Abstracts
Panagiotis KOUSOULIS
(University of the Aegean)
The demonic identity of the dead and its ritual manipulation in the Egyptian underworld: The evidence from the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period
The ancient Egyptians were famous for their elaborate preparations for death. Death was both feared as a horror and seen as a necessary stage in the human cycle. Although Egyptian funerary art rarely contains gruesome images of the dead, other sources mention several categories of hostile and dangerous spirits. Most prominent among them are the mut, metet or metyw and the manifestations of deceased persons such as the ba and the akh. They are associated with a range of diseases and quite often they are not envisaged as particular individuals, but as a collective group, which combine human or divine/demonic characteristics. They seem to be a collective body, one of the forces of chaos in the universe that caused the misfortune for mankind. No reason is ever given for the hostility of the dead, and no treatments ever attempt to placate them, merely to combat or destroy them. The current paper will explore both the definite and the possible demonic influence of the dead in the funerary and magical corpora of the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period. Special attention will be given to the different names and identities of the hostile dead. When describing the demonic identities of the hostile dead, two issues will be addressed: one is the distorted, evil nature of the dead themselves, and the other is the way in which the evil nature is manifested through hostile behaviour. It will be shown that many of the demonic epithets of the dead do not seem to have any ontological countenance outside a specific ritual framework. It is the inner magical mechanism of the latter, especially through the exploitation of sounds and recited formulae that artificially creates and manipulates demonic names and personae.
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