5 While falcons feature prominently in these recipes, there are many other animals – beetles, shrews, 6 lizards, various kinds of fish, as well as a cat, a lizard, a swallow, a mole, and a hoopoe, appearing in one recipe each (see table 1).
Twenty-one of these are found in seven papyrus manuscripts which survive from 3rd and 4th century Egypt, 4 and a further eight occur in the Cyranides, a collection composed and collated in the first few centuries of our era, perhaps in Alexandria, and preserved in manuscripts dating from the 12th to 16th centuries. 7 Another spell which may belong to this category is PDM Suppl. 28-40, a fragmentary dream-sending s (.)ģ The ritual involving the circaean falcon is only one of nearly thirty such recipes which survive from the Roman period, in which various animals are drowned in magical rituals., p. 83 translates the word used here (.) 6 The translation in H. D. Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, op.5 The Cyranides is a work in four books attributed to two authors, Harpocration of Alexandria and Cy (.).4 The papyri in question are from the Papyri Graecae Magicae (“Greek Magical Papyri”) and Papyri Dem (.).In the final part of this discussion I will turn to consider what these rituals tell us about the way in which the identities and personhood of human and non-human animals were conceptualised, discussing the cases of the Apis bull, the divinised Antinous, and a drowned cat. If these two discussions put their focus on the second-order category of ‘religion’ rather than ‘magic’, they are nonetheless important for our understanding of the magical papyri, whose ritual mechanisms depend heavily on the theological concepts of the Ptolemaic and Roman temple cults. This mystery – a drowned falcon worshipped as a god by his killer – is not alone in the corpus of Greek and Demotic magical papyri, but it is the first strand of a red thread that I will attempt to unravel here, a thread spun from Egyptian ideas about the lives and deaths of humans, animals, and gods.Ģ I will begin this discussion with an overview of magical texts in which animals are drowned, examining their treatment and role in these rituals, before looking at the role of animals in Egyptian religion more broadly, in particular the creation of votive mummies, and then of the religious significance of drowning in Graeco-Roman Egypt. 3 This is a mystery in the ancient sense of the word: a secret and deeply significant rite which might nonetheless appear paradoxical or shocking to the uninitiated. 2 A footnote to the translation, by Robert K. Ritner, tells us that “he magical rite of drowning effects deification”. 3 In H. D. Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation including the Demotic Spells, Chicago (.)ġ The first spell from the first of the Greek Magical Papyri contains a mystery: “take a circaean falcon, 1 and deify it in the milk of a black cow, mixed with Attic honey, and when it is deified wrap it in an uncoloured strip of cloth… and set it up in a shrine of juniper”.1 “Circaean falcon” here translates the Greek ἱέραξ κιρκαῖος or κίρκος, which appear in PGM I.4-5 an (.).The abbreviation TM used occasionally in footnotes refers to the Trismegistos online portal ( ). Unless otherwise noted, Greek texts refer to those stored online within the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (), while pre-Coptic Egyptian texts (Middle/Traditional and Late Egyptian and Demotic) are drawn from the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (/tla/index.html). There have been relatively few studies focusing on the animal hasye in magical texts the most significant discussions I am aware of are in T. Hopfner, Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber, C. Wessely (ed.), Amsterdam, Verlag Adolf M. Hakkert, 1983 (reprint), vol. 2.1-2, §§ 129-130, 181-182, 264, 266 (p. 207-210, 438-443, 444-446) A. Cheak, “Waters Animating and Annihilating: Apotheosis by Drowning in the Greek Magical Papyri”, in D. Z. Lycourinas (ed.), Occult Traditions, Numen Books, p. 48-78 Y. Koenig, “Traditions pharaoniques et papyrus grecs magiques”, in S. Crippa and E. M. Ciampini (ed.), Languages, Objects, and the Transmission of Rituals: An Interdisciplinary Analysis on Ritual Practices in the Graeco-Egyptian Papyri (PGM), Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2017, p. 80-84. I would like to thank Marina Escolano-Poveda, Linda Evans, Thomas Galoppin, Julia Hamilton, Edward Love, Andrea Pillon, Luigi Prada, and Katrin Annikka Schlüter, all of whom helped me in various stages of the research that led to this article.
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