The Headless God

The hymns, which are likely older than the surrounding magical recipes, nor the ritual practiced by the magical editor, indicate that the poet or magician saw Seth-Typhon in the sun. The poet separates the two sharply from one another, and when Nephotes boasts of the god's name—that earth, depth, underworld, heaven, sun, moon, and stars tremble before him—he explicitly distinguishes between the sun and Seth. However, the author of the first hymn was familiar with the legend of the battle between Osiris and Typhon.

An invocation of Seth in P VII (961–970) also shows the demon as a powerful universal god; the magician asks for his appearance:

To me, you in the empty space of light, Invisible One,
All-Ruler, Creator of the gods,
To me, unconquerable demon,
To me, you who have not grieved your own brother, Seth,
To me, fire-shining spirit,
To me, god and demon not to be despised....

With blatant flattery, the magician seeks to win the god over. Others, such as the author of the first piece in the Oslo papyrus, see Typhon's murder as a source of glory for their patron deity and call him "the one who slaughtered his own brother".... Even if he is a fire-demon, he need not be conceived as a sun god. He rules over the fire that is feared, that causes disaster. He is indeed the typical god of harm who brings misfortune and subjugates. Thus he stands also in P XII 11, 15ff. To destroy order, peace, and friendship, one cites him:

"I call upon you, the terrible god in the empty space of air, the invisible one, the great god who strikes the earth¹ and the sublime cosmos, who loves confusion and hates stability and lashes the clouds apart."² Then the request to sow discord between two people, "as Typhon and Osiris had (or, for man and woman: Typhon and

1 τὸν πατάξαντα P, from which DELATTE makes κατατάξαντα (p. 200). But Seth is attributed the opposite of orderly activity, and furthermore, he likely has his epithet 'Patathnax' from this effect; it was likely formed by the palindromic reversal of the final part of πατα-ξαντ(α).

2 His whip is the lightning: this, I believe, is how the first image of the Pap. Oslo (Plate I) shows him: in his right hand he holds three lightning bolts, which, however, turned out poorly enough due to the childish art of the scribe and illustrator. OMONT sees in the bundle of rays, which is likely taken from well-known Zeus statues, strips of magical recipes.