dear comrade

Tonight I heard Rita Lucarelli lecture on magic and demonology in ancient Egypt. I took so many notes my hand cramped.

I had intended just to listen. I was (am) very tired and had planned just to sit at the back of the free lecture and try not to fall asleep. But then in context of our ideas of magic versus magic in ancient Egypt, she said, "Magic is a god," and I sat up. Magic's name in Egyptian is Heka; she showed a slide of him on the boat of Ra, a rather ordinary-looking male human figure holding the tail of a serpent squiggling in protective waves all around the sun-god as he journeys through the underworld night. Magic is not trickery, blasphemy, a practice against the gods. Magic is an integral part of creation, of maintaining the world. It can be distinguished from religion, just as demons can be distinguished from gods. By humans, it's used for defensive, curative, and transformative purposes, with love-spells serving as a subset of that last; they are considered aggressive magic, forcibly changing a person. But there is no concept of black magic in ancient Egypt, though any spell practiced against the pharaoh can be banned. A magician is not someone secretive and strange but a priest, a doctor, a local scholar. Anyone who deals with the liminal world.

Which is where demons come in. We see them represented side by side with gods, but gods exist in the mythic dimension, it is their work to look out for the living and the dead, they have cults, shrines, are worshipped; demons are appeased. They protect, but they have to be asked to do it. But they are not figures of inherent evil, even though the word we use for them has picked up so many connotations of temptation, punishment etc. in its passage through Christianity from the Greek δαίμων; that is all irrelevant to an Egyptian demon. They don't possess people, either. The closest we get is the language of disease personified as a demon seizing a patient, which anyone who has ever spoken of being knocked on their ass by a cold can comprehend without needing to call in Father Merrin. Lucarelli likened them more to Plato's original definition of daimones, liminal messengers between the mortal world and the divine; she likes Gregor Ahn's term Grenzgänger, which he considers untranslatable and she thinks can be adequately rendered as "boundary-crosser." They do not polarize between good and evil as in ancient Greek religion, however; there is no such thing as an Egyptian agathodaimon. They can be either or neither or both; it can be a meaningless question. Seen in the underworld of the Book of the Dead, they are not devils of hell but guardians, protectors, dangerous only to those who approach them without the right spells. Many-named and nameless, Lucarelli called them; some have snake wands in their hands; one has a duck on his head. There is no one word for what they are.

I could not write fast enough by hand to take down the names of some demons she identified when I was also trying to copy their Egyptian names; the only one I got in full was "Face-downward, numerous of shapes" (sḫd-ḥr, ʿšȝ ir.w). Others translated to "Radiant," "Sad of voice," "One who stretches out his brow." The otherwise human-formed demon with four cobras quirked above his head like interrobangs is known as "He who protects his body," i.e., the body of the deceased: the body that is his to guard. The wooden figurine of a gazelle-headed demon twists as dramatically as a Fosse dancer, an aggressive pose, Lucarelli said; it's part of the same group, crumbling black with plastered linen, as the demon with a turtle for a head. They too are tomb guardians. To address the question of scary rather than protective demons, she called up a criminally cute cartoon of Anubis and the Devourer, whose name now appears to be rendered "Amemet." Certainly she looks like a monster to us, that hulking composite of hippo-crocodile-lion alertly poised ("She's ready to go!") to engulf the heart that drops truth's scales with its weight of sin, but in a culture that represents its gods therianthropomorphically, her hybrid nature is not intrinsically monstrous nor even necessarily ugly. The same goes for the crocodile-vulture demon with snakes in its hands, frightening off the nightmare demons—it's the ones you don't see that you should fear, the ones so bad they are never depicted, only written about, falling from the sky to fasten on the breast of the sleeper. They may be atypically represented in an image of crocodiles swarming a human form, but if so Lucarelli has never seen anything like the iconography again. More often they are the fill-in-the-blank in the oracular formulae of amulets: I/you/we shall keep him/her/NN safe from any kind of evil dead/demon . . . wanderers, disease-bringers, messengers, murderers. They can be subordinated to the goddess Sekhmet. Somewhere in here she introduced us to the headache demon Sehaqeq, scratched in black ink on an ostrakon—his name means "half-head" (shȝḳḳ), migraine. He looks like a young man with his arm flung over his face, as if he is having trouble bearing the light, but he has a tongue growing down his back. I would almost expect to find him in a collection of yōkai, but he's more than three thousand years old. It is still common to demonize illness, Lucarelli noted. Black dogs, brainweasels. It seems to help the patient. I had no idea that was what Tiny Wittgenstein was doing.

There is no formal demonology in ancient Egyptian culture as there is in Judaism. The demons in Mesopotamia seem to lean more toward the evil than the amoral. An incantation bowl is inscribed spiraling inward in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, an owl-like, bat-like demon at its center; it's Ashmedai, seen a beat later as Asmodeus in Collin de Plancy's nineteenth-century Dictionnaire infernal. (The bowls seem to have functioned as one-way fish-traps, drawing in the demon, containing it from moving around the house under whose threshold it was buried.) An amulet against Lamaštu depicts her trampling a donkey, overseen by her enemy Pazuzu, in nearly the same pose as the infant Horus trampling crocodiles under the approving eye of Bes: they look so similar and mean such different things. Everyone in the ancient world believed in demons, even if not exactly the same kind. It would have been strange only if the ancient Egyptians had not. The last slide was a modern photograph of a gazelle and a lizard hung apotropaically in the grate of a window. Demons and magic are still with us today.

There were questions afterward. Lucarelli pointed the audience toward the websites she's involved with: the interactive Book of the Dead in 3D, the snazzily named Demon Things. I tried not to mourn how badly my fast-penciled handwriting has disintegrated in the thirteen years since I was using it on the regular. The professor who had introduced the lecture wished everyone well on their way, safely protected by the right demons. I couldn't help noticing as I came home in the slushy black ice that I didn't have to wait for a bus once.