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Amulets: Ancient, Medieval, and Oriental: Thoth

For this Heart of mine is the Heart of the god of mighty names [Thoth], of the great god whose words are in his members, and who giveth free course to his Heart which is within him.

And most keen of insight is his heart among the gods. Ho to me! Heart of mine: I am in possession of thee, I am thy master, and thou art by me; fall not away from me; I am the dictator to whom thou shalt obey in the Netherworld. Were there sufficient evidence as to the use of jade by the ancient Egyptians, we might be justified in finding an allusion to this substance in the 160th chapter of the Book of the Dead. This chapter was to be inscribed upon a small column made of a green stone (Renouf translates "green feldspar"), as appears in the text, which reads, in part, as follows:

I am the column of green feldspar which cannot be crushed, and which is raised by the hand of Thoth.

Injury is an abomination for it. If it is safe, I am safe; if it is not injured, I am not injured; if it receives no cut, I receive no cut. Said by Thoth: arise, come in peace, lord of Heliopolis, lord who resides at Pu.

The text is accompanied by a vignette in which Thoth is represented bringing the column enclosed in a box or casket. This is one of the forms of the neshem-stone, a name used in Egyptian as widely and vaguely as was smaragdus in Latin. One thing is, however, quite evident, the material designated here must have been of exceptional hardness and toughness, for the special virtue of the column-amulet was to make the body as hard and indestructible as itself. Incidentally we may recall that the hermetic work of Thoth, named by the later Greeks Trismegistos, the Thrice Mighty One, which was said to have been unearthed in a tomb, was inscribed upon smaragdus. The larger part of the amulets used in ancient Egypt represented some living creature. The most usual type is the bull's head, which was cut from carnelian, hematite, amazon stone, lapis lazuli, or quartz. Prehistoric Egyptian amulets representing the fly have been found; these were of slate, lapis lazuli and serpentine. In historic times gold was employed as the material. Other types occurring in pre-historic times are the hawk, of quartz or limestone; the serpent, of lapis lazuli or limestone; the crocodile and the frog. Carnelian was freely used as the material for amulets in the earlier historic times, among the prevailing forms were the hand, the fist, and the eye; amulets figuring the lion, the jackal-head, the frog, and the bee, also appear. Silver or electrum was substituted for carnelian in the Middle Kingdom. At a later period amulets were used less and less frequently. The mysterious virtues of the scarab are not yet forgotten in the East, in Syria at least, for we are told that this beetle is an object of much veneration among the Syrian peasants as an amulet. One use of it in this way is to enclose a specimen in a box and lay this upon the breast of a babe in its cradle as a sure protection against the greatly-dreaded Evil Eye. There is also a superstition in this region that if a "scarab" is found lying helplessly on its back, anyone who charitably relieves it of its embarrassment by setting it on its feet, will be relieved of the guilt of a number of sins. It is difficult to see any other origin for the scaraboid, or imperfect scarab form, than that afforded by the Egyptian scarabs, some of which date back to about 4000 B.C. Whether we can literally say that the scaraboid was introduced into Babylon by the Egyptians may be open to question, as the form itself appears to have been evolved by Etruscans and Greeks. Unquestionably the scaraboid was much more easily shaped than the scarab proper, and for those traders who wished large supplies for commercial purposes at a low cost, this was by no means a negligible quality.

The evolution of the ring from the cylindrical seal is of course purely a matter of conjecture. Here, as is often the case in a chain or series of fossil remains, we have a succession of types which may be connected with one another genetically, but which must not be so connected. That is to say, we cannot prove the affirmative and can only point to a probability. Many cut and engraved stones, some of which had evidently been used as talismans, have been washed up on the shore at Alexandria, Egypt. Not all of these are completed, some being only half worked, as though the engraver had become dissatisfied with his design, or had found a flaw in the material, or that they had been lost from boats or ships. It has been conjectured that these half-completed gems were the work of household jewellers employed in the palaces of Alexandria. In Mas'udi's "Meadows of Gold" we read that in his time, in the tenth century A.D., there was what he terms "a fishery for precious stones" on the seacoast near Alexandria, Egypt. To account for this he relates two bits of legend. One of them represents these fragments of precious stones as having originally adorned the richly decorated vases and vessels of Alexander the Great, which were broken up and cast into the sea by Alexander's mother after his death. The other tale was to the effect that Alexander himself had gathered together a mass of jewels and ordered them to be thrown into the sea near the Pharos, so that its neighborhood should never be deserted; for, Mas'udi remarks, wherever precious stones are to be found, whether in mines or in the depths of the sea, men are sure to assemble to seek for them.