of the Nile that's responsible for
basically sustaining life along the Great Nile river, and and
you can also point to various examples in any given

(35:28):
culture where like there's there's a definite uh, there's there's
a definite knowledge that there are seasonal things that have
to happen in order for life to continue, be it,
you know, even as simple as the return of spring,
you know, out of the winter and so forth. But yeah,
this idea that that the world is fragile and you're
not in the in the case of the ancient Egyptians,

(35:49):
you're not even guaranteed tomorrow unless the prayers are there
to support the solar barge in its journey, well said.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
Yeah, but anyway, So yeah, I guess that's the basic
framework about magic in ancient Egypt.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
And from here I want to briefly look to the
idea of curses in a summary way, because of course,
Heca was not only capable of healing and protecting. As
we mentioned earlier, Heca had the power to weaken, to sicken,
to harm and cut off, and even to kill. In fact,
not just to kill, to attack you in the afterlife,

(36:32):
to attack your potential for the afterlife. And this brings
us to the role of curses in ancient Egyptian magic.
To start off, I just wanted to mention a few
basic types of curses we might think about in ancient Egypt,
maybe going from the most familiar types in our context
to the least familiar. And here I'm going to make

(36:54):
some generalizations obviously across the thousands of years and the
millions of lives in questions, and there will be some exceptions.
I'm just trying to capture some main patterns. But none
of this is the case in all cases. So the
first category I want to mention is personal curses. In
later magical papyri from Egypt, we see all kinds of

(37:17):
run of the mill curses designed for regular people who
want to harm rivals or enemies. Did somebody steal from you,
did somebody speak ill against you or hurt someone you
care about, Well, you can address this. You can consult
a priest or, you can open up your magical papyrus
and curse that person. You can make them fall sick

(37:38):
and die, you can make them tormented with madness and pain.
And I want to be clear here, it seems that
there's more evidence for this kind of personal individual cursing
against enemies from later periods of Egyptian history. It may
have become more common as time went on, especially in
the Greco Roman period. The existence of this type of cursing. Interestingly,

(38:04):
it might seem to be at odds with a claim
I mentioned earlier from Geraldine Pinch, the claim that most
of the time ancient Egyptians did not view the practice
of magic as evil or subversive, and more often attributed evil,
dangerous magic to foreign sorcerers from other countries. I was

(38:24):
trying to reconcile these and I was thinking, obviously, wouldn't
the Egyptian victim of a curse cast by another Egyptian
be tempted to view that as evil magic, as wicked sorcery. Well,
they might well see it that way, But it does
seem my best understanding, based on what I could piece
together here, is that there was probably some distinction between

(38:47):
what we're seen as legitimate curses and illegitimate, harmful magic,
much in the same way that people might think about
physical violence today, where it is permissible to use violence
in self defense or in some cultural contexts if it's retaliatory,
but not permissible if it is against a random or

(39:07):
innocent victim.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, this kind of comes back to what I was
talking about earlier about litigation, like thinking of it as litigation,
Like you might seek litigation if you have been harmed,
have you been in an accident, you know, call such
and such number, get the fighting lawyer on your side,
because that lawyer or in this case, you know, a
priest or a magician is going to is going to

(39:29):
restore mott, is going to restore balance. Right At the
same time, you use the legal comparison, Yeah, you can
very much go out there and hire a lawyer to
go after somebody for illegitimate purposes like nuisance lawsuits and
so forth. You know, you can formulate an entire list
there in your own head. But but yeah, we often

(39:53):
think about like, oh, I need to lawyer up because
I have been wronged or I'm about to be wronged.
I need to count the evil of others.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Yeah, and it's true that even the fairest and most
just system is always going to be in some way
subject to abuse. So there's like, you know, or some
people are going to feel like they're getting the short
end of the stick about it. So, yeah, you can't
ever prevent that entirely from happening. But this seems to
be generally how people thought that the system worked when

(40:22):
it was working correctly according to them, So that's personal curses,
Like when it came to cursing Egyptians, could you know,
you could go to a priest or you could privately
read a magical papyrus to harness the morally neutral power
of heca to harm a legitimate enemy. And it seems
like this sort of thing was viewed basically as fair play.
But if magic was used to torment an innocent person,

(40:45):
that's probably attributable to chaotic wizardry performed by evil foreigners,
you know, not somebody who would be working with a
legit Egyptian temple priest. Yeah, another kind that is going
to be more familiar to us, and this will factor
in majorly in the rest of the series. His funerary curses.
One of the most famous varieties of Egyptian magic, the
curse that seals a tomb and punishes defilers or grave robbers.

(41:10):
And while we can later discuss ways that the reality
of this type of curse has been twisted somewhat in
popular retelling, these kinds of curses absolutely do exist, and
private tombs from Egypt are sometimes inscribed with offensive magic
calling down injury, death, and even I thought this was
pretty wicked, that the punishment of the soul and denial

(41:32):
of an afterlife upon anyone who would disturb the sanctity
of a tomb or steal its contents.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
All right.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
And then after those categories you start getting into some
types of curses that I think it would be less
familiar in our modern understanding of witchcraft and magic. One
of them is political curses. This is a bit like
the idea I mentioned of Nixon getting witches to do
something so he could win in Vietnam. Like, the king
and the state have enemies, and the enemies must be destroyed.

(42:01):
These enemies could be rival kingdoms, or the princes of
foreign nations, or the leaders of revolts and rebellions. The
enemies of Egypt and the king would often be cursed
to destruction in official temple rituals. A common way of
describing this as execration rituals, where maybe an effigy or

(42:21):
a clay pot on which there has been established a
symbolic link between the pot and the person in question.
These objects would be ritually smashed or otherwise destroyed. Okay,
and then finally, I think the most interesting type of curse,
religious or cosmic curses. Remember how I mentioned a minute

(42:42):
ago that most ancient Egyptian cosmologies held that the gods
themselves were to some extent affected by heckamagic and that
the divine forces of order needed the help of temple
based rituals in order to prevail. That help could well
involve curses to help the gods and the divine forces

(43:02):
of order when victory continually over the monsters and the
spirits of chaos, Egyptian priests would perform sort of smiting
curses against the divine and cosmic enemies of order, much
like they would against the earthly enemies of the kingdom.
And of course it's a this is a very loose analogy,
but imagine if daily worship in a Christian church also

(43:26):
involved witchcraft that would invoke death curses against the devil.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Oh, well, that's an interesting topic unto itself, right, because
you can you can look at various examples of historic
individuals kind of having their own personal war against the
devil or demons, you know, cursing them back, telling you know,
depart evil doer and do everlasting fire and so forth.
And then also so many I think of various like

(43:53):
folk songs and bits of folk art where the devil
is tricked, smashed over the head with something herded by
cowboys and so forth. There is so many different examples
poked with a hat pin, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Oh like in the Santa Claus movie.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
That Santa Claus definitely invokes death curses against the devil.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
All right, Well, yeah, I wanted to. I want to
expand a little bit on the topic of the funerary
curses because this was this was part of the of
of what Colleen Darnell talked about in her presentation, and
she used to There were a couple of Egyptian words
that she focused on here. One is the word for curse,

(44:48):
which is usually a verb but is also sometimes a
now which is sewer, not quite sewer, but you know,
similar to that like suewear. And then there's also a
word shin wit, and this means incantation, but depending on
the context, could also definitely mean a curse. So just
some more specific terminology for what was invoked here. And

(45:13):
so a lot of her talk centered around like evidence
that we have for or against the idea of ancient
Egyptian curses on people entering tombs or certainly defiling them
in one way or another. So one of the important
facts that she pointed out is that in general, the

(45:34):
upper part of a tomb was generally a public space
for visitors with good intentions, so family members and the like,
and people visiting the tomb. It might line up with
certain festivals and so forth, and so there would never
be a blanket curse against visiting a tomb space. And
this is interesting too. She pointed out that sometimes graffiti

(45:56):
in the form of writing your name was encouraged, as
it was with certain temples voted inscriptions, where if you
would be the honorable thing to do, just scratch your
name on the wall. Again in antiquity, not today.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
Oh well, that just reminded me of something we talked
about years ago. We did some episodes on the Colossus
or Colossi or Colossus of Memnon. There were multiple of them, Colossie,
the Colossi of Memnon, which not in our modern times,
but in ancient times to us were visited by tourists
who wrote graffiti on them, like Romans would write their

(46:32):
names on these, you know, great monuments whatever.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Marcus was here, Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I thought of that
as well when this came up. She also stresses that
ancient Egyptian curses, when they were used, they tended to
have a dual formation, a dual formulation rather a blessing
on positive actions and then a focused threat against negative actions.
And again a lot of this comes back to the

(46:56):
importance of MOTT. You know, you got to have both energies,
you got to have bad balance, and therefore a negative
action is not just a transgression against the king or
even a god, but against cosmic balance itself. Of course,
she as I mentioned earlier, she made the She stressed
that the ancient Egyptians were very legalistic and that the

(47:16):
cursed language typically invokes this, speaking to litigation against the
defiler of the tomb in the afterlife. Like some of
these basically read like and if you do X, Y
or Z, I will see you in ghost court. You
will be judged and I will be there for it
because there is like a legal proceeding that will follow.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
It's like one of those scary letters you get from
a lawyer.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
To exactly yeah, It's like this is the scary letter
essentially from a priest. She also pointed out that ancient
Egyptian curses tend to follow the same formulations as pure
laws that were written for the living, and the idea
here too is that a real world prosecution and punishment

(48:00):
would kind of be the first stop, and then this
would be augmented by supernatural prosecution and punishment, kind of
coming back to that whole the D twenty plus D
four situation we were talking about, Like, ideally, if you
rob this tomb, you know we're going to catch you
and there'll be some sort of real world punishment. But
in addition to that, or instead of that, if we

(48:20):
can't catch you, there will be litigation and punishment in
the afterlife.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
Oh, I mean, this is another example of what we
were talking about earlier, where you attack the same problem
with multiple solutions, one magical and one practical.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Yeah. Yeah. One example that she pointed to and bring
up a couple here is the Tomb of Many from
the Sixth Dynasty, and it includes this example where the
writing is basically saying, look, I paid everyone who worked
on this tomb. It was fair, but if you damage
my tomb quote, A crocodile be against him in the water,

(48:55):
a snake be against him on the earth. And essentially
saying the Great God, generally a cyrus or a local deity,
will be the one to judge you. Another example of
litigation in one of these inscriptions. She pointed to the
inscription of Idu from the sixth Dynasty quote as for
any man who will take my grave from me, my

(49:16):
claim will be litigated with them by the Great God,
again like le Osiris or another like local deity. So
threat of legal action, if not in this world, then
at least in the next. She points out that there's
no curse against an individual or visitor to a tomb
in any of the royal tombs that we know of
and have access to, and that it would have gone

(49:38):
without saying that you shouldn't enter a burial chamber, like
no signage is required there. I imagine it's sort of
like it's just it would be known to everyone involved.
Anybody who could read the text, you would know not
to go into the burial chamber.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
Yeah. Yeah, And I think I mentioned this earlier, but
I remember reading that the most common places where these
funerary curses are found or in private tombs.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
She also points to something from the Pyramid text that's
a cursed template for a deceased king, not against mortals
but against the gods. Getting back to what we were
talking about earlier about how magic could be used essentially
against the gods in defense of Mot. And this is
I believe spell for eighty five, and it essentially says, look,

(50:26):
bulls will be slaughtered for any god who takes this
king to heaven. But if you don't take this king
to heaven, you're not going to be honored. That's obvious
to it. And so yeah, this apparently factors into a
lot of Egyptian magic. You know, if something violates Mot,
it kind of goes above the heads of the gods
because they are bound to Mont as well.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Feels bold, strong arming the gods like that, but you
can admire it.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
She also brings up a couple of cases involving grabbing
someone's neck like a bird or wringing their neck like
a goose. So there's one from ones from twenty three
hundred BCE from the tomb of Cantika of Sakkara, and
my apologies that may be hitting these pronunciations wrong, but

(51:12):
this one says, as for any person who shall enter
my tomb in a state of impurity, not having purified
themselves according to the manner of entering a temple. I
will be judged with them about it in the west,
in the court of the Great God, and I will
wring his neck like a goose. So this one again,
it's like saying I will see you in court. You know,

(51:32):
you will be judged. I will be there. But then
I adding this extra bit, I will bring your neck
like a goose. And we see that again. There's another
example she brings up twenty This is from twenty two
hundred BC from the Tomb of Ninki. As for any noble,
any official, or any person who will destroy any stone
or any brick in this tomb, I will be judged

(51:53):
with him by the Great God. I will seize his
neck like a bird. So again I like how this
one seems to be translated as I will be judged
with you by the Great God, which very much brings
this idea of like, there's a court proceeding, I'm going
to bring this charge against you and let it be decided.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
And I'm going to win. The implication, yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Yeah, that seems to be the main implication of the
ringing the neck like a goose. But this too is
also interesting because apparently this is referring to sacrificial killing
of a duck or a goose that would have been
done like by a priest. So there are you know,
inscriptions there images of this of Akanatin sacrificing a duck.

(52:39):
You can look this up. I believe this is in
the collection of the Met Museum from between thirteen fifty
three and thirteen thirty six PCE, and it's you know,
here's a figure ringing the neck of a goose. So
you know, this seems to largely refer to that. One
thing that Darnell stress is that, you know, there were

(52:59):
definitely some sort of real world punishments, but we don't
necessarily know all of the details on what those were,
so I don't know. Does this possibly also refer to
some sort of like real world punishment that would be
dished out in this life. We don't know for sure.
But also it's kind of a this is another potential
connection here birds offered for sacrifice and temples, a connection

(53:21):
between like the magist and the magic and the religious
rituals that were being carried out, you know, in both
cases by the priests. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah, And it's interesting the way I don't know the
different feelings that can be created by the threats in
these curses. Some of them have this more legalistic or
more directly physically violent analogy in them, like wring your
neck like a goose, or the crocodile will get you
in the water, though that may have other implications that

(53:52):
you know, but at least to me, conjures this idea
of physical violence attacked by an animal or by another person.
And then there's a way in which, at least to me,
an even colder implication is made by these tomb curses
that threaten your existence in the afterlife, like you will
not receive an honorable burial, you will not go to

(54:14):
the afterlife, you will get nothing.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Yeah, yeah, I mean coming back to the crocodile. This
reminds me of the of of Omit, the devour of
the dead, that if memory serves like his role in
the judgment of the dead is like he consumes you
and brings on annihilation if you are not worthy to
pass on. So, yeah, that's quite a that's quite a

(54:37):
threat to impose. But you know you can you can also, yeah,
you can understand it, like first first saying you know
you will be you will be litigated. You will be
tried in this world in addition to or instead of that, though,
you know, watch out in the afterlife, because charges will
be brought against you and you may might just be
annihilated altogether. All right, Well, looking at the clock here,

(54:59):
we're about out of time. So what we're going to
do is we're going to break and come back with
this topic on Thursday. We have much more to discuss.
We're going to get into the twentieth century myth of
the Pharaoh's curse, where that comes from, how it shakes
out when you look at it, and we'll also look
to an example outside of Egypt that aligns with some
of the ideas there, and then we'll have more to

(55:21):
discuss about Egyptian magic and Egyptian curses in general. In
the meantime, we would remind you that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
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