Spells against fear - Egyptian Rituals

An exhibition on medicine in ancient Egypt shows that the therapeutic means have changed, but the panic that invades us when the disease attacks us is the same as 5,000 years ago.

Two large granite sculptures, representing female figures with a lion's head, flank the entrance to the room of Musca Metropolitan New York where he opened a few days ago an exhibition on medicine in ancient Egypt. The room is not very big, and general lighting is rather dim.

In other areas of the museum, Egypt is the land of fantastic colossal statues, sarcophagi of the bas-warriors, the mummies. Here is another world more hidden and more modest, the physical suffering of the poor and invented ways to correct a world of human beings identical to us that though almost always die young and have almost no other relief that spells and amulets to fight the disease.

The sculptures of granite head of leo na representing the goddess Sckhmet, which is the divinity of the sudden misfortune, that the attack on his victim as DENTELLE or zarpazo of a lion. One look at their traits hermetic, his serene majesty and menacing, and you can imagine the shapes of fear that are embodied in it: the fear of plague, into the wilderness to wild animals, to the bites of snakes and scorpions that abounded both in the Nile valley, the jaws of crocodiles that would come out of their torpor to curtail the arm or leg of an unwary who are placed in the water.

The protective deities of health have a much more humble scale, as if unconsciously invented and those who wanted to rely on them recognize their very questionable effectiveness: the god Bes, a dwarf panzudo with the big mouth and ears Lion, the goddess Taweret, erect a hippopotamus with large breasts and bellies of pregnant women.

Figures are very small, probably amulets, such as figurines of women nursing a baby. Women and small children were most vulnerable in this remote world that is not the Statue of Cyclopean and massive columns of the temples but the poorly lit rooms of petty in which succeeding the terrors of illness, childbirth and the hare .

A sharp object and crudely carved from flint is a knife with which Corlar the umbilical cord of newborn babies. Nearly 5000 years separate us from the people who knocked these reverential figures, which are hung from the neck or had in their household shrines, but that gap nearly disappears from time to the intuition of a tender in which we can recognize: a small jar with a mouth so peculiar that served it to store the breast milk of a mother, a pair of sandals with soles in the drawing of two scorpions crushed: magically, this prodigiously naturalistic design that would protect the child shim sandals the scorpion stings.

A scorpion and a snake in each hand holds the god Horus child in a trail of black basalt covered with a dense hieroglyphic writing which is a series of attacks against spells of animals and disease: the person injured or sick vertería on water Figure sacred, and drink after the pick, and the water will convey the virtue of healing.

But not all the misery that has brought human beings the goddess inscrutable Sckhmet come from the animals or the frailty of human nature, almost
more afraid than the figures of scorpions or snakes give the Made-tipped bronze ax sharp bronze argued that an Egyptian warrior in a battle for several millennia.

Suddenly become aware of the pain of the flesh-hearted, the infection unstoppable, crack casualty with a broken skull which was beaten by the ax. Unexpectedly sense that these figures of the bas we have seen in so many museums were as human as ourselves. But perhaps the biggest difference there is between them and us is that they usually die much younger, who were unable to address the fear and disease rather than through spells, amulets, plasters and honey herb: the difference is that they continually feel the fragility of life, whereas we fed a sense of invulnerability that has a lot of arrogance.

We hope the antibiotics, not the statuettes of the god Bes, maternity homes and in our simple asepsis is more effective at protecting newborns and their mothers that the hippopotamus goddess Taweret. But when misfortune or illness suddenly burst into our world safer feeling of panic is the same as if miráramos 5,000 years ago and bloody factional unmoved by the goddess Sckhmet.