Mummification: To be reborn in the afterlife

PIETRO TESTA

MUMMIFICATION

To be reborn in the afterlife

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© Layout and graphic elaboration: Paola Agnolucci

ISBN: 9788831427210

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PROEM

"Ah, Unis! You certainly didn’t go dead, but you went alive!" ¹

This statement addressed to the late King Unis of the 6th dynasty is a prelude to the contents of this book: funeral rituals in ancient Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians, loving life very much, tried to continue it after death. To fulfill this hope, they subtly and logically exploited the concepts of religion and magic based essentially on the myth of Osiris’ bloody death and rebirth united with the sun, the principle of light and life on earth and in the afterlife.

Religion and magic arose from the careful observation of nature and its intrinsic forces that are not visible, but can be understood by attentive and receptive souls. The prehistoric cultures of the Nile valley laid the foundations for a belief in the continuation of life after death, creating a legacy that was developed and shaped by the needs of the country’s historical and cultural changes, while remaining certain characteristics of phenomenology.

The historical and cultural memory accompanied the problem of death during the historical arc of Egypt, providing a series of religious speculations of the myths expressed in written and oral canons that characterized the preparation for the journey into the mysterious world of the other life. We then realize that the origin of the mechanism of death and rebirth of the human being starts from the death and rebirth of the gods, from the animation of their painted or plastic images, receptacles of their heavenly power and strength on earth.

The myth of Osiris bequeaths the concept of preserving the corpse in the form of incorruptible matter by mummification process accompanied by the protection of magic, understood as a natural force existing since Creation. The incorruptible corpse is thus made ‘noble’ and must be vitalized in its organs: it is necessary to give it life and energy to put it back in harmony with its ka, its ba and its akh. The animation, the breath of life given to the divine statues is also transferred to the mummy which is also a ‘statue’, a ‘simulacrum’ of the living era: we thus have the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth, naturally connected also to the Mysteries of Osiris .

This gear that becomes more and more complex with the passage of time, especially in the late epoch and under Roman domination, has its place in a tomb, an image of the house of the living, equipped with figurative presences and writings animated magically and eternally by the ‘voice just ‘(appropriate) of the ritualist priest, and specialized in the pronunciation of the ethereal vibrations present in the images and in the hieroglyphic writing, which however is image.

We could be perplexed before these testimonies of a millenary culture like that of the people of ancient Egypt, but we should not forget that it was precisely this civilization (with its strengths and weaknesses) that left a culture of thought that influenced the Greeks , and whose filaments came and settled in the Roman Empire, with echoes in Christian culture.

The reader who will have the good fortune to read the pages of this book should for a moment abandon today’s mentality and let himself go to that of ancient Egypt, accepting the way of understanding the life of this people as news and cultural (and spiritual) enrichment. and his legacy.

The hieroglyphic texts are performed with the JSesh software provided FREE online by Serge Rosmorduc. I have not reported the transliteration of the documents (except in some cases), preferring only their translation for practical reasons of the reader, apart from the explanatory notes, the excursus and the annexes.

Happy travels in the rituals of ancient Egypt!

Pietro Testa

Naples 2019

CHAPTER 1

Notes on the Egyptian religion

1.1. The world before creation

Egyptian texts frequently refer to the gods and events involved in creating the world. There are many different explanations for the creation, and most of them were associated with the worship of a particular god in one of the major cities of ancient Egypt. Egyptologists believed that these accounts represented competing theologies with each other and, to a certain extent, this is true. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to recognize that the various accounts of creation were less confused than the different aspects of a single, uniform account of how the world was created. onfusi dei diversi aspetti di un singolo e uniforme racconto su come il mondo fu creato.

rk nTr, rk rark nTrw, the time of the gods. This reflects the Egyptian concept that the creation was the work of both one creator and other gods: it was a joint effort of all the forces and elements of the universe.

nw(y), the aqueous medium. it(i) nTrw, father of the gods, in recognition of his priority.

Even if no one ever saw this universal ocean, its characteristics could be imagined in contrast to the created world.

It was water (nwy(n(i)n(y), (HHw(kkw( imn( tnm).

Like the waters themselves, these qualities were considered divine by right, male deities because such are their names. Some of them are mentioned in the very first religious texts dating back to the end of the Old Kingdom. Since the waters were an integral part of the creation, the qualities of the waters could also be considered as creator gods.

In early Intermediate and Middle Kingdom texts, we meet four of these entities in this role:

wateriness (nwy)

Infinity (HHw)

Darkness (kkw)

Confusion (tnm).

Since the Egyptians associated birth with creation, male qualities had female counterparts. From the Late Period, the group was made up of four couples, usually:

Nu (o Nun) e Naunet, representing aqueousness and inertia (niny)

Huh e Hauhet, infinity

Kuk e Kauket, the darkness.

Amun e Amaunet, the occult.

xmnyw, the Ogdoade (a Greek word meaning group of eightxmnw, survived in the modern Arabic name el-Ashmunên.

The myths that focus on the role of the Ogdoade in creation are known as the Hermopolitan system. Most of what we know of this theology comes from texts from the Ptolemaic Period.

In older texts the gods were simply mentioned by their name. However, although antecedent reports of the Hermopolitan system are lacking, it is probable that the theology encountered in the Ptolemaic texts already existed in the Old Kingdom, since the name xmnw, City of Eight, given the 5th Dynasty.

In one of the later texts, the Ogdoade is described as father and mother of the solar disk who came to his presence on the high hill from which the solar lotus arose. This refers to one of the most ancient Egyptian images of creation: a hillock that emerged as the first dry land when the primordial waters retreated. We try to see in this image the thought of the first Egyptian farmers who observed the hills of land emerging from the withdrawal of the waters of the annual flood. Just as the flooding of the Nile left the land fertile and ready to grow new plants, so too universal waters produced new life on the primordial hill, in the form of a lotus plant from whose flower the sun emerged on the world for the first time to give light after dark.

(nfr-tm). The same primordial hill, honored as the first place (tA-Tnn(y), lett. land that becomes distinct ). Many temples Egyptians had in their sanctuary a hillock of earth that not only commemorated the primordial hillock, but was also intended as a primordial hillock. Like the creation tales themselves, these hillocks did not compete with each other in recognition of the primordial hill, but were seen as alternative, complementary realizations of the first place.

The image of the primordial hill is not only preserved in the texts of creation, but also in hieroglyphics. The word appear , where the image is clearer and more expressive.

1.2. The Gods

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who is supposed to have visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, describes the Egyptians as more religious than any other human race. Most of us have the same impression. Apart from the tombs, the most vivid and immanent manifestation of Egyptian architecture is represented by temples; Egyptian art is dominated by the figures of the gods; the names of many Egyptians honor the gods; and it is difficult to find an Egyptian text that does not mention one or more deities.

Herodotus’ assertion that the Egyptians were religious to excess, however, reflects a particular western notion of religion which (starting with the Greeks) has distinct beliefs for the various spheres of human existence, such as government, social behavior, research intellectual and science.

In ancient Egypt there was no such distinction. What we call the Egyptian religion is nothing but the way the ancient Egyptians understand their world and relate to it. In Egyptian writing there is no vocabulary translatable with religion, nor with faith or devotion. However, there are a series of terms to designate the offering and all the objects and acts connected to it, or the clergy. The word adoration, as an expression of man-divinity relationship, appears in many forms; the prayer is then expressed in various ways without being distinguished from praise, a similar word as resulted from the shape of the sign.

In ancient Egypt there was no such distinction. From this we deduce that religion in Egypt had a very different structure from that which had become familiar to us with Christian examples. For the predominance of the cult, the Egyptian one is characterized by elements such as the offering and the priest, thus falling within the context of the ancient pagan religions to which the revealed religions are opposed, such as the Christian, the Jewish and the Islamic with the their God who speaks and orders, and with the relative sacred texts of paramount importance.

Conceptually undefined, in the Egyptian religion these phenomena are inconspicuous or, as in the case of prayer, they are closely connected with the ritual formulas.

The Egyptian cult, however, did not derive from duties towards the divinity imposed by the statesman: it reveals, with its available means, the nature and works of the divinity also to each individual of the community. Ethical problems lead the Egyptian towards the divine lord of justice who can grant or deny the grace of knowledge and judge. Theological thought itself meets the needs of the devotee eager to be enveloped by the maximum power of the god.

The ancient Egyptians faced our own physical universe and, like us, tried to understand it and behave in relation to it. But, without the benefit of our centuries-old experience, they had to seek an explanation of natural phenomena and the means to behave accordingly.

Where we see impersonal elements and forces acting in the world, the Egyptians saw the will and actions of beings greater than themselves: the gods. For example, not knowing the scientific origin of a disease, they could only imagine that some evil force was in it. Although they could, and did, develop practical remedies for fighting ailments, they believed that it was necessary in the first place to ward off or pacify the force that had caused the disease. The Egyptian medical texts therefore contain not only detailed descriptions of physical diseases and pharmaceutical prescriptions, but also magic formulas to be used to combat evil forces. What we distinguish between the science of medicine and the religion of magic was the same for the Egyptians.

The gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt are neither more nor less than the elements and forces of the universe. The gods did not control these phenomena, like the Greek god Zeus with lightning: they were the elements and forces of the world. We express this peculiarity by saying that the gods were immanent in the phenomena of nature. For example, the wind was the god Shu: when an Egyptian felt the wind on his face, he perceived that Shu touched him. As there are hundreds of elements and forces in nature, so there were hundreds of Egyptian gods: the most important, logically, were the major natural phenomena. They included Atum, the original source of all substances, and its offspring: Geb and Nut, the earth and the sky; Shu, the atmosphere; Ra, the sun; Osiris, the male generating power; Isis, the female principle of motherhood.

What we consider human behavior to be abstract principles, for the Nilotic were also gods and goddesses: for example, order and harmony (Maat), disorder and chaos (Seth), creation (Ptah), reason (Thoth), anger (Sekhmet), love (Hathor). The power of royalty was also a god (Horus), personified not only by the sun as the dominant force of nature, but also in the person of Pharaoh as the ruling force over human society. Our distinction between religion and government would have been incomprehensible to an ancient Egyptian, for whom royalty was a divine force.

As much as the ancient Egyptians could, and did, rebel against kings or even assassinate them, they never replaced the pharaonic system with another method of government: it would have been like replacing the sun with something else.

The Egyptians saw the will and behaviors of their divinities in the action of the phenomena of everyday life: Ra, in the daily return of light and heat; Osiris and Isis, in the miracle of birth; Maat