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Tessalus and kind Imhotep

The scarcity of ghosts story in Egypt doesn’t mean that in this country people did not believe to the possibility to evocate them. All the field of paranormal was in the priests’ hands and they used it until the Roman conquest. Then, as the Romans were suspicious about magic and punished harshly whoever exercised it, they became very wary about showing their art in this field and, fearing overall to be denounced and be sentenced to the death, they always refrained to practice it in front of “infidels”.
However, in Claudius’ times, a medic named Tessalus went in pilgrimage to Imhotep’s Teban temple. Imhotep, who in the third millenium a.C. lived under the reign of the Pharaoh Djeser Neterierkhet (III dinasty), was an extraordinary genius who, apart of being a famous architect, had also been one of the best doctor of all the times, so that the Greeks had assimilated him to Asclepius. He was a savant who in both the fields of architecture (Sakhara pyramid), and in medicine, and in both he proved such an exceptional capacity that the Egyptian considered him as a divine being and thought him to be a son of Ptah, the very important creator god, the third highest one in Egypt who could do everything with only the help of his mind: An intellectual divinity who gave the same gifts to his son. Obviously after having attributed to Imhotep this divine origins, everybody was sure that at his death Ptah couldn’t have abandoned him: people thought that he must have been elevated to the rank of a god. Thus the god Imhotep was born and to him temples were erected.
Now, as for the Greeks Imhotep was Asclepius, the classic god of medicine, Tessalus knowing of the great evocative might of the Egyptian priests, asked them to make Imhotep appear before him and to persuade him to unveil to him his most secret knowledges and his miraculous medicines. But when Tessalus asked to the priests of the temple if among them there was someone who could do this, all of them denied it and were very curt about it. We certainly must not marvel for this answer: Roman laws were harsh and strictly put in practice and nobody wanted to be beheaded or crucified.
However after all this an old priest went in secret to Tessalus and after having asked him if the person he wanted to evocate was a man or a god, and Tessalus having answered that he wanted to get in touch with Imhotep, he allowed him to assist to this evocation. Of course the priest’s question to Tessalus if he wanted to get in contact with a man or a god clears to us the fact that the Egyptian priests went on practicing necromancy from end to end, and, if by any chance, Tessalus had wanted to see some of his dead friends or any relative, the old and saint man would have organized a very lively seance. But Tessalus wasn’t interested in common ghosts: He wanted Imhotep and nothing else. Thus the priests made him to fast for three days and then brought him in the temple in front of the god’s empty throne. Here the old monk pronounced the magic formulae, the secret words of power, and Tessalus saw the god all resplendent in his radiant beauty emerging from the darkness. Obviously the Roman doctor nearly fainted, but it was the same Imhotep that encouraged him and persuaded him to not be scared and to stay there with him. Tessalus stood and the god doctor talked with him for a long time, during which, with incredible kindness, he revealed to him many secrets very useful for his profession. He also cleared to him the time and the right places where to pick the herbs that belonged to the different planets and the zodiacal signs, wonderful medicaments with a very strong effectiveness of which - he assured his frightened interlocutor - the Pharaoh Nechepsu had known the “simpathy”: He also told him of the “simpathy” that joined the different stones and teached him well in this art. Then, just in the same way in which he had appeared the ghost disappeared and Tessalus found himself alone and trembling. The day after he told everything in a long letter sent to the emperor. Due to the Roman point of view on seances we can only hope that he kept secret the name of the old priest.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
F. CUMONT, L’Egypte des astrologues, Bruxelles 1937 p.163 Letter of Tessalus, a doctor, to Caludius or Nero, p.163
BOLOS di MENDES the DEMOCRITEUS, Egypt scholar of the III cent. B.C. who studied the “sympathy” and “antipathy” among the three reigns of the nature