Temple of the Cosmos by Jeremy Naydler

Author:Jeremy Naydler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 7.1. The king as image of Ra gives audience. Tomb of Huy. Eighteenth Dynasty.

This, of course, is state magic: magic practiced as part and parcel of the successful running of the Egyptian state. Magic held a central place in statecraft, which was never a merely secular business. A particularly vivid example of the practice of magic by the state involves a further elaboration of the mystical identification of the king and Ra. In time of war, the priesthood would engage in a variety of magic rites, one of which consisted in identifying the enemy with Apophis, the archdemon of the Underworld and chief opponent of Ra. It would be unlikely that such rites were not performed by the magician-priests accompanying the forces of Ramesses II at Kadesh (chap. 5). As representative of the forces of destruction and chaos, Apophis is eternally vanquished by Ra in the Underworld. This is a mythical event, an eternal truth enacted in the First Time. By magically identifying the enemies of Egypt with the serpent Apophis, the Apophis archetype was made to adhere to the enemy in such a way that their defeat at the hands of Pharaoh, the son of Ra, was inevitable.

In the inscriptions recording the various accounts of the battle of Kadesh, there is no mention of the performance of magic rites. But in order to accomplish the adhesion of an archetypal pattern of events to a temporal situation, such as is described in the various Kadesh inscriptions, a complex of rituals would almost certainly have been necessary. Normally, a model of Apophis had to be made and indissolubly united to the enemy. Then the model was struck, pierced with knives, spat upon, and burnt,5 while priests chanted a spell for “repulsing the serpent,” such as follows:

Back rebel, for his light is piercing.

Ra has overthrown your words.

Your face has been turned upside down by the gods;

your heart has been torn out by the panther.

You have been bound by the scorpion;

your pain has been caused by Maat. . . .

Fall, turn aside Apophis, enemy of Ra.6

In figure 7.2, the archetype of this ritual is shown, in which Apophis is caught and bound by Selkit (the scorpion goddess) in the Underworld. She is assisted by another god who lassoes his tail. Selkit knifes Apophis in six places, thereby destroying his power.

Beyond statecraft, invocation of the First Time was a common magical practice. We see it utilized, for instance, as a medical technique. In myth, Horus is badly wounded by Seth but is restored by his mother Isis. This archetypal pattern could be applied to a patient in a similarly dangerous condition to that of Horus. As the patient’s bandages were taken off, the patient identified inwardly with Horus. In the text that follows, the patient first invokes the First Time event,

Unbound he was, unbound he was by Isis.

Unbound was Horus by Isis,

from all the evil done to him by his brother Seth,

when Seth killed his father Osiris.

Then the patient prays to Isis,

Oh Isis,

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