In this post we will begin a small subseries within the larger subject of animals in Coptic magic, to look at the theme of animal transformation. In this first part we will discuss this theme in Christian narrative literature from Egypt, while the next posts will look at real magical practice – animal transformation as a metaphor in love and hate spells, and the illusionistic transformation of the practices known as “lamp experiments”.
The transformation of humans or human-like beings into animals is a regular theme in literature from around the world, including in Pharaonic Egypt and Classical Greece, two of the cultures which lie behind that of Late Antique Egypt. In the New Kingdom Contendings of Horus and Seth the two gods transform into hippopotamuses to fight underwater, while in Homer’s Odyssey we find the famous story of Circe, the divine witch who transforms visitors to her island into pigs and other animals with drugs and the touch of her wand.
The examples we will look at here are similar to those found in the story of Circe – human beings transformed by hostile magic into animals, usually horses or donkeys. One of the earliest and best known of these stories is found in the Lausiac History (17.6) by the Bishop Palladius, written around the year 420 CE, in which he recites the stories of various early monks, among them the legendary holy man known as Macarius of Egypt, or Macarius the Great. Palladius recounts the story of:
A certain Egyptian [who was], enamoured of a lady married to a husband, and being unable to seduce her, consulted a sorcerer, saying, “Lead her to love me, or contrive that her husband reject her,” And the sorcerer having received a sufficient sum, used sorcerous spells and arranged for her to take the form of a mare. The husband, having come in and seen her, was surprised that a mare lay on his bed. He weeps and laments; he talks to the animal, but gets no reply. He calls in the priests of the village.
He brings them in, shows her to them, but does not discover what has happened. During three days she neither took fodder as a mare nor bread as a human being, thus deprived of both forms of nourishment. Finally… it entered into her husband’s heart to take her into the desert… the brethren stood by the cell of Macarius, struggling with the woman’s husband and saying, “Why did you bring this mare here?”. … The husband answered them: “She was my wife and was turned into a mare, and today is the third day that she has tasted nothing.”
They referred the matter to the saint, who was praying within, for God had revealed the matter to him and he was praying for her. The holy Macarius therefore answered the brethren and said to them, “You are horses, since you have the eyes of horses. For she is a woman and has not been transformed, except in the eyes of deluded men.” And he blessed water, and pouring it from the head downwards on to her bare skin, he prayed. And immediately he made her appear to all as a woman. Then, giving her food, he made her eat and sent her away with her husband thanking the Lord. And he advised her thus, “Never give up the church, never stay away from the communion. For these things happened to you because you did not attend the mysteries for five weeks.”
There is another version of this story in the slightly earlier History of the Monks in Egypt, which has the same broad details, but some minor differences – in this other account, the woman is a consecrated virgin, the man casts the spell himself rather than consulting a magician, and it is the girl’s parents who take her to Macarius, who heals her in a slightly longer ritual involving isolating her in a cell for seven days before anointing her with oil. Nonetheless, there are several interesting points which are clearer in Palladius’ text.
First, the text reveals an important element of the official Christian discourse about magic. Magic can only create illusions – the woman is not really a horse, and it is only in the eyes of those less perceptive than Saint Macarius that she seems to be. When Macarius undoes the magic, he does not really transform her back from horse into woman, but only removes the illusion. Secondly, the woman can only be affected by the magic because of her own flaws – she has not been attending church regularly as she should have been, and so had lost divine protection. Christians in Late Antiquity were expected to attend church twice a day – morning and evening – and to take eucharist twice a week, on Saturday night and Sunday morning. But it seems that many found this too onerous and did not do so; literary texts like this often warn them that in failing to carry out this obligation, they were leaving themselves open to sorcerous attacks. This may also explain why she is unable to eat either human or horse food – bread or fodder; she is not really a horse, and so cannot eat hay, but she, like the other lesser Christians, has been tricked into seeing herself as a horse, and so believes that she cannot eat bread. The Coptic version of the Lausiac History, adds a further detail – Macarius instructs the woman to avoid eating meat after being saved, since that was a pleasure of the flesh which would permit the Devil, and the powers of the magicians who served him, to enter into her own flesh.
The big question, though, is why turning a woman into a horse would make sense in the context of a love spell. In the next blog post we will explore the widespread ancient idea that horses were lustful animals, and so turning a woman into a horse might be a way of making her more willing to mate, but this does not seem to be the idea in this text. Instead, Palladius implies that the goal was to have the husband reject her. If she was turned into a mare, perhaps the husband would not realise that she was his wife, or would give up turning her back into a woman, and either sell her or set her free, a kind of divorce which would allow her other admirer to get sexual access to her, presumably after turning her back into a human.
This implicit idea is found in a later story almost certainly based on the older legend, found in the Arabic-language History of the Patriarchs, a history of the Coptic Church told through the lens of its patriarchs. It tells us that during the patriarchate of Michael I (r. 744-768 CE):
… there was a magician who took a maiden, and turned her into a donkey by his wicked arts in the presence of all who saw her. And she remained with him three years, as she related. And when he took her out into the desert, he made her a woman, that she might serve him, and he might commit sin with her. But when he entered the city, he rode upon her, as if she were a donkey. Then, on the seventh of Abib, the feast of the holy Shenoute, the excellent prophet, the aged Abba Paul (the Bishop of Akhmim) met that man, when she was with him, and took her from him, though none knew of her except the accursed misbelieving magician. And Abba Paul took the magician, and gave him up to the governor, who caused him to be burnt in the fire after he had been put to death. Then the bishop loosed the woman from the bonds of Satan and delivered her to the superior of the convent of nuns.
Here the implicit becomes explicit; the woman is transformed into an animal in order to cut her off from normal human society, and turn her into a beast of burden so that the magician can ride her; he has picked a woman as his victim so that he can transform her back into her original form and abuse her when they are alone in the desert. Again, it is a holy man, Apa Paul, who rescues her from this miserable state of affairs; his discernment is able to recognise that the donkey is really a woman, rescue her, and hand the magician over to the governor to be punished.
We might think that these are stories told purely for entertainment, but we should be hesitant to do so; accounts of the miraculous deeds of saints were often used in literary texts to make particular arguments, here to teach their readers and listeners to trust in holy men, to go to church regularly, and so on, and to do so they relied on the events they told having a believability, or at least resonance, for their audience. In his City of God (18.18), written around 426, the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo recounts that:
Indeed we ourselves, when in Italy, heard such things about a certain region where there were landladies of inns, imbued with these wicked arts (of magic, who) were said to be in the habit of giving to such travellers as they chose, or could manage, something in a piece of cheese by which they were changed on the spot into beasts of burden, and carried whatever was necessary, and were restored to their own form when the work was done. Yet their mind did not become bestial, but remained rational and human, just as Apuleius, in the books he wrote with the title of The Golden Ass, has told, or feigned, that it happened to his own self that, on taking poison, he became an ass, while retaining his human mind.
Here Augustine tells us that the idea of magical transformation into beasts of burden was a real fear for travellers, who were worried that they might be turned into a beast of burden and forced to work. He evokes what is probably the most famous story of this type, The Golden Ass of Apuleius of Madaura (c. 124–after 170 CE), which was in turn based on an older work. In it, the hero accidentally transforms himself into a donkey while unwisely experimenting with the magic salves in a witch’s workshop. He then has a series of misadventures – being forced to work for various cruel masters – before being rescued by the intervention of the goddess Isis. Keith Bradley has noted that Apuleius’ story can be seen as a kind of metaphor or imaginative exploration of slavery – the way that enslaved humans are reduced to the status of animals. This is the process referred to by scholars of slavery as “animalisation”, which, in the words of Bradley, “offered the prospect of converting human beings to a state of mute and unquestioning docility and obedience in which there were virtually no limits to the demands of work, punishment, and disposal that might be made of them, and in which the slaves’ ability to exercise their will and make independent decisions might be completely destroyed”. Indeed, the hero of The Golden Ass often describes himself as a slave, and the humans he works alongside as his “fellow slaves”, while the way in which the transformed donkey is falls suddenly from a relatively privileged life of wealth to one of hard labour would reflect the experiences of many people in the ancient world who were suddenly enslaved by bandits or pirates; we could understand Augustine’s story as a kind of supernatural expression of this fear of the dangers of travelling. By the same token, the stories about women transformed into animals tell us something about the fears and desires which surrounded women in Egypt – the desire of some men to turn them into animal-like slaves, and the fears of women and their guardians that they might attract the dangerous attention of men outside the family who might seek to abuse them. Against these, the stories promise that regular church attendance, and the intervention of holy men, were the best recourse.
As a postscript, let us look at a different version of the theme, recorded by the Czech scholar Werner Vycichl sometime between 1934 and 1937. In his travels he would often find himself listening to the folk stories told by Coptic laymen at night gatherings. Many of these were about Simʿān al-Darāwi (“Simon of Daraw”), a legendary Coptic magician said to have lived 100 years earlier. In one story he heard, Vycichl records that Simʿān worked as a schoolmaster who:
…taught the Coptic children to read and write. However, the Muslims also had a school in the same alley and a faqīh (jurist) taught there, who bitterly hated the Copts. Every day he incited his pupils to beat the Coptic children. When they kept coming to Simʿān in tears and complaining to him, he took it upon himself to go to the faqīh. But the faqīh insulted him and mocked him and incited his students to beat the Coptic children even more.
When Simʿān saw that the faqīh could not be dealt with by kindness he tried his hand at magic. He took a palm rod and gave it magical powers by muttering magical charms over it. Then he asked the children at his school, who had been watching his actions attentively, “Which of you is ready?” One pupil answered, “I.”
Simʿān gave him the palm rod and told him to wait outside the faqīh’s door. When he stepped out of the door, he was to touch him with the palm rod and bring him. The boy did as he was told. When the faqīh stepped out of the door, he touched him with the palm rod and suddenly a strange change happened to him: his ears grew long and his body became covered with hair and before the boy knew it, a donkey was standing in front of him.
The boy grabbed the halter and brought the donkey to Simʿān. He was delighted when he saw the faqīh in the form of a donkey and said, “You’ve come at the perfect time! I’m just about to build a new house and you’re going to carry the bricks for me!”
As is customary in Egypt, he then loaded a double basket onto the donkey, which hung down to the right and left of the back, filled it with bricks and took them to the building site. This went on for six weeks until all the bricks were in place.
But the donkey looked very emaciated, sad and battered. Simʿān saw no more use for him and thought of giving him back his human form. He touched him with the palm rod, muttered his spell and in an instant the faqīh was back. However, because he had been carrying bricks for six weeks, he looked just as skinny and battered as the donkey.
Simʿān wanted to annoy the faqīh and feigned deep sympathy: “Oh, where have you been, ya ḥabībī (“my friend”)?” But the faqīh knew very well that Simʿān had cast a spell on him and swore his revenge. But first he went home, where he had to stay in bed for days to recover from the strain of the spell.
Perhaps we can discuss the faqīh’s revenge in a future post, but for now we can note that this telling is both like and unlike the others: as in the earlier versions, Simʿān’s transformation of the faqīh serves to enslave him, reducing him to the status of a miserable prisoner who must perform hard, body-breaking labour. The tone, though, is very different; Simʿān is not a sinister outsider, but rather a kind of hero, who uses his magic to punish a cruel neighbour; if magic isn’t harmless, it is both humorous, and a potential tool of justice.
Bibliography
Bradley, Keith. “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction”, Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000) 110–125.
A discussion of the theme of slavery in the context of the Golden Ass.
Chaîne, Marius. “La double recension de l’histoire Lausiaque dans la version copte”, Revue de l’Orient Chrétien 25 (1927) 232–275.
The Coptic version of the Lausiac History.
Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.
A general discussion of the phenomenon of slavery, focusing on the Americas, but with a discussion of ‘animalisation’ on p. 28–47.
Dods, Marcus. “Augustine of Hippo: The City of God”, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, online at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120118.htm
Translation of the City of God used here.
Dosoo, Korshi. “Circe’s Ram: Animals in Greek Magic”, in Animals in Ancient Greek Religion, edited by Julia Kindt. London: Routledge (2020) 260–288.
A discussion of animals in Graeco-Roman magic.
Dosoo, Korshi. 2022e. “Suffering Doe and Sleeping Serpent: Animals in Christian Magical Texts from Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt”, in Korshi Dosoo and Jean-Charles Coulon (eds.), Magikon Zōon: Animal et magie dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge | Animal and Magic from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Paris-Orléans: Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (2022) 495–544, online at https://books.openedition.org/irht/757?lang=en
A discussion of animals in Coptic and Greek magic from Christian Egypt.
Evetts, B. History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Part 3: Agathon-Michael I (766 AD), Paris, Firmin-Didot et Cie., 1910.
An edition of the Arabic History of the Patriarchs; the story quoted above may be found on pages 205–206.
Frankfurter, David. 2001. “The Perils of Love: Magic and Countermagic in Coptic Egypt”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10.3/4, 480–500.
A discussion of the themes of animal transformation and love magic in Late Antiquity, including a discussion of the stories of Macarius the Great discussed above.
Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid, Animals, Gods and Humans. Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas, London and New York, Routledge, 2006.
A helpful discussion of the role of animals in Early Christianity.
Vycichl, Werner. 1952. “Koptische Zaubergeschichten”. Der Zyklus von Simʿān al-Darāwi, dem koptischen Dr. Faust”, Le Muséon 65, 291–301.
An account of stories of magic told by Copts in the 1930s. The episode cited above is presented on pages 294–296.
Clarke, W.K. Lowther. The Lausiac History of Palladius. London: Macmillan Company, 1918.
The source of the translation of the Lausiac history used here is found on pages 74–76.