Ancient Egypt and the Afterlife

The ancient Egyptians were preoccupied with the specter of death and the problem of how best to accomplish passage to the other side. There was never an ancient people who insisted upon believing that death was not the final act of a human being, that "it is not death to die," with more emphasis than the Egyptians.

In the cosmology of the early Egyptians, humans were considered the children of the gods, which meant that they had inherited many other elements from their divine progenitors than physical bodies. The ba, or soul, was portrayed on the walls of tombs as a human-headed bird leaving the body at death. During a person's lifetime, the ba was an intangible essence, associated with the breath. In addition to the ba, each person possessed a ka, a kind of ghostly double which was given to each individual at the moment of birth. As long as people kept control of their ka, they lived. But as soon as they died, it began a separate existence, still resembling the body that it formerly occupied, and still requiring food for sustenance. Each person also had a ren, or name, which could acquire a separate existence and was once the underlying substance of all one's integral aspects. Other facets include the khu, or intelligence; the ab, or heart (will); the sakkem, or life force; the khaybet, or shadow; the ikh, or glorified spirit; and the sahu, or mummy. But the most important of all these facets of a human being was the ka, which became the center of the cult of the dead, for it was to the ka that all offerings of food and material possessions were made. Those priests who were ordained to carry the offerings to the dead were called "servants of the ka. "

Upon an Egyptian's death, although the body became inert, no longer capable of motion, the body did not decay, for the greatest care was taken to preserve it as a center of individual spirit manifestation. The body was carefully embalmed and mummified and placed in a coffin, on its side, as if it were only asleep. In the tomb with the mummy were brought all the utensils that a living person might need on a long journey, together with toilet articles, vessels for water and food, and weapons and hunting equipment to protect against robbers and to provide food once the initial supply was depleted.

Based on their writings concerning their concepts of goodness, purity, faithfulness, truth, and justice, beginning in the Pyramid Texts and extending onward, most scholars agree that the ancient Egyptians were a highly moral people. The gods Osiris and Isis were exalted as the ideal father and mother, and Set (god of chaos) became the personification of evil. During the time of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000 b.c.e.,) the story of Osiris became a kind of gospel of righteousness, and justice was exalted in a manner found in few periods of history.

Egyptian Book of the Dead

As early as the Eighteenth Dynasty, which began about 1580 b.c.e., most of the religious literature of ancient Egypt, including the Pyramid Texts —the oldest extant funerary literature in the world, dating back to as early as the fourth millennium b.c.e.—and certain revised editions of those texts, called the Coffin Texts, were brought together, reedited, and added to, and painted on sarcophagi and written on papyrus. This massive literary effort, the work of many authors and compilers, is now known as the Book of the Dead; its creators called it The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. Although many known copies of this ancient work exist, no one copy contains all the chapters, which are thought to number around 200. The subject matter of each chapter is the beatification of the dead, but the chapters are as independent of one another as are the psalms in the Old Testament.

One of the most curious aspects of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is that while the work is filled with realistic and graphic scenes of the preparation of the deceased for mummification, there are no illustrations depicting death and dying. For a people obsessed with the mortuary and funerary aspects of death, the Egyptians seldom dealt with the actual ways in which people lost their lives. Some scholars have observed that it was not so much that the ancient Egyptians wished to avoid the unpleasant topic of death and dying; it was rather that they never really formulated any clear conception of the nature of death or of its cause.

By the time the text of the Book of the Dead was being copied on rolls of papyrus and placed in the tombs of the dead, a great social and religious revolution had taken place. Whereas the Pyramid Texts were meant only to be inscribed on the sarcophagi of the royals, it was now decreed that anyone who could afford the rituals would be entitled to follow the god Osiris into the afterlife. The cult of Osiris had now been extended so that any deceased human, commoner or noble-born, who had the means could become an "Osiris."

The most important ceremony associated with the preparation of the dead was the opening of the eyes, mouth, ears, and nose of the deceased. This rite was thought to guarantee life to the body and make it possible for the ba to reenter its former dwelling. If the deceased's budget allowed, it was also customary to bring into the tomb a number of small figures called ushabtiu, whose duty was to speak up and give character witness when the entombed stood before Osiris and the 42 divine judges.

The Book of the Dead also contained certain holy incantations that were designed to free the ka from the tomb and allow it to be incarnated again. The spirit might experience an existence as a hawk, a heron, or even a plant form, such as a lotus or a lily, moving along through various expressions of the life force until, after about 3,000 years, it could once again achieve rebirth as a human.

Delving Deeper

Gaster, Theodor H., ed. The New Golden Bough. New York: Criterion Books, 1959.

Larousse Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions. New York: Larousse, 1994.

Osiris: Death and Resurrection

Osiris was called Lord of Lords, King of Kings, and God of Gods by the Egyptians. According to the scholar E. A. W. Budge, "[Osiris] was the god-man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They [the Egyptians] believed that they would inherit eternal life, just as he had done."

The ancient myths proclaim that Osiris first received renown as a peaceful leader of a higher culture in the eastern Delta, then as a powerful ruler over all the Delta, a veritable god of the Nile and its vegetation, growth, life, and culture. He was the husband of Isis, goddess of enchantment and magic; father of the great war god Horus; and finally conqueror of northern Upper Egypt with his principal city at Abydos. It was then that he came into conflict with Set, who killed and dismembered him. The dark mists of death didn't eliminate Osiris. Quite the opposite, in fact, for Isis, incarnation of the divine mother goddess, used her magic to put him back together. Osiris rose from the dead and became for all of his followers a god of resurrection. The cult of Osiris was established at Abydos, where he became known as the Lord of the Death or Lord of the West, referring to his mastery over all those who had traveled "west" into the sunset of death. The theology of Osiris, which promised resurrection, soon overshadowed that of the sun god Ra and became the dominant feature of all Egyptian religion.

Ra was a creator god, fundamentally solar, a king by nature, whose theology concerned itself with the world, its origin, creation, and the laws that governed it. Osiris and his doctrines were concerned with the problems of life, death, resurrection, and an afterlife. The connection between the two deities was Horus, who was a sky god of the heavens and also the dutiful son and heir of Osiris. The general influence of Ra and Osiris can be traced back to the time of the Pyramid Texts and forward to the decline of Egyptian religious history. The cosmology of Osiris may be divided into two periods. The earlier one extended up until the time of the Pyramid Texts, during which he was a peaceful political power, an administrator of a higher culture, the unifying factor in bringing the Delta and northern Upper Egypt into one realm, the ideal husband and father, and after his death, the god of resurrection. The second period extended from the time of the Pyramid Texts to the common era, when he was primarily god of the dead and king of the underworld.

When an ancient Egyptian died, the deceased expected to appear before Osiris, who would be sitting upon his throne, waiting to pass judgment on him or her. The deceased would be led in by the jackal-headed god Anubis, followed by the goddess Isis, the divine enchantress, representing life, and the goddess of the underworld, Nephthys, representing death. There were 42 divine judges to assess the life of the one who stood before them, and the deceased would be allowed to deny 42 misdeeds. Once the deceased had presented his or her case, Osiris indicated a large pair of balances before them with the heart of the deceased and the feather of truth, one in each of the pans. The god Thoth read and recorded the decision. Standing in the shadows was a monstrous creature prepared to devour the deceased, should the feather of truth outweigh his or her heart. In those instances when the heart outweighed the feather—and few devout Egyptians could really believe that their beloved Osiris would condemn them—the deceased was permitted to proceed to the Fields of Aalu, the world, where the gods lived. Because humans were the offspring of the gods, the Fields of Aalu offered an eternal association and loving companionship with the deities. This, the ancient Egyptians believed, was the natural order of things. They had no doubts about immortality. In their cosmology, a blessed afterlife was a certainty.

Delving Deeper

Ferm, Vergilious, ed. Ancient Religions. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950.

Gaster, Theodor H., ed. The New Golden Bough. New York: Criterion Books, 1959.

Larousse Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions. New York: Larousse, 1994.

Pyramid Texts

The Pyramid Texts recorded some of human-kind's earliest written insights concerning its concepts about the soul and the afterlife. The texts were inscribed on the stone walls of five pyramids at Saccara during the later part of the Old Kingdom, 2400–2240 b.c.e., and were compiled by priestly scholars from a variety of sources, some dating earlier than the beginning of the historical period, about 3000 b.c.e. Beginning with the Middle Kingdom, about 2000 b.c.e., priests began to copy large portions of the Pyramid Texts onto the sarcophagi of pharoahs and nobles.

Although the texts deal only with the manner in which to guarantee the safe passage of deceased nobility to the other world, they also reflect the general thinking of the common people toward the next world, as well as that of the priesthood and the royal heads of state. It is clear that the Egyptians, even during this remote and long-ago period, thought of themselves as being more than a physical body, but what is not easily understood is exactly what their conception of death might have been. From what can be ascertained from the earliest mortuary texts is that the entire culture was in denial of death and refused to accept it as a natural and inevitable event. In fact the texts allude to a time when death did not exist, but there is no account of how death entered the world, as there are in many other cultures.

All pharaohs were considered to be divine, a belief that had its roots in the myths that gods had ruled Egypt in prehistoric times and that the earliest human rulers were the actual children of these divine beings. Therefore, when a pharaoh died, he could be prepared for death and become an "Osiris," the god of resurrection.

The Egyptians of this period conceived of two nonphysical entities, the ka and the ba, that made up the whole self and were of equal value to the physical body. Although it is difficult to ascertain a precise understanding of the cosmology of the Egyptian people of such a faraway time, it would appear that the ka, often represented in hieroglyphs as two arms upstretched in a gesture of protection, was believed to have been a kind of spiritual double of a living person that also served as his or her guardian spirit. A person's tomb was called the het ka, the "house of the ka, " suggesting that the Egyptians not only considered the ka an essential aspect of a human being, but understood that a provision for it, as well as for the physical body, must be made at the time of death.

The ba is generally understood by modern scholars as representing that aspect of the essential self that is commonly referred to as the soul. Often depicted in ancient Egyptian art and hieroglyphs as a bird with a human head—male or female, corresponding to the sex of the person represented—the ba hovers near its physical counterpart. In cultures throughout the world, the bird is often utilized as a symbol for the soul. And certainly, in the Egypt of thousands of years ago, the high-flying, free-moving creature of the air would have seemed an obvious representation of the aspect of the self that separates from the body at the time of death.

While there seems no question that the ancient Egyptian view of the nature of each individual human included both the physical and nonphysical aspects of the whole person, the spiritual, nonmaterial representations were not valued above the material body. Such an assertion is easily demonstrated by the lengthy process of embalmment and the elaborate process of mummification conducted on the physical body of the deceased. The magical rituals and ceremonies carefully performed to prepare the dead for the afterlife journey indicate that the body was as important an aspect of the complete entity as were the ka and the ba. Nor can it truly be known if the ka and the ba were viewed strictly as spiritual entities, for they, as well as their mummified human-self, were left food and drink in the mortuary offerings so they might live on in their roles of overseers.