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 and forty days clinging to me like a female dog under a male dog, like a sow under a boar… (PCM I 7.32–36; VI-VII CE)
…(may she become) like a female donkey under a male donkey, a female cat under a male cat, a female dog under a male dog, and she whinnies like a mare, and she chews like a she-camel, as she is crazed like a she-bear and a crocodile, and she clings to lust and desire for NN, the son of NN, as for a drop of water clinging to the edge of a jar when one looks at it while fasting in the burning heat of summer… (PCM I 28.114–121; X-XI CE)
As Frankfurter discusses, these are “efficacious” or “performative analogies”, figures of speech which are intended to perform the action of transforming the physical and social world in real ways. We can think of them as a kind of conceptual metaphor, using the ideas of the philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. As they pointed out, we often use concrete processes as metaphors for more abstract ones, such as the metaphor of TIME IS MONEY. Like money, we talk about spending time, saving time, wasting time, investing time. This metaphor allows us to think about time as something precious which must be used wisely, even if, strictly speaking, time isn’t a material resource which can really be spent or saved. Ortal-Paz Saar has likewise described a common metaphor of LOVE IS FIRE, often found in magical texts, Jewish, and, indeed Coptic. Like a fire, these texts describe love as a physical sensation, an intense feeling like burning, which can consume a person’s entire life, which can blaze, or be managed or extinguished:
(Gabriel) will fill (the female victim’s) heart and her soul and her spirit and her mind with burning lust and scorching desire and disturbance and tumult, filling her from the nails of her feet to the hair of her head with lust… (PCM I 28 p. 5 ll. 2–8 (X-XI CE))
In the same way, Saar has suggested the term LOVE IS ANIMAL to refer to the love spells using the metaphor of animal behaviour. So what do these examples tell us about how people in Egypt conceptualised love, animals, and humans? First, the love, or sexual desire, is described as very intense, as it almost always is in love spells of this type. The first text describes the female victim clinging to her lover for forty days and nights, while the second describes the woman acting in a crazed way, crying out like an animal.
We may also observe that the creatures used in these metaphors are often domestic animals who were part of human society – dogs, cats, horses, camels, donkeys, pigs – so that the writers would have been able to observe them. But they were a marginal and ambiguous part of human society; the writers would probably have seen them mating in the open, or roaming and crying out in sexual heat. Another text wishes the targeted woman to become like “a female cat going from house to house” (Hay 3 ll. 11–13; VIII–IX CE) in search of a lover. This analogy thus begins from an observation of features common to animals and humans – their inner drives, in particular their sexual desires – but extends it. Humans, and especially women in a traditional Christian society, could not openly express their sexuality in the way that a wild or domestic animal can, and so the spells seek to shift their behaviour, stripping away social convention and making them like animals, calling out in spontaneous and unrestrained desire and seeking out the male user of the spell.
The metaphor of LOVE IS ANIMAL has a pre-Christian history in Egypt; we find a predecessor in a Demotic magical text of the second century:
“(may she be filled with) the desire which a female cat feels for a male cat, desire which a female wolf feels for a male wolf, desire that a female dog feels for a male dog” (GEMF 16/PDM xiv.1029–1031)
Similar performative metaphors are found in other magical traditions; the analogy was, perhaps, quite obvious for people who lived in close contact with animals.
Interestingly, we also find the opposite metaphor, that of HATE IS ANIMAL. Separation spells were aimed at breaking up romantic couples, and making family members and friends quarrel with one another. In one Coptic example of the tenth or eleventh century, we find the wish that a man “hates (a woman) like a pig and a dog” (PCM I 31 vo ll. 7–8). Interestingly, we find almost the same text in a slightly later Jewish text from Egypt, found in the Cairo Genizah: “he shall hate NN, son of NN, as the dog hates the pig and the pig the dog” (Cairo Genizah, T-S K 1.73, p. 4 ll. 17–18). Again, this metaphor draws upon the idea of stereotyped animal behaviour; unlike humans, who are usually understood to have choice and free will, animals are seen as acting on instinct, in a spontaneous and unthinking, almost automatic way. The choice of pigs and dogs here may arise, again, from observed behaviour: both were scavengers, and so it may be that their conflicts over food they found in the streets or in garbage piles led them to be seen as implacable enemies.
Conceptual metaphors which draw upon animal behaviour allow us to see more clearly ancient conceptions of humans, animals, love, and sexuality. Normative human sexuality was controlled and rational, in contrast to animals who acted spontaneously and on instinct. But the writers of magical texts were aware that these boundaries in sexual behaviour between humans and animals existed, at least in part, more as ideals than realities, and sought to use superhuman power to blur them.
Bibliography
Dosoo, Korshi. 2020. “Circe’s Ram: Animals in Greek Magic”, in Animals in Ancient Greek Religion, edited by Julia Kindt. London: Routledge, 260-288. URL
A discussion of the role of animals in Greek-language magic, overlapping with this theme in Coptic magic on pp. 262–267.
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. URL
Discussion of the role of animals in Coptic magic; the texts discussed here appear on pp. 531–534.
Frankfurter, David. “The Perils of Love: Magic and Countermagic in Coptic Egypt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10.3/4(2001): 480–500. URL
David Frankfurter’s discussion of the theme of animal transformation in Coptic magic.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press.
The classic introduction to the concept of “conceptual metaphors”.
Saar, Ortal-Paz. 2017. Jewish Love Magic: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill.
A brilliant essay on love magic, focusing on Jewish magic but relevant to many other traditions. The themes mentioned here are discussed in passages on pp. 136–137, 191–192.