ANCIENT EGYPTIAN RELIGION by Jennifer Pignataro 

There is a wealth of information about Ancient Egyptian Religion and it would be very easy and interesting to dwell on an inventory of the various gods, their personalities, qualities and appearances. 

My intention in today’s lecture is to consider particular aspects of this civilization’s religion. Principally I would like to discuss the following:

  ·        The Cults of Ra and Osiris

·        The function of Maat

·        The Ka and Ba ·        Mortuary Customs     ·        The Court of the Underworld

This paper comprises large references to a range of writers. While I have read widely and selected the most illustrative quotes I have not attempted to give an interpretation or additional discussion on these references. My objective is to present ‘information’ about particular aspects of Ancient Egyptian religion in the hope that this audience may use it as a springboard into a wider private research. 

The Cults of Ra and Osiris

Ra was a version of the sun god, and Egyptian art most often represented him with the solar disk – a circle drawn over the head of deities associated with the sun. The story of creation that was developed in ancient

Egypt expressed the view that the first of the gods, Ra, evolved out of disorder and chaos in the universe. Parallel to creation stories in other cultures, the ancient Egyptians believed that in the beginning were only primeval waters. Ra willed his creation and existence and arose through the darkness and contained the dual principles of male and female.The great Ennead (a group of nine) focussed on Ra as the first principle with the evolution of the remaining eight gods.  The family tree of the gods is as follows: 

1.    Ra (sun god)  2.    Shu (god of air) 3.    Tefnut (goddess of mist) 

4.    Geb (god of earth)  5.    Nut (goddess of sky)  6.    Osiris (god of the dead) 

7.    Isis (wife of Osiris) 

8.    Seth (enemy of Osiris) 

9.    Nephthys (wife of Seth) 

For the ancient Egyptians, the sun was the source of all life. It was vital, life-affirming, and with its dawn and sunrise, epitomised the concept of renewal, rebirth and rejuvenation.      The sun – Ra, took pride of place in the pantheon of gods and deities. The character of Ra is described in a hymn as evidenced in the, Book of the Dead: 

“You rise, you rise, you shine, you shine, you who are crowned king of the gods.You are the lord of heaven;You are the lord of the earth;You are the creator of those who dwell in theHeights and of those who dwell in the depths,You are the One God who came into being in the beginning of time. You did create the earth, you did fashion man,You did make the watery abyss of the sky.You did form Hapi (the Nile at flood).You did create the watery abyss,And you do give life to all therein that is.You have knit together the mountains, You have made humans and the beasts of the fieldto come into being. You made the heavens and the earth.Worshipped be you whom Maat embraces at morn and at eve.You travel across the sky with heart swelling with joy…” 

Osiris

Osiris was one of the five children of Nut and was king of Egypt. His brother Seth represented evil in the universe. Seth murdered Osiris and himself became the king. After killing Osiris, Seth tore his body into pieces, but Isis rescued most of the pieces for burial beneath the temple.  Seth made himself king but was challenged by Osiris’s son – Horus. Seth lost and was sent to the desert and became known as the god of terrible storms. Osiris was mummified by his wife and became the god of the dead. Horus, his son, became the king and from him descended the pharaohs. A version of the tale, according to Plutarch, is that Seth made a chest into which only Osiris could fit. 2 “Seth invited Osiris to a feast and at the banquet made a bet that no one could fit into the chest. Osiris was the last one to step into the chest, but before he did, asked if he (Seth) could hold Osiris’s crown. Osiris agreed and stepped into the chest. As he lay down, Seth slammed the lid shut and put the crown on his head. He then set the chest afloat on the Nile.             

Isis did not know of her husband’s death until the Wind told her. She then placed her son in a safe place and cast a spell so no one could find him. When she searched for her husband, a child told her a chest had washed up on the back and a tree had grown up. The tree was so straight the king had used it for the central pillar of his new palace.

Isis went and asked for her husband’s body and it was given to her. The god of the underworld told her that Osiris would be king, but only in the underworld.” The burial customs we most readily relate to the ancient Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification have their origins in the cult of Osiris. After

Isis reclaimed the body of her husband, she had asked Ra to breathe life into him so that he be resurrected. While

Isis was to have one last night of love with her resurrected husband, the next day he died and was embalmed by Anubis. Hence, Osiris was the first mummy. Function of Maat   

The philosophical and ethical principle underpinning the goddess Maat is one which permeated every aspect of behaviour in life and death of the ancient Egyptian. The general translation of the word maat is truth. The vernacular meaning was…”that which is straight”.  3 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature” that one of the uses of nature is to provide metaphors for moral behaviour … Straightness, which is a physical, geometric term, was perceived as symbolic of moral rectitude… Straightness implies order, and the presence of Maat stamped order on chaos at the moment of creation. As Morenz suggested, when looking at ancient religions, one is always justified in asking whether belief in the gods carried implications for human moral and ethical behaviour. In Egyptian religion and politics the answer for the concept of Maat was clearly yes; Maat reflected an attitude that order in law was influenced by truth and justice, and that respect for order, truth and justice was required for positions of authority… The moral concepts Maat represented were as primordial as Ra and the waters from which he created himself. Maat also played a role in the underworld. During the trial of the deceased soul, Maat was always present. In some drawings her feather sat on top of the scales to guarantee fairness, and the heart of the deceased was always weighed on the balance against the feather…If the heart were found to balance perfectly, the dead person was to have passed the first test and to be nearing immortality. Then the deceased progressed to the Hall of Maat, or Hall of Judgement. Here, the soul had to give 42 denials of sin and identify the magical names of the various parts of the door. Maat supervised these activities and had the soul completed the said tasks correctly; Maat deemed that the soul was ready for admittance into the presence of Osiris for final acceptance.”  

Ka and Ba 

It was believed that a person had a Ba (or soul) which was depicted as a bird with a human head. It was also believed that a person had an invisible twin called the Ka. The Ba was in contact with friends and family of the dead and the Ka went back and forth from the other world where the deities of the dead reigned.  4 “The purpose of preserving the body through embalming is clearly shown in the two components the Egyptians thought built up a man’s personality. In both cases the physical body was essential for their existence and an eternal life for the deceased. The Egyptians believed that every person (both during and after life) was followed by an invisible double called – ka. He was created at the moment of birth and stood for “force of life” for the person. He could not be seen or depicted but all big tombs had a “blind door” for him to use. After death a transformation of rebirth took place and every night he was released to give his dead master a spiritual travel to the land of the living. The travel itself was made by his soul – Ba. This was the link from the tomb to life on earth that was supposed to go on for ever. The poor commoners who could not afford an embalming were offered small simple statuettes of mummies to give their Ka someone to stand beside in the life beyond and thereby please their life-long companion and get eternal rest themselves. During life, the Ba was his master’s conscience and after death he was himself protected from being misled by evil spirits through rituals and prayers from The Book of the Dead, performed by priests or relatives. A correct behaviour in both worlds was essential to the Egyptians.  After death he was released from the mummy every night and could fly back to the world of living to check things out. Before sunrise he was back within his master who thus never lost contact with the world he had left.” In the stunning article in Sunrise magazine [April/May 1985] written by Immanuel M. Oderberg, a former member of the Theosophical Society, entitled Light from Ancient Egypt, another layer shrouds our discussion on Egyptian religious thought and practice. [If you wish to read this article please click on: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sunrise/34-84-5/re-imo2.htm]   This veil to which I refer is that of the notion of rebirth, renewal, or better known as reincarnation. This concept is central to Ancient Egyptian Religion and is the reason why the ancients were so concerned with what we may consider the macabre practice of embalming. 5…Herodotus, the Greek historian (5th century BC) wrote that:              The Egyptians were the first to teach that the human soul is immortal, and at the death of the body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth; and after passing through all creatures of land, sea and air (which cycle it completes in three thousand years), it enters once more into a human body, at birth.) 

Reincarnation has been connected with the rites of Osiris, one of the mysteries or cycles of initiation perpetuated in Egypt. The concept of transformation as recorded in the Egyptian texts has been interpreted in various ways. Herodotus writes of transmigration, i.e., that the soul passes through various animals before being reborn in human form. This refers not to the human souls but to molecules, atoms, and other components that clothe it. They gravitate to vehicles similar to qualities to their former host’s, drawn magnetically to the new milieu by the imprint made by the human soul, whether it be fine or gross. It is quite clear from The Book of the Dead and other texts that the soul itself after death undergoes experiences in the Duat or the Underworld, the realm and condition between heaven and earth, or beneath the earth, supposedly traversed by the sun from sunset to sunrise. A text translated as part of doctoral thesis by L.H. Lesko, entitled The Ancient Egyptian Book of Two Ways considers the evolution of the soul. The scripture deals with ritual connected with initiation from one level of self-becoming to another. The Ancient Egyptian Book Of Two Ways considers sacred scripture which deals with rituals assumed to apply to after death conditions – similar to the Book of the Dead. Moreover, Lesko paints a picture that emerges of the deceased or candidate for initiation reaching a fork offering two paths called “The Two Paths of Liberation.”  They involve different experiences. One path, passing over land and water, is that of Osiris or cyclic nature and involves many incarnations. The other way leads through fire”,… “a direct or shortened passage. In symbolism, fire stood for the higher mind. The experiences gained on the shorter path are related in the myth of Horus inscribed on the walls of the temple at Edfu. This is also known as the Winged Disk myth, it tells of the contest in which Horus (light) overcomes Seth (darkness).” This myth represents the duality of human nature, of the battle which must be fought for the transmutation of lower attributes into the more lofty. There is reason to believe that the after-death adventures met with the soul through the Duat were also undergone by a neophyte during initiation in the temples.  

Mortuary Customs   

The purpose of mortuary preparation was to ensure the deceased a successful passage into the next world. 6 “The religious belief was that the body should be preserved intact for the soul to occupy in the next world. Without a physical body the soul had no place to dwell and became restless forever.”  7 “When an ancient Egyptian died, he was not buried in the ground, mourned and then forgotten…the ancient Egyptians believed that ritual existed which would bring sensory life back to the deceased’s form, enabling it to see, smell, breathe, hear and eat…The ritual that would re-animate the deceased was called The Opening of the Mouth ceremony. It was an important ritual in both funerary and in temple practice. The Opening of the Mouth originated as a ritual to endow statues with the capacity to support the living ka, and to receive offerings. It was performed on cult statues of gods, kings, and private individuals, as well as on the mummies of both humans and Apis bulls. It was even performed on the individual rooms of temples and on the entire temple structure. The effect of the ritual was to animate the recipient. The ritual allowed the mummy, statue, or temple to eat, breathe, see, hear and enjoy the offerings and provisions performed by the priests and officiants, thus to sustain the ka. The earliest Old Kingdom textual references to the ceremony date to the early 4th dynasty and the decoration of the tomb of the royal Metjen. At this time, the ritual seems to have been performed solely to animate statues. The captions of the scenes in Metjen’s tomb mention that the ritual is performed four times, in conjunction with censing and transforming the deceased into an akh. In the Pyramid Texts and later Funerary Texts, the rites are also said to be performed four times. It was not until the sixth dynasty that the statue ritual was incorporated into an Opening of the Mouth ceremony already developed independently as part of the funerary ritual. This ritual itself may have been a symbolic re-enactment of the clearing of a baby’s mouth at birth. The earliest implements used were probably the priest’s fingers, later replaced by finger-shaped iron blades. Some texts refer to these as the fingers of Horus, son of Orisis and Isis. Earliest references to the ritual come from the Pyramid Texts, inscribed on the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Unas, dating to the end of the 5th dynasty. One set of Pyramid Texts referring to the use of the fingers to open the mouth are translated by Faulkner as: 

“…your mouth is split open by Horus with this finger of his with which he split open the mouth of his father Osiris.” 

Other implements besides fingers were added, as indicated by Spells 11-15 of the Pyramid Texts. They describe the Opening of the Mouth ceremony using the foreleg of a bull and an iron wood-working adze. Other inscriptions give an offering ritual in which two blades of meteoric iron are said to open the mouth. Faulkner translates this spell as: 

            “O Osiris the King, I split open your mouth for you – god’s iron of upper Egypt, I ingot; god’s iron of Lower Egypt, I ingot”.

The ritual would thus be performed with various implements, most commonly a wood-carving adze, which were touched to the lips by the officiating priest. An adze was an arched metal blade fastened across the top of a wooden handle with leather thongs, used in woodworking. Implements used in the Pyramid Texts ritual continue to appear in private tombs of the Middle Kingdom, but a rather different version of the ritual also appears in the Coffin Texts. Now Ptah (his dominant role was that of creator, he was the origin of intelligence and the means of communicating it) joins Horus to open the deceased’s mouth,, then Ptah and Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, and science) transform the deceased into an Ankh and Thoth replaces the heart in the body so that the deceased remembers what has been forgotten and can eat bread as desired. The ceremony was conducted in the House of Gold. Once the deceased had arrived at the tomb, the rituals were performed to bring about his transfiguration. The rite consisted of many acts, the opening of the mouth being just one, but central. The first part was the washing. The deceased’s mummy was first set up on a clean mound of sand, facing south, He should be purified with water poured from jars and his mouth especially purified with balls of natron from Upper and Lower Egypt. The deceased should then be fumigated by incense. This part of the purification harks back to the Pyramid Texts, such as spells 16-29 where perfume was used. The priest was dressed in his panther-skin garb. The priest identifies himself with Horus and opens the mouth of the statue with his fingers rather than with the adze. The ox-bull is butchered and the heart presented to the deceased, its foreleg is severed and pointed towards the deceased. The hieroglyph for foreleg denoted strength and perhaps it was considered that the foreleg transferred the life-force of the bull to the recipient of the Opening of the Mouth. The mouth is opened. An ostrich feather is presented, the knife is presented and more aromatics are burned. The mummy is animated, the ceremony is done. 

The Court of the Underworld 

This part of the lecture will unpack some of the stages associated with the journey to Paradise. In summary, the seven stages were: 

The Seven Stages to Paradise: 

1. Crossing the celestial river to the “Land in the West” 

2. Passing through gates and labyrinths by answering questions 

3. Being let into the great Court of the Underworld 

4. Addressing a jury of 14 judges about the deeds during life on earth 

5. Taken by Anubis to “Balance of Truth” to weigh his heart for sins 

6. If the heart wasn’t heavy, brought by Horus to Chief Judge Osiris 

7. Entering the “Fields of the Reed” (Paradise) and get eternal life. 

8 “When a person died he was taken to the Underworld where his deeds in life were taken to the Court of Osiris for the final judgement. Since this place also was called “The Island of Fire” it is obvious that the Egyptians had knowledge about the burning interior of the earth though they had no volcanoes in their own country. 

Before coming there the dead person had to pass a labyrinth of gates and doors and answer questions correctly to enter. The lion-god Aker let him through the last gate and he was facing the fourteen members of the jury in the Tribunal Hall. There he was allowed to speak about his behaviour on Earth.  Then Anubis took him into the courtroom presenting him the scale where his heart would be put in balance with the feather of Maat, deity of truth and harmony. The procedure was recorded by Thoth – god of writing and wisdom. Sometimes Thoth’s animal (a baboon) was sitting on top of the scale ready to adjust the result using a sliding weight. If the heart of the deceased was not too heavy with sins from his life on earth, he went through and could continue his journey to the afterlife and was granted a plot of land in the “Fields of Reeds”. This was the paradise for the ancient Egyptians – to grow crops for eternity in a land that was the very image of the

Nile

Valley they just had left. If he failed the test on the other hand – his heart was immediately devoured by the beast sitting under the scale. In that case, the dead faced the most horrible future imaginable for the Egyptians – he was denied an eternal life in the land of the West and his would be restless forever”. According to Immanuel Oderberg,…” for the rest of mankind, the way (a reference to the “Two Paths of Liberation”) is slower, progressing certainly, but more gradually, through many lives. The ultimate achievement is the same: to radiate the highest qualities of the spiritual element locked within the aspiring soul”. To conclude this lecture, I would like to share a hymn found in the Coffin Texts, (1,197) which was inscribed on the interior of coffins. Appropriately, it echoes Oderberg’s sentiments about releasing and illuminating the celestial enclosed within each soul. 

ENDNOTES:

2. Fergus Flemming: Alan Lothian (1997). The Way to Eternity.

Amsterdam:Duncan Baird Publishers, p.82.  3. Robert A. Armour, (1986) Gods and Myths of Ancient

Egypt. The

American

University in

Cairo Press, Pp. 133-135.4. Ottar Vendel, The Spirits of Nature – Religion of the Egyptians www.

5. I.M. Oderberg. Light from Ancient

Egypt.

Sunrise Theosophical Society

Pasadena.

6. Ottar Vendel.7. Marie Parsons The Opening of the Mouth Ritual.

8. Ottar Vendel. 

Now you are a king’s son, a prince,

As long as your soul exists, so long will your heart be with you.

Anubis is mindful of you in Busiris,

Your soul rejoices in

Abydos where your body ishappy on the High Hill.

Your embalmer rejoices in every place.

Ah, truly you are the chosen one!

You are made whole in this your dignity which is before me.

Anubis’ heart is happy over the work of his hands and the heart of the Lord of the Divine Hall is thrilled when he beholds this good god,

Master of those that have been and Ruler of those that are to come.

 

           

This is the text of a lecture given by the author at a public meeting of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne, Australia. The ideas expressed in all our public meetings are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the TS (Pasadena). 

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