From Disturbing Dreams to Divine Dread: Fear in Late Antique Christian Magic from Egypt

In this essay, I address the theme of fear in the late antique Egyptian artifacts scholars generally deem both Christian and magical, with particular attention to textual objects with inscriptions in Greek and Coptic. Although we might intuit behind many of the amulets written against fevers, demons, or witchcraft and other pathological/demonic/ritual concerns a certain level of what we might call fear, the ancient language that we associate with and thus translate with terms, such as “fear,” only explicitly manifests itself in such textual objects on occasion. This language was principally deployed in late antique Egyptian magical contexts in two partially overlapping ways: (1) as a condition of the client in light of a particular threat or danger and (2) as a condition that God induces in (demonic) enemies, especially in those that cause harm to the client. For heuristic purposes, I divide my essay into two parts which reflect these respective tendencies in the evidence. That said, I note objects in which both dimensions interact and overlap.