ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DEMONOLOGY - Lecture in Toronto

[The SSEA]

Toronto Chapter of The Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities:
"Ancient Egyptian Demonology"
Speaker: Dr. Rita Lucarelli, Visiting Scholar ISAW – NYU / Book of the
Dead Project – Bonn University
Thursday, November 3, 2011 | 7:00 pm
Room 142, 5 Bancroft Ave, Toronto, Ontario
This event is free to SSEA members; $5 for non-members.
"In the ancient Egyptian language there is not an univocal term
defining “demons” as ontological category and distinguishing them from
the netjeru, “the gods”. However, the religious universe of the
ancient Egyptians was populated by a multitude of supernatural beings
whose nature, function and kind of interaction with human beings
qualified them differently from the official gods of the pantheon.
Sometimes called “minor deities”, “evil spirits” or “genii”, these
beings played a central role in human life on earth and in the
netherworld. In this paper, a few central issues concerning the
terminology, the moral ambiguity, the iconography and the historical
evolution related to the concept of “demons” will be discussed on the
basis of the evidence provided by magical and ritual sources from the
Pharaonic and Greco-Roman periods of the ancient Egyptian history"
Please contact The SSEA by emailing us at tor...@thessea.org or
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About The Speaker: Dr. RITA LUCARELLI, studied at the University of
Naples "L'Orientale," Italy, where she took her MA degree in Classical
Languages and Egyptology. She holds her Ph.D. from Leiden University,
The Netherlands (2005) and her Ph.D. thesis was published in 2006 as
The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen. Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion
in the 10th Century BC. Currently she works as Research Scholar at the
Book of the Dead Project of the University of Bonn, Germany and
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn is a faculty membe of
the Aegyptologisches Seminar.
Her primary research interests are the magical and funerary
compositions of the Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt, in particular
those of the so-called “Book of the Dead” papyri whose contents aimed
at the protection of the dead during his journey in the netherworld.
She is also currently preparing a monograph on demonology in ancient
Egypt, where she is attempting to disclose and clarify the meaning and
function of that category of intermediate beings conventionally called
“demons”.
She has been chosen as a Visiting Scholar for 2011-2012 at the
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
During her stay at the ISAW she will develop her research on
demonology on an interdisciplinary level, by comparing the beliefs in
demons in ancient Egypt with those in Mesopotamia during the 1st
Millennium BCE.