Mad Scientist Club

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD. 
As described by Annie Keary 1870

The best preserved copy of the sacred Ritual yet found is now in the museum at Turin. The whole has been translated into English by Dr. Birch, and the principal part into very beautiful French by M. de Roug, who has given many years of labor to the task of comparing the papyri of different epochs together, to arrive at the most ancient versions of the sacred text. He has come to the conclusion that four of the 164 chapters of which the Turin copy of the ritual is composed, are late additions; the remaining 160 chapters he believes to consist of two parts, — a very ancient text, older than any other writing in the world, and a running commentary, which at a later but still very remote period was inserted between the sentences of the original sacred book by the scribes who copied it. The sentences are generally very much more easy to understand than the commentary, which appears to have been written when a complex mythology had thrust aside the simpler early faith. 

Each chapter has a title at the beginning, and at the end a symbolic picture, which frequently is found to throw great light on the obscure meaning of the text. I will translate from M. de Rouge's papers in the Revue Arc Mologique, the substance of some of the chapters, and his descriptions of the little pictures that accompany them. This will give you some idea of the subjects of which this oldest book in the world treats. It is a strange Pilgrim's Progress of five thousand years ago, only here it is the disembodied spirit that begins and concludes the journey, and it is conducted through scenery as fantastic and terrible as any that Dante's imagination conjured up. What poet of five thousand years ago saw or dreamed it, and, struggling with almost insurmountable difficulties of imperfect language and means of writing, dimly pictured it forth so that we can trace its outline still. The first seventeen chapters have a general title, and appear to have originally formed a separate volume of the sacred writings. 

The frontispiece shows the funeral procession — the weeping parents and friends, the dead man drawn along in his coffin ; a calf bounds before him, emblem of the new life on which he has entered. Step by step the chapters of the old poem follow the deceased in his wondrous progress through the under world. 

In the first stage of the journey the departed soul is manifested to the light ; he finds himself alive after death, and proceeds to travel through a region which is not the abode of departed spirits, but a shadowy tract lying between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Walking in heavenly paths, he discovers that no one is permitted to work in this under world. He finds himself in the empty regions of the giant Apap, the king of the desert, of void lifelessness and impotent death. These regions it is desirable that the soul should leave in the day-time, lest, being steeped m a double darkness, he should wander into Ammah, one of the hurtful regions of the shadowy land. 

Leaving the empty waste in the day-time, he is justified before his enemies and accusers in the under world, and advances towards light; the stains on the soul begin to be wiped out, and kneeling down the deceased bursts into a hymn of praise to Ra, the god of light. "Swallowed up in light," he is now borne onward to the termination of his first trial. Here a picture shows the traveler in four different scenes : in the first he turns on the furthest verge of the border region to look back on his friends in the world of the living, who are still bringing offerings to his tomb ; in the second and third, leaving old things, he has joined himself to a band of spirits who adore, first the rising and then the mid-day sun of the new world he is entering on; in the last scene he enters into the ship of God, and is permitted to worship light in its three-fold manifestation. 

From the ship of God he lands on another more advanced region of the land of shades, and forms part of the following of Osiris; he is nourished with the food of the justified ; he shines out in the day; he takes every shape he desires. At length he, the living soul, the justified Osiris (the departed soul takes the name of Osiris, and is always spoken of as the Osiris), devoted to the great gods, is admitted into the Palace of Wisdom, and addresses a prayer to Thoth. He prays that Thoth (the wisdom of God) will remember the justification of Osiris, and justify him from all his sins. The justified is crowned, and his mouth is opened ; the dead speaks ; the new soul-language is opened to him. Many chapters of the Ritual relate to this part of the soul's advance, and a picture represents the soul standing before a spiritual being, who instructs him in sacred words, while he himself is permitted to utter the sentences of the sacred books he has stored up in his memory during his lifetime. 

And now that his tongue is opened it becomes a question about the heart of the man. The spirit-heart, enlightened and purified as it is, cannot live again truly till it is in some sort reunited to the old natural heart, which (if he is a justified soul) spiritual beings have taken in charge, and have been keeping warm with life since his decease. 

Kneeling down, the spirit-man speaks to his heart, which he holds in his hand. He entreats the four spiritual beings who preside over the funeral rites to protect his heart — not to take it away from him — to let him live again truly. Rising from this invocation, he adores the Scarabaeus, the emblem of creative power which alone can invest him with the second life. And now that his heart is restored to him, and the past human life and the wondrous shade-life are linked together so that the flood of memory pours in, a .series of combats begins: he traverses a tract peopled with fantastic, horrible creatures (which probably symbolize the sins and sorrows of his past life) — crocodiles, serpents, tortoises, evil things of nameless shape, devourers of heads and hearts, scented with death, and with fingers of steel. 

He fights his way through them with a lance in his hand, pronouncing sentences from the sacred ritual as he advances, before which the horrible phantoms give place. After this experience he learns what are the woes that may befall a wicked soul in the under world. He is instructed not to nourish himself with corruption, but to seek to escape the second death, and so to carry himself that he may not be turned back from his celestial house long since prepared for him. Here there is a picture of the celestial house, and of the soul (represented by a mummified figure) approaching it from the right; to tire left of the house sits a phoenix, the emblem of the completion of a period of time. The pictures accompanying these chapters represent the deceased either as fighting his way through enemies, or as embraced and supported by Anubis, one of the presiding deities of the funeral rites. The evil region is symbolized by a sword resting on a block of wood. 

And now that he has had a glimpse into the terrors that await the wicked, he begins to experience the favors that are accorded to virtuous souls. Kindly winds speed him on his way, the water of life is given him to drink; and here a picture shows the deceased reposing after long travel in an arm-chair, while the goddess of the blue of heaven pours out for him living water from the top of a sycamore tree, the 
tree of life. The draught preserves him evermore from being scorched by the nether fires; he walks on triumphant towards yet more distinct manifestations of light. Now he approaches a chapel, where sits a hawk with outstretched wings, the emblem of new life rising out of death; now he worships before two human-headed deities ; now he seeks, by the aid of a serpent, to un-swathe his lower limbs, and to walk like a man. At length he arrives at a celestial Heliopolis — that is to say, he has completed a period of transformation; the arrival of the phoenix at Heliopolis, or rather the Heliacal rising of the star Sothis observed at Heliopolis, being the event from which the ancient Egyptians dated a new period of time. 

In the next more advanced stage of progress the virtuous soul finds he may assume what form he pleases in the under world. He may be a hawk, and carry the staff of dominion; he may become a phoenix; he may fly like a swallow; he may take the shape of the prince of princes; and even while he walks along the dark way assume the form of a god. Here there is a picture of the deceased walking with Osiris himself, who is however partly hidden from him by a dividing disk or screen of light. In this period of the soul's progress a union of the body and soul is spoken of. A human-headed hawk flies to the mummified body, which holds out to it the symbol of life, a hieroglyphic sign something like a cross. The deceased opens the door of a cell, from which the soul flies. 

The deceased now seeks for greater intellectual enlightenment. He implores the god Thoth to give him his papyrus and reed ; he visits the place where Thoth lives, and becomes an enlightened spirit in the under world. He is permitted to sail with the sun over celestial waters, and arrives at the house where Athor (Love) dwells, and sits down in the presence of the great gods. He receives a cup of joy, learns to know the spirits of the East and of the West, and is introduced to other spirits of departed men dwelling in various regions of the under world. And now he nears the end of his journey ; he pauses and prays before the sacred door. He enters the Hall of the Two Truths (or perfect justice), and there he has to make his way through all the sins he has committed in his life before he can look upon the faces of the great gods. 

The last chapter, of the group of chapters which relate to this part of the journey, is headed by the celebrated judgment picture, of which the illustration furnishes a faithful copy. Osiris sits on his throne in the Hall of Perfect Justice, holding in one hand the symbol of life, in the other the staff of dominion. The deceased is introduced into his presence by Thmei (Truth) herself. Before Osiris stands an altar of offerings, surmounted by a waterlily, which supports the four presiding spirits of Amenti. Cerberus, the surly guardian of the palace, the "accuser," whose office it is to see that none enter unworthily, crouches before Osiris. Seated above in a long row, as witnesses called to testify for or against the deceased, are the forty-two assessors of the dead. Each spirit is the stem watcher against a certain sin, and addressing each in turn the deceased has to plead — 

" I have made no one weep." 
" I have not brought evil report on any one." 
" I have not neglected God in my heart." 
" I have not been indolent." 
" I have not robbed." 
" I have not told lies" 
" I have not multiplied my words more than necessary"
" I have not applauded my own words"

Ibis-headed Thoth, the god of intelligence, stands ready with papyrus, scroll, and reed-pen, to record the pleading. Horus, the symbol of the new life, aided by Anubis, the wise-judging friend of the dead, holds and directs a gigantic pair of scales, in which the heart of the deceased is to be weighed. An ape, the symbol of Thoth (intelligence), sits on the beam of the scale, watching intently to see which 
way the scales incline. In one scale is placed a vase enclosing the heart of the deceased, in the other the symbol of perfect truth. Is he true of heart? If not, the dreaded sentence of the second death will be pronounced upon him. 


1. — Osiris on his Throne of Judgment. 

2. — Table of Offering, surmounted by the four Genii of Amenti, who preside over 
funeral rites. 

3. — Cerberus, guardian of the Hall of Judgment. 

4- — Thoth recording the judgment with reed-pen on slip of papyrus. 

5- — Symbol of Truth, used as a weight to balance the heart of the deceased. 


6. — Anubis, guardian of the dead. 

7. — Dog-headed Ape, emblem of Thoth. 

8.— Horns, son of Osiris, holding the emblem of life in his hand, watches the weight. 

9.— Vase containing the heart of the deceased, protected by Guardian Spirit, who 
proclaims that the balance is even. 

10. — Thmei (Truth) welcoming the deceased into the Hall of Perfect Justice. 

II. — The deceased entering the Judgment Hall. 

12. — The forty-two Assessors of the dead assisting at the judgment. A figure of the deceased kneels before them. 



 


The judgment happily ended, the deceased invokes four spirits (who are shown in a picture presiding over a lake of fire), whose business it is to wipe out the stains the soul has contracted in its journey through the under world. On their favorable answer to his prayer, he is instructed concerning the nature of the inhabitants of the different regions through which he still has to journey. He prays, and invokes the sun of the upper and of the lower world. He again enters the barque of the sun with his companions. Osiris himself is seated in the celestial boat; a hawk's head shows that the sun is rising (a new life beginning); a phoenix at the prow symbolizes the completion of a period. He sails in company with the princes of the celestial sphere, and at length reaches heaven. 

A picture shows him marching towards the disk of the sun; he enters his celestial house, and is instructed in the nature of God, and learns all the names of God, and to know the places where Osiris best loves to dwell. Athor and Isis receive him. He stands before Atoum, the essential god; and it is said of him, "He is Toum, the essential man ; he is come into his own country; he has won to the end of his journey; the stains of iniquity are purged away from him:" he has become himself Ouati (an eye of fire), a new source of light, co-operating with the great gods in the warfare between light and darkness, good and evil, that goes on eternally. 

Prayers to Osiris, and hymns of praise to Ra in his various manifestations — as rising, mid-day, and setting sun — bring the ritual to a conclusion, and occupy many chapters interspersed among those which appear to narrate the soul's progress. The arrangement of the chapters in the Turin papyrus is perhaps not very ancient. Many of them treat of the same subjects, and appear to be repetitions; and many are probably misplaced. 

The 17th chapter, which ends the first division of the Ritual, entitled "The manifestation of the Soul to Light," contains an epitome of all the teaching on which the later chapters enlarge, and is considered by M. de Rouge to be the most important portion of the ancient book. Interspersed with its account of the soul's life in the under world are sentences put into the mouth of Osiris, and hymns and prayers addressed to the gods, which M. de Roug believes to contain the real doctrines concerning the nature of the Godhead, and the genesis of the earth, that were received in Egypt by the priests and those who were deemed worthy of initiation into sacred mysteries. 

From a careful study of the obscure symbolism under which these doctrines are veiled, and a comparison of the ritual teaching with that set forth in inscriptions and pictures on early tombs and temples, M. de Roug arrives at the conclusion that the Egyptians believed in one God, self-existent and omnipresent. In the Ritual He is called Atoum, the concealed one, who made "Being" and "not Being" from Himself He is also called Cheper, and represented by a scarabaeus, the symbol of self-existence. This one eternal concealed God from the earliest times had different names in different places. He is Amun at Thebes, Pthah at Memphis. 

One, there is still a duality in His essence. He is the Father and the Son, the Creator, and that which He produces out of Himself Under that aspect Atoum appears in the 17th chapter of the Ritual in the double character of Osiris and Ra — Osiris, thought; Ra, appearances; or, as they are symbolized, the sun of the spiritual world, and the sun of the visible world. Osiris precedes the light and the day. He dwells from eternity in the abyss. He himself is eternity, and eternity is unfathomable, brooding night, the teeming womb of all existences. On a day He calls, "Come to us" and Ra the visible sun comes to Osiris in the under world, and the visible order of the universe springs into existence. From henceforth' Atoum the essential divine exists in its form of "twins." Osiris (spirit) rules in the world of spirits, but to the inhabitants of the upper world He is a dead God, swathed and mummified, hidden from them under the ever-changing forms of that which he has projected from Himself, viz. Ra, and the outward world over which Ra rules. 

Yet each man is himself an Osiris. He belongs, as no other outward thing does, to both sides of the divine nature. He lives in Ra's world, but he has that within him which is destined hereafter to take its place in the home of eternal realities. 

Mingled with these metaphysical subtleties there was no doubt a large amount of actual worship of the disk of the sun; but in the purest time of the Egyptian faith the sun seems to have been reverenced as a symbol of divinity, not as divine in his material substance. 

In his daily setting and rising the ancient Egyptians saw an emblem of perpetual renewal. It was the aspect of nature they best loved to contemplate, and considered most godlike — life growing out of death; fresh beginnings germinating under decay;  Isis and Nephthys walking the world hand-in-hand, conducting the soul through many successive livings and dying till they brought it at length into the presence of the fount of true being, the undivided, changeless Atoum himself. 

The highly symbolic form under which these doctrines are set forth in the Ritual Was resorted to, no doubt, in the first instance, from the imperfections of language and the nature of the hieroglyphic writing, hardly advanced beyond the picture stage when the sacred books were first indited; every thought had to be expressed by a sign that appealed to the eye rather than the ear. It is easy to see how the use of these symbols gave rise among the uninitiated to polytheistic notions of the Deity. In the lapse of time certain symbols came to be identified with religious ideas, and reverence was transferred from the thought to the sign. 

The various attributes of God, put into forms at first to make them intelligible, were regarded by the vulgar as separate gods. Thoth, the wisdom of God; Anubis, the righteousness of God; Kneph, the creative power of God — became distinct personages, and had genealogies invented for them, and were ranged in orders of worth. The aspects and forces of nature found a place, too, in the cosmogony. If Ra the visible sun was twin with Osiris in the Divine Being, then Hapi the great river, the soil of the Nile valley, the wide blue of heaven, the moon, the stars, were parts of Him too, and might be conceived of as distinct existences worthy of worship. 

To add to the confusion, the meaning of the old symbols began to be forgotten, and new stories were invented to explain them. The history of the death and burial of Osiris — which from allusions to it in the Ritual appears in early times to have allegorized the work of creation, when Osiris dismembered and concealed himself to produce the visible order of the universe, died that the world might live — in later times was amplified, and had a variety of new meanings given to it. Osiris was said to have been destroyed by Typhon, the evil principle, and restored by the care of Isis, his wife, and sister. It is impossible to say when the change in the meaning of the myths began, or even how far the notion of some violence having been done to Osiris by the powers of evil is justified by the sacred writings, for frequent mention is made in the Ritual of enemies of Osiris. 

Still more puzzling and difficult to account for is the worship of animals, which certainly prevailed in Egypt at a very early time. Manetho tells us that the bulls Apis and Mnevis, and the Mendesian goat, were appointed to be gods by a king of the Second Dynasty. 

The sacred animals were not reverenced merely as symbols of certain attributes of the Godhead. The bull Apis, at all events, seems to have been regarded as the vehicle through which the god Osiris, the god of the spiritual world, manifested himself to men, and in which he dwelt among them. As soon as an Apis died, it was believed that a re-incarnation of the god took place, under the form of another bull marked by certain traditional signs, and priests were sent all over Egypt to seek for the divine guest in lowly shape that they believed had come to dwell among them. When found, the sacred bull was treated with the greatest reverence through its life, and honored at its decease with a more pompous funeral and grander sarcophagus than that accorded to the Pharaoh himself 

It was of the bull Apis, the incarnation of Osiris, god of the under world, that the children of Israel made an image when they grew weary of waiting for the return of Moses from Mount Sinai. During their long sojourn in Egypt they had grown familiar with the feelings of the Egyptians about the Apis. They had witnessed the mourning in which the interval between the death of one Apis and the finding of another was passed, and they had taken part in the frantic rejoicings into which the whole nation burst at the news of his discovery. 

One of the mythological stories that had grown up about Osiris in the later times was, that he had fought with and overcome a giant called Apap, the king of empty places, of wild howling wildernesses, and deserts of sand. They looked round, and saw the dominions of Apap stretched on every side, and their dread of being deserted of any helper grew strong. Who should deliver them from Apap if not Osiris. "Where be our gods to go before us" they cried, as they pressed round Aaron, and, even with the thunders of Sinai in their ears, forced him to give them as close a likeness as could be procured of the worship they had been used to. 

Strange as it is that such debasing forms of worship should co-exist side by side with such spiritual teaching as the " Book of the Dead " discloses, there can be no doubt that such was the case in Egypt for many centuries. Amid all confusions, however, the sacred books remained, and, to those who took the pains to study them, must always have conveyed something, at least, of the old truths. M. de Roug considers that the belief in one supreme God, and in the immortality of the soul, was never completely lost in Egypt, though it was probably confined to a few of the learned class. 

The king whom Abraham visited appears to have been a believer in one God. But if he was a devout and understanding student of the Ritual, there would be a wide gulf between the simple faith of the patriarch in an ever-living personal God, who in this present life revealed Himself in direct communing with the spirits of living men, and the metaphysical Egyptian's conception of a concealed divine essence, who could only be rightly known when the life on earth was over. 

Already in Abraham's time, remote as it appears to us, the evil effects of concealing the highest teaching from the mass of the people, under symbolism understood only by the learned, were beginning to show themselves. 

To pass from talk with an Egyptian sage on the nature of Atoum into the midst of a crowd of worshipers prostrate in trembling joy at the news of the discovery of a new Apis, or the birth of a sacred cat or crocodile, must have been to a thoughtful foreigner a strange experience. Josephus says that Abraham lived several years at Heliopolis, the town that M. de Roug believes to have been the chief seat of the ritual worship, and that he conversed with the priests there and taught them many things. If such discourse as Josephus speaks of did take place at Heliopolis 4,000 years ago, it is clear that some of the very same topics that are subjects for argument still must have come into it, and that Abraham and the pantheistic Egyptian priests must have represented schools of thought that have not come to any understanding with each other yet. 

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.
As described by Annie Keary 1870 (very interesting)

The best preserved copy of the sacred Ritual yet found is now in the museum at Turin. The whole has been translated into English by Dr. Birch, and the principal part into very beautiful French by M. de Roug, who has given many years of labor to the task of comparing the papyri of different epochs together, to arrive at the most ancient versions of the sacred text. He has come to the conclusion that four of the 164 chapters of which the Turin copy of the ritual is composed, are late additions; the remaining 160 chapters he believes to consist of two parts, — a very ancient text, older than any other writing in the world, and a running commentary, which at a later but still very remote period was inserted between the sentences of the original sacred book by the scribes who copied it. The sentences are generally very much more easy to understand than the commentary, which appears to have been written when a complex mythology had thrust aside the simpler early faith.

Each chapter has a title at the beginning, and at the end a symbolic picture, which frequently is found to throw great light on the obscure meaning of the text. I will translate from M. de Rouge's papers in the Revue Arc Mologique, the substance of some of the chapters, and his descriptions of the little pictures that accompany them. This will give you some idea of the subjects of which this oldest book in the world treats. It is a strange Pilgrim's Progress of five thousand years ago, only here it is the disembodied spirit that begins and concludes the journey, and it is conducted through scenery as fantastic and terrible as any that Dante's imagination conjured up. What poet of five thousand years ago saw or dreamed it, and, struggling with almost insurmountable difficulties of imperfect language and means of writing, dimly pictured it forth so that we can trace its outline still. The first seventeen chapters have a general title, and appear to have originally formed a separate volume of the sacred writings.

The frontispiece shows the funeral procession — the weeping parents and friends, the dead man drawn along in his coffin ; a calf bounds before him, emblem of the new life on which he has entered. Step by step the chapters of the old poem follow the deceased in his wondrous progress through the under world.

In the first stage of the journey the departed soul is manifested to the light ; he finds himself alive after death, and proceeds to travel through a region which is not the abode of departed spirits, but a shadowy tract lying between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Walking in heavenly paths, he discovers that no one is permitted to work in this under world. He finds himself in the empty regions of the giant Apap, the king of the desert, of void lifelessness and impotent death. These regions it is desirable that the soul should leave in the day-time, lest, being steeped m a double darkness, he should wander into Ammah, one of the hurtful regions of the shadowy land.

Leaving the empty waste in the day-time, he is justified before his enemies and accusers in the under world, and advances towards light; the stains on the soul begin to be wiped out, and kneeling down the deceased bursts into a hymn of praise to Ra, the god of light. "Swallowed up in light," he is now borne onward to the termination of his first trial. Here a picture shows the traveler in four different scenes : in the first he turns on the furthest verge of the border region to look back on his friends in the world of the living, who are still bringing offerings to his tomb ; in the second and third, leaving old things, he has joined himself to a band of spirits who adore, first the rising and then the mid-day sun of the new world he is entering on; in the last scene he enters into the ship of God, and is permitted to worship light in its three-fold manifestation.

From the ship of God he lands on another more advanced region of the land of shades, and forms part of the following of Osiris; he is nourished with the food of the justified ; he shines out in the day; he takes every shape he desires. At length he, the living soul, the justified Osiris (the departed soul takes the name of Osiris, and is always spoken of as the Osiris), devoted to the great gods, is admitted into the Palace of Wisdom, and addresses a prayer to Thoth. He prays that Thoth (the wisdom of God) will remember the justification of Osiris, and justify him from all his sins. The justified is crowned, and his mouth is opened ; the dead speaks ; the new soul-language is opened to him. Many chapters of the Ritual relate to this part of the soul's advance, and a picture represents the soul standing before a spiritual being, who instructs him in sacred words, while he himself is permitted to utter the sentences of the sacred books he has stored up in his memory during his lifetime.

And now that his tongue is opened it becomes a question about the heart of the man. The spirit-heart, enlightened and purified as it is, cannot live again truly till it is in some sort reunited to the old natural heart, which (if he is a justified soul) spiritual beings have taken in charge, and have been keeping warm with life since his decease.

Kneeling down, the spirit-man speaks to his heart, which he holds in his hand. He entreats the four spiritual beings who preside over the funeral rites to protect his heart — not to take it away from him — to let him live again truly. Rising from this invocation, he adores the Scarabaeus, the emblem of creative power which alone can invest him with the second life. And now that his heart is restored to him, and the past human life and the wondrous shade-life are linked together so that the flood of memory pours in, a .series of combats begins: he traverses a tract peopled with fantastic, horrible creatures (which probably symbolize the sins and sorrows of his past life) — crocodiles, serpents, tortoises, evil things of nameless shape, devourers of heads and hearts, scented with death, and with fingers of steel.

He fights his way through them with a lance in his hand, pronouncing sentences from the sacred ritual as he advances, before which the horrible phantoms give place. After this experience he learns what are the woes that may befall a wicked soul in the under world. He is instructed not to nourish himself with corruption, but to seek to escape the second death, and so to carry himself that he may not be turned back from his celestial house long since prepared for him. Here there is a picture of the celestial house, and of the soul (represented by a mummified figure) approaching it from the right; to tire left of the house sits a phoenix, the emblem of the completion of a period of time. The pictures accompanying these chapters represent the deceased either as fighting his way through enemies, or as embraced and supported by Anubis, one of the presiding deities of the funeral rites. The evil region is symbolized by a sword resting on a block of wood.

And now that he has had a glimpse into the terrors that await the wicked, he begins to experience the favors that are accorded to virtuous souls. Kindly winds speed him on his way, the water of life is given him to drink; and here a picture shows the deceased reposing after long travel in an arm-chair, while the goddess of the blue of heaven pours out for him living water from the top of a sycamore tree, the
tree of life. The draught preserves him evermore from being scorched by the nether fires; he walks on triumphant towards yet more distinct manifestations of light. Now he approaches a chapel, where sits a hawk with outstretched wings, the emblem of new life rising out of death; now he worships before two human-headed deities ; now he seeks, by the aid of a serpent, to un-swathe his lower limbs, and to walk like a man. At length he arrives at a celestial Heliopolis — that is to say, he has completed a period of transformation; the arrival of the phoenix at Heliopolis, or rather the Heliacal rising of the star Sothis observed at Heliopolis, being the event from which the ancient Egyptians dated a new period of time.

In the next more advanced stage of progress the virtuous soul finds he may assume what form he pleases in the under world. He may be a hawk, and carry the staff of dominion; he may become a phoenix; he may fly like a swallow; he may take the shape of the prince of princes; and even while he walks along the dark way assume the form of a god. Here there is a picture of the deceased walking with Osiris himself, who is however partly hidden from him by a dividing disk or screen of light. In this period of the soul's progress a union of the body and soul is spoken of. A human-headed hawk flies to the mummified body, which holds out to it the symbol of life, a hieroglyphic sign something like a cross. The deceased opens the door of a cell, from which the soul flies.

The deceased now seeks for greater intellectual enlightenment. He implores the god Thoth to give him his papyrus and reed ; he visits the place where Thoth lives, and becomes an enlightened spirit in the under world. He is permitted to sail with the sun over celestial waters, and arrives at the house where Athor (Love) dwells, and sits down in the presence of the great gods. He receives a cup of joy, learns to know the spirits of the East and of the West, and is introduced to other spirits of departed men dwelling in various regions of the under world. And now he nears the end of his journey ; he pauses and prays before the sacred door. He enters the Hall of the Two Truths (or perfect justice), and there he has to make his way through all the sins he has committed in his life before he can look upon the faces of the great gods.

The last chapter, of the group of chapters which relate to this part of the journey, is headed by the celebrated judgment picture, of which the illustration furnishes a faithful copy. Osiris sits on his throne in the Hall of Perfect Justice, holding in one hand the symbol of life, in the other the staff of dominion. The deceased is introduced into his presence by Thmei (Truth) herself. Before Osiris stands an altar of offerings, surmounted by a waterlily, which supports the four presiding spirits of Amenti. Cerberus, the surly guardian of the palace, the "accuser," whose office it is to see that none enter unworthily, crouches before Osiris. Seated above in a long row, as witnesses called to testify for or against the deceased, are the forty-two assessors of the dead. Each spirit is the stem watcher against a certain sin, and addressing each in turn the deceased has to plead —

" I have made no one weep."
" I have not brought evil report on any one."
" I have not neglected God in my heart."
" I have not been indolent."
" I have not robbed."
" I have not told lies"
" I have not multiplied my words more than necessary"
" I have not applauded my own words"

Ibis-headed Thoth, the god of intelligence, stands ready with papyrus, scroll, and reed-pen, to record the pleading. Horus, the symbol of the new life, aided by Anubis, the wise-judging friend of the dead, holds and directs a gigantic pair of scales, in which the heart of the deceased is to be weighed. An ape, the symbol of Thoth (intelligence), sits on the beam of the scale, watching intently to see which
way the scales incline. In one scale is placed a vase enclosing the heart of the deceased, in the other the symbol of perfect truth. Is he true of heart? If not, the dreaded sentence of the second death will be pronounced upon him.

1. — Osiris on his Throne of Judgment.

2. — Table of Offering, surmounted by the four Genii of Amenti, who preside over funeral rites.

3. — Cerberus, guardian of the Hall of Judgment.

4- — Thoth recording the judgment with reed-pen on slip of papyrus.

5- — Symbol of Truth, used as a weight to balance the heart of the deceased.

6. — Anubis, guardian of the dead.

7. — Dog-headed Ape, emblem of Thoth.

8.— Horns, son of Osiris, holding the emblem of life in his hand, watches the weight.

9.— Vase containing the heart of the deceased, protected by Guardian Spirit, who proclaims that the balance is even.

10. — Thmei (Truth) welcoming the deceased into the Hall of Perfect Justice.

II. — The deceased entering the Judgment Hall.

12. — The forty-two Assessors of the dead assisting at the judgment. A figure of the deceased kneels before them.


The judgment happily ended, the deceased invokes four spirits (who are shown in a picture presiding over a lake of fire), whose business it is to wipe out the stains the soul has contracted in its journey through the under world. On their favorable answer to his prayer, he is instructed concerning the nature of the inhabitants of the different regions through which he still has to journey. He prays, and invokes the sun of the upper and of the lower world. He again enters the barque of the sun with his companions. Osiris himself is seated in the celestial boat; a hawk's head shows that the sun is rising (a new life beginning); a phoenix at the prow symbolizes the completion of a period. He sails in company with the princes of the celestial sphere, and at length reaches heaven.

A picture shows him marching towards the disk of the sun; he enters his celestial house, and is instructed in the nature of God, and learns all the names of God, and to know the places where Osiris best loves to dwell. Athor and Isis receive him. He stands before Atoum, the essential god; and it is said of him, "He is Toum, the essential man ; he is come into his own country; he has won to the end of his journey; the stains of iniquity are purged away from him:" he has become himself Ouati (an eye of fire), a new source of light, co-operating with the great gods in the warfare between light and darkness, good and evil, that goes on eternally.

Prayers to Osiris, and hymns of praise to Ra in his various manifestations — as rising, mid-day, and setting sun — bring the ritual to a conclusion, and occupy many chapters interspersed among those which appear to narrate the soul's progress. The arrangement of the chapters in the Turin papyrus is perhaps not very ancient. Many of them treat of the same subjects, and appear to be repetitions; and many are probably misplaced.

The 17th chapter, which ends the first division of the Ritual, entitled "The manifestation of the Soul to Light," contains an epitome of all the teaching on which the later chapters enlarge, and is considered by M. de Rouge to be the most important portion of the ancient book. Interspersed with its account of the soul's life in the under world are sentences put into the mouth of Osiris, and hymns and prayers addressed to the gods, which M. de Roug believes to contain the real doctrines concerning the nature of the Godhead, and the genesis of the earth, that were received in Egypt by the priests and those who were deemed worthy of initiation into sacred mysteries.

From a careful study of the obscure symbolism under which these doctrines are veiled, and a comparison of the ritual teaching with that set forth in inscriptions and pictures on early tombs and temples, M. de Roug arrives at the conclusion that the Egyptians believed in one God, self-existent and omnipresent. In the Ritual He is called Atoum, the concealed one, who made "Being" and "not Being" from Himself He is also called Cheper, and represented by a scarabaeus, the symbol of self-existence. This one eternal concealed God from the earliest times had different names in different places. He is Amun at Thebes, Pthah at Memphis.

One, there is still a duality in His essence. He is the Father and the Son, the Creator, and that which He produces out of Himself Under that aspect Atoum appears in the 17th chapter of the Ritual in the double character of Osiris and Ra — Osiris, thought; Ra, appearances; or, as they are symbolized, the sun of the spiritual world, and the sun of the visible world. Osiris precedes the light and the day. He dwells from eternity in the abyss. He himself is eternity, and eternity is unfathomable, brooding night, the teeming womb of all existences. On a day He calls, "Come to us" and Ra the visible sun comes to Osiris in the under world, and the visible order of the universe springs into existence. From henceforth' Atoum the essential divine exists in its form of "twins." Osiris (spirit) rules in the world of spirits, but to the inhabitants of the upper world He is a dead God, swathed and mummified, hidden from them under the ever-changing forms of that which he has projected from Himself, viz. Ra, and the outward world over which Ra rules.

Yet each man is himself an Osiris. He belongs, as no other outward thing does, to both sides of the divine nature. He lives in Ra's world, but he has that within him which is destined hereafter to take its place in the home of eternal realities.

Mingled with these metaphysical subtleties there was no doubt a large amount of actual worship of the disk of the sun; but in the purest time of the Egyptian faith the sun seems to have been reverenced as a symbol of divinity, not as divine in his material substance.

In his daily setting and rising the ancient Egyptians saw an emblem of perpetual renewal. It was the aspect of nature they best loved to contemplate, and considered most godlike — life growing out of death; fresh beginnings germinating under decay;  Isis and Nephthys walking the world hand-in-hand, conducting the soul through many successive livings and dying till they brought it at length into the presence of the fount of true being, the undivided, changeless Atoum himself.

The highly symbolic form under which these doctrines are set forth in the Ritual Was resorted to, no doubt, in the first instance, from the imperfections of language and the nature of the hieroglyphic writing, hardly advanced beyond the picture stage when the sacred books were first indited; every thought had to be expressed by a sign that appealed to the eye rather than the ear. It is easy to see how the use of these symbols gave rise among the uninitiated to polytheistic notions of the Deity. In the lapse of time certain symbols came to be identified with religious ideas, and reverence was transferred from the thought to the sign.

The various attributes of God, put into forms at first to make them intelligible, were regarded by the vulgar as separate gods. Thoth, the wisdom of God; Anubis, the righteousness of God; Kneph, the creative power of God — became distinct personages, and had genealogies invented for them, and were ranged in orders of worth. The aspects and forces of nature found a place, too, in the cosmogony. If Ra the visible sun was twin with Osiris in the Divine Being, then Hapi the great river, the soil of the Nile valley, the wide blue of heaven, the moon, the stars, were parts of Him too, and might be conceived of as distinct existences worthy of worship.

To add to the confusion, the meaning of the old symbols began to be forgotten, and new stories were invented to explain them. The history of the death and burial of Osiris — which from allusions to it in the Ritual appears in early times to have allegorized the work of creation, when Osiris dismembered and concealed himself to produce the visible order of the universe, died that the world might live — in later times was amplified, and had a variety of new meanings given to it. Osiris was said to have been destroyed by Typhon, the evil principle, and restored by the care of Isis, his wife, and sister. It is impossible to say when the change in the meaning of the myths began, or even how far the notion of some violence having been done to Osiris by the powers of evil is justified by the sacred writings, for frequent mention is made in the Ritual of enemies of Osiris.

Still more puzzling and difficult to account for is the worship of animals, which certainly prevailed in Egypt at a very early time. Manetho tells us that the bulls Apis and Mnevis, and the Mendesian goat, were appointed to be gods by a king of the Second Dynasty.

The sacred animals were not reverenced merely as symbols of certain attributes of the Godhead. The bull Apis, at all events, seems to have been regarded as the vehicle through which the god Osiris, the god of the spiritual world, manifested himself to men, and in which he dwelt among them. As soon as an Apis died, it was believed that a re-incarnation of the god took place, under the form of another bull marked by certain traditional signs, and priests were sent all over Egypt to seek for the divine guest in lowly shape that they believed had come to dwell among them. When found, the sacred bull was treated with the greatest reverence through its life, and honored at its decease with a more pompous funeral and grander sarcophagus than that accorded to the Pharaoh himself

It was of the bull Apis, the incarnation of Osiris, god of the under world, that the children of Israel made an image when they grew weary of waiting for the return of Moses from Mount Sinai. During their long sojourn in Egypt they had grown familiar with the feelings of the Egyptians about the Apis. They had witnessed the mourning in which the interval between the death of one Apis and the finding of another was passed, and they had taken part in the frantic rejoicings into which the whole nation burst at the news of his discovery.

One of the mythological stories that had grown up about Osiris in the later times was, that he had fought with and overcome a giant called Apap, the king of empty places, of wild howling wildernesses, and deserts of sand. They looked round, and saw the dominions of Apap stretched on every side, and their dread of being deserted of any helper grew strong. Who should deliver them from Apap if not Osiris. "Where be our gods to go before us" they cried, as they pressed round Aaron, and, even with the thunders of Sinai in their ears, forced him to give them as close a likeness as could be procured of the worship they had been used to.

Strange as it is that such debasing forms of worship should co-exist side by side with such spiritual teaching as the " Book of the Dead " discloses, there can be no doubt that such was the case in Egypt for many centuries. Amid all confusions, however, the sacred books remained, and, to those who took the pains to study them, must always have conveyed something, at least, of the old truths. M. de Roug considers that the belief in one supreme God, and in the immortality of the soul, was never completely lost in Egypt, though it was probably confined to a few of the learned class.

The king whom Abraham visited appears to have been a believer in one God. But if he was a devout and understanding student of the Ritual, there would be a wide gulf between the simple faith of the patriarch in an ever-living personal God, who in this present life revealed Himself in direct communing with the spirits of living men, and the metaphysical Egyptian's conception of a concealed divine essence, who could only be rightly known when the life on earth was over.

Already in Abraham's time, remote as it appears to us, the evil effects of concealing the highest teaching from the mass of the people, under symbolism understood only by the learned, were beginning to show themselves.

To pass from talk with an Egyptian sage on the nature of Atoum into the midst of a crowd of worshipers prostrate in trembling joy at the news of the discovery of a new Apis, or the birth of a sacred cat or crocodile, must have been to a thoughtful foreigner a strange experience. Josephus says that Abraham lived several years at Heliopolis, the town that M. de Roug believes to have been the chief seat of the ritual worship, and that he conversed with the priests there and taught them many things. If such discourse as Josephus speaks of did take place at Heliopolis 4,000 years ago, it is clear that some of the very same topics that are subjects for argument still must have come into it, and that Abraham and the pantheistic Egyptian priests must have represented schools of thought that have not come to any understanding with each other yet.