may you be useful; for I am phōr phora phōs phōtizaas (but others read: phōr phōr ophothei xaaas).' And on the seventh day, lifting up the scarab, burying it with myrrh and Mendesian wine and

Two things make this line remarkable. The first is the name the magician claims: phōr phora phōs phōtizaas. Buried in the barbarous string is plain Greek — phôs is 'light,' and phōtízō is 'to give light' — so even in the untranslatable, the reciter is declaring himself the light-bringer, identifying with the solar god whose beetle he holds. The voces are not always pure nonsense; sometimes a real word glows through, and here it is the light. The second is the parenthesis: hoi dé, 'but others [read].' A scribe has frozen, right in the spell, a variant reading — the way this magical name was said in another copy. It is a startling glimpse of how these books actually lived: hand-copied down the generations, their sacred names drifting and dividing, and a careful copyist unwilling to choose, preserving both forms so the power would not be lost to a slip of the pen. The same scholarly instinct that gives us 'other manuscripts read…' in a critical edition is here at work on a spell — reverence and philology in one breath. And then, without a pause, back to the craft: on day seven, lift the beetle out and bury it — tháptō, the verb for a human funeral — with myrrh and wine, exactly as a body is embalmed.