Heka

Summary

In Egyptian heka is the name of magic itself and the name of a god who is magic, and the texts hardly separate the two, writing the word now with the divine determinative and now without it. The god's earliest appearance is on a wall of the funerary temple of King Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty, where he heads a procession of nome gods bringing offerings to the king. From the end of that dynasty come stelae of men who were both physicians and "prophets of Heka", and estates of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties bear names such as "Heka satisfies Unas" and "Heka satisfies Teti". His name survived until the third century CE in a Demotic magical papyrus, and from it comes the Coptic word ϩⲓⲕ, hik, "magic".

His fullest account is in the Coffin Texts, in spell 261, titled "To become the god Heka". Heka stands before the gods in the presence of the Lord of All, asks them to respect him as they know they should, and says that he is the one the Unique Lord made before two things had come into being in this land, when he sent out his single eye while he was alone, by what came out of his mouth, when he put Hu, the authoritative utterance, on his mouth. He is the son of the one who gave birth to the All, who was born before his mother existed; he is the protection of what the Unique Lord ordained; he gave life to the Ennead; he is "Lord of kas", heir of Ra-Atum; the All was his before the gods came into being. He ends: "Descend, you who have come in the end. I am Heka." In spell 648 Heka came into being of himself; the gods rejoiced at seeing him and live by his sweet savour, and he created the mountains and knit the firmament together.

Then Heka works every day. He rides with Ra in his barque together with Hu, "utterance", and Sia, "perception", "Heka who opens his two eyes that the two lands might see", and he is sometimes shown lifting the sky from the earth in place of Shu. At night he guards the barque: in the seventh hour of the book "What is in the Underworld" Ra overcomes his enemy the serpent Apophis by the magic of Isis and of the "Eldest Magician", who is Heka. Then the same power was given to people: The Instruction for Merikare says that the creator made sky, earth, air and food for mankind, and "made for them magic as weapons to ward off the blow of events, guarding them by day and by night".

The idea Heka turns on is that power lies in the word. In spell 261 the creator puts the word on his mouth, but Heka was there before it: he is what makes the word become a thing. Ritner says that in this spell magic resides in the word itself. The power by which the world was made is the power by which Ra guards his barque against Apophis, and the one given to people as a weapon; so, Ritner says, magic in Egypt was no deviation from religion but a gift of the creator.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it ḥkꜣ: ḥ, k and the Egyptian ꜣ. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from ḥakā and ḥikma, telling and wisdom, and grades it "likely". In Lane ḥakā is to relate a story and transmit it, to do or say exactly what another did or said, and also "to tighten a knot and make it strong". So the told word and the tightened knot are both tools of the magician. The name's last letter was, in Old Egyptian, a kind of l or r, and became y after the Middle Kingdom; read with its old l, the name is ḥkl, and in Lane al-ḥukl are animals whose voice is not heard, like ants; ʿilm al-ḥukl, "the knowledge of the voiceless", is Solomon's knowledge of the speech of ants; and iḥtakala is to learn a foreign tongue. So the name in its old form comes near, on the method, to hidden speech that only one granted its knowledge understands, and in its later form to telling and the knot, which are the two faces of magic in Egypt: a word that is spoken and an act that is imitated.

Linguistic Root

Ḥakā and ḥukl

The Egyptian essay compares heka with ḥakā and ḥikma, gives them the sense of story and wisdom, and grades the comparison "likely".

The ḥ and k of the Egyptian name are Arabic ḥ and k. The third letter, the Egyptian ꜣ, remains. Peust says this ꜣ was, in Old and Middle Egyptian, a kind of liquid, used from the Middle Kingdom on to write Semitic r and l in Semitic names, never a Semitic glottal stop; after the Middle Kingdom it merged with y, and in Coptic it was lost in most positions, which is why Coptic says hik with no third letter. So the name has two shapes: an old one whose third letter is l or r, its shape in the Pyramid Texts and Sahure's temple, and a later one whose third letter is y.

The later shape is the ḥakā the essay reads. In Lane: ḥakaytu al-ḥadīth, I related the story; ḥakaytu ʿanhu al-kalām, I transmitted the words from him; ḥakaytu al-shayʾ, I did the like of the thing; ḥākaytuhu, I said exactly what he said, no more; and ḥikāya in the grammarians' usage is the repetition of the very words. Lane also has "ḥakā and aḥkā: he tightened a knot and made it strong", a dialectal form of ḥakaʾa. The Egyptian magician's word is a word repeated exactly as the text requires, and the Sura of the Daybreak speaks of "the women who blow on knots". Ḥikma adds an m that has nothing to answer it in the name.

The old shape, read with l as its third letter, answers ḥkl, a reading proposed on the method. In Lane: aḥkala ʿalayya al-khabar, the information was dubious and obscure to me; iḥtakala, he learned a foreign language after Arabic; ḥukla, a barbarousness or impediment in speech; and al-ḥukl, animals that have no voice to be heard, such as young ants and ants. Lane reports from al-Layth that al-ḥukl is a name of Solomon in Ruʾba's verse "were I given the knowledge of the ḥukl", that is, Solomon's knowledge of the speech of creatures whose speech is not heard. So ḥukl is hidden speech that only one granted its knowledge understands, and Egyptian magic works through hidden names that only the magician knows.

The reading we give is a merger: the name in its later shape is ḥakā, as the essay reads it, and in its older shape it comes near ḥkl on the method. In both shapes it is a word: a word that is told, and a hidden word not everyone understands. The limit of the reading is that it cannot yet say which shape the name began in.

The Egyptians themselves explained the name in two ways that Ritner reports: the late priests of Esna explained it as "first work", since Heka was the first thing the creator made, and te Velde took it as "he who consecrates (literally strikes) the ka", from the verb "strike" and the word for the vital spirit. Ritner also mentions Vycichl's link with Arabic siḥr, "magic", which he finds unconvincing; its letters do not meet those of the name.

Heka is not to be confused with ḥqꜣ, with q, "ruler", from which comes the crook the king holds.

Shifts used: ḥ = ḥ; k = k; Egyptian ꜣ as l in the old shape and y in the later.

Key Mythic Narratives

The magician king in the Pyramid Texts

Spell 472 of the Pyramid Texts opens with the power of magic over the cosmos: "The sky trembles, the earth quakes before the king. The Magician is the king. The king possesses magic." In spell 539 Heka threatens the gods: any god who will not build the staircase for this king will have no offering bread and no sunshade; "it is not the king who says this against you, O gods; it is Magic who says this against you". In the Cannibal Hymn Khonsu slaughters the lords for the king, and the king eats their magic and swallows their spirits, so that their magic becomes his.

"Great of magic"

The title "Great of magic" is given to many goddesses, among them Isis, and to the crown and the cobra on the king's brow. In spells 220 and 221 of the Pyramid Texts the king comes to the Red Crown and the uraeus and calls them "Great One, Great-in-magic", asking that the terror of him be like the terror of them. The cobra on the brow is Wadjet. Ritner says that "Great of magic" became in the New Kingdom the name of a protective cobra goddess, and that a magical wand in University College London makes Hu, the word, "son of the kas of She-who-is-Great-of-Magic".

Magic that harms

Magic was not all good. Ritner notes that medical treatises contain recipes "to drive out heka from the body" of the patient, and that a late wisdom saying warns: "As for the one who performs his magical spells, they go into him." The power that guards can also harm, and the one who wields it answers for it.

Heka at the king's birth

In the royal birth scenes of the New Kingdom and later, Heka is shown presenting the newborn king and his ka to the creator, and a version of spell 261 has Heka say that he "consecrates the kas" of the creator.

Symbolic Reading

The Egyptian rereading essay makes Heka the "hidden power" that binds everything in the cosmos, and calls it the oldest concept of an "energy field": a force activated by the right words as physical laws are by equations, needing exact knowledge, able to heal or destroy, the whole cosmos being Heka. For the essay the priest is a scientist who knows these forces and uses them, and the "spells" are practical recipes, many of them real medicine wrapped in ritual words.

That is the essay's analogy. The Egyptian texts themselves say something closer to the word than to energy: Heka comes before the authoritative word, and through him the word becomes a thing. One side of the essay's analogy is borne out by what Ritner says: the first physicians were "prophets of Heka", and in Egypt the boundaries between magic, religion and medicine were not drawn as moderns draw them.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Coptic scribes chose the word hik, which comes from Heka, to translate Greek "magic". In the Acts of the Apostles Simon is said to have "practised magic", and Coptic says he "did hik"; it sets "the man who does hik" beside the Greek loanword magos, the very word for the Magi. The Egyptian name of magic and the name of the Persian magi met in one translation.

In Mesopotamia the exorcist drives Lamaštu out with his words and ends: "I conjure you by Ea's curse: you must go away!" The power of his words comes from Enki, Ea the wise, as the Egyptian magician's power comes from Heka.

In the North, Ynglinga saga says that Odin could quench fire, still the sea and turn the winds "with words alone", that he taught these arts with runes and songs called galdrar, so that the Æsir were called "spell-smiths", and that he practised seiðr, by which he knew the fates of men and things not yet come to pass.

Heka in Ra's barque, guarding it against Apophis at night, is part of the sun's journey and of the chaoskampf. In spell 261 he exists before two things were in the land, which belongs with the primordial waters and what came before them, and when he lifts the sky in Shu's place he belongs with the separation of heaven and earth.