Pathogens or healers? The ambiguous role of the dead in the Egyptian perception of illness – CRE 2017 (original) (raw)

According to the Egyptian worldview, dead people were included among the supernatural causes of disease and illness. Together with gods, goddess, demons and the malevolent magic of personal enemies, they were believed to harm the living by entering and attacking specific parts of the victim's body, such as the head, the belly, the eyes and so forth. As a pathogen, the hostile dead recurs in most prescriptions, spells and incantations throughout the medical corpus. In contrast, some Letters to the Dead stress a different role for the spirits of dead people. Recently dead members of the family, such as husbands, wives or parents, were believed to intervene in the afterlife to put an end to whatever might be going wrong in the relative's life, including illness. This discussion proposes to explore the ambiguity in the conception of the deceased, both a pathogen and a vehicle for healing, trying to comprehend the place he occupied in the system of values of old Egyptian afflicted people.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact