The Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist

The passage is brief and its job is plain. Someone is afflicted by a daimon; the text is used to expel it. It is framed as a stele, an inscribed monument, attributed to a figure named Jeu and given the epithet hieroglyphist, and it addresses a power described as akephalos, headless. Headless divine figures are well attested in Graeco-Egyptian magical imagery, where a decapitated form signals a power that stands outside ordinary categories rather than one that has been injured.

Structurally it belongs to the largest and least glamorous category in the whole corpus. Exorcism and protection texts vastly outnumber the ascent narratives and the love spells, and they are what the material was mostly for. A household in fourth century Egypt was more likely to have recourse to a practitioner over a fever, a possession or a persistent bad dream than over a lawsuit or a rival.

The text is a good example of the mixing that runs through the papyri. It uses the Hebrew divine names that appear throughout the corpus, sets them beside Egyptian ones, and treats the whole set as available. Nothing in it suggests the writer thought he was combining religions. He was using names that worked.

The framing as a stele is worth noticing, because it is a convention rather than a description. A number of texts in the magical papyri present themselves as copies of something inscribed on a monument, recovered from a temple archive, or found in a hidden chamber, and attribute themselves to a named ancient authority. The claim is one of provenance: it tells a user that what he holds is old, that it comes from a place where such things are kept, and that it worked for somebody with a name. Whether any such stele existed is not the point and was probably not the point for the copyist either.

Charles Wycliffe Goodwin published the British Museum papyrus in 1852, three quarters of a century before Karl Preisendanz assembled the corpus, and his edition is how the passage entered English. In it the Greek akephalos was rendered in a way that produced the English word bornless rather than headless, and that word stuck. It is generally regarded now as a misreading. It is also the form under which the text became one of the best known items in modern Western magic.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took the passage up in the late nineteenth century and rebuilt it as a working invocation. Aleister Crowley carried the Golden Dawn version forward and placed it at the front of his edition of the Goetia as a preliminary invocation, which is where most later practitioners met it. The received English text is not a translation of the papyrus. It is a nineteenth century ritual composition with a fourth century ancestor.

That distinction is the reason this atlas holds the two separately. The papyrus is an attested text with a witness and a findspot. The Bornless Ritual is a modern practice with a documented history of its own, and the atlas records it as such. Treating the modern rite as the ancient text, which a good deal of popular writing does, hides the most interesting thing about either: that a short exorcism copied in Roman Egypt was still being performed a hundred and fifty years ago because a Victorian classicist made an error in a word.