The Egyptian Demonic Calendar

The ancient Egyptians recognized three categories of sentient beings: The Ankhew, the Akhew and the Neterew which can be translated as the Living, the Dead and the Gods.

The ancient Egyptians divided the year into 36 weeks of ten days duration, hence ‘decan’ from Greek ‘ten’. In Egypt, as in many other places, the lunar month lasted approximately 30 days, and could therefore be divided into three trimesters, each of ten days, which is a decan or Egyptian ‘week’. Therefore, the entire year had 36 weeks or decans. Each decan is ruled over by particular stars, rising in succession over the course of a year.

Every person is born into this intricate web of stars. The 36 decans are in effect an earlier Egyptian equivalent of the later Greek system of 12 zodiacal signs. The 12 culminating decans are also the equivalent of the 12 ‘houses’. Looking deeper it seems these Egyptian decans were connected with what they called a person’s trifold “soul”, a mysterious mix of the Ba, the Ka and the Akh. The Egyptians, like many cultures, had no generic word for ‘demon’. Although some words, such as Akhew, get very close. Etymologically, the Greek derived term ‘daemon’ or ‘demon’ means divider or alloter, and from Homer’s time onwards, it referred to an operator of unexpected and intrusive events in a person’s life. Think of it as a guardian spirit, or demon, that became associated with someone at birth. So using all these sources, Mogg Morgan interprets the Demonic calendar to identify and analyze this ‘demon’ or guardian spirit that influences a person’s inner being from birth, taking a Pisces birth date as an example.

“The third Decan in Pisces is a woman whose hair has been loosened and who wears ornaments bearing the emblem of (the tribe of) abhiiras (cow?). She shrieks, as she is frightened. She stands in the water adorned by troops of spirits having the shapes of jackals, cats, and boars.”

Mogg Morgan is a practitioner-cum-scholar of all aspects of occultism. He was a Wellcome research student at Oxford, taught by the late Professor B K Matilal, a widely respected expert on South Asian thought. Over the years he has been exploring the connections between the popular magick of ancient Egypt and its continuation/crossover with the living magical traditions of the middle East, and the Kaula/witchcraft of south Asia and beyond.

He has a particular interest in divination, dream interpretation and oracles, and has experimented widely in using some ancient oracles to address modern queries. Consequently, he sometimes prepares “horoscopes” in the original and authentic Egyptian manner and also uses dice oracles based on Greco-Egyptian and Tantrik sources. He is the author of several books on Egypt, specializing in folk religion, ritual calendars and the “archaeological memory” encoded in the religions of post pharaonic Egypt.