Northern Cal. Egyptology Lecture, 01/25/26 - She is the Son of Bastet”: Gender in Papyrus Louvre 32308

[Glenn Meyer]

The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a lecture by Rachel Barnas, UC Berkeley: “She is the Son of Bastet”: Gender in Papyrus Louvre 32308 Sunday, January 25, 2026, 3 PM PST  UC Berkeley Venue To Be Determined  This is an in-person lecture and is not virtual. No registration is required. The lecture will be recorded for later publication on the chapter's YouTube channel.  https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE                           About the Lecture: Magic was a tool for dealing with a host of everyday problems in ancient Egypt, from headaches and snakebites to bad luck and nightmares, and employed a wide variety of strategies accordingly. Underlying many of these different strategies was a shared reliance on the power of analogy, which was used to impose a desirable mythological template on immediate, everyday reality. To accomplish this superposition, tools, problems, and even the speaker or subject of a spell could all be assigned mythic identities, ensuring that success was already predestined. What happened, though, when there was a mismatch between the divine identity needed and some aspect of the subject’s everyday self? This situation presents itself in the case of one amuletic papyrus, Papyrus Louvre 32308, in which a female patient is cast as multiple male deities. Such casting raises a number of questions: Was this gender conflict seen as a problem? How does the text navigate this apparent conflict? Why not just pick some female deities and avoid the problem altogether? Exploring the answers to these questions through  close reading of the Louvre papyrus and comparison to similar spells can help us refine our notions of when the bounds of gender could or could not be pushed in ancient Egypt and why, revealing just how much ancient magical texts can tell us about their users.                                                     About the Speaker: Rachel Barnas is a PhD candidate in the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from Yale University in 2013 and her M.A. in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in 2020, both with a focus in Egyptology. Her dissertation project examines patterns of literary and grammatical device usage in Ramesside non-funerary magical texts, as a means of analyzing the relationship between how the ancient Egyptians used language and how they experienced and understood their world. She has also worked in both curation and epigraphy, including as Terrace Research Associate at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and as a member of the IFAO team documenting the tomb of Padiamenope (TT33). About Northern California ARCE: For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://arce-nc.org, https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.

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