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Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 44, Number 1, 2011, pp. 52-71 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/par.2011.0004

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Thought, Utterance, Power:

Toward a Rhetoric of Magic
Edward Karshner

abst ract
To the ancient mind, magic was a powerful force to be subjected to or to control.
Egypt, more than any other early culture, stressed the importance of intellectual
agency as the antidote to the imperfection perceived between foundational thinking and anti-foundational speaking. Just as rhetoric seeks to express the conceptual ideal pursued by philosophical inquiry, these earlier thinkers stressed magical
language as the key to unlocking the power of the cosmos. This article will explore
the Ancient Egyptian concept of rhetorical magic as a practical wisdom that allows
an individual to function fully within the boundaries established by a perceived
cosmic order. The Ancient Egyptians applied rhetorical magic to ease the dissonance felt between intellectual engagement and the semiotically saturated cosmology in which they dwelt. These same ancient rhetorical practices hold promise in
assisting our own attempts to navigate a world inundated with information.

Going back as far as the Old Kingdom (24502300 BCE), ancient Egyptian
speculative thinkers had already developed a complex understanding of the
relationship between personal agency, power, and the role of magic. What
is more, these early philosophers saw that this world (individual and social)
and the other (cosmological) operated according to the same principles.
The rules by which one secured power were the same whether one was a
peasant or a god. Through perception, the heart/mind would design an idea,
the mouth would speak it and, as if by magic, the task would be accomplished. Thoughtful, reasoned speech was the mechanism for reestablishing the order that was manifested in the reasoned creation of the universe.
Power and magic were not mysterious or esoteric to the Egyptians. Instead,
power and magic were a part of an individuals very existence.

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2011

Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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the rhetoric of ancient egyptian magic

This paper explores the parallel epistemological roles magic and

mysticism share with rhetoric and philosophy within the Egyptian metaphysical system. The rhetoric of Egyptian magic was based on the idea that
deeper foundational truths were expressed in a highly gurative, mythical
language as a means to avoid an antifoundational emphasis on language
only. Truth and the expression of truth were not seen as mutually exclusive. Rather, to reconnect with the higher reality of truth, the Egyptians
stressed, through the very structure of their complex symbol system, an
intense, epistemic interaction with words and symbols as maps to truth
not truth itself.
I further illustrate that the ancient Egyptians understood the dissonance between foundationalist epistemology and antifoundationalist rhetoric. Yet they still believed that within this uncertainty a coherent
order was to be found. Magic, operating as an epistemic rhetoric, sought
to reconnect the practitioner, through reasoned speech, to the ethical truth
of the universal mind. This reconnection was made possible by the ethical
epistemology agents gained from a life spent seeking maat (truth) in every
given situation. Through the full utilization of magio-rhetoric, an individual could arrange experience in such a way as to express ethical knowledge.
Understanding, then, occurred epistemically through the close observation of the cosmos and through an accurate and rational articulation of the
knowledge gained from that observation. In short, it was intense individual
eort directed toward the apprehension and expression of the seemingly
inaccessible realm of the mystical that elevated the profane word to sacred
truth in the end.

mysticism as philosophy: the foundational scene

of utterance
The most basic assumption of rhetorical discourse is that an utterance is a
reaction to a certain exigency, directed toward a particular audience who is
seen as being capable of mediating the exigency. This process of mediating
disorder through discourse requires that the speaker and audience share a
set of philosophical beliefs about a foundational order that is a priori to
the recognized ontological order. Philosophy, as the foundational scene of
rhetoric, represents a specic kind of knowledge and speaking that comes
through close observation of and engagement with the world and other
meaning-seeking agents. This experiential knowledge allows speakers to
apply, in each case, a set of knowable contexts that not only express their
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edward karshner

worldview but speak to the specic worldview of the individual or group

they hope to persuade. Rhetoric, then, is more than persuasive speech. It is
also an expression of a linguistically constructed worldview.
In The Mind of Ancient Egypt, Jan Assman identies this belief in the
relationship between the perception and expression of existence as being
characteristic of a cosmological society. He writes that a cosmological
society lives by a model of cosmic forms of order, which it transforms
into political and social order by means of meticulous observation and
performance of rituals (2002, 205). According to Assmans denition, a
cosmological society creates meaning based on the close observation of
foundational forms in a manner that closely references the original forms
or order. Assman goes on to explain that meaning emerges from the ability
to adapt the order of the human world to that of the cosmos [and] to keep
the cosmic process itself in good working order (2002, 205). The cosmos
itself becomes a heuristic revealing mystical knowledge that establishes the
local, personal, and social order at the same time that the local, personal,
and social order serves as a heuristic in establishing magical practices that
maintain the cosmological order. In other words, while the agent is speaking from a social scene to a human audience, he or she is simultaneously
addressing deities in the cosmological realm. The disputants and the discourse, then, speak from and to a complex, multilayered situation.
In magical utterances, there is an appeal to another set of circumstances
outside the immediate scene of the agent. This rhetorical scene of magic is
characterized by Mircea Eliade as a life lived on a two-fold plane; it takes
its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman
life, that of the cosmos of the gods (1957, 167). Symbolically, this twofold
existence is represented by what Eliade terms a homology. Simply dened,
a homology is a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. It is
within this homology that the relationship between mysticism and magic
is made apparent. Kenneth Burke quotes James Baldwin in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology as dening mysticism as embracing those
forms of speculative religious thought which profess to attain an immediate apprehension of the divine essence or the ultimate goal of existence
(1969a, 287). In other words, mysticism is belief in and the desire to achieve
what Eliade called the transhuman life. That is, mysticism expresses the
human desire to identify with and articulate, through symbolic expression,
the innate knowledge of the cosmos.
This rhetorical perspective suggests that a text not only expresses a purposeful and meaningful point of view but also provides the framework by
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which hearers and readers understand the function of that text. Mysticism
as philosophy, from this perspective, reects a foundationalist perspective.
Scott Consigny writes that foundational rhetoric maintains that there is
an order or truth in the world that we may approach or apprehend if we use
the appropriate faculty or are inspired and that we may communicate this
truth if we speak in the proper manner (2001, 6364). Belief in a foundationalist context leads speakers to construct a text according to a mystical
understanding in order to reect that understanding using language. This
epistemological stance requires ontological experience and, consequently,
knowledge not just of the proper manner but an ability to speak in that
proper manner. From the audiences perspective, the apprehension of this
truth likewise requires knowledge of the appropriate faculties. Speakers
and audiences thus must have knowledge of a shared experience in order for
the truth of rhetorical texts to be experienced, understood, and expressed.
The ancient Egyptians articulated this shared, epistemic experience
through their highly complex and symbolic onto-cosmological narratives.
An onto-cosmological narrative expresses the fundamental beliefs of its
cultural background and reveals the ontological concerns of a group situated in a specic time and place. In short, the onto-cosmological narrative
seeks to express what is possible and what is ideal and how what the group
desires can be accomplished by it within the cultural paradigm (Berlin 1993,
14849). These narratives create the essential rhetorical situation by explaining both philosophically and semantically those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse (Bitzer 1968, 1) in order to be fully
involved with the creation and maintenance of a world.
Essentially, these onto-cosmological narratives are foundationalist in
that mystical truth is presented as an independent goal or starting point or
origin that is ontologically, logically and temporally prior to human inquiry
and knowledge; that is independent of the contingencies of human life,
culture and language; and that serves as a criterion for claims to knowledge
and meaningful speech (Consigny 2001, 61). Because of the strong emphasis on all the metaphysical elements, creation stories stress an individuals
participation in the coming into being of knowing. Encoded in the narrative is the nature of truth as both goal and means. Once again, however,
there must not be a hard distinction made between the cosmology of the
gods and the ontology of human beings. What separates the cosmological
truth from the ontological goal of truth is a mere matter of location.
Over Egypts long history, many creation stories evolved to explain
the onto-cosmological situation of those living on the banks of the Nile.
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Each creation story addressed the particular exigency of its area and people.
What this myriad of stories share is that they are primarily etiological. An
extraordinary exception is the Memphite Theology, a religious treatise
that emphasizes the role of reason and language in constituting reality. In
this story, Ptah emerges as the divine reason that creates and maintains
the universe. Ptah is characterized as he who has given [life] to all the
gods and their kas through his heart and his tongue (Lichtheim 1975, 54).
The Ennead (the council of gods), according to this text, functions as the
limbs informed by the intellect (heart) and performative speech (tongue).
Likewise, while Ptahs intelligent speech is formative, the gods, cattle,
and humans (interestingly lumped together) function through their speech
and actions as agents of denition. The Memphite text declares thus all
the faculties were made and all qualities determined, they that make all
foods and provisions, through this word. Thus Ptah was satised after
he had made all things and all divine words (Lichtheim 1975, 55). Humanity nds itself in a world of linguistic construction. Consequently, to participate fully in this reality, an action is required to determine ones proper
function in context. In other words, one exists only as fully as ones command of the word.
To have command of the word, an individual must know the formative
and performative power of speech reected in the magical vocabulary that
emerges from the onto-cosmological narrative. An illustration of the creative power of words is further revealed in the vocabulary of Egyptian magic.
For the ancient Egyptians, the primary creative force in the universe was
heka, usually translated as magic. According to the Con Texts (spell 261),
heka is the rst created force, and consequently, the divine force that empowered the creation event (Wilkinson 2003, 110). Heka, then, is not merely
hocus-pocus but the vitality behind the process of invention and production that establishes the order of existence.
The power of heka was found in its close association with language. In
fact, the whole of Egyptian mysticism and magic is encoded in the metaphysics of its linguistics. Therefore, before explicating the word heka, it is
necessary, rst, to clarify the complexities of the Egyptian writing system.
Despite the philological advances in hieroglyph research, many lay people
still believe that the ancient Egyptian writing system was purely pictographic. In reality, this system of writing was far more complex in that the
signs used fall into three categories. First, signs could be used to represent
consonant sounds. Here, the signs could further represent monoconsonant,
biconsonant, or triconsonant sounds. Second, there was a group of ideograms
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the rhetoric of ancient egyptian magic

that did function as picture writing. For example, a representation of the

heart meant heart and carried with it the corresponding sound for heart
(ib). These signs came with a strike mark underneath to show that they were
being used as a word sign and not merely a sound sign. Finally, a type of
ideogram called a determinative could be used in the writing of a word.
This sign came at the end of a word to determine the meaning but did not
have a sound value. In this case, the word day (hrw) is spelled with the
monoconsonant signs for h, r, w, and is followed by the determinative of the
sun disk (aten) to determine the meaning of the word. This may seem like
a complex or even convoluted writing system, but it gave the scribe great
leeway in the way ideas were transmitted visually.
The sign for heka is made of three characters. The rst is the pictograph
of twisted ax. It is a unilateral sign for an emphatic h sound and is there
purely for its phonetic value. The second sign is where this etymological
dissection becomes really interesting. The Egyptians now insert the word
sign for ka. They could have continued to use unilateral signs: a basket for
the k sound and the vulture sign for the short a sound. Instead, they use the
ideogram for ka which, in simple terms, is the word for the soul; however,
the ka is a far more signicant ontological concept. The ka represented the
essential self of an individual (David 2002, 117). Moreover, the ka was
the power of creation that allowed an individual to be an active agent in
the physical world. Finally, the last sign in heka is the determinative representing a rolled scroll meaning writing. Essentially, the sign for heka
could be translated as soul writing. Robert Ritner describes it better as at
the strike of a word, magic (heka) penetrates the ka or vital essence of any
element in creation and invest it with power (1993, 25). In this case, the element is writing or the word, and heka reects the creative power of the
word. It is important to note that heka refers to the vital power of the word
and not the word itselfthat is, heka resides in the word itself (Ritner
1993, 17). A word possesses its own function and performative soul.
The powerful word that is conjured by the power of heka is hu. Within
Egyptian metaphysics, hu is dened as the authoritative utterance, that
speech which is so eective that it creates (Wilson 1977, 57). What imbues hu
with eectiveness is heka, which, preceding it, imparts to hu the very creative
vitality that structured the universe. James Henry Breasted links this idea
of the creative word to the agency of creation by which mind became creative force. The idea thus took on being in the world of objective existence (1933, 37). Both Wilson and Breasted link hu to the concept of logos
found in the Gospel of John. Like logos, hu manifests the intangible intent
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of the creative mind in the tangible world of existencecreative intent yields

creative process yields created product. Each of these events is linked by the
vital reasoning principle heka.
Hu is most often paired with sia. In a word, sia is perception. Within
the context of Egyptian metaphysics, it is further dened as the cognitive reception of a situation, an object or idea (Wilson 1977, 56). In the
words of the Memphite Theology, sia is that which has been devised by
the heart. The connection between sia and hu is that hu repeats what the
heart has devised (Lichtheim 1975, 52). Hu and sia combine to reect a
cognitive process that, through perception and expression, establishes order.
John A. Wilson describes this process as a system which employs invention by the cognition of an idea in the mind and the production through the
utterance of creating order by speech (1977, 56). This cognitive process that
moves from perception to speech eventually leads to the knowable order of
the universe brought into being through the essential power of heka.
This ability to determine function with speech reects the power of
the divine order. At the root of the power of speech, shared by creator and
created, is the ability to reason. Articulated here is the idea of an epistemic
rhetoric through which man could know because he was identied with
the substance of God, that is, the universal mind. From the universal
mind (logos), mans mind (logos) can reason (logos) to bring forth speech
(logos). This wonderful ambiguity of logos retains the identity, that is,
truth (Scott 1994, 314). Deeper than language is the power of reason that
connects humankind to the universal mind. The culmination of intelligent,
articulated speech, rooted in perception, was manifested in the ability to
form and inuence reality. This magio-rhetorical process of reasoning is
what links the universal participants together and situates the individual
within the onto-cosmological homology.
For the ancient Egyptians, the foundational truth that resulted from this
cognitively created system was maat. Maat was the universal idea of order,
justice, or truth. More fundamentally, maat was the onto-cosmological principle that connected the divine order of the cosmos with the social order of
justice and the ethical reality of human beings. In short, maat, at once, can
translate as both an ethical and a metaphysical concept. Henri Frankfurt
characterizes maat as a divine order, established at the time of creation,
an order that is manifest in nature in the normality of phenomena[,] in
society as justice[,] and in an individuals life as truth (1961, 63). This natural, social, and individual order is manifested in ones direct use of perception
(sia), reason (heka), and articulation (hu). Just as Ptah in the Memphite
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Theology transformed chaos into order, the king was expected to preserve
or reestablish justice within the kingdom, while the everyday Egyptian was
to do what was loved (ethical) over what was hated (unethical) as had been
established since the beginning of time.
For both gods and humans, maat was the very basis of ones speech
and actions: Do maat speak maat (Morenz 1992, 117). Another text
declares [hu] is in thy mouth, [sia] is in thy heart, and thy tongue is the
shrine of Justice [maat] (qtd. in Wilson 1977, 84). Order is the only true
outcome of intelligence. What is perceived and spoken must reect what
is true. Just as word is a manifestation of mind, justice or truth is a product
of them both. Their power is found in the articulate expression of concepts.
When heart and tongue are in agreement, all faculties are made and all
qualities determined. Thus justice is done to him who does what is loved,
and punishment to him who does what is hated. Thus life is given to the
peaceful, death is given to the criminal (Lichtheim 1975, 5455). The power
of conscious expression is not just revealed in the metaphysical order but
in the ethical order as well. The recognition of maat in the expressed order
of the universe becomes the sia of the human/social order. The language
of human beings must also express this order in a terrestrial sense. This is
precisely why Ptah is in every mouth of all gods and all men. There is no
cognitive dierence between the maat of men and gods; the dierence is
one of location only.
Rosalie David nicely summarizes this cognitive, cosmological process:
The two divine principles of perception [sia] and creative speech [hu] are
the rational forces by which creation is achieved, when the creator god rst
perceives the world as a concept and then brings it into being through
this rst utterance. To achieve this, the creator uses the principle of magic
[heka], a force that, according to Egyptian belief, could transform a spoken
command into reality (2002, 86). Egyptian metaphysics was rooted in the
idea of developing an awareness of concepts and then correctly expressing those concepts so as to create a right dealing and just order. At the
most essential level, this cognitive process relied on the correct word and
phraseology to reect the idea that had the power to determine order.
While maat was the fundamental principle of order in the Egyptian
cosmos, the Egyptian metaphysician recognized that order was not something created and xed but rather something to be created and that consequently a break in the sameness of order was necessary for true action.
Like their Hebrew neighbors, the Egyptians believed that the paradise of
maat was threatened by an adversary determined to upset the reasoned,
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linguistic order that had been established at the beginning of time. Lurking in the netherworld of the Egyptian cosmos was the demon serpent
Apophis. According to the mythology, Apophis was the embodiment of
the powers of dissolution, darkness and non-being (Wilkinson 2003, 221).
Essentially, Apophis was the nemesis of the sun god Re. In the Book of
Gates, Re sails across the sky and through the underworld, governing
the world as well as bringing it light and life. Apophis, as the enemy of
order, threatens to overturn the divine barque at sunrise and sunset with
the intention of preventing the journey that not only symbolizes maat but
is the cosmic act of enforcing maat. Aiding Re on this journey is Heka.
In this myth, Heka is linked to Re as his protector. As Robert Ritner
notes, Heka protects the passage of the sun through the netherworld he
defends the very created order itself (1993, 19). R.T. Rundle Clark underlines the importance of this pairing of Re and Heka, pointing out that the
solar barque is the centre of the regulation of the universe, so it is suitable
that it should be manned by the personications of intellectual qualities
(1959, 24950). Re represents the agent of maat. As its agent, he must meet
the challenges of disorder with the instruments of order. Without the intelligent awareness and proper utilization of Heka, he is helpless in the face
of disorder. The agent of order (be it Re, the king, or the average Egyptian)
must seamlessly match his or her intentions and actions to the metaphysical demands of cosmic order. The onto-cosmological narrative makes it
clear that only intelligent action is true action.
This connection between rhetoric, heka, and Apophis is drawn even
more clearly by Ludwig D. Morenz. In his essay Apophis: On the Origin
and Nature of an Egyptian Anti-God, Morenz moves beyond mythology
and netherworlds to explore the etymological meaning of the name Apophis. Morenz identies two elements in this demon gods name. The rst element 3 means great and the second element, pp, translates as roar, babbler,
babble. Morenz believes that pp is an onomatopoeic word imitating the
inarticulate or even nonverbal sound of this mythological water snake
(2004, 203). This construction is similar to the Greek root for barbarianbarbar, which is onomatopoeic for the inarticulate speech of foreigners.
Putting these elements together, Apophis comes to mean great babbler, an onto-cosmological concept for gibberish and confused speech.
Morenz writes that Apophis is understood to be evil because language
endows meaning and relation, and Apophis is the negation of precisely these
ideas (2004, 204). Yet Apophis was more than a mere symbol of a distant,
cosmic crisis. Assman sees Apophis as denoting a danger that threatens
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life on all its semantic levels and can attack at any time and in any form
(1995, 54). Because the Egyptian cosmos was based on the intelligent articulation of perception, Apophis threatens it by confusing language and, therefore, wisdom. He is the very antithesis of reasoned speech and order.
In their onto-cosmological writings, the Egyptians clearly illustrate
the role of rhetoric as dened by Burke:
Let us observe, all about us, forever goading us, though it be in
fragments, the motive that attains its ultimate identication in
the thought, not of the universal holocaust, but of the universal
orderas with the rhetorical and dialectic symmetry of the Aristotelian metaphysics, whereby all classes of being are hierarchally
arranged in a chain or ladder or pyramid of mounting worth, each
kind striving towards the perfection of its kind, and so towards the
kind next above it, while the striving of the entire series head in
God as the beloved cynosure and sinecure, the end of all desire.
(1969b, 333, emphasis his)
We all seek order rather than chaos, and then we desire to express that
order in some way. Yet it is in chaos, or in the face of disorder, that the
power of formative and performative speech is found. The desire to express
order is secondary to the need to recognize possibility in the epistemological crisis. Therefore, reasoning- and language-using agents nd themselves
going from a situation in which no point of reference is possible and hence
no orientation can be established (Eliade 1957, 21) to one in which they
must consider truth not as something xed and nal but as something to
be created moment by moment in the circumstances that they nd themselves in and that they must cope with (Scott 1994, 318). It is within this
context of uncertainty that rhetorical magic becomes necessary.

antifoundationalist rhetoric and the demands

of ethical magic
The duality of language explored by the Memphite Theology and the
Apophis legend clearly illustrate that the ancient Egyptians believed, like
Kenneth Burke, that language was capable of both putting things together
and taking things apart (1969c, 49). These onto-cosmological narratives
also reveal Ptah as a symbolic representation of the foundationalist perspective that truth is objectively present in the world and can be apprehended
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and expressed through logocentric discourse. Apophis, on the other hand,

shows that purposefully inarticulate language can hinder the movement
toward truth. In both cases, Egyptians recognized rhetoric as a purposeful
attempt to secure cooperation through words carefully chosen to appeal to
a particular audience in a particular situation. While rhetoric must reference the truth (that is, must not be created from whole cloth), the goal of
rhetoric is to construct a text that directs the attention into some channels
rather than others (Burke 1969a, 45). A text is meant to reect only what
the speaker wishes the audience to perceive. Therefore, the text reects exigency, not truth.
It is this dissonance between the apprehended and spoken truth that
intrigued the ancient Egyptians. While they did not reject the idea of
an objective reality (maat remains maat regardless of human attempts to
thwart it), they clearly understood that a discourse about reality is itself
a human construct, articulate in a language that is inevitably situated in
a particular time, place, and culture (Consigny 2001, 64). This attitude, in
fact, is not a departure from the Memphite Theology at all. The homology
between the logocentric reasoning of Ptah and the tongues of gods and
men shows that human speech, like divine speech, is capable of expressing order based on what is observed. The tongue speaks, after all, what the
heart has devised. The heart, then, will base its thoughts on two sets of exigency: the desire of the agent and the particular situation of an audience.
Therefore, if the ancient Egyptians were foundational in their thinking about the epistemology of rhetoric, they were antifoundational in their
attitudes toward the expression of that knowledge. An antifoundational
position is skeptical about the existence of a one-to-one relationship
between truth and the expression of truth. Consigny writes that antifoundationalists characterize discourse as a form of social behavior in which
words acquire meaning not by referring to independent entities in the
world, but by playing a role in language games They thus reject the
notion that any use of language is able to provide an impartial, unbiased
account of the true nature of things (2001, 64). The Egyptians never saw
truth and language as synonymous. Truth was to be sought and a relationship with it maintained. Language, on the other hand, was to be scrutinized and controlled. So, language was not truth, but, rather, an attempt to
express the multiple perspectives of truth.
This is precisely the rhetorical magic William Covino denes as the
practice of disrupting and recreating articulate power: a (re)sorcery of spells
for generating multiple perspectives (1994, 90). The articulate expression
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of multiple perspectives is the natural outcome from an utterance spoken

from within a two-fold plane. As Robert L. Scott notes, rhetoric is
epistemic because one must actively seek to know what truth is being presented for consideration. He writes that at best (or least) truth may be seen
as dual: the demands of the precepts one adheres to and the demands of
the circumstances in which one must act (1994, 318). Truth, then, emerges
in two ways: cosmologically as foundational belief and ontologically as an
antifoundational linguistic act. Both speaker and audience must be willing
to discover the dierence.
The ability to create the perception of being through language was the
magic the Egyptians saw in rhetoric. Covino nicely summarizes magics
rhetoricity as the process of inducing belief and creating community with
reference to the dynamics of a rhetorical situation (1994, 11). Covino makes
two points here. In the same way that rhetoric exemplies the seeking out
and demonstration of truth, magic represents the human means of discovering and expressing the divine truth of the cosmos. Further, just as rhetoric
is the counterpart of the dialectic, so magic directly references mysticism.
For while mysticism is clearly situated in cosmology and magic in ontology,
both come together as apodictic speech when they establish the denition
of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai (Grassi
1980, 19). It is at this point that rhetoric and magic begin to converge. In
the same way that rhetoric demonstrates truth, the magic reveals mysticism.
In this manner, magic is the microcosm of mysticisms macrocosm.
For the ancient Egyptians, the tension between mystical belief and
magical expression was revealed in their mode of discourse. They made a
clear distinction between the idea of truth and representations of truth. The
mystical experiences that revealed truth were expressed through magiorhetoric, a highly symbolic discourse ltered through social expectations and
personal exigency. Truth was to be experienced in the cosmological realm
of the gods and expressed to those in the ontological social realm. Magiorhetoric, then, was the epistemic process of tracing an expression back to its
foundational principles as revealed in the onto-cosmological narrative of a
culture. These logocentric myths illustrate that, for the ancient Egyptians,
the magio-rhetorical situation from which an agent spoke was marked by
uncertainty. It is this imbalance between apprehension and expression that
creates the exigency for rhetoric. Intuitively and linguistically, an agent
knows that something is wrong. The question is, what can be done?
Again, the ancient Egyptians relied on myth to answer this question.
Stories about the gods supplied a specic structure for converting uncertainty
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into meaningful action. Assman suggests that regularity, recurrence, and

predictability attained signicance against the background of the contingent,
unique, and deviant, and that this was the means by which magio-rhetorical
texts mediated onto-cosmological exigency (2002, 205). Just as Ptah created
order from chaos through experience, inquiry, and utterance, so each speculative narrative supplied a heuristic meant to instruct in the mediation between
mystical truth and magical expression. These narratives were not magical
merely because they recounted the adventures of the gods but also because
they supplied human beings with rhetorical strategies for investigating the
elements of each unique rhetorical situation that made possible the expression of maat as revealed in isfet (disorder/chaos).
In Egyptian literature, this onto-cosmological exigency is explored in
The Contendings of Horus and Seth, a story that recounts the events
following Osiriss murder at the hands of his brother Seth. According to
this narrative, the murder of the great god king is followed by a less-thanepic eighty-year court case to determine who, Horus or Seth, will ascend
to the throne of Egypt. The Ennead is split on who is the rightful heir. The
Horus group sees the son as being the legitimate heir. Toth, the god of
wisdom and writing, asks, Shouldnt we ascertain who is the imposter? Is
the oce of Osiris to be awarded to Seth even while his son Horus is still
about? (Wente 2003, 93). The group supporting Seth counters by asking
Is this oce to be awarded to the lad even while Seth, his elder brother, is
still about? (Wente 2003, 95). This is political theater we easily recognize
today. The rule of law, what is right, is being restructured and redirected
to meet changing agendas and preferred outcomes. Both parties to the
debate make their case in the means best suited to achieve their agendas.
The Horus group bases its case on law and order. The god Shu reasons that
justice [maat] is a possessor of power. [Administer] it [maat] by saying
Award the oce to [Horus] (Wente 2003, 92). Further, the Seth group
is admonished for exercising authority alone (Wente 2003, 92). According to the Memphite Theology, thought and action (speech) must reect
maat. The Seth groups claim is a mere exercise of authority, then, because it
is devoid of an ethical position. Instead, its exigency is based entirely on a
desire to pursue personal concerns and political agendas.
Not having the authority of maat, the group loyal to Seth use personal
attacks in place of reasoned argument. The issue, the group claims, is not
that Seth is a better leader but that Horuss youth disqualies him from
the throne. As the Universal Lord tells Horus, You are despicable in
your person, and this oce is too much for you, you lad, the odor of whose
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mouth is bad (Wente 2003, 94). Thus although Horus is qualied for
the throne because he holds the power of maat, his critics object to his
kingship based on his age and his bad breath. These objections are absurd,
but the politics of personal destruction is sucient enough to cloud the
issue. Through its satirical tone, The Contendings of Horus and Seth
illustrates that the ethical demand of maat can be obscured by subjective
interpretations and presentations meant to misdirect an audience from the
issue of justice.
Despite clever arguments and wishful thinking, the reality of maat
cannot be altered. Isis illustrates the essential nature of truth when she
tricks Seth into evaluating the situation with maat rather than his ambition. Disguised as a beautiful young woman, Isis seeks an audience with
Seth. Finding him alone, she testies that I was the wife of a cattleman
to whom I bore a son. My husband died, and the lad started tending his
fathers cattle. But, then a stranger came and settled down in my stable.
He said thus speaking to my son, I shall beat you, conscate your fathers
cattle, and evict you (Wente 2003, 96). Seth, distracted from his own
agenda, responds to this intrigue with Are the cattle to be given to the
stranger even while the mans son is still about? (Wente 2003, 96). Isis then
reveals herself and admonishes Seth, saying Be ashamed of yourself ! It is
your own mouth that has said it. It is your own cleverness that has judged
you (Wente 2003, 96). Isis shows that Seths mouth has expressed ethical
knowing and, consequently, justied him.
This rebuke is taken directly from the Memphite Theology. The text
instructs that sight, hearing, breathing report to the heart, and it makes
every understanding come forth and that the mouth repeats what is in
the heart (Lichtheim 1975, 54).The heart takes what is seen and arranges
that information in accordance with the foundational qualities of justice.
Thoughts and words reect justice only when they express maat. In fact,
it is in the best interest of an agent to participate in the doing of maat.
To ignore ethical justice is to step outside the established ontological
framework. As The Memphite Theology states, only one who does maat
actually lives.
The Contendings of Horus and Seth illustrates that maat is the natural consequence of reasoned thought. It actually takes eort and planning
to distract ones self and others from the reality of ethical justice. Magic,
as epistemic rhetoric, functions to distract an agent from subjective, antifoundational agendas in order and thereby refocuses the cognitive energies
of him or her in such a way as to encourage the syncretization of his or
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edward karshner

her behavior with cosmic truth. When distracted from his own subjective
position, even Seth responds with maat. The point of the story is clear. We
cannot alter maat with the clever arrangement of words. Although humans
possess, through reasoned speech, the power to create possibilities and
explore them, these alternate views are not maat. Therefore, it is not maat
that must be preserved or protected or maintained but rather ones relationship to maat.
The dualistic nature of discourse as illustrated in the onto-cosmological
narratives manifested itself in the day to day lives of the ancient Egyptians.
In everything from pharaonic victory steles to court cases to letters to the
dead, this cultures rhetoric struggled to apprehend and express truth, cosmologically to the gods and ontologically to each other, through a complex linguistic system. These complexities, however, were claried through
a speakers adherence to maat. Maat, rhetorically speaking, becomes an
organizing principle a speaker follows in order to structure both the investigation of phenomena and the expression of the particular knowledge
he or she arrives at. In the scheme of Egyptian magic, language not only
expresses maat, but stresses that the most powerful speech is that which
comes nearer to approximating the reality of maat. One knows maat by
doing and speaking maat. Conversely, it is maat that an audience or reader
will respond to in communication. Maat, then, is the preferred method of
rhetorical arrangement.
For the ancient Egyptians, no single event characterized the need for
maat as mode like the passing from life to death. The Egyptian funerary
cult believed that the deceased required care in the afterlife just as the living did in life. Therefore, before death, an individual set out to establish
an endowment for his/her mortuary cult that was designed to perpetuate
the owners name among the living and his divine status among the dead
(Ritner 1997, 140). Daily food and water oerings as well as prayers and the
speaking of the deads name performed by a ka-priest or family member
were required if one were to live forever. The real fear for the soon-to-bedeparted was not the inevitability of death but the eternal death that would
result should these rituals cease to be carried out. In The Man Who Was
Weary of Life, the writer laments:
Even those who built with stones of granite,
Who constructed the magnicent pyramids,
Perfecting them with excellent skill,

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the rhetoric of ancient egyptian magic

So that the builders might become gods,

Now their oering stones are empty,
And they are like those who die on the river bank with no survivors.
(Tobin 2003, 18182).
This passage clearly expresses the pessimism Egyptians felt regarding the
possibility of an eternal life that relied on the devotion of a funerary cult. If
the builders of the pyramids could be forgotten, what hope could there be
for a simple farmer or sherman?
Once again, the goals of magic and rhetoric converge. In the hopes
of countering the forgetfulness of the living, the Egyptians relied on the
logological precepts of their metaphysics to induce ontological action.
Cosmologically, the magic of image and word was used to ensure that
the deceased would be provided with the full range of necessary items.
Actual menus are often inscribed beside the altar within the tomb chapel,
in association with the standard funerary prayer (Ritner 1997, 141). When
visitors entered the funerary chapel of the tomb, they would see the images
of food, speak the name of the food and thereby magically transform the
word back to the ideal form in the cosmological realm. The prayer would
likewise contain the name of the deceased. By reciting the prayer and the
name, the visitor would ensure the continued existence of the departed.
The problem, then, became enticing visitors into the tomb. Here,
the Egyptians relied on the ontology of rhetoric. Ritner writes that the
elaborate decorations and inscriptions of the open chapel were intended to
entice visitors, who might leave oerings, pour water, or recite the funerary prayer, thereby acting themselves as ka-priests and extending the life of
the cult (1997, 141). Because their mysticism was clearly metaphysical, the
Egyptians were able to examine and express this cosmological scene ontologically with magio-rhetoric. As Kenneth Burke observes, what connects
rhetoric and magic is the way both rely on symbols to get things done.
He writes that the realistic use of addressed language to induce action in
people became the magical use of addressed language to induce motion in
things (1969b, 42). Within the scene of ancient Egyptian metaphysics, this
world and the one beyond still operated under the same symbol system;
therefore, by Burkes denition, this magic, rather than being irrational, was
actually quite realistic. By arranging language in the appropriate manner,
speakers were able to identify and cooperate with the higher, intelligible
order and persuade others to do likewise.

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edward karshner

In Rhetoric and Identity: A Study of Ancient Egyptian Non-Royal

Tombs and Tomb Autobiographies, Carol Lipson similarly characterizes
tomb chapels not only as magical places but as rhetorical texts. She writes
that in the tomb, the owner created and presented a performance of the
self in visual, textual and material form. The stylized performance presented
the best self, not the full reality, but the version of the self one would want
to live as forever[,] a self deemed to be worthy, by its actions in society,
to warrant permanent existence in the afterlife (2009, 95). She concludes
her argument by observing that such persuasion to inuence attitudes and
actions are fundamentally rhetorical (2009, 121). In the textual performance
of the tomb, the ancient Egyptians illustrated that magio-rhetoric functioned on two levels. On the one hand, the structure of the text reected the
epistemology that referenced what was so. That is, the tomb as text existed
as a demonstration of maat in that it was seen as right and just to maintain an individual in his or her eternal retirement in the west (the ancient
Egyptian euphemism for the afterlife). Construction of the tomb and the
awareness of its purpose required knowledge of both the cosmological
workings and an understanding of the necessity of the funerary cult. On
the other hand, the presentation of the text sought to illustrate what was
possible. Specically, the deceased sought to illustrate through the complex
rhetoric of temple construction (the appearance of the tomb and the wording of the mortuary autobiography) that he or she was indeed worthy of an
elite afterlife.
However, like our own revisionist history, these mortuary texts only
represent one possible reading of past events. The ultimate test of a worthy life rested on the visitors and their own reading and understanding
of the tomb. History shows that even the most extravagantly decorated
tombs were not persuasive enough to prevent desecration, defacement, or
dismantling. Despite the artistic and rhetorically sound arrangement and
presentation of a life, it was ultimately left to the discernment of the audience whether a departed individual would live forever in the west or simply
cease to exist.

conclusion: ancient egyptian magic for the modern

rhetorical situation
This paper has examined the role magic and mysticism played in the
onto-cosmological belief system of ancient Egypt. Egyptian speculative thinkers conceived the relationship between magic and mysticism in
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the rhetoric of ancient egyptian magic

much the same way Aristotle conceived the relationship between rhetoric
and philosophy. Just as rhetoric serves as the counterpart to the dialectic in the demonstration of truth, so too magic functioned as a means
to apprehend and express the mystical. In the course of this process, the
universal mind and the human mind became one. Acting as a balance in the
middle of this process was maat, the fulcrum of the onto-cosmological narrative. To discover what was possible, one needed to be able to epistemically
fuse individually motivated action with what was morally right. Magic was
no less than the apprehension and expression of the mystical realm through
individual, ethical action.
It is clear that the ancient Egyptians took discourse about truth very
seriously. Reason, language, and ethics were at the very heart of their
metaphysics. In fact, The Memphite Theology goes so far as to portray
reason as the ethical expression of the divine will. The seriousness with
which they attended to onto-cosmological matters extended to the way
they approached their epistemology as well. How eective one was was
determined by his or her ability to not only speak the truth but also apprehend the truth (or lack thereof ) in the speech of another. Their magic was
a practical, epistemic rhetoric meant to realign personal ambition with
maat. In other words, as revealed in the essential narratives of their culture,
magic was epistemic rhetoric in that it stressed the active pursuit of justice
through thinking and speaking.
In my study of ancient Egypt, this emphasis on metacognition, semiotics, and ethics has intrigued me more than pyramids, mummies, or
golden sarcophagi. Yet little attention has been paid to how the Egyptians
expressed their metaphysics with rhetoric. Ancient Egypt was a culture that
saw eective rhetoric as active rhetoric. Its rhetoric was a mode of discourse
that stressed an interactive understanding of maat on the part of speakers
and their responsibility to express maat through the construction of texts.
In a highly stratied culture with a nearly incomprehensible bureaucracy,
a subordinate, as Lipson rightly argues, could rebuke a superior with the
ethical demands of maat using maat as function, form, and proof. Clearly,
in a culture that had the same word for truth and justice, epistemic action
was not only required but was also a moral imperative.
The greatest lesson these ancient metaphysicians have to teach is seemingly the most esoteric. Yet, like most aspects of Egyptology, the surface
esotericism obscures a humanistic pragmatism that speaks across time
to reveal the promise of our own existential exceptionalism. Whereas
the Egyptians mystied discourse, our culture has demystied the use of
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language to the point where the matter of whose metaphysics is more

primitive is debatable. We live in a world of information saturation rather
than of semiotic saturation. Our situation should demand the same deep
level of interaction that ancient Egyptian metaphysics required. Instead,
what is true has been reduced to easy taxonomies and -isms that require
only the belief in the belief of another. When a radio talk show host can
promise his listeners I think about this stu so you dont have to, and
those listeners respond with emphatic mega dittos, the ethical relationship to the truth has been clearly surrendered.
To be sure, the ancient Egyptians have a great deal to teach us. For me,
however, it is their demand that talking points not be spoken until they
have been fully investigated using the cosmological gift of reason given
to all human beings, that ones ethical loyalty and duty is to the truth not
individuals or institutions, and, nally, that when confronted with isfet (the
opposite of maat), we are required to speaknot in the shrill discourse of
partisanship but in the calm, reasoned speech of justice (which is loved)
that teach us the most about how we can become vindicated souls.
Department of English Studies and Communications Skills
Robert Morris University

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