Heka

I'd like to add a little bit more to it.

The frogs actually were represented, of course, by Heka, as we mentioned last time.

And Heka was a frog-headed goddess.

But also there was Hapi, H-A-P-I, and he was the bestower of nourishment.

And they always depicted him, that is the Egyptians, as holding a frog out of his mouth that flowed with a stream of nourishment.

And this, I think, shows the close relationship between the god of the Nile and Heka, the frog goddess, who was one of the oldest mother goddesses.

She was the goddess of fertility and rebirth and the patroness of midwives.

One Egyptian picture shows this frog-headed goddess reciting spells to effect the resurrection of Osiris, and a carving shows Heka kneeling before the queen and supertending at the birth of Hathsepset.

And the very interesting thing is that the Egyptians worshipped about every animal That was imaginable.

They worshiped Heka, the frog-headed goddess, and it was a fence to kill frogs.

But my friend, when you get up in the morning, there are frogs in bed with you, frogs on the floor, frogs in the kitchen.

You have a mind to want to kill them, but they're all sacred, you see.

So let us begin our cultural journey in ancient Egypt, a civilization that transformed the creation of amulets into a profound theological art form.

To the Egyptians, magic was known as Heka, or a primordial force that the Creator God used to fashion the universe.

Hekka wasn't dark or forbidden.

It was the very energy that sustained life, and it could be channeled through specific words, materials, colors, and even shapes.

And a wide range of magical applications, from medical magic to execration magic, this is magic which wards off evil, to the animation of statues by divine gods, to the resurrection powers that are found in the Egyptian mythology around the afterlife.

I'm planning on doing an episode specifically on Egyptian magic or Heka at some point in the near future, so if you're really interested in that form of magic, stay tuned.

A second reason for the endurance of so much written magical material from this period, and just written material in general, is that the medium used for writing in ancient Egypt, papyrus, is incredibly durable.

As you probably know, papyrus is made from a reed which is stripped, and those strips are laid against one another.

Take the defaced tablet.

In ancient Egyptian theology, the concept of Heka, magic, is intimately tied to the written word.

Yeah.

Hieroglyphs aren't just letters, they are the things they represent.

It says, no, they did the same thing that Moses and Aaron were doing.

Heka was understood as a real force and it was woven into existence.

This was not something that was reserved to the margins.

Proper magic for them was understood as cooperation with the gods in holding chaos at bay.

But they're also, I think, primarily seeking protection, protection from a chaotic physical world.

And they're seeing, OK, the things that are going on in the physical world.

are being acted upon by unseen forces, and we want to seek to appease these unseen forces.

And eventually, over time, it becomes more than just appeasement.

Egyptian religion also preserved ideas that later audiences readily call magical.

The Egyptian concept often translated as Heka referred to a divine power active in the world.

Sacred words, names, images and rites could have force, yet it would be misleading to portray Egyptian priests as secret rebels practising forbidden sorcery beneath an official religion.

Many practices that modern viewers would separate into religion and magic belonged together within accepted Egyptian religious culture.