CHAPTER 4 Illness as Divine Punishment: The Nature and Function of the Disease-Carrier Demons in the Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts

Rita Lucarelli

In modern English, the word “demon” or daimon has a mainly negative con­notation, referring mostly to the court of evil, dreadful beings at the service of Satan in the Christian hell and opposed to the angelic creatures populating the celestial abode of God.

As a matter of fact, of all Egyptian religious concepts, the notion of demon has always been one of the most difficult to interpret for modern scholars. The first difficulty lies in the fact that in the Egyptian terminology and iconography there is not always a clear ontological distinction between demon and deity. In fact, there are no ancient Egyptian terms that could be translated as the modern English “demon” and which could be interpreted as a lexicographical evidence of “demons” being other than the deities, which in ancient Egyptian are called ntr.w. However, the names of a few inimical or potentially malevo­lent beings are written in red ink in magical and funerary texts and often the determinative for death or enemy is added to the phonetic signs, showing that the Egyptians did recognize at least evil demons as an ontological category in their own right and linked them with illness and death.^[120]

The main difference between demon and deity in ancient Egypt is that, generally speaking, demons received no cult, at least not until the late New Kingdom.^{[121] [122] Within the hierarchy of supernatural beings, demons are subordi­nated to the gods; although they possess special powers, they are not universal but rather limited in nature and scope.}

According to the descriptions occurring in ancient Egyptian magical texts and to the depictions attested on apotropaic objects, ancient Egyptian demons mostly manifest in hybrid, composite forms with teriomorphic and anthropo­morphic components, but also in full animal form;^[123] disincarnated spirits and the beliefs in ghosts, generally indicated as akhw (spirits) are also attested in incantations of daily magic, in the so-called “Letters to the dead” and in some literary accounts as well.^[124]

According to the Christian reception of the Greek term daimon in Late Antiquity, demonic entities were classified as evil, in contrast to angels who were classed as good; in the ancient Egyptian religion however, the notion of “evil” (isfet) does not belong exclusively to demonic entities but was mostly conceived as a cosmic force occurring in creation and incarnated in Apopis, the giant snake attempting to stop the solar boat during its daily journey through night and day.^[125] As liminal entities, demons always act on the borders between order (maat) and chaos/evil (isfet) and have the capacity, by divine command, to bring chaos into the ordered world but also to mediate between order and chaos, the sacred and the profane, by protecting sacred places on earth and in the netherworld from impurity. Because of their multifaceted character and forms of appearance, we cannot identify a single ontological category of demonic beings but on the basis of their function and location, two main classes of demons are recognizable in ancient Egypt: stationary/ guardian—demons and wandering/messenger—demons.

Stationary demons are tied to a well-defined place, such as a region or gate of the netherworld, or a temple or tomb entrance on earth; their main function is to protect the place where they are located and to block the access to those who do not possess the magic, secret knowledge to face them. On the con­trary, wandering demons constantly travel between this and the other world, often being sent as punishment from angry deities or also bringing misfortune on their own will; the disease-carrier demons should be considered as a sub­category of the wanderers.

Due to this recurrent demonization of illnesses, magical practices and spells were used together with medical prescriptions in ancient Egypt, as attested in the so-called “magico-medical” papyri, which were particularly en vogue during the Ramesside Period (1292-1077 bce) although already appearing in the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 bce).^[126] This kind of document testifies that magic and exorcistic rites to expel illness-demons from the body were consid­ered powerful remedies complementing medical science. As in other ancient civilizations and in particular Mesopotamia, in ancient Egypt spells to avert the influence of the disease-demons are well attested although, if compared to Mesopotamia, the exorcism genre is not so popular in ancient Egypt during the Pharaonic period.^[127] From the available sources it seems that those illnesses not presenting visible physical symptoms, such as headache and epilepsy, were more commonly demonized than other types of conditions such as poisonous insect bites; skin diseases were also commonly seen as demonic manifestations.^[128]

Besides individual demons personifying specific illnesses, we have also collective gangs of demons controlled or sent by gods and represented as dis­ease-bringers as well. This category is well represented in the ancient Egyptian sources under the general names of the wpwty.w, “the messengers,” hity.w, “the slayers” and the smy.w, “the wandering ones,” which mostly act as divine agents of punishment.

Moreover, some “astral demons”, namely astral bodies depicted as hybrid demonic creatures, were demonized or divinized because of the influence they were believed to have on humankind; planets, stars and other celestial bod­ies are represented in the so-called “astronomical ceilings” of the temples and occasionally also in funerary compositions decorating tomb walls. The decan­stars, for example, are often personified in later texts as malevolent demons, which could bring pestilence and illness on earth, especially during some cru­cial periods of the year such as the epagomenal days, namely the last five days of the lunar calendar.

These various demonic gangs are often undefined in number and gender and they are not described in detail as far as their whereabouts are concerned; the main information provided from the texts is that, when they appear in the world of the living, it is because they have been sent by deities in order to bring to humankind plagues and diseases, exploiting what seems to be a clear divine punishment coming from the sky which is avoidable only through the perfor­mance of the temple rituals and magical rites. This is especially the case of the h,’ty.w and the smy.w, whose fearful action is mentioned in magical, funer­ary and ritual texts as early as the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 bce) and into the Ptolemaic Period (332-31 bce). Angry feline goddesses such as the lion-headed Sakhmet and the cat-headed Bastet are among their most popular masters, but the messenger-demons may be also designed as emissaries of the sun god Re and of the god of the dead Osiris.

In the main magical textual corpus of the Middle Kingdom, the so-called Coffin Texts inscribed mainly on wooden coffins, the messenger-demons are especially related to Osiris and characterized as a special god's army of the underworld; the influence of the messengers is therefore not only active in this world but also in the next.

If this book is used on earth, he (i.e. the deceased) shall not be seized by the messengers who attack those who commit wrong in the whole earth.^[130]

In many magical and medical texts of the New Kingdom (1550-1069 bce) and especially in the temple texts of the Ptolemaic Period, the wandering demons are instead related to the so-called 1,’d.t rnp.t, “the pestilence of the year”; similar to the slaughterer-demons (hity.w), they were considered executors of aggres­sive goddesses, who could arrive on earth and bring misfortune and illness.

This kind of textual evidence, where disease-demons operate on a double level, namely in the netherworld, mainly at the service of Osiris, and on earth as emissaries of terrifying goddesses, speaks for the blurred borders existing between mortuary and daily magic in ancient Egypt. As a matter of fact, they are not only mentioned in the funerary texts but also in the magical texts of the New Kingdom and later, which are concerned with daily magic and the world of the living. This means that, although it is true that two different realties must be distinguished when discussing demons in ancient Egypt—the world of the dead and the world of the living—these realties however seem to com­plement each other in the religious belief in evil spirits. The demons of daily religion and those mentioned in amuletic and magical texts may occasionally be the same as those appearing in funerary texts; the idea of seeking divine intervention and protection for deflecting those demonic forces stays the same in both the world of the dead and of the living.

For instance, the demonic category of the hity.w, “the slaughterers”, whose earliest occurrence is found in the Pyramid Texts inscribed in the royal tombs of the Old Kingdom and therefore can be considered as originally belonging to the netherworld, occurs in a variety of other textual genres, from the incanta­tions of daily use of the Ramesside Period to the ritual texts inscribed in the temples of the Ptolemaic Period.

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In these kinds of text, which are used in non-funerary contexts, the h;ty.w are disease-bringers; their name recalls a word used for describing illness, namely h;y.w, “disease’’^² and the deity most often mentioned as their master is the lioness-headed Sekhmet, who was characterized especially in the Late Period as a dreadful goddess who needed to be propitiated with special cults. Her name derives from the word shm (sekhem), the term for “power” in ancient Egyptian; her power was especially terrifying since it included the capacity to spread pestilence among humankind, as narrated in a popular myth which sees her as protagonist; one of her epithets was that of “Dangerous goddess”?³ The need to appease her fury therefore resulted in her acquiring also an impor­tant role in healing practice. Her priests were effective as swnw, doctors, in the practice of medicine and there are hints that they also functioned as vet­erinary surgeons.14 Sekhmet, together with Osiris, was also often considered the sender of the wpwty.w, the “messengers” who, similar to the “slaughterers” (h;ty.w), may act as punishers and executers of the divine will, as already clear from their names.

It is also interesting to note how, in magical texts, the names of these three main demonic gangs (h;ty.w, sm;y.w and wpwty.w) seem interchangeable, prob­ably due to the fact that they share the same basic function: inflicting punish­ment through plagues, diseases and famine.

These demonic gangs of disease-bringers can be instead distinguished from certain more individually characterised illness-demons, which unlike the demonic gangs are not an explicit symbol of illness but whose occurrence in the texts illustrates even more clearly how the ancient Egyptians believed that many illnesses were the manifestation of a demon which would possess the patient or a part of his body. This kind of demons may also cause wounds in the human body, as in the so-called “spell for a mother and his child” of the Middle Kingdom, where the already mentioned tmy. t-demon occurs,^[132] which is said to be able to break the bones of a man!^[133] In the medical papyri of the Ramesside Period we have also a consistent number of illness-demons pre­sented as malign influences entering the body from the outside. In Papyrus Ebers, for instance, it is said that “the breath of life enters into the right ear and the breath of death enters into the left ear”?^[134] Another medical case described in the same papyrus (Papyrus Ebers, 854e) ascribes deafness to breathing air from the “beheading demon” (heseq). Finally, a medical case occurring in the surgical papyus Edwin Smith describes a skull fracture through which a malign entity can find its way from the outside to the inside of the body: “as for some­thing entering from outside, it means the breath of an outside god or death. It is not an entering of that which is created by his flesh’d^[135]

As is clear from the evidence presented above, different types of demons are mentioned as causes or as bringers of diseases, many of them manifest­ing as gangs with collective names. It is still an open issue, among scholars of ancient Egyptian magic and medicine, how to interpret the texts where dis­ease-demons are mentioned. Are they to be intended as personified illnesses or were they mere technical names, within a medical language, employed in order to express the idea of illness as a noxious external intruder in the patient's body?i^[136] I believe that, in order to answer such a question, we need a more in­depth lexicographical study of the magical and medical texts, something that was advocated some years ago but still remains to be done.^[137]

In any case, it is interesting that the above-mentioned disease-demons occur also in non-medical contexts, namely in ritual temple texts as well as in incantations of mortuary magic. This evidence speaks of a multi-facetted nature of the demonization of illnesses, which bears a close relationship with the world of the divine and its ritual sphere. Impurity and failure to fulfil the ritual duties necessary to appease potentially angry deities, such as the previ­ously mentioned lion-goddess Sekhmet, would lead to a punishment manifest­ing under the form of a demonised disease.

The rituals to chase away the disease-demons, which are described in many incantations of daily and funerary magic, certainly had a beneficial psycho­logical effect on the patient, who would also feel “absolved” from a prior state of pollution when the favour of the gods could not be granted. The ancient Egyptian experts in medicine and magic (doctors, magicians, healers and priests) were aware of such a psychological need for patients to be released from the disease-demons, which often came from the other world, and there­fore fostered the beliefs in their dangerous influence and their characteriza­tion as semi-divine, dangerous demonic beings. In order to deal with them, it was not sufficient to use medical receipts; the cure had to be completed with the acquisition of a magical amulet or spell and through the intercession of a ritual specialist who could re-establish the favour of the gods and eliminate the influence of the demons on the patient's body.