Profs & Pints Alameda: Magic and Demons of Ancient Egypt

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Magic and Demons of Ancient Egypt” with Rita Lucarelli associate professor of Egyptology at the University of California Berkeley faculty curator of Egyptology at its museum of anthropology and scholar of ancient Egyptian demonology and death practices.

Get yourself hyped up for Halloween in a distinctly old-school way by learning about magic death and demon beliefs in ancient Egypt. Come to Faction Brewing in Alameda and take a scholarly trip through space and time to learn about evidence of belief in the uncanny among those who lived under pharaohs many centuries ago.

We’ll start by discussing what is meant by “magic” and “demons” in ancient Egypt and in the ancient world at large. We’ll look at recent studies on the topic as well texts and artifacts from Egypt from early Pharaonic times to the Greco-Roman periods. Professor Lucarelli will discuss ritual and magical objects particularly coffins as well as ancient Egyptian magic spells from the Book of the Dead and other sources.

From there we’ll look at the character of ancient Egyptian magical practices with a special focus on the role that demons played in magical texts and images. You’ll learn how the demonologies and magic practices of ancient Egypt compared with and influenced those elsewhere in the ancient world including Greece the Near East and the ancient Jewish world.

You couldn’t ask for a better guide on such a journey. Dr. Lucarelli is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the author of The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. In addition she is working on a project aimed at creating 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins and writing a monograph about ancient Egyptian demonology. She serves as faculty curator of Egyptology at UC-Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and she teaches courses on Egyptology and on interest in ancient Egypt in the modern world.

Learning from her will be a Halloween treat. (Tickets available only online. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17 or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A segment of ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead circa 1275 BCE depicts the crocodile-headed demon Ammut “devourer of the dead” attending a final judgement (British Museum / Wikipedia).