We all think we know the difference between religion and superstition. But how do these relate to magic, and ancient magic in particular? In the first of an occasional series on ancient Egyptian beliefs, Jenny Jobbins looks at how far back we need to go in search of an answer
Perhaps we pray to be delivered from evil: that is religion. We cross our fingers that we don’t catch flu: that is superstition. Or we might place a few items with a written charm in a drawstring pouch and wear during a full moon: that is magic. All different, but all ways to a similar end: the age-old desire for protection.
Perhaps, indeed, the need for protection was where it all began. Protection must have been a primal need, and may have developed with man’s first consciousness. Early humans would have protected themselves by enacting ritual observances, making propitiatory offerings, wearing jewellery and possessing sacred objects. Above them and their world hung the divine protection of the magical, mystical moon, the light that brought a pattern to the skies; that brought females of all kinds into season; that delivered one from darkness; that harnessed creation and seemed to be the point of it all. This was long before the advent of agriculture that many scholars believe issued in sun worship — the notion that death (the sinking sun, or the fallow period after harvest) must occur to ensure the continuance of life (dawn, or the birth of Spring).
By the time the society of the ancient Egyptians evolved, agriculture was the norm. People no longer depended on the moon to govern the fertility of the herds of wild or domestic animals that supplemented a diet of wild plants. Now they worshipped the Sun God (in his various and successive manifestations) whose cult centre was at Iwnw (City of Pillars), the city called by the Greeks Heliopolis, City of the Sun.
