• Coptic Charms

    Coptic Charms II: Horus and the Fish of the Sun God

    In this series we’re discussing charms – spells in the form of short stories which mirror and resolve problems in the real world. In the first post of this series we discussed a text from an eighth-century CE manuscript which, although from a Christian context, contained a story in which the Egyptian god Horus eats a bird which is mysteriously three birds at the same time, and has a stomach ache which is healed by his mother Isis. As we mentioned, this Coptic text has a very close parallel in a much older Egyptian charm, which is the subject of this post. Leiden I 348 is a roll 360 cm…

  • Coptic Charms

    Coptic Charms I: Horus, Isis and the Three Agrippas

    In previous posts we’ve talked about some of the characteristic features of Coptic magical texts: they often begin with speech acts directed to the supernatural beings they summon, phrases such as “I invoke you” or “I adjure you”, and they often contain the magical signs we call kharaktēres, and the magical words we call voces magicae – both understood as divine languages containing superhuman power. There is an important subset of Coptic magical texts, however, which don’t follow this model, the group which I like to call “charms”. These take the form of short stories, often called historiolae, set in the mythic past, whose characters are gods, saints, and other…