Considering the superstitions amid which their great forefather had been brought up, it was scarcely surprising that the monotheistic ideal peculiar to the Jews should have suffered occasional eclipses. Nor were Chaldean magic and Persian Zoroastrianism alone responsible for the Jewish conception of witchcraft. In time of famine Abraham and his wife went down into Egypt, just as did his descendants, and the Egyptian magician has earned for himself a fame no less enduring than has the Chaldean. Thot, who revealed himself to man as the first magician, was their divine patron--and it is significant that he also first taught mankind the arts of writing and of music, to say nothing of arithmetic, geometry, medicine, and surgery. This divine schoolmaster pointed out in advance days of ill-omen, and, his magical arts making him master of the other gods, provided counteracting remedies. The Egyptian magician interpreted dreams, cured demoniacal possession, and was skilled in casting nativities. In less amiable mood, he could send nightmares, harass with spectres, constrain the wills of men, and cause women to fall victims to infatuations. For the composition of an irresistible charm he required no more than a drop of his subject's blood, some nail-parings, hair, or a scrap of linen from his raiment--to be incorporated in the wax of a doll modelled and clothed to resemble him or her. As with the Babylonian witch and her mediæval successors, anything done to the effigy was suffered by the original. Thot also taught the magicians how to divide the waters, and a pleasant story has been preserved of a fair maiden who dropped a new turquoise ornament from a boat into the river, and, appealing in her distress to an amiable magician, was consoled by finding it, he having divided the waters for her, safe and sound on a potsherd. It is not difficult to trace to a similar origin the Jewish legend of the Red Sea passage.