I was wandering around the used book store in downtown mountain view and notice this book called Egyptian Magic and noticed that it is only $6 and said wow - I gotta get that.
I wouldn't really recommend the book since it goes through a lot of detail without as much overview and context as I'd want, although I think it assumes that the reader knows more about ancient egypt than mummies and pyramids.
What is interesting is seeing where a lot of what we now consider magic comes from. They were very into the power of words - both written and spoken and into items like amulets - I guess claiming that Harry Potter got its ideas from Lord of the Rings is missing the mark by about 6,000 years. They also invented horoscopes - you'd think every few thousands years people would come up with something new...
Their magic was very interleaved with their religion. There was a whole lot of effort that went into preparing the dead - although I guess a lot of people now go through all sorts of stuff to get into Heaven.
It is also interesting because it provides a lot of background for Judaism since it is basically what Jews were turning away from and informs a lot of how exodus played out. One thing I didn't realize is it is not that they thought statues were gods, but rather that they could put part of gods in statues and then use those gods' powers. Also interesting is that all of the gods were actually different aspects of one main god - Ra, the sun god - so actually a bit more monotheist than it would seem. Exodus makes more sense because all the stuff Moses did was very similar to Egyptian magic - the torah just claims he did it better - hence the Egyptians just being impressed how powerful Moses's god was. I always had the feeling that they should be impressed that he had a god doing magic acts at all, but apparently that was run of the mill in Egypt at the time. One example of the similarity to Egyptian magic is the Egyptians have an even older story about a magician parting a river in a similar manner.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
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Interesting post! That last part about the "other Moses" reminds me of something a friend of mine told me recently: He said he remembers the exact point in which he stopped believing in God- it was when he was reading Paradise Lost and realized just how much the Judeo-Xtian religion paralleled what we modern civilizations call "mythology". Lots of people have been saying that Christianity is just a myth for awhile now, but just the way Milton interweaved Greek mythology, paganism and Christianity sparked this epiphany for him.
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