古埃及的医学与巫术:重估两者的关系

Medicine and Magic in Ancient Egypt: Reassessing Their Relationship

本篇文章尝试呈现对古埃及医学和巫术之间的关系进行评估。对比传统的观点,19世纪和20世纪宗教学、人类学影响下对埃及巫术的新理解对本文所关注的议题十分重要。巫术并非古埃及宗教及礼仪活动中一种负面的非理性构成;相反,埃及巫术是一套全面的调节系统,用以稳定现存世界的秩序。这套系统用于人类活动的方方面面,旨在根据理性机制尝试将具有威胁性和混乱的部分整合到正常世界秩序中。在以往的古埃及医学研究中,现代性偏见明确地将文献中的(据称高级的)医学与(据称低级的)巫术区分开来,轻视巫术活动,或是将巫术的使用解释为纯粹心理学上的暗示。能够看到,在医学中使用巫术依赖一套准技术性类比体系,为遭受病痛折磨的患者建立与绝对(神的,或者神秘的)秩序之间的联系,例如,在患者与荷鲁斯之间建立联系。最近的研究同样证明医药处方不仅仅在药剂层面有效。药物的生产复制并反映了疾病本身的特征,这就使药物不仅有药效而且还具有神秘功效。对这一机制更系统化、更为细致的研究将会使我们达到对埃及本位的理解,发展出对古埃及医学和巫术实践更融贯的功能理论。

This contribution attempts to present a reassessment of the relationship of ancient Egyptian medicine and magic.Crucial to this is a new understanding of Egyptian magic that puts it in explicit contrast to conventional views influenced by religious and anthropological discourses of the 19 th and 20 th centuries.Rather than being a negative and irrational component of ancient Egyptian religious and ritual practices,Egyptian magic was a comprehensive regulatory system aimed at stabilizing the existing world order.This system,used across all areas of human activity,functioned according to rational mechanisms that attempted to reintegrate threatened or chaotic parts of the world into the normative order.In past scholarly treatments of ancient Egyptian medicine,modern biases are obvious that aim to separate(purportedly superior)medical from(purportedly inferior)magical parts of texts,that minimize the application of magic or explain its use as purely psychological or suggestive.It can be shown that the useof magic in medicine relied on a system of quasi-technical analogies that established a link between the patient suffering from a disease and the absolute(divine,or mythical)order,e.g.,between the patient and Horus.Recently,it has similarly been demonstrated that the prescriptions of drugs operated on more than just the pharmaceutical level.The production of drugs replicated and mirrored features of the disease itself;this provided the drugs not only with pharmaceutical but also magical efficacy.Further systematic and meticulous study of these mechanisms will allow us to unravel the Egyptian-emic-understanding and to develop a coherent functional theory of the interface of medical and magical practices in ancient Egypt.