In the fifth of these tasks, they must overcome the hypnotic power of Iris, the Egyptian. He receives them in his hypnosis clinic, which looks like an Egyptian temple, decorated with free interpretations of famous Egyptian works of art, such as the Sphinx of Gizeh or the paintings of Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh. The character of Iris, dressed in a caricature of the funerary attire of the Egyptian pharaohs, including the nemes-headdress with the Uraeus replaced by an oil lamp on the magician's forehead, specialises in transforming people into animals through hypnosis, using an oral formula that includes the mention of the gods Osiris and Apis. In the case of Asterix, he tries to make the protagonist believe he is a wild boar. The scene is a criticism of the power that this type of character, the hypnotists, were attaining in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
At the same time, it makes a free critical interpretation of the relationship between the ancient Egyptian world and magic in contemporary popular culture. In the end reason, which is represented by Asterix, defeats the superstition and magic embodied by Iris the Egyptian. And the success is due to the concatenation of absurd questions and interruptions by the film's protagonist, which cause the hypnotist to lose the thread of his own implausible discourse and end up hypnotising himself and leaving his clinic believing himself to be a wild boar.
The film was eventually turned into a comic book with the same title and development, which was published shortly afterwards. In the English version, Iris speaks with a blatant ‘oriental’ accent.

Author: Alfonso Álvarez-Ossorio Rivas