Throughout history, many cultures have looked for help and answers about fertility in religion. The Romans had the deity Ceres, while the Aztecs had at least of handful of gods related to these issues. However, in Egypt they seem to have gone the extra mile to ensure the future of their families and society. Researchers recently found that they likely prepared a vision-inducing concoction that included bodily fluids and hallucinogens during rituals surrounding pregnancy and childbirth.
This finding was achieved after a team of researchers, led by Professor Davide Tanasi of the University of South Florida's History Department, scraped the inside of a Bes mug and performed multiple chemical and DNA analyses to the sample. Bes mugs are ancient Egyptian ceramic vessels that existed from the 16th century BCE to the fifth century CE. Their name is owed to Bes, a deity related to fertility, protection, medical healing, and magical purification.
The vessel from the study is kept at the Tampa Museum of Art, and dates back to the Ptolemaic period (323 to 30 BCE). The Bes mug is a head-shaped jar that shows the god with large eyes, a crown of feathers, and his tongue sticking out. While academics have long struggled to figure out their function, they have speculated that they were used in obscure rituals at Saqqara, a famous funerary complex. This complex has rooms known as Bes Chambers, where these rituals are believed to have been performed. Still, there was little concrete evidence, until now, to back up the scholarly community's beliefs.
“For a very long time now, Egyptologists have been speculating what mugs with the head of Bes could have been used for, and for what kind of beverage, like sacred water, milk, wine or beer,” says Branko van Oppen, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Tampa Museum of Art. “Experts did not know if these mugs were used in daily life, for religious purposes or in magic rituals.”
The residues revealed a mixture of psychedelic drugs, alcohol, and bodily fluids—such as breast milk, mucous fluids, and blood— that would be used in a magic ritual. It was flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice, and grapes, which would give the concoction a blood-like appearance. The researchers believe it was used for reenacting an Egyptian myth, likely for fertility.
“This research teaches us about magic rituals in the Greco-Roman period in Egypt,” Van Oppen shares. “Egyptologists believe that people visited the so-called Bes Chambers at Saqqara when they wished to confirm a successful pregnancy because pregnancies in the ancient world were fraught with dangers. So, this combination of ingredients may have been used in a dream-vision inducing magic ritual within the context of this dangerous period of childbirth.”
The team recently published their findings in Scientific Reports. “There’s no research out there that has ever found what we found in this study,” Tanasi says in a statement issued by the University of South Florida. “For the first time, we were able to identify all the chemical signatures of the components of the liquid concoction contained in the Tampa Museum of Art’s Bes mug, including the plants used by Egyptians, all of which have psychotropic and medicinal properties.”
To Tanasi, this study has led to scientific proof that the Egyptian myths have some kind of truth. “It helps us shed light on the poorly understood rituals that were likely carried out in the Bes Chambers in Saqqara, near the Great Pyramids at Giza” he said. “Religion is one of the most fascinating and puzzling aspects of ancient civilizations.”
Source: Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a ptolemaic Egyptian vase
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