Among Egyptian literary texts, few are as enjoyable to read as the Westcar Papyrus. It is a collection of tales of wonders told at the court of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. The heroes are magicians, almost always chief lector priests, who perform marvels through speech and knowledge. The papyrus offers a lively portrait of how the Egyptians imagined magic in their own legendary past.
The manuscript
The papyrus is named after Henry Westcar, who acquired it in Egypt in the nineteenth century; it is now kept in Berlin. The copy dates to the Second Intermediate Period, but the tales are set in the Fourth Dynasty, many centuries earlier. The beginning and end are lost, and the first tale is almost entirely missing.
The frame is simple: Khufu asks his sons to entertain him with stories of wonders performed in the time of earlier kings. Each prince tells one.
The tales
| Tale | King of the time | Magician | Wonder |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Djoser | Not preserved | Text almost entirely lost |
| Second | Nebka | Webaoner | The wax crocodile |
| Third | Sneferu | Djadjaemankh | The waters of the lake folded |
| Fourth | Khufu himself | Djedi | Heads rejoined to bodies |
Webaoner and the wax crocodile
The lector priest Webaoner discovers that his wife is betraying him with a man who meets her in a pavilion by the lake. He then models a small wax crocodile, seven fingers long, and recites a spell over it. When the lover goes into the water, the servant throws the crocodile into the lake: the figure becomes a real crocodile, seven cubits long, and drags the man to the bottom. He stays in the water for seven days; then Webaoner shows him to the king, and the crocodile turns back into wax in his hand.
Djadjaemankh and the lake
King Sneferu, bored, asks the chief lector priest Djadjaemankh for a remedy. The magician suggests a boat trip on the palace lake, with twenty young women at the oars. During the outing one rower drops a fish-shaped turquoise pendant into the water and stops rowing. Djadjaemankh recites a spell and folds one half of the waters onto the other, as one folds a sheet: the pendant appears on the dry bed, is recovered, and the waters return to their place.
Djedi, the hundred-year-old magician
The last tale concerns not the past but the present. Prince Hardjedef tells his father of a man named Djedi, who is a hundred and ten years old, eats a great quantity of bread and meat every day and drinks a great deal of beer. Djedi can reattach a severed head, tame a lion, and knows the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth, which Khufu wants for his own pyramid.
Brought to court, Djedi refuses to perform the wonder on a human prisoner, because, he says, it is not permitted to do so to the "noble cattle" of god. Instead he performs it on a goose, a bird and an ox: the severed heads move back to the bodies and the animals get up again.
The final prophecy
Djedi then announces that the secret the king seeks will be revealed by others: three sons to be born to a woman named Ruddjedet, wife of a priest of Ra. The three children will become kings. The papyrus recounts their birth, attended by Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet, Heqet and Khnum, who arrive disguised as musicians and dancers. The text breaks off while the story is still going on.
Many scholars read this prophecy as a legitimation of the Fifth Dynasty, whose first kings are presented as sons of Ra, born by divine will.
What it tells us about magic
The Westcar Papyrus shows some constant features of Egyptian thought:
- magic is professional knowledge, tied to the book and the figure of the lector priest;
- it works through images and words: the wax crocodile, the spoken spell;
- it has moral limits: Djedi refuses to act on human beings;
- it serves kingship, which witnesses and guarantees it.
Studio Esoterico Cornelio regards this text as a precious document precisely because it is not a manual: it is the story, full of irony and wonder, of how a civilisation saw its own sages.
In short
- The Westcar Papyrus gathers tales of wonders told at the court of Khufu.
- Webaoner animates a wax crocodile to punish his wife's lover.
- Djadjaemankh folds the waters of the lake to recover a pendant.
- Djedi rejoins the heads and bodies of animals, but refuses to do so to a man.
- The final prophecy announces the birth of the first kings of the Fifth Dynasty.
