The Jacques-Édouard Berger collection contains over four hundred objects, of which a good hundred are amulets. Although these may be less spectacular than other significant pieces in the collection, they bear witness to a collector in quest of objects that reveal a popular sensibility, far removed from the grand theological speculations elaborated by a priestly elite in the seclusion of the 'houses of life'.

Jacques-Édouard Berger was not interested in assembling a 'complete' collection of amulets, as found in museums that display typological series – although these are very useful for research. His intentions were fundamentally different, based on the search for the object that he felt to be nefer, i.e., beautiful, perfect in its plenitude, in its ability to reveal netjer, the expression par excellence of universal and divine complexity.

The collector was in touch with a popular vein that the evidence of grand official art, whether religions or funerary, does not reveal. He thus brought attention to bear on the magico-religious mentality of a people with a profound love of life, who perceived great natural events as manifestations of powers that had to be conciliated, and who were much concerned with the afterlife.

For every Egyptian, rich or poor, scribe or illiterate, high official or simple peasant, the amulet was a very effective object because it contained netjer, which functioned as an immediate link to divine power. Would it not have been reassuring for an 'overseer of harvests' to wear a necklace decorated with the immediately effective image of the goddess of harvests, for a woman about to give birth to be assured of a successful delivery by having recourse to an image of Taweret, the benevolent hippopotamus goddess, protectress of births, or for a scribe to favour the image of a baboon, incarnation of the god of writing Thoth, who would help him directly with his daily work? To wear any of these amulets was to have recourse to netjer, which responded to the immediate preoccupations of a people kept at a distance from the official rituals and who were not in the least concerned with the theological subtleties elaborated by a priestly elite.

The amulets in this collection attest to a deliberate selection, to a passion and to an original quest. A few are exceptionally well made; others, more crudely fashioned, are the expression of a very direct popular belief. By exhibiting the most significant examples in the collection, we hope not to betray the procedure initiated by the collector. The amulets are grouped according to themes that Jacques-Édouard Berger favoured in his passionate quest for the beautiful, the expression of a sacred, and always complex, truth.

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