Demons, magic and medicine

After attending the excellent conference ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DEMONOLOGY A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE, at Bonn earlier this month, I realised that many is still up to discussion on ancient Egyptian concepts, in particular here, what is a demon, what is a god, what kind of entities ancient Egyptians feared, struggled with, used, invoked, and last but not least, were unaware of but had a 'sixth sense feeling' about them anyway.

Some Egyptologists argued that ancient Egyptians did not assume that they had no knowledge of entities and others launched the question 'is Osiris really a god'...

We had discussion panels and nothing was finalized of course, this is a project to be developped in the near future, with more conferences, a museum exhibition, a database in progress, and publications to follow.

I really enjoyed it as almost all demons are related to the well-being of the person, so among several 'categories' we have the illness-demons.

It was stated that categories of demons are not yet defined, yet, they have different 'origins', as proposed by Dr. Lucarelli, world specialist on demons in AE:

demons of the netherworld

guardians

illness-demons

gangs of demons sent by gods

astral demons

demonic ones

individualized demons

I am interested in all of them, but specially on the illness-demons for obvious reasons, my research in medicine in AE.
But it is nice to compare these 'types' with other religions' entities and find there are correlations.

We had a very interesting lecture on Pre-Columbian entities and another on Mesopotamian ones, as well as Minoan inspired in Egyptian entities; and also Coptic.

It should be a colorful publication and the next meetings will surely be interesting, will try not to miss any of those...