A. H. Sayce

The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia


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the robe of fire in which it should be clothed, its brightness is dimmed, and its purity is sullied. The death of the body releases it from its prison-house; it once more soars to heaven and becomes a spirit (δαίμων), while the soul is carried to the hall of judgment, there to be awarded punishment [pg 063] or happiness in accordance with its deserts.30 The Khu, in other words, is a spark of that divine intelligence which pervades the world and to which it must return; the Ba is the individual soul which has to answer after death for the deeds committed in the body.

      The plover was the bird usually chosen to represent the Ba, but at times the place of the plover is taken by the hawk, the symbol of Horus and the solar gods. That the soul should have been likened to a bird is natural, and we meet with the same or similar symbolism among other peoples. Like the bird, it flew between earth and heaven, untrammelled by the body to which it had once been joined. From time to time it visited its mummy; at other times it dwelt with the gods above. Now and again, so the inscriptions tell us, it alighted on the boughs of the garden it had made for itself in life, cooling itself under the sycamores and eating their fruits. For the Ba was no more immaterial than the Ka; it, too, needed meat and drink for its sustenance, and looked to its relatives and descendants to furnish them.

      But, as Professor Maspero31 has pointed out, there was a very real and fundamental difference between the idea of the Ka or double, and that of the Ba or soul. The Ka was originally nourished on the actual offerings that were placed in the tomb of the dead man; it passed into it through the false door and consumed the food that it found there. But the soul had ascended to the gods in heaven; it lived in the light of day, not in the darkness of the tomb; and it is doubtful if it was ever supposed to return there. To the gods accordingly was committed the care of the Ba, and of seeing that it was properly provided for. By the power of prayer and [pg 064] magical incantation, the various articles of food, or, more strictly speaking, their doubles, were identified with the gods, and communicated by the gods to the soul. Long before the days when the Pyramid texts had been compiled, this theory of the nourishment of the soul was applied also to the nourishment of the Ka, and the older belief in the material eating and drinking of the Ka had passed away. All that remained of it was the habitual offering of the food to the dead, a custom which still lingers among the fellahin of Egypt, both Moslem and Copt.

      Besides the double and the two souls, there was yet another immortal element in the human frame. This was the heart, the seat both of the feelings and of the mind. But it was not the material heart, but its immaterial double, which passed after death into the other world. The material heart was carefully removed from the mummy, and with the rest of the intestines was usually cast into the Nile. Porphyry32 tells us that in his time, when the bodies of the wealthier classes were embalmed, the Egyptians “take out the stomach and put it into a coffer, and, holding the coffer to the sun, protest, one of the embalmers making a speech on behalf of the dead. This speech, which Euphantos translated from his native language, is as follows: ‘O Lord the Sun, and all ye gods who give life to man, receive me and make me a companion of the eternal gods. For the gods, whom my parents made known to me, as long as I have lived in this world I have continued to reverence, and those who gave birth to my body I have ever honoured. And as for other men, I have neither slain any, nor defrauded any of anything entrusted to me, nor committed any other wicked act; but if by chance I have committed any sin in my life, [pg 065] by either eating or drinking what was forbidden, not of myself did I sin, but owing to these members,’—at the same time showing the coffer in which the stomach was. And having said this, he throws it into the river, and embalms the rest of the body as being pure. Thus they thought that they needed to excuse themselves to God for what they had eaten and drunken, and therefore so reproach the stomach.”33

      Now and then, however, the heart and intestines were replaced in the mummy, but under the protection of wax images of the four genii of the dead—the four Khu of the Book of the Dead. More often they were put into four vases of alabaster or some other material, which were buried with the dead.34 Though the latter practice was not very common, probably on account of its expense, it must go back to the very beginnings of Egyptian history. The hieroglyphic symbol of the heart is just one of these vases, and one of the two names applied to the heart was ḥati, “that which belongs to the vase.” After ages even endeavoured to draw a distinction between ab “the heart” proper, and ḥati “the heart-sack.”35

      From the time of the Twelfth Dynasty36 onwards, the place of the material heart in the mummy was taken by an amulet, through the influence of which, it was supposed, the corpse would be secured against all the dangers and inconveniences attending the loss of its [pg 066] heart until the day of resurrection. The amulet was in the form of a beetle or scarab, the emblem of “becoming” or transformation, and on the under side of it there was often inscribed the 30th chapter of the Book of the Dead, to the words of which were ascribed a magical effect. The chapter reads as follows: “O heart (ab) of my mother, O heart (ḥati) of my transformations! Let there be no stoppage to me as regards evidence (before the judges of the dead), no hindrance to me on the part of the Powers, no repulse of me in the presence of the guardian of the scales! Thou art my Ka in my body, the god Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come thou to the good place to which we are going. Let not our name be overthrown by the lords of Hades who cause men to stand upright! Good unto us, yea good is it to hear that the heart is large (and heavy) when the words (of life) are weighed!37 Let no lies be uttered against me before God. How great art thou!”

      Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the “Ka” of it, which is addressed in the words just quoted, had made its way through the region of the other world, until it finally reached the place known as “the Abode of Hearts.” Here in the judgment-hall of Osiris it met the dead man to whom it had formerly belonged, and here, too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts he had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good thoughts and words of which he had been the author. For the heart, though the organ through which his thoughts and words had acted, was not the cause of them; in its nature it was essentially pure and divine, and it had been an unwilling witness of the sins it had been forced to know. Eventually it was weighed in the balance against the image of Truth, and only if the [pg 067] scales turned in favour of the dead man could it rejoin its former body and live with it for ever in the islands of the Blest.

      The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the religious conceptions which gathered round the name of Osiris, like the Paradise which the risen mummy looked forward to enjoy. It was only after the worship of Osiris had become universal throughout Egypt, and the older or local ideas of the future life had been accommodated to them, that it was possible for an Egyptian to speak of meeting his disembodied heart, or of the testimony it could give for or against him before the judges of the dead. The fact that the use of the scarab does not seem to extend further back than the age of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, may imply that it was only then that the Osirian beliefs were officially fitted on to earlier forms of faith. However this may be, the worship of Osiris and the beliefs attaching to it must be left to another lecture, and for the present we must pass on to the mummy itself, the last part of man which it was hoped would be immortal.

      The mummy or Sâḥu has to be carefully distinguished from the Khat or natural body. The latter was a mere dead shell, seen by the soul but not affording a resting-place for it. The mummy, on the other hand, contained within itself the seeds of growth and resurrection. It could be visited by the soul and inspired by it for a few moments with life, and the Egyptian looked forward to a time when it would once more be reunited with both its heart and its soul, and so rise again from the dead.

      It is impossible to say how far back in the history of the Egyptian religion this belief in the immortality of the mummy may go. It can hardly have originated in the same circle of ideas as the doctrine of the Ka, though the doctrine of the Ka could easily be reconciled [pg 068] with it. On the one hand, it seems connected, as we shall see, with the cult of Osiris; but, on the other hand, there are no traces of mummification in the prehistoric graves, and it is doubtful whether there are any in the royal tombs of Negada and Abydos which belong to the age of the First and Second Dynasties. At all events, the scarab, which accompanied embalmment, first appears at a much later date, and perhaps had a Memphite origin. There are, however, indications that the process of embalming first arose among the pre-Menic rulers of Nekhen, in the neighbourhood of El-Kab. The soil of El-Kab literally effloresces