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Egypt

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Among all the antique countries Egypt was considered the most important centre of magic and here we find all sorts of magicians and soothsayers. In a word it was the land of paranormal, and thus we must not marvel if one of the personality who dominated the Egyptian Pantheon was Isis, a great goddess but also the most powerful enchantress of all the times. She was the wife of Osiris - the life to come god, who killed, made into pieces and scattered in a large area by Seth, his malevolent brother – was by her sought with persistence. She found nearly all of her husband’s fragments and again put him together ,but she didn’t succeed to find everyone she wanted: One piece was lost in the cane-brakes of the Nile’s delta and, unluckily, it was just the part she needed more. However she did not resign and magically recreated it anew. Then, having recomposed all his body, she joined with him to procreate their posthumous son and avenger, Horus, the beautiful falcon god, who looked just like the ones that today we see fleeing in the sky over the pyramids.
Well, Isis was a sorcerer-goddess who could make incredible prodigies and formulate magic spells, thus the ancient Egypt was full of magic. Here enchantment, astrology and all that today we call paranormal was thriving and dominated people’s life. Some time this activity was professed by persons invested by priestly charges, some other they were put in practice by people very near to the reigning family, men who had access to the mysterious books that contained those secrets and were kept in the Pharaoh’s library. But apart of real magic and its near religious practices, ancient Egypt was swarmed with very cheap astrologists and slums magicians who, anyway, knew enough about herbs and poisons to distil toxic brews of such a strength that a sip of it could kill any one. Moreover they sold them at such reasonable prices that in Egypt it was very simple to kill a busybody mother-in-law, a boring wife or an old rich husband. Obviously, in parallel with all this kind of industry, also the market of improbable love filters flowered. Nearly always those enchantments were not very effective, but their recipes were always very amusing.