Hope for Cure and the Placebo Effect: The Case of the Greco-Egyptian Iatromagical Formularies

Abstract

Abstract The present paper focuses on healing rituals from Greco-Roman Egypt, where medicine and religion were inextricably linked to each other and further connected to the art of magic. In Pharaonic Egypt, healing magic was especially attributed to the priests who served a fearsome goddess named Sekhmet; although Sekhmet was associated with war and retribution, she was also believed to be able to avert plague and cure disease. It then comes as no surprise that the majority of healing spells or other types of iatromagical papyri dating from the Roman period are written in Demotic, following a long tradition of ancient Egyptian curative magic. The extant healing rituals written in Greek also show substantial Egyptian influence in both methodological structure and motifs, thus confirming the widely accepted assumption that many features of Greco-Egyptian magic were actually inherited from their ancient antecedents. What is particularly interesting about these texts is that, in many cases, they contain magical rites combined with basic elements of real medical treatment. Obviously, magic was not simply expected to serve as a substitute for medical cure, but was rather seen as a complementary treatment in order to balance the effect of fear, on the one hand, and the flame of hope, on the other.