Taxonomies of Illnesses and the Dynamics of Cursing and Healing the Body in Christian Egypt

The How and Why of Illnesses and Misfortunes

To understand the dynamic between curses and healing rituals in Coptic magic, we will explore the theory of misfortune put forward by the anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard. In his 1937 book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard summarized his theories on social dynamics among the Azande, an ethnic group in Central Africa, following the fieldwork he conducted there since the 1920s, with witchcraft at the center of his study. One observation concerning the causes attributed by the Azande to various misfortunes Evans-Pritchard made in his book is of particular use to this article. In the following passage, he described the unfortunate event when a granary fell onto a group of people and harmed them:

The Zande knows that the supports were undermined by termites and that people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape the heat and glare of the sun. But he knows besides why these two events occurred at a precisely similar moment in time and space. It was due to the action of witchcraft. If there had been no witchcraft people would have been sitting under the granary and it would not have fallen on them, or it would have collapsed but the people would not have been sheltering under it at the time. Witchcraft explains the coincidence of these two happenings.^[31]

What Evans-Pritchard distinguishes here is the how and why, the technical cause for the fall of the granary, and the reason why the granary fell onto a particular person at a specific time and place. This distinction is crucial for our analysis, as it highlights the how and the why of an unfortunate situation. To illustrate this in a secular context, consider the following example: A child grazed its knee. The child had been cycling on a wet road, and in a curve, the bicycle slipped. This would be the material cause for the fall, the how. But, according to the child’s parents, the “real” reason is the why: the child did not pay attention. The parents’ response (the “treatment”) would have two elements: First, to treat the wound, and second, to teach the child to be more attentive. One of these treatments responds to the how and the other to the why. It will never be certain whether the child had this small accident because of inattentiveness or whether it was pure coincidence. The why tends to have an element of uncertainty associated with it. Nevertheless, a reason why the event happened must be determined to give it meaning and, most importantly, to prevent it from happening again.

How do these observations relate to the medico-magical material attested in Coptic? In our case, the how is the physiological symptom and the corresponding physiological treatment (e.g., using a pharmacological substance), and the “supernatural” cause of the disease treated by warding off the evil is the why (e.g., commanding demons to flee the body of the patient). In short, the how and why to treat an illness in a particular way in correspondence with the appropriate cause. In the argument I make here and which will be illustrated on several examples, I suggest that two healing methods existed within the Coptic magical corpus: one responding to the how, a medical or pharmacological component of the treatment responding to the symptom (with little consideration concerning the cause of the disease), and the other to the why, responding to the supernatural cause.

Before studying in detail this how and why of illnesses, we will examine how their symptoms, causes, and treatments tend to be presented within the corpus. Regarding the causes for the diseases, if given in the manuscripts, these are typically not physiological but arise from various “evil influences”. Consider the following examples: The first is a Prayer of Mary from a tenth-century codex of the invocation ideal type (cf. the passage highlighted in italics):

Iao Sabaoth Adonai Eloei, you who undo work which has envy in it, magic and every sorcery, the things that come about through evil and meddlesome men, whether blindness, or deafness, or speechlessness, or pain of his head or a strike (?) of the demons, or someone who has a fever, or someone who is disturbed, or someone who is crushed, or blood that was loosened under someone, or someone who was given pain by the demons, or <caused by> some oil, or some fruit, or a banquet, or <a> vessel, in short, whatever he has, let it be undone through your great, holy name, away from NN, child of NN! Let NN, child of NN, be sound in his body and his entire body be strong, his sinews and his bones, his flesh be healthy, away from every magic of men and every crushing (?) of the demons, those of the day and of the night, neither fates, neither deities!^[32] (…) I entreat and I invoke you today, I, NN, child of NN, that you send to me your holy power so that it cleanses every spirit of sickness that dwells in the body of NN, child of NN!^[33] (…) I adjure you today (…) that you will send to me the holy mother of God, Saint Mary the holy virgin, so that she blesses them, and the water, and she sanctifies them, and she seals them, this oil, so that in the moment that I will pour the water upon NN, child of NN, <NN, child of NN,> will become strong and healed (…).^[34]

The second example is also from a formulary, a seventh-century prayer for pregnancy associated with the monastery of Bawit, to be pronounced by the ritualist over a cup of wine drunk by the woman who wished to conceive:

Yea, Lord, you who listen to anyone who calls upon you, Adonai Elon Sabaoth, god of gods and lord of lords, even if a man has bound a phylactery to her, even if someone has given her an enchanted cup, even if it is from you, may the binding of her womb be released, and [of her] navel (?) and of her belly!^[35]

The highlighted passages of these healing texts are important for our understanding of taxonomies; they combine the human and supernatural agents causing disease, rituals causing diseases, and the diseases themselves, effectively mixing causes and symptoms together within the framework of a healing manuscript. In these lists of illnesses and agents causing them provided in these two manuscripts, we learn about the symptoms of the various afflictions (blindness, deafness, muteness, headache, demonic possession, fever, mental health issues, haemorrhage, pain, infertility), their causes (food, oil, and drink, which were manipulated to cause harm, spirit of sickness, curse through an applied object, will of God), and the agents of these causes (men using magic [typically appearing as mageia] and sorcery [pharmakeia], God, demons) and, in case of the latter text also the “physiological” cause (binding of womb and belly). The treatments the two examples offer are very similar. In the former, pouring water (and oil?), upon which the prayer of Mary was uttered, on the sick, and in the latter, making the infertile woman drink from a cup of wine upon which the prayer to God was uttered. These categories of symptom, cause, and treatment are somewhat permeable and always a matter of interpretation. Nevertheless, as we observe, they can all be present in a single healing manuscript.

Uncertainty is the key to understanding the why aspect of such healing texts; the lists of illnesses and the agents causing them function as an attempt to encompass uncertainty and reply to the why question posed when a person fell ill. As Umberto Eco noted, we create lists “because we cannot manage to enumerate something that eludes our capacity for control and denomination”,^[36] and even went so far as to say, “We like lists because we don’t want to die”.^[37] Concerning lists of demons in Antiquity, Frankfurter wrote that they provide “the pretense of certainty, control, and ritual tradition” and stated that these were composed “according to the same form that Egyptian apotropaic amulets had used from the classical through Roman periods”.^[38] A similar attempt to control and contain is palpable in the long lists of possible evils, causes and symptoms that Coptic magical papyri frequently include.

Considering the how and why concepts within the Coptic healing texts in more detail, the first example comes from a single leaf, BnF Copte 129 (20) fol. 178, detached from an otherwise unpreserved codex containing healing prescriptions for various issues, accompanied by prayers. The codex dates to the tenth or eleventh century and was copied in the scriptorium of Touton and subsequently owned by the White Monastery.^[39] The sheet is inscribed on both sides, and on the side marked as page 22 it preserves a healing prescription for quick and painless childbirth and an incomplete prayer that belongs to it. The first healing procedure for childbirth corresponds to the invocation type, when a prayer is uttered upon a substance, but it contains an additional procedure, fumigation:

A woman suffering in labour: Fumigate her, she will give birth quickly. Say this prayer over a cup of wine, have her drink from it. She will give birth.

In the name of [Jesus (?)]. A bunch of grapes, that he pressed upon the [holy] tree of the cross, help your servant (f. sg.), daughter of (?) …!^[40]

Although this text is brief, we gain much information from it; it identifies the symptom and two types of treatment, but not the cause of the difficult childbirth. The first method of treatment the text offers, fumigation, is a more “medical” one, and the second, the prayer uttered over wine and drunk by the woman, is a “magical” one. Although drinking wine might seem like a more “medical” approach, the fact that wine upon which a prayer is uttered was not only used for healing but also for, for instance, in love potions, makes it a typical “magical” procedure; furthermore, the prayer clearly highlights a connection between wine and Christ’s blood, which might also be of relevance here.^[41] We find prescriptions for fumigations in both medical and magical texts, but in magical texts, as in this one, fumigation tended to be accompanied by further ritual action.^[42] What principally differentiates the pharmacological and medical prescriptions from the medico-magical ones is that the former addresses only the how aspect of the treatment. Compare the healing magical text to the following prescription for a woman with uterine haemorrhage from a medical codex dating to the seventh century:

Concerning a woman who had blood under her. [A] place of the fire. Fumigate her well. It will stop.^[43]

In this medical recipe, the fumigation responded to the bleeding, but the why of the ailment was not addressed; the medical and pharmacological texts respond only to the how, as opposed to magical texts. Returning to the BnF Copte 129 (20) fol. 178, what makes it different from the medical text, and why is it structured as it is? The fumigation procedure, otherwise often occurring in both medical and magical healing prescriptions, is a treatment that responds to the how, that is, how to treat the symptom, the painful childbirth. The why, however, unveils a more complex issue involving the dynamic of magical practices in this cultural context in general. What does this part of the healing procedure respond to? Why is the fumigation not enough? As the why is, almost by definition, uncertain and somewhat obscure (leaving the woman guessing why this happened to her), one can never be sure what caused it – was it the “meddlesome men” or God himself, as some manuscripts suggest? A “magical” treatment responded to this need to overcome uncertainty with something powerful that cannot be doubted or questioned – the authority of Christ, calling directly upon him and drinking wine upon which a prayer for him was uttered.

A second example from the Coptic magical corpus we will examine here is the already mentioned prayer for pregnancy. The passage quoted above appears right after the beginning of this formulary. The prayer opens by alluding to the miraculous pregnancy of Sarah, the wife of Abraham, known from the book of Genesis:

O Master, Almighty Lord God, since from the beginning, you created man according to your likeness and according to your image, and you also honoured the barren woman and the one who gives birth, you yourself said to our mother Sarah: “By this time next year you will have a child”. Again in this way, I entreat you and I invoke you, you who sit upon the cherubim, that you listen to my prayer today, I, NN, son of NN, over this cup of wine that is in my hand, so that when I give it to NN, the daughter of NN, you will grace her with a seed of man!^[44]

Concerning the cause, symptom, and treatment of the woman’s troubles, the cause is given (“even if a man has bound a phylactery to her …”), the symptom is barrenness (a “bound womb”), and the treatment is drinking the wine upon which God is called to help the woman. The prayer does not indicate any additional “medical” treatment, such as fumigation. The prayer provides suggestions as to the why of the barrenness: a curse binding the woman, an enchanted potion, and God himself. The ritual responds to this uncertainty by calling upon God, the highest power, to undo any of these. The how, the physiological element, is the binding of the womb and belly, which results from the why, but no treatment responds specifically to it. We might also formulate this differently – the treatment responds to the why and how without distinguishing them, meaning that this healing text does not overlap with medical or pharmacological ones.

Health Curses: Curses Causing Sickness

As the healing texts often explain the why of an illness by referring to curses attacking health caused by “meddlesome men”, “bindings”, and other agents and methods, we must now examine the curses themselves. What taxonomies of illness do these attest to? How were these manuscripts designed to cause illness? What do the health curses tell us about the illnesses they caused? In about half of the health curses (I have identified about 30 so far), an applied text or a formulary provides us only with an invocation, occasionally in the form of a charm.^[45] The formularies do not indicate how the ritual invocation was supposed to be used – whether only spoken, spoken over a substance, or written down as an applied object (or both). A curse to cause sickness written on papyrus and dating from the eighth century is an example of such a formulary. The highlighted passage is reminiscent of the lists of illnesses and agents causing them observed in the healing texts – the why of the illness – suggesting a shared repertoire of the vocabulary of illness both healing texts and health curses draw upon:

(…) I adjure <you> today, O angel of the holy altar, that you will not be free, nor will you be released to go up to God, nor <to take> your offering up, nor to worship the true judge, nor to meet the Lord, until you have stood upon the body <of> NN and you have brought upon him suffering and disease and sickness and a discharge and a fever and a pain and a weariness and a dejection and a shivering and a swelling and a demon of madness and seventy diseases, each one being different, and you bring them down upon the [body] <of> NN for all the days of his life, so that neither a male magician nor a female sorcerer will be able to take pity on him, nor heal him from my hands, I, NN, child of NN, until I have mercy upon him! (…)^[46]

The numinous agent of the curse that the beneficiary (the human agent of the curse) calls upon is an angel. The illnesses to be brought upon the victim are numerous and have various symptoms: suffering, haemorrhage or efflux, fever, pain, shivering and swelling, madness, and others. Although the treatment is not detailed, it depends on the beneficiary’s will. However, these afflictions might have been potentially cured by a “magician” (magos) or “sorcerer” (pharmakos), who are normally accused of cursing in healing texts; this further emphasizes the interesting dynamic between curses and healing texts.^[47] A similar example, which also highlights various illnesses and the agent causing them, is a curse to make a woman bleed, dating to the fifth or perhaps sixth century, written on a papyrus roll and invoking the angel Athrak:

I invoke you Athrak, the great angel who stands at the right side of the sun, he

to whom all the authorities of the sun are subject, for if I sent you to the abyss,

you would destroy it; silver, that you would destroy it; steel, that you would break

it (…); a pregnant woman, you would tear open her right side and you would bring out the child (…) […] womb to her side, opening from the crown of her head down to the nails of her feet, may (?) you draw out from under her polluted blood and darkened water from her right side to her left side. May you cause it to weigh upon her like a millstone! May it flow under her like the source of the four rivers! Neither magician nor sorcerer nor heavenly <being> nor underworld <being> nor <the> hand of man will be able to contain this blood which is under NN <child of> NN, except me!

Again, the agent is clear, as well as the list of illnesses to be brought on the victim: abortion, uterine and other bleeding and efflux, and pain. Importantly, both of these passages from the health curses not only indicate the numinous agent of the curse (the human one is the one who cast the curse) and list the illnesses but also identify the agents of healing in the same way healing texts identify the agents of curses: magician, sorcerer, numinous being and man. Surprisingly, these are the same as the agents causing a disease, again confirming the hypothesis of a shared repertoire concerning illnesses and their causes within this corpus. In health curses, the beneficiary typically summoned the supernatural intermediary to strike the victim instead of acting directly, unlike in healing texts, where the numinous being is called upon to approach the beneficiary more closely (for instance, through the act of epiclesis).

Part of the curses that hurt someone physically were so-called prayers for justice, applied texts that differ from standard curses in several ways (e.g., they often allude to the vengeance of God as found in the Old Testament), most importantly that the beneficiary justified the curse as rightful vengeance, allowing us to understand the motivation of a person to cast a spell onto another.^[48] One such text is a fifth-century curse against Tnoute, again identifying the numinous agent and the list of illnesses that should torture Tnoute:

I, the poor, wretched, sinner (f.). [I(?)] cry up to the Lord God Almighty, so that you enact vengeance with Tnoute (f.), [since she has] parted my son from me and he despises me. You will not listen to her, G[od sth.], since she cries up to you. You will make her without hope in this world. You will strike her womb. [You will make] her barren. You will have her eat from/up the fruit of her womb. You will have that a demon come up up[on her, which will cas]t her up to a suffering sickness and a great distress. You will bring a fever up upon her, and a […] a cold, and a numbness of heart, and an itching. When you bring upon her the two […] a worm comes forth from her and a blood for all the days of her life. […] take them. She will not live. She will come to death. You will stupefy her. The one who sits upon the chariot of the Cherubim and the Seraphim, you (pl.) will enact vengeance for me with Tnoute.^[49]

Likely, this curse was written by someone other than the woman, as the literacy levels among women were relatively low, and the composition of the curse required some expertise (as they tend to be consistent in their wording).^[50] Apparently, once deposited at unknown locations, such curses were not supposed to be unfolded (“open”) and read under threat of being affected by the afflictions indicated in the curse.^[51] The woman Tnoute was to be stricken with various afflictions: bareness, demonic possession resulting in sickness and pain, fever, mental weakness, itching, hemorrhage, and finally, death, all to be brought upon her by God. In judicial curses, the supernatural agents called upon remained constant: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the archangels and angels, and the Twenty-Four Presbyters. However, the numinous agents called upon in healing texts and health curses differ widely and cannot be easily grouped or determined (e.g., Jesus was called upon to both heal^[52] and curse^[53]).

Besides the more generic formularies causing illness of the invocation type we surveyed at the beginning of this subchapter and the prayers for justice, there also exists a third category of health curses – these were applied curses deposited in tombs, calling upon the soul of the dead person to cause to “bring suffering”^[54] upon the victim.^[55] Four were written on bone, and three of these constitute an archive, the “Asyut Bone Curse Dossier”, written by the same scribe in Asyut in the ninth or tenth century and studied by Dosoo.^[56] The two remaining manuscripts from this group differ slightly (one is written on lead and apparently deposited with the hair of the victim,^[57] the other on an ostracon^[58]) and are much older, dating possibly to the sixth or seventh century.^[59] These six manuscripts suggest a strong connection between health curses and death; all of them were deposited under or by corpses^[60] and tended to adjure the dead corpse directly beside other beings, such as the Powers of Death^[61] (except for the example cited below), making it one of the supernatural agents of the curse. The fact that the majority were written on bones strengthens the link between health curses of this type and death. The illnesses they brought are similar to the lists already mentioned and to those commonly addressed in healing texts and other health curses: haemorrhage, pain, wounds, fever, undoing of sinews and bones, and even death. Consider the highlighted passage from a curse from this group written on lead:

I adjure you by your names and your strong powers, <that> as soon as I will place you under this corpse, you will cast Kurakos, the son of Sanne, the man of Penčeho into a painful sickness, into disease and a wasting sickness and pain in all his limbs! Take his heart! Eat his flesh! Drink his blood! Let his bread and his water become hateful to his soul! Loosen his [bones]! Tear his sinews! Smite him in haste, with an evil blow and an evil and unhealing wound, from his head to his feet! Let a fever and a fire, and shivering eat away at his flesh in the day and the night until he is destroyed like this corpse!

The curses from the Asyut archive call upon Powers of Death, who “bring every sickness down upon every man, that bring every soul out of every body”,^[62] and additionally specify that this physical suffering of the victim should be the same that the corpse suffered in its transition from life to death.^[63]

Besides these longer formularies providing a full list of illnesses attacking the victim and thereby providing us the why of the illness – the symptoms (the list of illnesses), causes (supernatural agents), and the treatments of the curses (e.g., “until I have mercy upon him”) – simpler ones exist as well. These constitute a fourth type of health curses, causing only one illness and often closely resembling pharmacological recipes in their formal pattern, as defined by Grons (e.g., “Causing pain. Take the sweat of a black male donkey and his testicles. Cook it with olive oil and put it on his face. It is sufficient”.^[64]).^[65] Interestingly, a prescription from a tenth or eleventh-century paper codex of curses is ambivalent and might be both a healing prescription or a curse:

Leprosy: Take beer and sow-thistle. Anoint his body. It will become completely white.^[66]

Does the fact that “it will become white” refer to white, meaning healthy, skin, or to the disease “white leprosy”? On the one hand, this recipe resembles a typical healing pharmacological recipe. Furthermore, Theophrastus (4^th–3^rd century BCE) in this Enquiry to Plants, informs us that thistle or a similar plant is used to cure white leprosy.^[67] On the other, it is doubtful if our copyist could know Theophrastus’ writings, as they are divided by more than a millennium. Furthermore, as the codex only contains curses and love spells, this would make it the only healing text out of 23 prescriptions for very different purposes, which would be unusual. Approaching the body of the victim comes across also in other procedures to harm a victim, as we have observed in some of the examples. Although it is uncertain how the enemy had intimate access to its victim, Dosoo has suggested that such contact could have been made using a substitute for the body of the victim, an effigy.^[68] This prescription remains ambivalent and again attests to the closely connected repertoire of these corpora.

Paradoxically, the treatment of the illness could have been very similar to the procedure that caused it (like the symptoms of the illnesses and their agents), for instance, giving someone a cursed or blessed substance, typically to eat or drink, as some of the above-discussed healing texts suggest. Consider the following examples, the first one of which comes from the Endoxon of Archangel Michael, a codex containing a long prayer followed by various prescriptions, which dates to the late tenth century:

An unconsciousness which you bring upon a man. Pronounce the prayer [the Endoxon] over some water. Throw it on him. He will be like a dead man. <Offering:> frankincense.^[69]

But in the same codex, we discover that saying a prayer upon a cup also leads to undoing a curse:

A man who has been given a cup. Pronounce the prayer three times over a glass flask filled with rose-water and charlock-water. Have him drink while fasting. It will remove <itself>. Offering: white costus.^[70]

Such a prescription may have counteracted love potions, like the following example of roughly the same date:

Desire. Take the gall of the hare and the sweat of your chest and the blood of your big finger and your [[semen]]. Purify them with Attic (?) honey. On the fourteenth day of the moon. Semen. Give it to her, fasting.^[71]

Similar formularies with a pharmacological component differ significantly from the other types of health curses; they do not call upon a numinous intermediary agent, meaning they address the how rather than the why element. Furthermore, as they lack a supernatural intermediary, they are more immediate; physical contact is important for their efficacy:

A man, to put him to death (?). At three <times> daily. Borax and bitumen, sweat of <a> black donkey. Anoint his head.^[72]

A second example from this group was mentioned above (for causing pain), and a third prescription of this type is the one mentioned above concerning leprosy. These three prescriptions come from the same codex and might thus form an exception, as all the other types of health curses used an intermediary, and typically, no direct contact was required between the beneficiary/ritualist and the victim.^[73] By contrast, no supernatural being was necessary in the cases from this particular codex if there was direct contact between the prepared substance and the victim.

Thus, although we see variety in the healing procedures and the health curses, they are based on a shared repertoire of ideas and practices; they exist within a unified understanding of the causality of illnesses. They draw from the same pool of ideas concerning illnesses – not only in terms of the procedures but also in terms of what causes sicknesses and the possible symptoms, as revealed by analysing them from a taxonomical point of view. Additionally, comparing healing texts and health curses reveals the social dynamic inherent in these practices, as observed in these lists of illnesses and the agents causing them. A sick person, as well as the one who might potentially have caused his or her illness, would have turned to a magical practitioner. The perpetrator was in conflict with the victim, with magical practitioners potentially standing in the middle of the strife.

Conclusion: Symptom, Cause and Treatment and Lists as Taxonomical Tools

Focusing on the so-called lists of illnesses and their agents as a taxonomical tool allowed us to make several observations, namely that health curses and healing texts align in terms of symptoms, causes (agents, numinous and human), and even treatments of illnesses. The reason why these lists were composed is difficult to determine, but the most likely explanation is that both healing texts and health curses used lists to ensure their efficacy.

The lists of illnesses in health curses generally correspond to the main concerns of healing recipes, often sharing the same vocabulary even with medical and pharmacological texts: fever (hmme, hmom, asik), haemorrhage, pain (tkas, mkah), disturbance (štortr), suffering (hise).^[74] The lists also give agents of healing and cursing, sometimes calling them by their names, sometimes by more generic terms, such as demon (daimōn), magician (magos), and sorcerer (pharmakos). These lists do not form any apparent structure, hierarchy, genealogical tree, or subcases. Occasionally, we encounter a sort of hierarchy concerning numinous agents^[75] or a more narrative description of the progression of disease (as in the curse against Kurakos). In both health curses and healing texts, the discourse of healing happens within these lists and passages; otherwise, the texts rarely unveil additional information concerning the symptoms, causes, and treatments of illnesses. One other place where the discourse of illness occurs in magical texts are headings, in particular in the texts that most resemble the pharmacological formal pattern of a prescription, as described by Grons. These texts and their pharmacological counterparts focus on the symptom (i.e., medical indication) and treatment but do not discuss the cause of the disease, the why. Unlike magical texts, the pharmacological texts do not reveal how the illness came to be.

Within the rich market for healing of late antique Egypt, do the magical healing texts respond to one specific cause of the sickness – curses – as opposed to medical and pharmacological practices? This is difficult to determine with certainty, as most health concerns are shared by the healing texts and pharmacological texts: fever, gynaecological issues, pain, issues of the eyes, haemorrhage, and so on.^[76] However, where these significantly differ is in the interest of magical texts in supernatural illnesses, which often have symptoms we would today associate with mental health (e.g., crying, madness, etc.) and are typically associated with demonic attacks.^[77] These do not tend to be treated by pharmacological or medical texts and are predominantly the concern of magical texts. Furthermore, the only example of a magical element in a purely pharmacological text I was able to find is in a recipe to heal someone who was “given a cup of sorcery”, the result of which should be “vomiting out the poison”.^[78] Thus, magical healing texts reflect a different way of thinking and a different universe than the pharmacological and medical ones – closer to the universe within which curses, love spells, and other spells and practices exist and are effective. Applying the how and why distinction to the material allowed us to perceive this difference. The magical texts focusing more on the how, typically more aligned with medical or pharmacological texts (including some of the health curses that are written similarly to them), are more concerned with healing or causing very specific issues. Our analysis brings the healing texts and health curses closer and, on the other hand, aids us in separating the healing texts focusing on the why from those focusing on the how, bringing these latter closer to the medical and pharmacological material, pointing out a repertoire shared by these texts.

To summarize, according to some magical healing texts, the cause of an illness seemed to be some agent (a person, demon, God, etc.) that attacked the body, leading to physical symptoms (e.g., fever, haemorrhage). The treatment attacked the cause and/or the material symptom; these could have typically been amulets bound to the body and water, oil, and wine upon which a prayer has been uttered, which directly affected the body from the outside or the inside. Furthermore, curses causing sickness and magical healing texts often used the same practices (and sometimes called upon the same numinous beings), likely because they stemmed from the same repertoire of rituals and ingredients the practitioners had at their disposal. Although the exact wording and ritual practices differed across the genres (be it healing spells, love spells, curses, etc.),^[79] the pool of ritual practices, materia medica/magica, cultural references, and effective methods was not bottomless, which is why we see the overlap. Furthermore, in long formularies containing numerous recipes, healing texts sometimes appeared along with curses and other genres designed to affect another person negatively. Apparently, a ritual specialist might have been familiar with the way these operate, which might be why some of the healing texts described the causes for sickness relatively accurately in correspondence to the curses. A last observation we can make is that direct contact between the healing substance and the patient seemed to be preferred in magical healing, pharmacological, and medical practices but was not always necessary for health curses. To conclude, healing in the Coptic magical corpus was often related to rejection and protection from evil influences that negatively affected the body.