Angels in Coptic Magic I: Introduction
coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de
coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de
Offering a perspective as an ethnic Copt, it is notable that most of the charms, “spells”, whatever you would call them, shown here, would be considered heretical today by Copts, though with the exception of basic crosses and icons and inscriptions limited to that of protection. The love spells and and such are in many a cautionary tale told to kids growing up to avoid at risk of invoking evil, so to say. Most of those stories come from the period where the “old religion” and Christianity were in flux.
Copts do also maintain a significant amount of syncretism with ancient Egyptian religion as well, both within language (typically, Egyptian Arabic words that are “odd” to middle eastern speakers are pulled from Coptic or earlier stages of Egyptian), and within ceremony (musical scales that do not sound “middle eastern” and are derivations of older Egyptian ceremony), and a belief that the Ankh, Hathor and Horus, etc. were precursors to modern Coptic religion.
> Copts do also maintain a significant amount of syncretism with ancient Egyptian religion as well, both within language (typically, Egyptian Arabic words that are “odd” to middle eastern speakers are pulled from Coptic or earlier stages of Egyptian)
This is true and also many of the characters in the language are believed to be derived from hieroglyphs.
This is true insofar as all Western writing systems are ultimately descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphics, via the Phoenician script. In the case of Coptic most of the letters are rather transparently borrowed from Greek.
Of course, Coptic is unusual in having added seven letters to the Greek alphabet for sounds not in Greek (Ϣ, Ϥ, Ϧ, Ϩ, Ϫ, Ϭ, Ϯ), and these were taken directly from the indigenous Egyptian writing system of the time, namely Demotic, itself a direct descendant of the Hieroglyphic script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script#Letters_derived_....
You're got copy-pasting of recipes between documents, warnings, threats, boasts, forbidden knowledge (the most delicious kind), wishful thinking dressed up as fact, pseudonymity, wisdom lineages, the lure of easy power, and recipes that don't actually work. The tone, to me, isn't a million miles away from a 90s-era BBS filled with geeky teenagers.
The tools might change, but the psychology remains the same.
I got the same more materialist-merchant impression from the Apocalypse of Abraham when I read it (if you squint really hard, Abraham is some sort of manufacturer that is fed up with the low quality of the things he make; the thing that is supposed to hold fire, maybe a lamp or something, catches fire and so on).
I know both these interpretations are likely imprecise. We can't be precise about knowledge we lost (what some of those things really meant), and there's a real maintained more fantastical explanation drawn on top of it that produced a beautiful layered mythology that is also interesting to be preserved. However, I can't unsee the merchant and the thing-maker as more plausible depictions of what that era was all about and why they feel mundane now but could have been super important (worth mythologizing over some decades or centuries after it happened) then.
Amusingly while looking for a different esolang just now the name of which I couldn't recall I asked an LLM and it proceeded to entirely hallucinate an impressively detailed take on the above concept with a catholic inquisition theme.