In the fifth century – the period when Christianity was settling in as the dominant religion of Egypt – Shenoute of Atripe (ca. 347-465 CE), head of a monastic federation in Upper Egypt, gave a sermon in which he attacked heretics, pagans and the orthodox Christians who fraternised with them. The sermon is known as The Lord Thundered, and it lives up to its name. Shenoute speaks of the wrath of God which will descend upon the pagans, and asks rhetorically how their false gods will save them: Where is Zeus, or his son Ares: the one who took the form of a wild boar to show his impurity? And…
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Religion in the Coptic Magical Papyri I: “Paganism” and Christianity
Religion and magic have a complicated relationship; Jewish and later Christian law often banned practices that were understood as magic, but as we saw in the previous post, Coptic magical texts are full of “religious” elements – mentions of the Christian Trinity, the saints and angels. The period that we are studying in this project – roughly the fourth to twelfth centuries CE – was one that saw huge religious changes in Egypt, and magical texts offer us a fascinating perspective on these changes. This post will briefly sketch how Egypt turned from a “pagan” society into Christian society over the course of the first through fifth centuries CE. In…