extreme old age. The like uncertainty attached to those spells
which one person was supposed to be able to exercise over
another. It was held, for example, that if something belonging to
an individual, such as a lock of hair or a paring of the nails,
could be secured and incorporated in a waxen figure, this figure
would be intimately associated with the personality of that
individual. An enemy might thus secure occult power over one; any
indignity practised upon the waxen figure would result in like
injury to its human prototype. If the figure were bruised or
beaten, some accident would overtake its double; if the image
were placed over a fire, the human being would fall into a fever,
and so on. But, of course, such mysterious evils as these would
be met and combated by equally mysterious processes; and so it
was that the entire art of medicine was closely linked with
magical practices. It was not, indeed, held, according to
Maspero, that the magical spells of enemies were the sole sources
of human ailments, but one could never be sure to what extent
such spells entered into the affliction; and so closely were the
human activities associated in the mind of the Egyptian with one
form or another of occult influences that purely physical
conditions were at a discount. In the later times, at any rate,
the physician was usually a priest, and there was a close
association between the material and spiritual phases of
therapeutics. Erman[4] tells us that the following formula had to
be recited at the preparation of all medicaments: "That Isis
might make free, make free. That Isis might make Horus free from
all evil that his brother Set had done to him when he slew his
father, Osiris. O Isis, great enchantress, free me, release me
from all evil red things, from the fever of the god, and the
fever of the goddess, from death and death from pain, and the