Egyptian demons in research and the classroom

After a hiatus of few years working on the Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project  I am again offering her module on Ancient Egyptian Religious Beliefs and Practices—this time for both year 2 and 3. Students not only get to handle 4,000 year old artifacts in a special area of the Egypt Centre Museum as part of the course, but they also get to be creative and reconstruct an Ancient Egyptian ritual. One group made a “Mockumentary” while another group decided to dramatize and read out a “Water-Spell” against crocodiles. I can’t wait to see what we do this year!

You can also see a blog post by one of the students in my year 3 & MA module on “Supernatural Beings and Demons of Ancient Egypt” that was offered last year. His daemon was “MISSING: Armed and possibly dangerous!”

The Demonology Project and student volunteers were involved in three major events. Some included our Demon Creation Station where everybody was able to make their own helpful guardian “daemon.” Events included included the Heroes and Villains event at the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday, the Being Human Festival on Hopes & Fear    and the British Festival of Science. If you use #demoncreationstation on twitter you can see more pics!

Written by Dr Kasia Szpakowska