Ancient Egypt
Egyptian funerary magic
Priestly textual traditions for the transformation, protection and continued existence of the dead — not the work of any one occult author.
- Dates
- c. 2400 BCE onward
- Dating
- tradition or corpus
The life
The corpus widens over two millennia: first royal, then extended to a broader elite, then assembled individually for whoever could pay for a papyrus.
Place in the tradition
Later Western occultists would repeatedly claim Egyptian origins for Hermetism, Masonry, Tarot and ceremonial magic.
a note on the record
History and later legend
Some of those connections are real and indirect. Many specific claims of uninterrupted transmission are not.
the written record
Principal works
-
c. 2400–2300 BCE
Pyramid Texts
Inscribed inside royal pyramids, among the oldest substantial religious texts known. Their utterances concern the dead king's transformation, protection, ascent and identification with the gods.
-
c. 2100–1650 BCE
Coffin Texts
Extends formerly royal funerary privileges to a broader elite, elaborating the journeys, dangers and powers available after death.
-
from c. 1550 BCE
Egyptian Book of the Dead
A changing collection of funerary spells rather than one fixed book. Individual papyri were assembled for the deceased and supplied the knowledge, incantations and instructions needed to pass through the afterlife.
held in the source catalogue Read at Internet Sacred Text Archive ↗