The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a lecture by Beatrice De Faveri, UC Berkeley
"Pakhet of Speos Artemidos:
An exercise in divine and demonic ontologies"
Sunday August 24, 2025, 3 PM Pacific Daylight Time
MELC Lounge, Room 254 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
This is an in-person lecture and is not virtual. No registration is required. The lecture will be recorded for publication on the chapter's YouTube channel.
About the Lecture:
The lioness goddess Pakhet, worshiped inside the Middle Egyptian rock-cut sanctuary known as the Speos Artemidos, is renowned within the ancient Egyptian pantheon for her fearsome qualities. Usually depicted as a lion-headed woman, her theonym can be translated as “The Slasher”, a vivid image alluding to her aggressive nature. Despite her various theological associations with more benevolent deities the likes of Hathor and Isis, most of Pakhet’s titles and epithets consistently emphasize the inherent violence of her figure, along with her animal features. While this is rather common for the divine lionesses taking on the role of guardians of the sun god, Pakhet’s attributes allow for an argument about her standing at the intersection between the category of the divine (nTry) and the elusive notion of the demonic. The identification of demonic ontologies within the ancient Egyptian religious thought remains a famously daunting task, mostly due to systemic discrepancies between emic and etic definitions of what can be described as a “demon”. Nevertheless, the analysis of textual sources of the Middle and New Kingdom related to the goddess offer some valuable insights for reconstructing Pakhet’s individual position with respect to the taxonomy of the divine and the demonic. This paper attempts to discuss some previously overlooked aspects of her conceptualization, examined through the lens of the relation between Pakhet and the sphere of ancient Egyptian magic.
About the Speaker:
Beatrice De Faveri, CPhil, a fourth-year PhD student in Egyptology, received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Padua, Italy. She then graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy with an MA in Civilizations and Cultures of the Ancient World focusing on Egyptology. Since 2019, she has been the second leading archaeologist of the IFAO (Cairo) - Museo Egizio (Turin) excavation in the Upper Egyptian site of Coptos (Quft).
As for her current research interests, she specializes in ancient Egyptian magical texts, and harbors a special interest in collections of spells for which a ritual purpose can be identified. Her research extends to the relation between magical and ritual texts and the material culture they generate. As an adjacent interest, she has engaged in the investigation of the category of the ‘demonic’ in ancient Egyptian religious texts and practices.
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Parking is available in UC lots all day on weekends, for a fee. Ticket dispensing machines accept debit or credit cards. Parking is available in lots around the Social Sciences Building, and in lots along Bancroft. A map of the campus is available online at
http://www.berkeley.edu/map/ .
About Northern California ARCE:
For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE,
https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE,
https://arce-nc.org,
https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and
https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to
https://arce.org/membership/ and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.
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