Demons
According to ancient Egyptian belief and language, the world was populated by humans (rmT), the spirits of deceased humans (Ax or mwt), gods and goddesses (nTr), and a host of benevolent and malevolent para-natural entities. The last of these, unlike the previous three entities, was not constrained by a specific Egyptian term and existed on the threshold of the divine and the real world. These entities would be known as “demons.” Knowledge of these Egyptian demons, as well as how to defend oneself from them and employ them to one’s advantage, was crucial to the daily life of the ancient Egyptians.
Demonic entities, like the plethora of Egyptian gods and goddesses, numbered in the thousands. According to the Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project, undertaken by Dr. Szpakowska and supporting scholars at Swansea University, over 4,000 demons have been recorded. Unlike the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses, the vast majority of demons did not have temples or cults devoted to them. Instead, demons were featured throughout funerary compositions, such as the Book of Two Ways, Book of the Dead, and the Book of Gates.
It wasn’t until the Middle Kingdom (2030 BCE – 1640 BCE) that Egyptian artists started depicting demons. However, textual descriptions of these entities are believed to have existed in the oldest religious text known to exist, the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2649 BCE – 2130 BCE). Despite the plethora of depictions on amulets, wands, and in ancient texts, demons were frequently unnamed. Instead, ancient Egyptians associated demons with a pictorial representation and epitaphs, which can be a description of their appearance or behaviors.
Most importantly, demons were distinguished from each other by the specific illnesses and conditions they brought onto the living and which ones could be used for protection. Often, demons were anthropomorphic in appearance or a human-animal hybrid, ranging from turtle-headed and human-bodied to snake-headed with human arms wielding blades. Numerous demons were even an amalgam between numerous animals in addition to having human characteristics. Although there is no “official” hierarchy among the host of demons identified thus far, demons are believed to have belonged to two different classes.
According to many scholars, Egyptian demons can be divided into two classes: wanderers and guardians. Often held responsible for diseases, misfortune, acts of higher deities, and “things that go bump in the night,” wandering-demons were heavily intertwined with daily Egyptian life. Although wandering-demons often traveled between worlds under the orders of a higher deity, they also acted on their own accord and thus garnered a malevolent characterization. Some of these wandering-demons included Sehaqeq the headache demon (shAqq), He who lives on worms, He who overthrows the cat-fish, and the Emissaries of Sekhmet. As apparent by their epithets, wandering-demons were often the personification of a specific illness and punishment(s).