Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to enjoying sex and orgasm

Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to enjoying sex and orgasm

One case is described in detail on a funerary stela of the first century BC

The Lady Taimhotep was married at the age of fourteen to the High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. She bore him three daughters but the couple wanted a son. They prayed together to the deified Imhotep

The god appeared to the High Priest in a dream and promised that he should have a son if he refurbished the sanctuary of Imhotep's temple. The High Priest carried out the work and made offerings. Imhotep caused Taimhotep to conceive a male child, who was named after the god. She died four years later at the age of thirty.

Earlier in time, the major deities of the state-run temples were not so accessible. Women prayed to the traditional deities of household shrines, such as Taweret and Hathor. Appeals for help might also be made to the family ancestors. Some Letters to the Dead of the late third and early second millennia BC ask for the birth of children, or specifically for a son.

Such pleas might also be inscribed on figurines of a naked woman holding a child. These figurines would have been placed in the outer areas of tombs. The dead were probably being asked to intercede with the great gods, rather than to make things happen through their own powers. One inscribed figurine asks for 'a birth for your daughter'.

To reinforce the request, the figurine is in the form of the desired outcome — a young mother or nurse with a thriving child.

These 'fertility figurines', which were used at most periods of Egyptian history, can be made in stone, pottery, faience or wood.

The woman is usually naked except for amuletic jewellery such as cowrie-shell girdles and Horus falcon or crescent moon pendants. Some figures also display amuletic tattoos or body paintings. A minority have brightly-patterned dresses of the kind worn by priestesses and dancers who served the cult of Hathor.

The genitals may be shown below the dress to emphasize the sexuality of these figures.

In some examples of the second millennium BC, the lower legs are omitted

This could either be to curtail the figurine's power to leave a tomb, or because it was thought important to include only the parts of the body needed for the conception and rearing of children.

The woman sometimes suckles or holds a child, or is lying on a model bed with a baby beside her. The baby may be female or male, since children of both sexes were desired to make up the ideal Egyptian family.

Fertility figurines have been found in both child and adult, male and female burials, and in the outer areas of family tombs.

They were also kept in house shrines. In the second millennium BC they were dedicated in temples to Hathor, and in the first millennium BC to Isis. Placing the figurines in the vicinity of a higher power, such as a deity or a transfigured spirit, charged them with heka to act as fertility charms at all stages from conception to the rearing of infants.