Magic persisted, along with the practice of rational medicine. In this papyrus, the wording of the petition or prayer suggests that the amulet was not made against a particular illness but was intended to guarantee divine protection against all kinds of diseases and fevers. Here is the translation of the prayer, lines three to five:
Lord Gods, heal Helene, whom so-and-so bore, from every illness and every onslaught of shivering and fever, ephemeral, quotidian, tertian, quartan.
At the end, lines of vowels create the shape of an inverted isosceles triangle, a clever technique to reflect in writing an ancestral oral performance whereby a disease or evil deity was defeated by progressively reducing its name in speech until reaching complete silence. In our amulet, the fact that the vowels in each line form a palindrome suggests that what we see as disappearing is not the protective deity but its evil opposite.