Product Description

Ancient Egyptian Magic is the first authoritative modern work on the occult practices that pervaded all aspects of life in ancient Egypt. Based on fascinating archaeological discoveries, it includes everything from how to write your name in hieroglyphs to the proper way to bury a king, as well as:

• Tools and training of magicians

• Interpreting dreams

• Ancient remedies for headaches, cataracts, and indigestion

• Wrapping a mummy

• Recipes for magic potions and beauty creams

• Explanations of amulets and pyramid power

• A spell to entice a lover

• A fortune-telling calendar

These subjects and many more will appeal to everyone interested in Egyptology, magic, parapsychology, and the occult; or ancient religions and mythology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154865 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-06
• Released on: 1998-12-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"[A] dazzling array of age-old mysteries." -- Dallas Morning News

About the Author
Bob Brier has spent more than twenty years studying ancient Egypt and is an international authority on mummies. A Professor of Philosophy at C. W. Post campus of Long Island University, he is the host of a six-hour television series for The Learning Channel called The Great Egyptians.In 1994, he made national headlines by being the first person in two thousand years to mummify a human corpse using ancient Egyptian tools and techniques. Author of Egyptian Mummies, The Encyclopedia of Mummies, and The Murder of Tutankhamen, Brier lives in Riverdale, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Egypt had two kinds of magicians. There were trained priest -- magicians who were from established temples and who were part of the orthodox hierarchy. Then, there were what we might call "lay" magicians, untrained men who practiced magic but who were not attached to any institution. The second type was closer to our faith healers, or occultists. However, by far the great majority of magicians in ancient Egypt was of the first type -- priests of the establishment. Therefore, to know what a magician's life was like, we first will have to know his life as a priest.

Today, we expect our clergy to have entered into their profession because of a deep religious commitment. In ancient Egypt, however, being a priest was merely a job, a means to making a good living and having status in the community. This may strike us as odd and perhaps even missing the whole point of a religious life, but there was a crucial difference between the function of a priest in ancient Egypt and that of a modern cleric. In our society a minister or priest is thought of as having a close one-to-one relationship with God. If he does not have strong religious convictions, the relationship is vacuous. This was not the case with the Egyptian priest. His job was primarily to be a stand-in for the pharaoh.

Egypt was a theocracy -- its political ruler was a god. As a god, the pharaoh ultimately was responsible for maintaining the divine order throughout Egypt. Obviously, the king could not be present for all the ceremonies at the various temples in Egypt. He needed delegates who could take his place at temple functions. As the functions became more and more numerous -- sometimes several ceremonies each day at each temple -- the delegates became more and more numerous. This was the origin of the priesthood.

Since ancient Egyptian priests were not a group of men set apart from the rest of the community by their religious commitments, they dealt with mundane matters of life much as laymen did. For instance, it was common for a priestly office to be hereditary. The father who held a particular office could pass that position down to his son, regardless of the son's religious beliefs or moral conduct. Herodotus recorded the practice:

They led me into the inner sanctuary, which is a spacious chamber, and showed me a multitude of colossal statues, in wood, which they counted up, and found to amount to the exact number they had said; the custom being for every high-priest during his lifetime to set up his statue in the temple. As they showed me the figures and reckoned them up, they assured me that each was the son of the one preceding him...
--Herodotus, Book II, 143

Eventually, the priesthood became a tremendous bureaucracy numbering thousands of men. There were hundreds of temples dedicated to the various gods, and each temple was somewhat autonomous, having its own hierarchy and division of labors. However, all temples had similar offices with extreme specialization of services.

Perhaps one of the most important functions of the priests was caring for the cult statues of the gods, or "oracles." (See Chapter 13, "Oracles.") Only a select few of the priests were permitted to enter each temple's holy of holies and care for the oracle (Figure 5). This involved presenting food before the god several times a day, clothing him in the morning, sealing the chamber in the evening, and so forth. These priests were called the stolists by the Greeks, because they were in charge of the clothing of the god.

Customer Reviews

A Touch Sensational, but Pretty Good Nonetheless
The reader who gave this book a bad review probably didn't understand the nature of Egyptian magic in the first place, which could explain why nothing "worked" for him or her. Without the guidance of God behind it, Egyptian magic truly is nothing more than a few odd herbs and some mumbled phrases and it is indeed true that if you want to perform your heka without the touch of the source behind it, then you would do best to avoid this book.

For historical purposes, this is a very useful tome. For others, you may find this of some use as well. Brier is a touch sensational -- as always -- but he has a fondness of Egypt that comes through quite clear in his writing style and it's rather obvious that he loves the land of the pharaohs even if he himself does not completely understand it....

a fairly dismissive account
Brier, who wrote the wonderful MURDER OF TUTANKHAMEN, has written a book that is clearly dismissive of the religions and high culture of Egypt. In Brier's eyes, Egyptian religion was nothing but a silly lot of superstition. In fact, there is a highly symbolic nature to a great deal of Egyptian spritual thought that goes beyond a literal meaning of the hieroglyphs. Indeed, sounds were believe to hold vibratory magic, and anyone with sensitivity can read this in the hieroglypic texts. To read Brier, one would think that all they did was wear amulets to prevent illness and prepare disgusting mixtures for miraculous healing.

Surely, there were a large number of Egyptians who believed in all sorts of superstions, but Brier does not balance this fact with any of the many graceful, beautiful prayers that adorn the tombs. Surprisingly, good old Sir Wallis Budge summarizes Egyptian magic much better in his EGYPTIAN MAGIC. Budge has been considered outdated for many years, but his work still forms the basis of modern Egyptology.

All in all, this book was disappointing.

Lynn

good introduction to Ancient Egyptian magic
This book explains the various usage of Ancient Egyptian magic in medicine, hieroglyphs, spells, amulets and religious texts. The author, writing in a clear comprehensive style, demonstrates the importance of magic and its practice in this fascinating ancient civilization. It is an excellent introduction for a beginner's journey into the mystic of Ancient Egyptian magic.