In the last post in this series, we discussed stories in which transforming a woman or man into an animal served as a way to enslave them, so that they could be made to carry out forced labour or even driven into sexual subjection. These seem to be literary fantasies – we have not come across any magical texts from Egypt or elsewhere which really aim to transform a human into an animal. But, as David Frankfurter has pointed out, we do find texts in Coptic in which animal-like behaviour is wished on the targets of love spells: …I want to make NN, the daughter of NN, spend forty nights…
