Why do you never talk about what you're reading? Me:

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It helps me sleep ok?

It’s just mostly self-help and DIY stuff.

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I once had a friend that insisisted his copy of the Necronomicon started flying around the room by itself. He insisted I gave him my copy so he could destroy them both in a fire.

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OP

No comment.

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He insisted I gave him my copy so he could destroy them both in a fire.

This kills the Universe

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That would explain a lot.

I’m pretty sure the last 40 years of my life have been the Jacob’s Ladder-style hallucinations of a dead man.

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That which is dead cannot die.

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“I don’t care what Olivia is reading, I’m just glad she’s reading.”

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It’s just mostly self-help and DIY stuff.

Most of what I read is lemmy comments and blog posts, I think your reading list makes for better conversation. Also, most of the content I read is in a language that I don’t use in face-to-face conversations, which makes it a bit awkward to talk about it.

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I’ll take this. When we talk about daemons, these are often helpful spirits.

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I’d like to find a translation of that Arabian manuscript, forget the name atm.

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Written by Abdul Alhazred?

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I can’t remember.

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Maybe you did find one, and that’s why you can’t remember. Your mind is shielding you from horrors too old and great for us to understand that you found in it. Ignorance is a bliss.

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There’s a lot of those…

The first that comes to mind is the Shams al-Ma’arif, but there’s lots of other Arabic grimoires out there if you do some digging

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Does it have any resonances with alchemy? Are people doing Jungian delving via ceremonies? Is this book about ACTUAL ancient demonology, or is it a Theosophy-era imaginative creation set in Ancient Egypt?

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Looks to me like a pretty boring, but well written, set of anthropology essays. Mostly in the context of “this is Bob. He’s a demon, but that’s ok. He drinks blood, but not a lot. The Egyptians just think that’s annoying. The Greeks would have called him evil.”

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That sounds delightful. I should keep some blood in the fridge in case Bob every comes to my parties. I don’t have any exsanguinators in my social circle.

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See, that’s what they call “an echo chamber.” You need more diverse friends!

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Don’t demonology-gatekeep me pls.

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No. You kids and your TikTok and lazy demonology are going too far. Just yesterday there was a goddamn portal open to one of the more superficial layers of The Abyss right in the yogurt section of my local Stop & Shop. Surely it was some 3-year-old in a shopping cart mumbling along to The Lesser Keys of Solomon their mother handed them on their iPad. I had to steal some saffron and cloves from the store to close it, only to find out that the only greek yogurt available was the flavored kind.

I am done.

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Look man, not all of us have access to the damn Akashic Record. Some of us only had shittily translated versions of the Lesser Key when we were kids. Grimoires don’t grow on trees, you know.

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OP

I love you.

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It’s a very serious academic publisher.

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Book desc:

“In the Egyptian context, what we term magic and demon, drawing on our own cultural heritage, are not seen as negative aspects of cultural practice and conceptualisation. Similarly, the Egyptian equivalents do not carry the pejorative connotations borne by the modern terms and their Greek antecedents; magic and demons can be forces for good as well as evil. Indeed, the practice of magic and the conceptualisation of personified demonic agents are central to the Egyptian understanding of the workings of the world from the very continuation of the cosmos itself down to the vicissitudes of existence faced by individuals.

“In particular, the broader practice of magic and articulation of the involvement of demonic agency form one of the crucial links in Ancient Egypt between individual existence on the human level and the level of nature or the cosmos, the realm of the gods. Unlike, though, the explicit recognition of the term demon in the ancient Greek language and religion, as the intermediary between god and mortals, the majority of the demonic names in the Egyptian literature do not possess an apparent ontological essence, or a clearly defined denotation. Their characteristics and role depended momentously on the verbal and performative ritual environment they were part of. The relation between the name of a demon and its cosmic-natural personification is not contradictory as it may seem, but it is closely interwoven in a well established ritual framework of words and actions.

“This multi-authored volume of 10 essays comprises an up-to-date authorized account of many aspects of ancient Egyptian demonology, including the multiple persona of the demonic or name vs. identity in the Egyptian formation of the demonic, nightmares and underworld demons, dream rituals and magic, categories of demonic entities and the vague distinction between the divine and the demonic in Egyptian cosmology and ritual, the theological and demonic aspects of Egyptian magic, and demons as reflections of human society.”

From the authors blog:

“The aim of this ambitious, trandisciplinary research project is to study certain lexical, iconographical and chronological criteria for the formation of a category or categories of beings that could be mapped together and systemized to become a “demonology” within the cultural framework of Ancient Egypt. The time span covered is large (from the Old Kingdom through the Roman Period, roughly 3000 B.C. - A.D. 400) as are the source materials.”

https://kousoulis.blogspot.com/p/egyptian-demonology-project.html?m=1

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Cool. I wonder how the “undefined” nature of the named critters is due to time and recording. I tried to get into Egyptian mythology while I was watching Moonknight and apparently there was a lot of evolution and change to the stories and identities of the Gods.

Probably the same happens to everyone; like Yahweh’s been through some things; I don’t know why, but Norse and Greek mythology seems more crystallized to me–probably because they became regularized in the culture for several centuries after they ceased being religions, whereas as the Egyptian religion doesn’t really have a authoratative Bullfinche’s style presentation influencing generations.

I can’t get into all the different-headed gods; it’s too weird even for me. Are the demons also a menagerie of animal-headed creatures?

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It’s not either/or.

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Well, I mean, it’s primarily a work of history or it isn’t. It’s fine–all religions are equally valid and invalid, whether ancient or new.

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The DIY: Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri V. 96–172

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First rule of Ancient Egyptian Demonology

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Is that ‘We chat quite a bit about Ancient Egyptian Demonology’?

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Was it a good read? If it is not to sciencepapery it is right up my alley.

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I haven’t read it front to back (yet?). It has interesting info on the practice of magic in antiquity and some cool insight into ancient worldview. It’s written by several authors (each episode/section of a diff one focusing on different aspects), most are full of footnotes and they all definitely read like world history academic documents, but not science ones. Maybe the ones that rely more on archeology get close. Very few opinions, most conjectures and interpretations are cited, but it manages to have good content and if you don’t mind skipping some boring parts, mostly manages to stay interesting.

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Also FYI, “The Trial of Gilles de Rais” is not a coffee table book.

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OP

Depends on what kind of company you expect

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The title is funny, it’s a bit like saying ancient Egyptian semiconductors.

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