Ancient Egyptian Ideas on the Reunion of Soul and Body

[00:00:02] INTRODUCER:
Good evening. I am pleased to introduce this evening Dr. Erik Hornung as this year’s Foerster Lecturer. As a number of you probably know, the Agnes A. and Constantine E.A. Foerster Lectureship was established in 1928 by Miss Edith Zweybruck in honor and memory of her sister and brother-in-law.

It was her request that in each academic year, at least one lecture be given on the immortality of the soul or some kindred spiritual subject, not as a part of the regular college course, but by an authority specially qualified and specially appointed for the purpose. Dr. Hornung is an Egyptologist at the University of Basel and is recognized by his colleagues and by Orientalists generally as one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Egyptian religion. Dr. Hornung’s interests and expertise in Egyptian religion makes it most appropriate that he be nominated as this year’s Foerster lecturer, since the ancient Egyptians, perhaps more than any other people, devoted the greater part of their energy and resources to providing for life after death.

This evening, Dr. Hornung will speak on the ancient Egyptian ideas on the reunion of soul and body. The Egyptians’ belief in the immortality of the soul is a subject that has had considerable popular treatment with much speculation, perhaps based upon very little substance. Perhaps–

(clears throat)

Professor Hornung, however, has firmly established his reputation with numerous excellent books and articles. His definitive three-volume edition of Das Amduat, the book of which is in the nether world, provides one of the best sources of information that we have concerning the New Kingdom Egyptians’ belief in the afterlife. This work has gained wide acceptance not only because of the author’s accuracy and thoroughness in philological and lexicographical matters, but also because of his care in handling the religious aspects and in finding antecedents and parallels.

We are most fortunate this evening to have a scholar of Dr. Hornung’s stature as the Foerster lecturer, and I take great pleasure in presenting him to us.

(applause)

[00:02:56] DR. HORNUNG:
Ladies and gentlemen, before apologizing for my bad English, I want to thank for, for the very warm welcome here at Berkeley, and especially for the honor of being invited to deliver the annual Foerster Lecture on the immortality of the soul. A subject, of course, very familiar to any Egyptologist. But in the special title of my lecture, I want to stress a fundamental difference between our own view influenced by Greek, Hebrew, and Christian beliefs of life, life after death on the one hand, and ancient Egyptian beliefs on the other.

For us, the soul alone is what remains in the hereafter. Not so in Egypt. People on the Nile believed in the survival of both elements of soul and body.

The body is specially preserved by a sophisticated technique which we call mummification. And everybody who hears of Egypt thinks of mummies, of course. They are a must of every museum collection of Egyptian antiquities.

And there’s no need to describe this complicated process of embalming in detail. This art of preserving the body was developed to a level never attained again, although they tried to imitate it in modern Soviet Russia with Lenin and Stalin, and even now with Mao in China. Perhaps they have better success now.

According to Egyptian belief, there is no final decay, but survival for all parts of the human personality. To make room for new generations, we all have to leave this earthly stage of action forever. There is no return into this world, no transmigration or rebirth on Earth in Egyptian belief.

But in the vast space beyond, there is room enough for all bodies which have ever been, for the millions of of past generations, which constitute the multitude of the dead. Now let us go into some details of the Egyptian concept of human personality. There is our body, there is our soul, but this duality, again, is an invention of Greek thinking, is a result of simplification.

For most of the ancient cultures, man is not in an opposition of body and soul, but a constellation made up of several basic components. In Egypt, the body, the shadow, companion of every substantial being, the name, also an integral part of every being. To say it in the words of Alexandre Piankoff in his Litany of Re, the god Re creates merely by pronouncing some words whose sound alone evokes the names of things, and these things then appear at his bidding.

An exclamation, the result of an emotion, is a creative act and produces a name. As its name is pronounced, so the thing comes into being, for the name is a reality, the thing itself. And beside these components, there are finally two kinds of soul.

One called the ba, the other the ka. And there is a never-ending struggle in our discipline about the exact meaning of ba and ka, but we are not going to repeat all stages of this dispute here. It must be sufficient to show the present state of our understanding.

The ba, B-A, seems to be the free moving element of man, free from all restrictions and limits of bodily existence. Since the invention of the hieroglyphic script, that means since the beginning of the third millennium BC, the beginning of Old Egyptian culture, it has been represented in the form of a bird. But the definite form was found in the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty.

A bird with a human head and often with human arms as well. Here we have in the upper register, we have one of the oldest representations of these birds with human head from the Book of Amduat from the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, around fifteen hundred BC. Another example from a private tomb a little later.

Here we have the human arms, too, of this bird, human head and human arms. Here again, birds with human head and human arms from the Book of Gates, each with a bread before him. We’ll speak of this afterwards.

And a last example from a coffin at Basel with the same birds of a later period. In the strict sense, this is

(cough)

not a representation of the ba, but a hieroglyphic sign emphasizing the ascent of the ba. The free moving quality pointed out by the bird with its wings, the quality of being part of human personality by the human head and the faculty of action by the arms. Here again, from a coffin at Basel, the bird with outstretched wings and in frontal view.

This is quite uncommon, but we find it often on coffins of the beginning of the first millennium. For the Egyptians, combinations like this one are quite normal. If we think of the reverse combination of human body and animal head in the representation of Egyptian gods.

You all know these figures, a human body with the head of an animal. Here, the falcon’s head, with the god Horus leading the queen Nefertari. Or, in another case, a god with the head of a ram from the tomb of Nefertari again.

And an example with the head of a crocodile and with a knife before him, a demon of the netherworld again from the tomb of Nefertari. And a similar representation like the ba that means human head combined with the body of a bird or another animal we have in the sphinx, the lion’s body and the head of the king. The Holy Fathers of the Church abominated this way of depicting gods, but in vain, because even in the medieval, the world of Christian religion, certain saints could be represented with the head of an animal, just to show which saint or evangelist was meant, substituting his human head by his attribute.

So you can find Saint Luke with a bull’s head, Saint Mark with a lion’s head, Saint John with an eagle’s head, or Christophorus with a head of a dog, even in Christian times. Of course, for the Egyptian, every sign had a very real character, too. He did believe that gods and their ba’s could appear in such forms just to show who they are.

And we hear of strange creatures seen in visions of the Old and New Testament in a similar way. Thus, in the birds of passage, which come to Egypt every year from their northern homes, were recognized real ba souls of the dead coming from the beyond to settle for some time in this world again. We have a representation, um, a very famous representation of the Egyptian heaven represented as, um, the sky goddess Nut in the so-called Book of, uh, Nut.

And there we have a description referring to the space outside Nut’s arms, a place from which the birds come. And then the text continues, “These birds have faces like men, but their nature is that of birds. One of them speaks to the other with words of weeping.

Now after they come to eat vegetables and green stuff in Egypt, they flutter under the rays of heaven, and then their shapes become bird-like.” Of course, these are real birds. They eat and drink and copulate and show all necessities of bodily creatures.

This was not in contradiction to the Egyptian concept of the ba. Many representations do show the ba beside the dead person eating and drinking. Yes, it’s very dark, but perhaps you recognize here the ba bird at the edge of a pond, and here the dead person drinking from this pond, getting his cool water.

And there’s another ba bird receiving cool, cool water from the tree goddess here. We’ll see clearer pictures soon. For instance, here again, the tree goddess bending out of the tree and giving fresh, cool water to his deceased together with his ba in the form of a bird.

And here we have the couple of deceased with– together with his wife, and behind them, the two Ba birds of them, the Ba bird of the man and the Ba bird of his wife with a long peruke. So the Ba receives the offerings in the beyond together with the dead person, the offerings given by Nut. or Hathor as a tree goddess.

Another example of the tree goddess and the ba-birds, each of them having a bread before him, a round or oval bread, besides the water they get here from above. And again, the couple of the deceased with his wife. And the last example from, again, from a coffin at Basel.

Here the ba-birds are drinking water and the wife of the deceased receiving the cool water. The continuation of the scene even shows an obelisk with arms, a very singular scene. I don’t know of any parallel.

You see that, see that every object can be seen animated in Egypt and acting like men. Another very old material appearance of the ba is a form of a star. For the Egyptians, the stars are a visible proof that bas do exist in the beyond and are able to fly to heaven.

That’s the reason why we have the famous astronomical representations in the tombs, And what I mentioned before, the representation of the sky goddess Nut bending over the earth, represented as a god Geb, and between them is a god Shu who parts both. And you see the stars here on the body of the sky goddess Nut. One–

Yes, it’s the only Egyptian goddess represented naked. Otherwise, only Asiatic gods are represented in this way. And another similar scene from a papyrus, here without the stars on the body, but the same kind of depicting heaven and earth.

And what it– what is most important for the su-subject of our lecture, as the non-circumpolar stars do not always remain above the horizon, but disappear into the realms beneath us. They are, according to Egyptian belief, descending into the netherworld to reunite themselves with the body resting there. Therefore, we find, for instance, the famous astronomical ceilings in the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, representations of stars and constellations, many constellation, constellations which we cannot yet identify with our own modern constellations.

But in the strict sense, these are not astronomical, but again, religious representations of the world beyond, of the hereafter, where the ba of the deceased is going. But before taking a closer look at this phenomenon, let us say a few words about the other Egyptian soul, the ka. Sometimes the Egyptians call the dead “those who go to their ka.”

These are shown in the fifteenth scene of the Book of Gates, but we get more information from chapter hundred and five of the Book of the Dead, and from its vignette, where the deceased, who is already equipped with his ba, is shown pouring water and burning incense before his ka, addressing him as having returned. He drives off all evil from himself and his ka, as they both share in the fate of the blessed, receiving offerings and all they need. And so the dead is greeting his ka in the translation of Allen, which is, in my opinion, the best translation of the Book of the Dead available.

Hail to thee, my ka, my lifetime. Behold, I am come unto thee, risen, powerful, possessed of a soul, a ba, mighty. I have brought thee natron and incense that I may purify thee therewith.

This evil utterance which I have said, this evil wrong which I have done, they had not been given to me, for mine is this papyrus amulet that is at the throat of Re, and is given to the horizon dwellers. The provisions of my ka are like theirs. And in many scene, scenes, we see these provisions combined with the hieroglyph of the ka, two outstretched arms, and here before the deceased who, uh, gets these offerings in combination with his ka.

Okay.

(coughs)

I need a small offering myself.

(coughs)

(clears throat)

(clears throat)

That’s besides the reunion of body and ba, we have also the reunion of body and ka in the hereafter. At the moment of birth, both are formed by the Creator as two persons. They are famous representations from the temples of Deir el-Bahari and Luxor, and the ka of the king is often shown as a separate person behind him.

Here, an example from the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. It’s Thutmose the First together with his ka, a human person with the sign of the ka upon his head. And in other examples, here from Abydos, we see only the ka sign, only with arms, with human arms, and the combination with the so-called Horus name of the king above the ka sign.

Thus, the ka has been seen by many scholars as a kind of double, but probably it is rather a kind of animating power man loses in dying, but regains in the hereafter. In wishes for the deceased, we always find offerings for the ka of a person, for his vitality. Ka means also bull in Egyptian, the center of all his activity.

Death means the disintegration of all these elements, and we will look at the fate of each of them now. The body is mummified, as you know, and thereby preserved for eternity. We often see representations in the tombs of the mummy lying on its bier and together with the god Anubis, with the head of a jackal, who is responsible for the art of mummification.

And because the dead person becomes an Osiris, we see here Isis on the left and Nephthys on the right, kneeling and protecting the Osiris, that means the dead person. Nothing is lost. The intestines are buried separately in the so-called canopic jars we often see represented beneath the mummy.

Always four– mostly four jars with different, uh, heads upon them and meant to bury the intestines of the dead person. Yes, here from a coffin, again with only three canopics, and again Anubis with a mummy and the protecting bird with outstretched wings above the mummy, and the lotus as a symbol of regeneration of the dead person. And here, a similar scene from a papyrus, with a bier, with a mummy, and Anubis again, and Isis and Nephthys kneeling here and other protecting gods around the mummy.

And we know that even the materials used for embalming a higher-ranking person were buried separately and thus preserved, not destroyed. All this assures protection during the long journey which takes man into the unknown regions of the cosmos, up to the stars or down into the depth of the un– of the netherworld. But only very seldom the dead are really shown as mummies like here.

Usually, they appear like everybody on Earth. Of course, in scenes of the funeral, we have the mummy Carried to the, uh, to the tomb. And here we see the mummy directly before the tomb stela and the tomb here with a facade and a small pyramid upon it, and the western mountain of Thebes, where the tombs are excavated for the dead.

And again, Anubis is present to take care of the mummy. So in these scenes, scenes, we have, uh, the dead person represented as mummy, but in most scenes, we see him, here again together with his wife, just in the normal representation like the ancient Egyptian, Egyptians represented living persons. Here addressing two gods.

And in the famous scenes where we see the dead laboring in the Egyptian paradise in different positions with different works, Um, he’s always represented like the living on earth. That the purpose of mummification was not to provide the body with a final physical form, a form for eternity, but to preserve it during the critical phases of afterlife. This is a form of sleep in which the dead are waiting for their daily resurrection.

This resurrection happens every time the creator, and this is in Egypt, the sun god, Ra or Re, comes down into the netherworld, and he does it daily after sunset in the west, repeating his word of creation, which has the effect that all dead rise up from their sleep, draw off their mummy shape, which hinders their free motion, and assume, assume a new body. He addresses them, um, those who are stretched out on their sides, who repose in their place of rest, Take up your flesh, collect your bones for your, for yourselves. Join your members for yourselves.

Put together your members for yourselves. May sweet winds be for your nostrils, removal for your kerchiefs. May light be for your divine eyes, so that by them you may see the rays.

Rise from your lassitude, take hold of your fields in the field of the Lady of Offerings. There are fields for you in this field, and the water thereof is for you. So they get a new body exactly like the body they had on earth, capable of all bodily functions.

This is a kind of ideal body because all imperfections, even a cut-off head, are healed by the power of magic. Thus, even for drowned people who cannot be mummified, we have representation in these religious books. We have representations of the drowned here swimming in a kind of pool.

Above are again the ba birds I have shown already. And a detail from another tomb, that drowned in the water. They cannot be mummified because the crocodile takes them away, or they simply get lost in the water.

There is finally no problem for them because magic is more effective in restituting the body than any physical treatment like mummification. And it was the highest aim of an Egyptian magician to know how to join a cut-off head again to its body. So there was hope enough for the many people who could not afford to be mummified because they were too poor.

And here is the answer. to the question, to the question, I hear very often, um, when seeing this wonderful burial equipment of Tutankhamun and other high-ranking persons. What happened to all the other people who were not in such a lucky position?

The answer is, they were not excluded from a happy afterlife in spite of their imperfect preservation. We can observe the same phenomenon here, which we know so well from Egyptian medicine, where magic and physical treatment were used side by side. Using only magic or only physical methods increases the danger of missing something essential.

But to give the body a perfect treatment, and in addition to protect it by effective spells of magic, seem to be the best guarantee for a happy fate in the hereafter. Thus, to start a new life in the regions beyond, four conditions were essential to the Egyptians. First, the physical and material means.

Besides mummification, we have, and even before mummification, a cosmetic treatment of the body to restore the freshness of life. For instance, in the earliest periods, they were often just painted red to give them the resemblance of living. Then, of course, the material offerings and the burial equipment, whose richness depended on the rank of its owner.

Even the poorest had some amulets, some vessels filled with offerings, some linen for clothing. Then, second, the power of magic, which is independent of any material means but does require effective spells the deceased could use. And the most important collection of such spells to be used in the hereafter is the famous Book of the Dead, a collection of spells written on papyrus.

Here’s the beginning of such a papyrus roll in the Oriental Institute of Chicago. And this corpus of spells belonging to the New Kingdom descends from older corpora like the Coffin Texts and the Pyramid Texts. Then the third condition is a reunion of body and soul, or more Egyptian, of the body with all the other elements of human personality: the ba, the ka, and the shadow.

The fourth condition is a world of creation renewed by the sun god Ra, thus replacing darkness by light, sleep by action, silence by sound, opening all tombs and shrines, and chasing away all evil powers. Now, as physical means and magic are interchangeable or can be combined, reunion of soul and body and renewal of creation must also be seen together. This reunion is not possible without the journey of the Sun God through the netherworld, his descensus ad inferos.

The Ba and the Ka too leaves the body at death and goes up to the realms of heaven, where it can move freely in company of the sun and the stars. Time and again, the funerary texts tell us that the bas are in the following of Ra, whilst the bodies are only visited by him during his journey through the netherworld by night. And there is an established formula saying that the body belongs to Earth, the ba to heaven, or in the form to Earth with Osiris, to heaven with Ra.

The very essence of Ra creates the problem of his relation with Osiris, the king of the dead, the ruler of the underworld. And the solution found in the New Kingdom makes both one god, of whom Ra is the ba, and Osiris the body. Thus, Ra is seen as the ba of Osiris coming down from the heights of heaven to visit him in the earth.

In the tomb of Queen Nefertari, the queen of Ramesses the Second, the beginning of the nineteenth dynasty, around twelve hundred sixty BC, we see the representation of a god who is Osiris and Ra combining elements of both gods. The ram head belongs to Ra in his night form, but the mummified figure belongs to Osiris. And again, Isis here on the right and Nephthys on the left, of course, belong to Osiris, protecting him.

And the inscription added here says, “It is Ra who goes to rest as Osiris,” and it is Osiris who goes to rest as Ra. So they are interchangeable. They are one god.

And in chapter seventeen of the Book of the Dead, um, we have another formulation. Um, there we hear of the twin souls combined together, and this is explained. It means Osiris, when he entered Mendes, he found Re– Ra’s soul there.

Then they embraced each other. Then he became his twin souls. And these twin souls we have represented too in this chapter seventeen.

For instance, here on a papyrus, the two ba birds, which mean these, this double ba of Ra and Osiris. This reunion of both gods taking place every night in the world below is the reunion of soul and body par excellence, setting the example for every deceased whose ba travels with Ra through all regions of the world, whose corpse, however, rests with Osiris in the earth like the sun god himself, who is represented visiting his corpse lying in the netherworld and protected by a huge serpent with many heads. Again, a representation from the Amduat.

Well, in reconstructing this perpetual reunion, we use texts and representations from a group of religious books called Books of the Netherworld. They belong to the New Kingdom, but we meet a similar composition already in the corpus of the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom, the so-called Book of Two Ways, published by our dear colleague Leonard Lesko here at Berkeley. It is the first pictorial representation of the world beyond, and the problem is finding the right way in the hereafter.

Very similar in chapter hundred and seventeen of the Book of the Dead, but in a very shortened form. The compositions of the New Kingdom were in use till the Ptolemaic time of Egypt, and it seems that certain ideas of these books can be found again in the Gnostic texts of early Christianity in Egypt. These books of the Netherworld are richly illustrated texts written on papyrus, but mainly used in the decoration of the walls in the royal tombs of the New Kingdom.

So we have to go, uh, excuse me, this was a copy of the Book of the Two Ways, uh, of the Middle Kingdom I just mentioned. But now we have to go to the famous Valley of the Kings, A lonely desert valley stretching from the north into the western desert at Thebes, nearly parallel to the Nile you see here in the background. And a closer view of this valley already with the entrances to the tombs.

And there, below those steep cliffs, the entrances of these tombs of the most famous kings of the New Kingdom are lying. They have chosen this lonely place as their burial place. And here we go down into one of these tombs, passing over the shaft and seeing, uh, one very typical representation of the king before different gods and goddesses of the other world, gods who are responsible for his happy afterlife, Osiris, Anubis, Hathor, and others.

A closer view. You can again recognize Anubis with his jackal head and Osiris, Hathor, and always before them, the king. And in the older, in the tomb, tombs before the Amarna period of Akhenaten, we have the decoration executed in painting, but after the Amarna period, in very fine painted relief.

Also during the Ramesside period, At the entrance of the Ramesside tombs, we find the king before the sun god, Ra, here again represented with the falcon’s head, his daily form. And finally, deep down in the burial chamber, we has– we have the mummy of the king lying in his sarcophagus. And the walls of these tombs are covered with these religious books, the books of the Netherworld.

For the English reader, there is a splendid edition of one of these tombs, the tomb of Ramesses VI of the twentieth dynasty, published by Alexander Piankoff. It’s volume forty of the Bollingen Series, New York 1954, including translations of most of these texts together with diagrams of the illustrations, because they are all ill-illustrated books. The older compositions, the Amduat and the books of– Book of Gates, are divided in twelve parts corresponding to the twelve hours of the night.

Here, for instance, we see part of the Amduat, the second hour here on the left ending there, then the third hour and the fourth hour, where the sun god is changing from his water course to a sand way, a zigzag form, sand way running through this fourth, um, hour of the night. In each hour, we meet the sun god standing in his boat, because a boat was a typical means of transport in Egypt, where we don’t have any roads but the channels and the Nile for transport. And we see him here with a ram head standing in the boat, protected, protected here by one serpent and by another around his shrine, and accompanied by other gods.

Here, two powers of creation standing with him in the boat. He has the head of a ram, the form he assumes during night before his daily rejuvenation in the form of a beetle, the scarab, the morning sun. In this form, he is flying to heaven at the end of the night, in the twelfth and last hour of the night.

As the ram is read Ba and could be used in writing Ba soul, this night form can be understood as showing the Ba of the god coming down into the netherworld to join his corpse there. He sails along the Nile of the netherworld, stopping in each hour to greet and to supply the blessed and to punish the damned. In his retinue, and he himself is called the greatest Ba, are the innumerable Bas of all the blessed dead eager to join their corpses buried in the deep underworld.

There they are lying on their biers in the deep sleep of death. Uh, again, I forgot one slide. Uh, above the entrance of the Ramesside tombs of the kings, we have a representation of both forms of the sun god.

This form with the ram’s head and the beetle, the scarab, besides, both put into the sun disk and venerated again by Isis and Nephthys. This is a typical representation above the entrance. But now we are at the mummies lying on their biers or in their closed shrines, like here, where the sun god is approaching from the left.

In the dangerous darkness, they are protected by their mummy shape. Here, indeed, it’s very dark, but perhaps you can recognize the bier in the form of a serpent. Here is the head of a serpent, and it’s a very long bier with a lot of mummies lying on this serpent-formed bier.

But when the god arrives, uh, again, this representation of the mummy on its spear and a lot of demons and gods around the mummy protecting it again with knives against all evil powers or holding symbols of regeneration like the lizard or the serpent. The sun god approaches and addresses them, and then all doors open up by themselves. The rays of the night sun, of course, not so bright as daylight, but anyhow light it is, they penetrate into the darkness of the shrines.

The mummies turn themselves and begin to rise from their sleep. The Egyptian books show this rising in different stages. First, in the normal position, the mummies are lying on their back, like here, and painted black, the color of dead– of death.

(cough)

Then they begin to rise. You have here a mummy already turned, lifting up the head and lying on its belly on the bier below. And in the next picture, you have them already standing.

Yes, you have a combination the beings with the mummies, but upon the mummies is already standing the new body, which is no longer in the shape of a mummy. Thus, finally, their mummy shape is transformed into a new body, which is able to move and to speak, and to receive all the offerings accorded by the Sun God. Only now do they begin to speak and to answer the god, thanking him for all he has done for them.

This they cannot do in being mummies, because in spite of all horror films, mummies cannot move and cannot speak. What enables them to do so? It is their ba, which carries life, and in the moment of its reunion with the corpse, it starts to breathe again and to function in the normal way.

When the dead speak to the sun god, it is their ba which is speaking. This is shown with interesting details in the eighth hour of the Amduat, where we see a row of shrines on both banks of the river where the sun god sails along. Usually, the shrines are closed, but here we see them already opened.

There are the doors here already opened, and in each shrine, there are three or four figures seated on the sign for clothing, the hieroglyph for cloth. Because the dead are not only in need of offerings such as meals, beer, and water, or sometimes wine, uh, but also of clothing, ointment, et cetera too. As the text in the middle register of this eighth hour tells us that the corpses are hidden under the sand of this region, it seems that what we see here are the barques resting upon the corpses.

According to the text, the sun god calls out to the souls of these beings, and then their voices are heard, but not like human voices. They sound like the hum of many bees, like mourning, or like the voice of bulls, like the cry of male cats or of birds, like the sound of a riverbank falling into the water, et cetera. Only the sun god is able to make sense of these voices and to hear what they say.

Okay. Together with the ba, the shadow comes down to join the body. Here you have a representation of the black painted shadow.

You have an even better representation on the invitation to this lecture, where the shadow is combined with the ba birds besides from another Theban tomb. So the shadow too comes down to join the body, giving strength and power because a shadow seems to be a center of power for men and gods. Overshadowing a person means giving it strength, and the shadow must be very powerful because it can move so quickly around.

In the books we just mentioned, the coming down of Ba and Shadow is thought of as taking place every night, somewhere in the western desert, where the sun sets in the evening in a far beyond. But the famous representation in the Book of the Dead shows a place much nearer to this world, the tomb at the edge of the desert, in view of the people still living, where the mummy lies in its burial chamber, here, deep, cut deep into the rock, while Ba and shadow are coming down from above through the shaft. Here we see the Ba bird coming from above to enter the burial chamber and to reanimate the body.

So the reunion here takes place in the burial chamber. There is no contradiction here because the tomb is part of the world beyond for the Egyp-Egyptians, And other spells of the Book of the Dead show the reunion independent from the tomb. Thus, the illustration of spell sixty-one, a spell for not taking the dead man’s soul away from him and the hereafter, shows the deceased holding in his arms his ba soul, again in the form of a bird with human head.

And the more important spell eighty-nine shows the b-ba bird embracing with its wings… There are diff-different copies of the Book of the Dead, embracing with its wings the mummy lying on a bier, or in other cases, hovering above the mummy, or perhaps the shadow again here. This spell pretends to make the soul atta-attach itself to one’s corpse in the hereafter, and the deceased has to say, “O bringer, O thou causer, who is in his in his hall, great god, mayst thou make my soul come to me from wherever it may be.

If there is delay in bringing me this soul of mine from wherever it may be, thou shalt find the Eye of Horus standing against thee.” See? This means it’s a serpent standing against this god.

So he forces the god to help that the ba comes to the dead person from wherever it might be.

(clears throat)

Wherever this reunion takes place, it has the effect that the dead person rises up, lives again, and gets a new body free from all restrictions of action and motion which the mummy shape involves. In this new blessed state, the animated body is moving round, around, around in the field of rushes, the Egyptian paradise, getting and consummating the offerings it needs and doing everything the deceased wants to do. He’s in company of the gods, seeing the sun going through the netherworld and shining over the body of Osiris.

But spell 61 of the Book of the Dead and other texts speak of the danger of taking away the soul of the deceased person in the hereafter, and there are dead people who don’t do not reach the blessed state, but are damned and punished and remain forever without the animating reunion with their Ba. It is an interesting development in Egypt that in the oldest religious texts, we meet certain dangers. Thus the dead have to face: walking upside down, eating their own excrements, being cut to pieces by certain demons, or tortured or trapped by others, losing their ba, etc.

In the books of the netherworld belonging to the New Kingdom, these dangers have become punishments for the sinners condemned during the judgment of the dead, which we know since the end of the Old Kingdom, but which got its final form in the New Kingdom. You all know the famous representation from the Book of the Dead. Oh, something happened there.

Yes, it’s sufficient. You can, you can go on. The representation from the Book of the Dead illustrating chapter thirty or chapter one hundred and twenty-five, the balance weighing the heart of the deceased, uh, against the Ma’at, yeah, the feather of the Ma’at, and Ma’at means truth or even the established order of the world.

Gods assisting, again, we find Anubis, uh, before the divine judge, Osiris, who is not present here, but we see the other judges above. And the monster called Devourer, we’ll see now more clearly in one of the next slides. Again, here, the balance with the heart of deceased and the Ma’at sign and Anubi- Anubis occupied with the balance and the monster called Devourer, a mixture of crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus.

Very funny creature, but very dangerous, uh, waiting for those who are condemned to eternal pain. This pain is one of body and soul. Both are punished with fire, like in this, uh, representation with the red fire here, meant to punish the sinners.

And in the Book of Gates, we meet a huge serpent called Wamemti, belching fire against the sinners already bound. Here we see them bound, and here this huge, uh, serpent with many coils. The text– in the text belonging to this scene, the god Horus calls out to this fiery serpent, “O mighty fire, O this great flame of my eye,” again, the eye of Horus as a serpent, “which comes out of this mouth.

He whose coils are guarded by my children.” These are the children of Horus here. Open thy mouth, distend thy jaws, belch forth the flame among the enemies of my father, Osiris.

Burn their bodies, consume their souls by this heat of thy mouth, by the fire which is in thy body. My children are against them. They annihilate their souls, and those who have come forth ag– uh, from me are against them.

They shall not exist. May the fire which is in this serpent come forth. Then these enemies are burned down after Horus has called to the serpent.

Thus, body and soul are punished together, even destroyed forever, facing the famous second death often mentioned in the texts, and this final death means death of the ba soul, too. Of course, everybody hoped to avoid the danger of being condemned by Osiris and the forty-two judges of the great tribunal in the Hall of Double Truth. Therefore, the negative confession spoken by the deceased, addressed to each of the judges and meant to chase away all sins.

Whoever acted upon earth according to Ma’at, according to the established order of things, could be confident to pass judgment and to reach, reach the blessed state. And if he succeeded, he survived manifold. His body lying in the tomb or in the deep underworld is daily reanimated and rejuvenated.

His name survives am– here among the living as long as men are pronouncing it, and high above in the realms of sun and stars, his Ba soul has eternal life. Man is not reborn on Earth in Egyptian belief. He does not come again into this narrow existence here, but the whole cosmos is open to him.

And there is something else with which I want to close my lecture. Because the Egyptians believed that their gods do not walk upon Earth like the Greek and Roman gods, but dwell either in heaven or in the netherworld. Only after death, men can see them face to face.

No longer in their images only, dwelling in their temples along the Nile, in sacred animals, or in the king as image of the gods. This is a deeper sense of calling the dead, uh, of calling the deceased gods and seeing death as an apotheosis. In dying, man is Osiris, the god killed by his brother.

But in living again, made possible by the reunion of soul and body, he shares the fate of the sun god, who disappears every night, but is still there, dwelling in other regions. Like him, the dead have disappeared, but are still there, dwelling in other regions, the regents of the gods. I thank you.

(applause)

Hmm.

(thunder rumbles)