Agents of Punishment and Protection. Assessing the Demonic in First Millennium BCE Egypt

FAIN: FT-278790-21

Rita Lucarelli
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

Research leading to preparation of a book on ancient Egyptian texts about the place of demons in religion. 

Demonology is an integral, though often neglected aspect of the ancient Egyptian religion. Defining “demons” poses issues of ontological classification, especially when dealing with an ancient civilization whose sources of study are not always descriptive neither comprehensive. In the ancient Egyptian magical texts and representations, a variegated series of liminal beings act as agents of punishment but also of protection towards the living and the dead. A contextualized and in-depth study of each of the available sources, which will be carried out in the proposed book-project, is necessary in order to understand the role that those agents played in the ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and how people would communicate with demons through magical practices and the help of professional ritualists. By assessing the existence of an ancient Egyptian demonology, the author will also attempt a comparative study with other discourses on demons in the ancient world.