Chapter X
We now approach a phase of the general theme, the
correction of popular misconception about which will be attended with the most
momentous consequences for the whole of world religion. Only one or two other
items of our revision of current belief will prove to be of more sensational
interest. The matter that promises so largely is the Egyptian mummy and the
practice of mummification. When the true signification of this marvelous custom
of a sage race begins to dawn in clear light, it will assuredly seem as if
modern appreciation of a great deposit of ancient knowledge could hardly have
suffered so utter a rout, so total a wreckage.
General opinion, expressed and shared by the most learned
of the Egyptologists, holds that the Egyptians mummified their dead for the
reason that, believing in reincarnation or forms of transmigration, they desired
the physical body to be preserved intact for the reoccupancy of the Ego or soul
upon its return to earth. Common belief asserts that they hoped by this
provision to make reincarnation easier for the returning soul, inasmuch as he
would find his former body ready for him, and would not have to build a new one
or enter the body of some animal. The quantity of “explanation” of this sort
that one reads in the works of reputed scholars is indeed enough to drive any
astute reasoner ad nauseam. Nothing betrays the shallow insufficiency of our
knowledge so flagrantly as does this matter.
It would seem as if it should be unnecessary to issue a
denial of the correctness of the popular theories just indicated. The truth of
the matter should be evident to anyone who can frame a syllogism. One fact alone
should have been sufficient to forestall the arrant blunder in misconceiving the
mummification motive. An act performed for the alleged purpose of preservation
began with a gross mutilation! The viscera, the whole of the organs of the chest
and abdominal cavity
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were first removed, and the entrails placed in the
Canopic jars at the four corners of the coffin. One does not mutilate that which
one wishes to preserve. If this be not conclusive, let us add that at times both
the head and the feet were cut off! Could the returning soul profitably use this
old shriveled, leathery and mutilated shell as its next living tenement? Our
idea has been a tacit insult to Egyptian intelligence. Surely we might have
credited them from the start with being no such fools. Because we believed,
under the lashing of medieval theologians, that Christ rose in his flesh and
that we should do likewise at the last trump, we assumed that the Egyptians
indulged their credulity in the same weird fashion. We are yet as children
essaying to frame an explanation of the most profoundly symbolic act of the most
illumined race of history.
It is the declaration drawn from our studies and
supported by the evidence to be submitted, that the practice of embalmment was
nothing more than a mighty rite of symbolism! One immediate item of confirmation
is the fact that it was performed for only a relatively few of Egypt’s
deceased, notably kings and functionaries. It was costly, required a hundred
days, and so was indulged in only in the case of those who could afford such an
elaborate funeral ritual. If the motive for mummification had been one arising
out of universal philosophy or accepted religious theory, it would have been
practiced generally, with rich and poor alike. Not all Catholic Christians can
afford elaborate masses. No enlightened nation would countenance for centuries a
practice based on a theory which made the difference in worldly wealth critical
for the whole future destiny of the great mass of its inhabitants. If the hope
of future evolutionary welfare depended on this performance with the cadaver,
then Egypt was guilty of a felonious neglect of her general population in favor
of her overlords. And we know that early nations were, as we like to say,
superstitious in the extreme about the punctilious observance of funeral rites.
Virgil tells of the dread of the heroes of having their dead bodies lie unburied
on the sand (inhumatus arena). Egypt could not have given the benefit of a vital
ceremony to only a limited class.
The effort is here made for the first time in our day to
set forth the inner spiritual significance of this great rite. Our development
of the obsolete meaning of “death” in primal theology has led us right up
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to the threshold of the denouement. One further step will
take us into the heart of the age-old mystery.
In the esoteric doctrine which regarded the present life
as death, and the living body as the soul’s tomb, we have the necessary
background for adequate elucidation of the matter. The body was mummified to
serve as a powerful moving symbol of the death of the soul in matter, and the
various features of the meaning of this mundane life! Nothing more. But this far
transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic virtue any theoretic
dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people since the days of
Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral of human life
in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply philosophical people
the lifeless body became at once the most impressive symbol of the entire import
of life itself. The preserved corpse became the mute but grandiloquent reminder
of life and death, mortality and immortality, in one mighty emblem.
The custom was an attempt to utilize the cadaver as the
central object in a ritual designed to incorporate the essential features of
their entire philosophy of life. The import of a ceremony based on the
ostensible preservation of a thing which obviously could not be preserved for
living purposes, was the enforcement upon all minds of the truth that the mortal
part of man could be immortalized! Concomitant with this, the ritual bore the
message that the divine part of man, the immortal soul, though in this body it
has gone to its “death,” is immortal still. It will defy death and
corruption, as will the mummy.
The mummy was the cardinal object in a grandiose ritual
precisely because it was a dead thing! It prefigured the nature of this life,
which was, philosophically, death. The dead thing thus became the emblem of
immortal life itself. The “dead” shall live forever. The mummy symboled life
as death, and death as the gate to immortal life. And the preservation or
immortalizing of the dead mortal by the infusion of spiritous oils, balsams,
ichors, was to emblem the raising of this mortal to immortality through the
adoption by the lower man of the spirit of eternal life from the injected Christ
nature. By the infusion of the mind of Christ into the dead Adamic nature, born
to sin, it could be raised to eternal life out of the realm of decay. To
associate ritualistically the idea of undying existence with the defunct relic
was to impress the lesson of the burial in matter of that divine fragment whose
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attribute is “life and everlastingness.” Under the
garb and swathings of death, its mission was to bring life and immortality to
light.
The embalming was not the enactment of a vague spiritual
ideal. Every detail of the process, as Budge testified, was a typical
performance with specific relevance. The injection of preservatives was designed
to do for the corpse symbolically what the putting on of the Christ spirit would
do for “the body of this death.”
An elaborate ritual was built up about the mummy. There
were the mutilations and exsections, symbolizing the dismemberment or
fragmentation of the divine intellect when cast into the distracting turmoil of
sense life. The facial mask carried the implication of the “false” nature of
the physical man, the personality, which was the mask (Latin: persona, a mask)
the soul donned over its true self. The bound legs and arms symboled the
limitation and motionlessness which matter ever imposes upon active spirit. The
four Canopic jars at the corners of the coffin stood for the physical world,
which is ever four-square as the base that upholds all higher life. The mummy
case itself signified the body or earth, the physical house and habitat of the
soul. The coffin lid served as the table for the mortuary meal, or the partaking
of the “bread of Seb” or food of earth. The bandages were emblematic of the
material vestures or bodies which enwrapped the soul, for one coming to earth it
was “all meanly wrapped in swaddling clothes,” the “coats of skin” that
God gave to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Then there was the light, signifying of
course the presence of the glowing power of deity within the fleshly house. When
darkness was over the land of Egypt, “the Israelites had light in their
dwellings.” More meaningful still was the image of the hawk, or the
hawk-headed Horus, which hovered over the mummy; for this was the figure of the
resurrection, the soul as a bird leaving the body to return to the upper air of
heaven. The ankh-cross, symbol of life when spirit and matter are tied together,
the ankham-flower of immortality, the Tat cross, symbol of eternal stability,
the level of Amentu, symbol of the balance of nature’s forces, the scarab,
symbol of the resurrection, the vulture, the greenstone tablet of resin, all
shadowed in one way or another the immortality of the spiritual principle lodged
within the mortal vehicle. The spices and balsams were preservatives, sweet of
savor. And the fluids that did so marvelously work their miracle of preservation
upon the substance of decay, were as “the Amrit juice of immortality.” In
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many countries a liquor called Soma (the Greek word,
incidentally, for the “spiritual” body) was considered to bestow
immortality. A tribal chant runs, in one verse:
“We’ve quaffed the soma bright
And are immortal grown
We’ve entered into light
And all the gods have known.”
The lower man’s immediate relation to his soul permits
him to drink of that immortalizing nectar, and as it was always Eve, or Hathor,
or Ishtar, a goddess, a woman, who offers to man the tempting cup, the inference
is that mundane experience with matter, the mother of life, is the brimming
chalice for our deification.
The mummy thus stood for the soul buried in body, or
sometimes perhaps for the body itself. By its descent the soul had become, as it
were, the mummy. It became the Manes, or shade of a dead person, in the
depiction.
Massey comes very close in one place to sensing that the
mummy must be given a spiritual significance:
“Hence the chapter of ‘introducing the mummy into the
Tuat [underworld] on the day of burial’ deals not with the earthly mummy, but
the mummy of the dramatic mysteries as a figure of the living personality.”1
This is the truth; but having seen the mummy in its true
light for a moment, Massey still adheres to his precarious endeavor to read
“the mummy in Amenta” into the life after (bodily) death, instead of
allocating it to its relationship to earth, where only the living personality
was in function. His phrase—“the mummy of the dramatic mysteries”—to all
intents and purposes concedes the legitimacy of our thesis as to the mummy’s
true function.
But this scholar’s study is so splendid in the main
that we will be enlightened by looking at portions of his material:
“Amenta as the place of graves is frequently indicated
in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the description of the great typical
burial-place in the valley of Hamon-Gog. This was in the Egypt described in the
Book of Revelation as the city of dead carcasses, where also their Lord was
crucified as Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. Amenta had been converted into a
cemetery by the death and burial of the solar god, who was represented as the
mummy in
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the lower Egypt of the nether earth. The Manes were
likewise imaged as mummies in their coffins. They also rose again in the
mummy-likeness of their Lord, and went up out of Egypt in the constellation of
the Mummy (Sahu-Orion), or in the coffin of Osiris that was imaged in the Great
Bear.”2
Can we miss the plain evidence here presented? The Manes
were imaged as mummies in their coffins! Amenta (this earth) converted into a
cemetery by the advent of the gods, our souls! We, the living on earth, figured
unmistakably as mummies in our sarcophagi! Hence the grave and tomb of all
ancient theology is the living physical body of man!
There will be profit in considering another Massey
statement, since it reveals how he stumbled and fell at the very door of the
truth:
“There is no possibility of the Manes coming back to
earth for a new body or for a re-entry into the old mummy. As the Manes says,
‘his soul is not bound to his old body at the gates of Amenta’” (Chs. 26,
6).3
That the soul would not re-enter the old mummy is a vital
point of truth, and Massey deserves all credit for discerning it. But that it
would not return to enter a new body flies in the face of all ancient and
universal belief in reincarnation. This is just the point of issue to be
clarified. The soul returns from life to life to be re-clothed in new garments,
since it assuredly does not take up life again in the mutilated and decomposed
old hulk. The Manes positively states that he is not bound to the old body; but
a score of times he says he will construct, or reappear in, a glorious new
vesture. This of course is the spiritual body of the resurrection. But it is not
built up in one brief life on earth. It is the product of many successive lives,
each in a new physical body. There is no room for confusion or dispute on this
matter.
Ptah, Atum and finally Osiris are described at different
stages as the solar god in mummified form in Amenta.
“He was the buried life on earth, and hence the god in
matter, imaged in the likeness of the mummy. . . . Such was the physical basis
of the mythos of the mystery that is spiritual in the eschatology.”4
And we find desirable explicitness in the following
passages:
“In the Osirian mythos, when the sun-god enters the
underworld, it is as a mummy or ‘coffined one’ upon his way to the great
resting place.”
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“The mummy-Osiris in Amenta is the figure of the
sleeping deity. He is the god inert in matter, the sleeping or resting
divinity.”5
Another most pertinent corroboration of our thesis that
the mummy was but a ritualistic figure for the human soul “dead” in the
body, is found in the following from Massey:6
“And just as Ra, the holy spirit, descends in Tattu on
the mummy Osiris, and as Horus places his hands behind Osiris in the
resurrection, so Iu7 comes to his body, the mummy in Amenta. Those who tow Ra
along say, ‘The god comes to his body; the god is towed along toward his
mummy.’ (Records, Vol. X, p. 132.) The sun-god, whether as Atum-Iu (Aiu or Aai)
or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven. Atum or Osiris, as the
sun in Amenta, is the mummy buried down in Khebt,8 or lower Egypt.”9
These passages conclusively indicate that the mummy was
the type of the god in the body.
Conquest of the carnal nature and escape from it is in
another place called the “overthrowal of your coffins.” (Book of Hades,
Fifth Division, Legend D.) Again, the earth is denominated “the coffin of
Osiris, the coffin of Amenta.”
In his descent to open the tombs for the release of the
sleeping captives Horus says: “I am come as the mummified one,” that is, in
fleshly embodiment. It should be noted that this explicit statement of the god
himself that he comes in the character of the mummy, taken with his other
assurances that he comes to “those in their coffins,” must be admitted to
certify the truth of our contention throughout—that it is the god who comes to
be buried in the matter of a lower kingdom, from which burial both he and the
lower entity will be raised again to higher estate. When the sun-god entered
“the ark of earth, which is called his coffin or sarcophagus,” he was buried
in obscurity and shorn of his power. In a sculptured sarcophagus of the fourth
century the three Magi are offering gifts to the divine infant, a mummied child!
Here the mummy is a figure of the divine nature circumscribed tightly by the
garment of flesh. Need we remind the student that numberless images of the
mummied Child-Jesus were found in Christian catacombs, tombs and chapels in the
early centuries? At first view the linkage of the idea of death as suggested by
the mummy, with the infant figure, rather than with the more appropriate stage
of senility,
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seems an ineptitude. In early Christian and pre-Christian
iconography Jesus was indeed often figured as an aged one, about to enter the
grave. It only requires that we move the symbolic hint one short step forward to
see the pertinence of the mummified child, called by the Egyptians the Khart.
For the buried god was to have his rebirth in matter and to begin life anew as
an infant. The deceased father god was to metamorphose into the new form of
himself as his own child, as God the Son. While yet a baby-god, beginning his
new career, he was cramped by the limitations of matter and the undeveloped
stage of his own powers. He was the new god, who had not yet broken his bonds or
risen from the limitations of his new incarnate situation.
It is evident that Hebraic development of archaic
typology did not carry the figure of the mummy into Biblical literature. Yet a
cognate symbolism is expressed through the word “flesh” mainly. Where the
Kamite Ritual says: “My dead body shall not rot in the grave,” the Hebrew
Psalmist writes: “My flesh shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my
soul to Sheol;10 neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.”
But occasionally an original Egyptian term has been
retained in Hebrew transcription. Such a term is Sekhem, one of the names of the
burial-place of the Osiris-mummy in the Ritual. The deceased is buried as a
mummy in Sekhem. Also the well of Jacob near Sechem answers to the well of
Osiris at Abydos, and the oak or terebinth in Sechem to the tree of life in the
Pool of Persea. The fields of Sechem correspond to the Sekhet-Hetep or fields of
peace and plenty in the Kamite original.
Also the incident of Joseph carrying Jacob’s coffin
matches Horus’ carrying the Osiris-mummy.
The word mummy is perhaps derived from the Egyptian mum,
to “initiate into the mysteries.” This origin would suggest that the
elaborate procedure of mummification was inaugurated to typify the whole broad
meaning of the incarnation, as a submerging of high spirit in the dense state of
mortal matter. For such a downward sweep through the world of material inertia
was, as we shall see, the only, if fateful, path leading to the “initiation”
of the spirits into the higher mysteries that lurk in the depths of life. The
Sphinx riddle of life can be solved only by a living experience in all worlds
from the lowest to the highest. Life’s own justification of its processes is
the raison d’être of our mum-
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mification in gross earthly bodies, and the great Nilitic
rite was designed to express nothing more.
Attention must now be given to the Egyptian word which
was used to designate the mummy. It was usually marked upon the coffin lid. It
may offer a connection of great potential fruitfulness for knowledge. It
consisted of the consonants K R S with a suffix T, giving K R S T. The voweling
is indeterminate, as it always was in ancient writing. Scholars have introduced
an A before the R and another after it, making the word K A R A S T as generally
written. There is probably no authoritative warrant for this spelling, but there
has ever been a stout resistance to all suggestions that the alternative vowels,
E, I, O or U be used in the form. Yet scholarship would be hard put to
substantiate any objection to the spellings Karist, Karest, Kerast, Kerist or
Krist. Indeed, as the root is very likely a cognate form with the Greek kreas,
flesh, there would be more warrant for writing it Krast, Krest or Krist than the
usual Karast. If we know how easily a “Kr” consonant metamorphoses into the
Greek Chr, we can not dismiss the suggested closeness of the word to the Greek
Chrestos or Christos as an absurd improbability. This may indeed be the Kamite
origin of our name Christ, whatever be the outcry against such a conclusion.
There are presented some other extremely interesting
possibilities in this etymological situation, for by the use of another vowel we
stand very close to the Latin crux, cross, the Middle English cros (cross) and
our own word crust. For indeed the ground meaning of the entire incarnation
story might well be expressed in the grouping of these very terms: The Christ on
the cross is the encrusting of the divinity with flesh (Greek kreas). Not far
away also is our word crystal, which contains the root meaning of any process of
incrustation, or the precipitation of spirit energies into forms of
solidification around an actuating nucleus of force. The large idea behind all
these forms that stand so closely related in spelling is just that of spirit
crystallizing and forming a crust about a spiritual node of life. And then the
Greek word chruseos, golden, points to the end of the process to be consummated
by the spirit in matter, when, metaphorically speaking, all baser forms of the
encrusted covering or mummy will be transmuted by the divinity’s glowing fire
into the purest spiritual “gold.” The “crystal sea” that is to receive
all back into its depths links the two ends of the chemicalization, first
downward, then upward, together in one
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coherence. Our kreas or mummy case, that becomes but the
crust of our life here on the cross of flesh, kreas, will be translated into
crystals of pure gold, chrysos, by undergoing the chrysalis transformation into
full deification. Still within the circle of these meanings we have chrism,
cruse (of ointment), chrisom, charism, an anointing oil (our cream—French
cresme, with the “s” dropped out, being a derivative of this stem), and
finally within the glow of its influence comes the bright outline of the meaning
of the great sacrament of the Eucharist. If all this etymological flourish
appears to be highly fanciful, let the reader be assured that not a single term
of the interwoven ideas in this chain is missing from the ancient symbolism. If
it is a delightful play of fancy, its poetic originators were the sages of old.
When, then, Osiris is called the Karast-mummy, the
meaning is doubtless that of spirit “fleshed” or incarnate. The flesh was
the crust crystallized about the soul and as such became not only the cross, but
the cruet or cruse containing the golden liquor of life. The partaking of it was
our Eucharist, and our final transfiguration will be the putting on of the
golden hues of immortality, symboled by the insect chrysalis operation.11 “O
thou who risest out of the golden” is an address to the soul in the Ritual.
Finally, then, we have Massey breaking through the
philological defenses thrown up by the alarmed orthodox scholars and openly
connecting the Egyptian Karast with the Greek Christos or Christ. He announces
the derivation dogmatically:
“Say what you will or believe what you may, there is no
other origin for Christ the Anointed than for Horus the karast or anointed son
of God the Father. . . . Finally, then, the mystery of the mummy is the mystery
of Christ. As Christian it is allowed to be forever inexplicable. As Osirian the
mystery can be explained. It is one of the mysteries of Amenta, with a more
primitive origin in the rites of Totemism.”12
He adds that Osiris as the Karast-mummy was the
prototypal Corpus Christi. As Osiris-Sekari he was the coffined one. Aseris, or
the Osiris, represented the god in the anguish of his burial in the cerements of
the mortal body, whose cries and ejaculations are to be heard ascending from
Amenta in many a page of the Ritual, or from Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures.
Massey states what has not been readily acceptable to Christian apologists
hitherto when he writes:
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“Indeed the total paraphernalia of the Christian
mysteries had been made use of in Egyptian temples . . . Osiris in the
monstrance should of itself suffice to show that the Egyptian Karast is the
original Christ, and that the Egyptian mysteries were continued by the Gnostics
and Christianized in Rome.”13
Immediately connected with the Christos is the term
Messiah, since both terms, the one Greek, the other Egypto-Hebraic, mean “the
anointed.” The word Messiah is traced to the Egyptian mes or mas, to steep, to
anoint, as also to be born. Messu was the Egyptian word for “the anointed”
initiate in the Mystery rites. The “-iah” was a quite significant suffix
added by the Hebrews, meaning, like the ubiquitous suffix “el,” deity or
God. As “-iah” or “-jah,” it occurs in many Hebrew sacred names,
sometimes as a prefix, as in Jahweh, but mostly as a suffix, as in Elijah,
Halleluiah, Messiah, Zechariah, Abijah, Nehemiah, Obediah, Isaiah, Hezekiah and
a long list more. The name Messiah then denotes the “divinely anointed” one
or the “born (reborn) deity.” When the first or natural man was anointed
with the chrism of Christly grace, he was reborn as the Christos.
An item of great importance in this ritual was its
performance always previous to the burial. It was a rite preparatory to the
interment. Said Jesus himself of Mary: “In that she poured this ointment upon
my body, she did it to prepare me for my burial” (Matt. 26:12). She was
symbolically enacting the Mystery rite of the chrism, and her performance quite
definitely matched the previous practices of the Egyptians, from whom it was
doubtless derived. But what does such an act denote in the larger interpretation
here formulated? If the burial was the descent of the gods into bodily forms,
then the anointing must have been enacted immediately antecedent to it or in
direct conjunction with it. The etymology of the word sheds much light upon this
whole confused matter. The “oint” portion of it is of course the French
softening of the Latin “unct” stem; and this, whether philologists have yet
discovered the connection or not, is derived from that mighty symbol of mingled
divinity and humanity of ancient Egypt—the A N K H cross. The word Ankh,
meaning love, life and tie, or life as the result of tying together by
attraction or love the two nodes of life’s polarity, spirit and matter,
suggests always and fundamentally the incarnation. For this is the
“ankh-ing” of the two poles of being everywhere basic to life. The
“unction” of the sacrament is really just the “junction” of
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the two life energies, with the “j” left off the
word. Therefore the “anointing” is the pouring of the “oil of gladness,”
the spiritual nature, upon the mortal nature of living man. The “unguents”
of the mummification were the types of the shining higher infusion, and they
prepared the soul for, or were integrally a part of, its burial in the grave of
mortality. And the Messiah was then crucified in the flesh. On this point Massey
speaks clearly:
“In preparation of Osiris for his burial, the ointment
or unguents were compounded and applied by Neith. It was these that were to
preserve the mummy from decay and dissolution.”14
Neith applies the preservatives in Egypt; Mary in the
Gospels. And as the feminine figures emblem matter, we must take the ritual as
dramatizing the anointing of divinity with materiality, rather than just the
anointing of the physical man with divinity. The same situation is found in the
baptism allegory, where the lower man, John the Baptist, anoints with his
element, water, the very deity, Christ, himself. In that close conjunction and
interrelation of the two natures which the great Ankh symbol connotes, each
nature “anoints” the other, and it matters little for final outcomes of
meaning which is considered. All ancient symbols denoting the two elements in
life are not only dual in themselves, but may generally be interchanged without
damage to the ground signification. This strange—and practically
unknown—aspect of the science of typology merits a full chapter in itself; but
perhaps it will be enough to point out its application in specific situations
where it will clarify the exegesis. Since the soul’s burial in body is the
cause and occasion of the release of its own higher potencies, its being
anointed or baptized by matter (or “water”) is thus both its active and its
passive anointing. Let it be remembered, it both converts matter and is
converted by matter. This is ever the basic formula. The anointing thus becomes
kindred with the embalming. The chrismatic ceremony was the “ankh-ing” or
tying together of soul and flesh for fuller outflow, giving in the outcome the
Karast or Christ. In man the angel and the animal-human anoint each other.
As the climactic step in a series of benefits which Horus,
the deliverer and reconstituter of his father Osiris, enumerates in an address
to the latter, he likens the anointing to the gift of grace and spiritual
unction:
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“I have strengthened thine existence upon earth. I have
given thee thy soul, thy strength, thy power. I have given thee thy victory. I
have anointed thee with offerings of holy oil.”15
The whole procedure of incarnation from its inception to
the Prodigal’s return, is to be seen as an anointing, first of spirit with
flesh, then of flesh with spirit. Massey says that anointing was the mode of
showing the glory of the Father in the person of his Son, and that Horus was
anointed when he transformed from Horus the mortal to Horus the divine man.
The usual material for anointing was oil, but at least
one other comes in as symbol. We are familiar with Jesus’ mixing his spittle
with a little earth to anoint the eyes of the blind man in the Gospels. A
Hawaiian legend also has it that the first man was created from red earth (the
meaning of “Adam”) mixed with the spittle of the gods, and the triadic god
then blew into his nose and bade him rise a living human being. Egyptian
ideography pictures that the primeval god Tum conceived within himself, then
spat, the spittle becoming the gods Shu and Tefnut, whose union as male and
female produced the world. Another Kamite construction holds that the Eye of Ra
(symbol of divine intelligence), being injured by the violent assault of Sut,
was restored when anointed with spittle by Thoth.
In many more legends the gods are said to have mixed
mortal clay with their blood, emblematic of their living power. The early
myth-makers were adept at variation of the symbols. Horus, representing the god
in man, says:
“He anointed my forehead as Lord of men, creating me as
chief of mortals. He placed me in a palace as a youth, not yet come forth from
my mother’s womb.”
This is a reference to the god’s burial in matter,
where life was a process of gestation for a new birth in spirit. The mortal man
has not yet resurrected, not yet come forth from mother nature’s womb! The
spirit entombed is like Joseph in “Egypt” and Daniel in “Babylon” before
they rose from out their “prisons” to become the rulers of the kingdom. We
are still to have our birth out of matter into spirit. Our incarnation is our
birth into body; our resurrection is to be our second birth, this time out of
body.
Isaiah (61: 1,2) emphasizes the anointing in a famous
verse:
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“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord
hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the poor. He hath sent me to bind
up the broken-hearted,16 to proclaim liberty to the captives. . . .”
The “poor,” it is to be recalled, are equivalent to
the Gentiles, the unregenerate natural man. They were the ones for whom the
message of the Messiah was intended. The announcement from heaven to earth that
a race of deities was about to descend to lift animal life into the kingdom of
reason and articulate speech was verily “the good tidings of great joy which
shall be to all people,” the best news ever wafted to the denizens of the
planet up to that period. “Thou hast anointed my head with oil, my cup runneth
over,” echoes the immortal Psalm (23). “Having had my flesh embalmed,”
says the Osirified deceased in the Ritual (Ch. 64), “my body does not
decay.” Hence flesh, inoculated with spirit, or the mummy embalmed, becomes
immortal. And the Word was made flesh! And flesh will be immortalized!
But the Egyptians had a correlative phrase with “the
Word made flesh.” It was “the Word made Truth.” The Logos or spirit made
flesh produced the first birth, the natural man, the first Adam. This was not
the true Word, for it was falsified by the admixture of the earthly, natural
element, by which it voiced the animal note. As the boy’s voice at the age of
manhood changes from a feminine to a masculine timbre, so the speech of the
mortal had to swing away from the tones of its mother nature and issue as the
voice of the spiritual Self. Figuratively at the human race’s age of twelve,
always the number marking our spiritual perfecting, the Christ within us has to
abandon the concerns of the maternal physical life and “be about his
Father’s business,”—the spiritual life. The race must turn from Mother
Nature to Father God at its spiritual puberty.
It is quite noteworthy in this connection that one of the
most eminent of modern psychologists, C. G. Jung, has divided human life into
two periods, which he calls the forenoon and afternoon of life, the boundary
line being placed at the age of thirty-five. He says that in the forenoon
mankind lives the life of “nature,” but turns in the “afternoon” to a
life of “culture.” So that we find even the span of mortal life epitomizing
the larger scheme, in that we begin the “day” of life by living under
nature, and turn in the afternoon to the concerns of the spirit and the mind.
“First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual,” St. Paul has
reminded us.
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The world took form upon the model of divine ideas, Plato
affirms. In us men a god is striving to stamp his lines of beauty and grace upon
the features of an animal! The God-word was fleshed so that it could preserve
and finally transfigure the mummy with its splendor. But—and let
ultra-idealists be advised!--spirit had to have plastic matter upon which to
imprint its form and comeliness, else it would have remained forever unknown.
The visible manifestation of latent wisdom, power and love could be achieved
only by the spirit’s encasement in a body. Matter, so derided by extreme
“spiritual” theory, is the womb in which alone divine conceptions can be
brought to birth. So that the fleshing of soul works the miracle of its own
anointing. Flesh is the way and the means by which man, the divine thought, is
christened with an ever fuller measure of the oil of beatification.
Carried some distance afield by certain involvements of
the mummy discussion, we return to that aspect of it suggested by the mythical
underworld. It has been already hinted that this nether world is our earth
itself. But readers may not be fully aware that this assertion is here made
directly in the face of all previous and present scholarship, and that it flouts
all scholastic opinion. So open a challenge to world scholarship must summon
additional proof to its support. The substantiation of the point is pivotal to
the entire interpretation here advanced. The case wins or loses on the
determination of this issue. Likewise the correct understanding of all theology
hinges upon the outcome. As the many transactions involving the experience of
the human soul in the body were enacted in Amenta, the underworld, the final
meaning of the whole structure of theology is bound up with the correct location
of this realm of gloomy shade. It is believed that the correction of the error
under which the academic world has labored for centuries with regard to this
region will necessitate the most sweeping alterations in religious and
philosophical ideology, nothing short, in fact, of a total recasting of all
meanings and values.
Amenta, the Egyptian term for this underworld, is given
as a compound of the Egyptian “Amen,” meaning “secret,” “hidden”;
and “ta,” “earth” or “land.” In this formation it becomes “the
hidden earth” or “secret, hidden land.” It is the land where the divine
sons were hidden away in “Egypt” till the “wrath” of the Karmic Lords
should be appeased. “Amen” was the “hidden deity,” “the god in
hiding.” His hieroglyph pictures him as kneeling under a canopy. The
“wrath” of
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God, be it proclaimed at last, is no divine “anger,”
in any human sense of the word, but the universally burning, consuming,
transforming, building and destroying energy of Life itself, always anciently
characterized as a “fire.” And the word seems derivative from “Ur-ath,”
the original fiery force in matter, as “Ur” is “fire” and “-ath” is
the feminine, that is, material classification. It therefore connotes the
cosmical transforming energies locked up in the bosom of matter! This is of
consummate importance. And all this complex ancient indirection of description
is just to carry the idea that the soul must be tied down in its linkage with
the deeply hidden energies of matter and body until the fiery potencies burning
at that level refine and purify its grosser elements. A Biblical text speaks of
its being “thrice refined in the fire,” and Egyptian scripts abound with
statements of its purification “in the crucible of the great house of
flame.” Maintaining the revolutionary thesis that Amenta is this earth, and
not some realm elsewhere into which men relapse after earthly demise, the
exposition will establish the fact that all the typology referring to it
pertains to our own world. In every ancient system of cosmology this globe is
the lowest of all planetary spheres. There can be no other hell, Tartarus,
Avernus or Orcus, Sheol or Tophet below it. It is that darksome limbo where the
Styx, the Phlegethon, the river of Lethe and other murky streams run their
sluggish courses through the life of mortals.
Very apt, then, is the story of Isis and Osiris. Their
infant, Horus, was suckled by Isis in solitude. She reared him in secret, and
his limbs grew strong in the hidden land. None knew the hiding place, but it was
somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower Egypt of the mythos. This is
matched in toto by the story of the birth of the mythical Sargon of Assyria.
Likewise it is the background of the “flight into Egypt” of Jesus in the
Gospels. The divine child had to be taken down into “Egypt” until the Herut
menace was passed and in order that the son of God might be brought up out of
it. As the angel of the Lord says to Joseph, “Arise and take the young child
and his mother and flee into Egypt,” so at the birth of Horus the god Taht
says to the mother, “Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child.”
She is bidden to take him down into the marshes of Lower Egypt, called Kheb or
Khebt. But the Egyptian version gives us more ground for understanding the
maneuver as a cosmographic symbol, because Taht tells Osiris that there “these
things shall befall: his limbs will grow, he will wax
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entirely strong, he will attain the dignity of Prince . .
. and sit upon the throne of his father.” This is highly important, since it
makes the hiding away a part of the cosmic process and not a mere incredible
incident in Gospel “narrative.” In the mutilated Gospel account the sojourn
in Egypt is left as if it were a matter of brief duration, followed by the
child’s return. In the fuller Egyptian record it is seen that the dip into
Lower Egypt is that necessary incubation in matter that must continue until it
has brought the infant potentialities to actualization and function. As the seed
in the soil, so the god in the earthly body and the “child” in “Lower
Egypt”—all are hidden away for the growth that only thus could be attained.
The secreting of the child is no more than the planting on earth of the divine
seed in its appropriate soil—humanity.
In the Ritual the Manes, or Osiris-Nu, says: “I am he
whose stream is secret.” Of Ptah it is also said: “Thy secret dwelling is in
the depths (or the deep) of the secret waters and unknown” (Renouf: Hibbert
Lectures, p. 321).
The presentation of the evidence supporting the mundane
location of Amenta takes on from this point largely the semblance of a debate
with Massey. If our study seems overburdened with his material, apology may be
found in the explanation that, in the first place, he has fairly earned this
amount of recognition, and secondly that his presentations focus the issues at
stake with more definiteness than those of any other scholar. Though he missed
the golden truth of this matter in the end, he still comes so close to it that
he at times almost states it in spite of himself. The truth can hardly be better
expounded than as the correction of his error, which proved so fatal at last to
his work. No one has ever put more succinctly and clearly the nature of the
experience of the soul or divine child in Amenta than he has done in the
following excerpt:
“In the eschatology Horus, the child, is typical of the
human soul which was incarnated in the blood of Isis, this immaculate virgin, to
be made flesh, and to be born in mortal guise on earth as the son of Seb (god of
earth) and to suffer all the afflictions of mortality. He descended to Amenta as
the soul sinking in the dark of death. . . .”17
Everything in this passage points to the identity of
Amenta with earth. Clearly as Massey saw through the thousand disguises of
ancient
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method, he was tricked at last by the arcane ruse of
presenting earth experience under the mask of a ritual for the dead. He could
hardly bring himself to believe, sharp as was his break with orthodoxy, that the
miscarriage of esoteric sense had gone so utterly awry as to misplace all
religious values finally in a wrong world. The enormity of cleric aberrancy was
already so shocking to him that he can be pardoned for failing to perceive that
it was indeed still seven leagues worse.
He fought his way through by what seemed the only devise
which would enable him to keep the judgment, hell, purgatory and the underworld
in the after-death realm. He was forced to split the term “earth,” so
frequently used with Amenta, into two parts, distinguishing an “earth of
time” from an “earth of eternity.” He took Amenta to be this fancied
“earth of eternity” beyond the grave or death. He located it vaguely in the
post mortem state, and segregated it from the earth of time, or the earth we
know. But a little reflection on his part would have told him that the term
“earth” has no possible appropriateness to a non-physical existence in
spiritual areas. The designations “land,” “country,” so often applied to
the heavenly state of being, are used only by grace of euphemism or figure.
Massey must have felt this, but it permitted him to use the word “earth” in
reference to a purely celestial locale. This could not have been other than a
bit disingenuous; and it cost him his place in renown and kept us an additional
forty or fifty years in bondage to religious superstition.
He rightly insists that “not until we have mastered the
wisdom of Egypt as recorded in Amenta shall we be enabled to read it on the
surface of the earth.” This is precisely what should be said, but where do we
have access to “wisdom recorded in Amenta” (considered as his spirit world)
if not on this earth, either in books or in experience? Can we go to (his)
heaven and read records left there? He speaks of a first paradise as being
celestial and a second one as “sub-terrestrial,” and says that the latter is
“the earthly paradise of legendary lore.” But, as has been shown, a
“sub-terrestrial” residence for man is meaningless verbiage, imagery without
possible counterpart in actuality. The “sub-“ was to be taken as subsolary
and perhaps sublunary, at any rate sub-celestial, but
never—really—sub-terrestrial. If it was used for poetic figure, there need
be no quarrel. The ancients did use subterranean
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caverns as types of our life in Amenta, but only as
types. Of a surety we shall not read old Egypt’s mighty wisdom aright until we
read it on the surface of this earth, for the inexpugnable reason that the
“wisdom recorded in Amenta” is the wisdom pertaining to this earth! Amenta
and this earth are one and the same place. Religion must bring back to this
earth the core of all those meanings which took their flight from this sphere on
the wings of scholarship’s egregious mislocation of the mythical region of
Amenta.
His mistake, as that of all other scholars, was
occasioned by loss of the archaic signification of “death.” Books of the
dead, forsooth, must inescapably apply to deceased humans, and hence their
rituals must be designed for the spirits of the departed on “that other
shore.” It was thus not possible for anyone under this persuasion to discern
that the Biblical phrase “after death” could mean its precise antithesis, as
commonly viewed; that is, after entry into this life. It could not be seen that
the phrase “deceased in their graves” had already been appropriated by the
sages of Egypt to type the living denizens here on the globe.
Nevertheless the identification of Amenta with a post
mortem state should have been seen at one glance as inadmissible in the light of
a single consideration. Amenta, Hades, Sheol are always portrayed as the land of
gloom, darkness and misery. These terms are often translated “hell” in the
Bible and elsewhere. They are the dismal underworld. In it souls are imprisoned,
captive, cut to pieces, mutilated, buried. Exactly opposite in description in
every religion is the state of life after decease! It matches the Amenta
characterization in no particular, but is its exact opposite. In it the soul
finds release from the dark, heavy, dreary, wretched conditions that are
descriptive of Amenta. It is the land of light, bliss, surcease from distress,
rest and peace! The two portraitures will not mix! The Amenta of misery and
gloom can not be at the same time the Happy Isles, the Aarru-Hetep and the
asphodel meads! If to enter the body is to undergo captivity, then to leave it
is to regain freedom, not to enter Amenta. Surely in this confusion of two
worlds of diametrically opposite classification our savants are convicted of the
most amazing want of acumen in reaching conclusions preposterously out of line
with the data of scholarship. Massey should have been enlightened by what he
wrote in this passage:
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“Except when lighted up by the sun of night, Amenta was
the land of darkness and the valley of the shadow of death. It remained thus, as
it was at first, to those who could not escape the custody of Seb, the god of
earth, ‘the great annihilator who resideth in the valley.’”
If Amenta was the place where the god of earth detained
souls in darkness, its localization on earth would seem to be incontrovertibly
indicated. Or was not the god of earth on earth? We might expect a god to
inhabit his own kingdom, the one over which he ruled.
Osiris, king of the land of the dead, is denominated
“lord of the shrine which standeth at the center of the earth.” (Rit., Ch.
64.) Massey speaks of “the human Horus”—and Horus was in Amenta. Humans
exist only on the earth. The earth must be Amenta, then. He writes again that
the drama “from which scenes are given in the Hebrew writings, as if these
things occurred or would occur upon the earth, belongs to the mysteries of the
Egyptian Amenta, and only as Egyptian could its characters ever be
understood.” The scenes in Hebrew scriptures are drawn largely from the early
Egyptian Mysteries, which typified cosmic and racial history under the forms of
dramatic ritual. But they were not events of either Egyptian or Hebrew objective
history. They did not “occur” anywhere on earth, but they portrayed the
interior meaning of all that did occur on earth. The events were not here, but
their meaning was. They were not occurrence factually, but the key to all
occurrence. Massey thought the myths must be veridically true in (his) Amenta,
since they were not objectively true on earth. He caught half the truth only.
The myths were only symbolic language telling human dullness of mind what life
meant. The moment the myths are alleged to have taken place in heaven or
anywhere else, that moment superstition begins to stalk into the counsels of
religion. Nothing could occur in Amenta as a place distinct from this earth,
since it was a mythopoetic name for earth itself.
But the sad part of Massey’s story and the reason it is
important for us to scrutinize his mistake is that it is the story of a whole
race’s deception for sixteen centuries! The localization of Amenta in heaven
instead of on earth has defeated the whole purpose of religion for ages. And no
pen or tongue will ever record the monstrous fatuity involved in the spectacle
of a race looking into the wrong world and waiting with sanctified stupidity for
the fulfillment of values that have slipped
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by them ungrasped all the while! When religion gave up
its effort to realize values in the life here and fixed despairing eyes on
heaven, it betokened the decay of primal human virtue and a sinking back into
mystical fetishism. Came the Greek “loss of nerve” and the turning from
earth to heaven for the realization of hopes ground to dust on earth. And this
shift of philosophical view left the ground of culture lie fallow, and bred the
rank growth that covered the whole terrain of the Dark Ages. There is needed no
other warrant for the extension of the material of this chapter to some length.
As things have turned out, it may well be that true location of the Egyptian
Amenta, instead of being a mere point in academic scholarship, is the critical
item in the life of culture today. The collapse of true religion is ever marked
by its turning for its real experience from earth to mystical heavens.
Scholars have not sufficiently or capably reflected on
the significant fact that ancient sacred books or Bibles have been largely Books
of the Dead. The obvious glaring peculiarity of this fact has never seemed to
occur to students. It should from the first have provoked wonder and curiosity
that the sages of antiquity would have indited their great tomes of wisdom in
such a form as to serve as manuals in the life to come, and not as guides for
the life lived in the sphere in which the books were available! Only the heavy
tradition that religion was a preparation for a life to come, instead of a way
of life here, could have stifled this natural reaction to a situation that is
odd enough in all conscience. It is no slight or inconsequential thing that
Budge writes in one sentence of “. . . religious texts written for the benefit
of the dead in all periods . . .” (of Egyptian history), without the least
suspicion that he was penning an astonishing thing. It had been ponderously
assumed by scholarship that the ancient sages were more concerned with the
hereafter and the next world than with life down here. How the march of history
would have swung into different highways had the world known that we living men
were those “dead” for whom the sagas were inscribed by the masters of
knowledge! And what must be the sobering realization for present reflection of
the fact that the primeval revelation given to early races for the guidance and
instruction of all humanity has missed entirely the world for which it was
intended!
The scene of critical spiritual transactions is not
“over there” in spirit land, but here in this inner arena of man’s
consciousness. Life’s ac-
196
counts do not remain suspended during our active
experience on earth, to be closed and settled when the exertion is over. We are
weaving the fabric and pattern of our creation of ourselves when we are awake on
earth, not when we are at repose in ethereal heavens. The droning cry of
lugubrious religionism for centuries has been to live life on earth merely as
the preparation for heaven. But there is no logic in the idea of making
preparation for rest! It is the other way around: rest is a preparation for more
work. The positive expression of life is the exertion of effort to achieve
progress. Rest is just the cessation of the effort, and needs no preparation.
The character of our effort may, to be sure, determine the nature of our rest,
yet one should say, rather, its completeness. Rest is in some degree correlative
with the effort. Still the logic is indefeasible, that we work to achieve our
purposes, and not to gain rest. The presumption that this life is of minor
consequence and has value only as the stepping-stone to another where true being
is alone achieved, is one facet of that enormous fatuity of which we are holding
orthodox indoctrination guilty. It is the last mark of the miscarriage of primal
truth in the scriptures that its meaning and application have been diverted from
that world it was intended to instruct, and projected over into another where
its code can have no utility whatever. The offices of religion have fled to
heaven, and must be brought back to earth. This return can be effected only by
the right interpretation of the term “the dead” and the true location of
Amenta, the scene of the judgment, hell, purgatory and the resurrection, and the
seat of all evolutionary experience.
Massey asserts that “the nether earth was the other
half of this” and that the “Gospel history has been based upon that other
earth of the Manes being mistaken for the earth of mortals.” But he errs on
both counts. For the “other half of this” life is lived in a sphere which
all faiths have located above this one, and not nether to it. The spirit world
can in no way be localized as under our world. His second statement misses truth
through the fact that the events in the life of the Manes are not, as he
supposes, actual transactions in the afterdeath life of the spirit, but are only
allegorical depictions of the soul’s history in this life.
But he makes a point of great moment, worthy of
transcription, when he states that the miracles of Jesus were not possible as
objective events:
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“They are historically impossible because they were
pre-extant as mythical representations . . . in the drama of the Mysteries, that
was as non-historical as the Christmas pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus
on earth had been previously assigned to Iusa, the divine healer, who was
non-historical in the pre-Christian religion. Horus, whose other name is Jesus,
is the performer of the ‘miracles’ which are repeated in the Gospels; and
which were first performed as the mysteries in the divine nether-world. But if
Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed
in by the miraculous, at the center of a maze with nothing antecedent for a
clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery, and no visible means of
exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage on mundane ground,
the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; thus the history was founded on
the miracles, which are perversions of the mythology that was provably
pre-extant.”
It was in these discernments that Massey rose to heights
of clear vision and made a contribution to the cause of religious sanity that
can not be rated too highly. This passage is a clear and courageous declaration
of the long-lost truth of the matter. He performed a great service in
discrediting the myths as history; but by thrusting them over into a purely
suppositious world as alleged realities in the “eschatology,” he committed
his costly blunder.
It was into Amenta that both Horus and Jesus descended to
preach to the souls in prison. Horus’ object in making the descent was to
utter the words of his father to the lifeless ones. So in the Pistis Sophia
Jesus passed into Amenta as the teacher of the great mysteries. It is said in
this Gnostic work: “Jesus spake these words unto his disciples in the midst of
Amenta.”18 Moreover a special title is assigned to Jesus in Amenta. He is
called Aber-Amentho; “Jesus, that is to say, Aber-Amentho,” is a formula
several times repeated. Aber means lord or ruler; so that again Jesus and Horus
are exactly matched in title.
If Jesus delivered his discourses to his disciples “in
Amenta,” all question of where this hidden land is located should be settled
forever. For unless all Gospels are accounts of the doings of wraiths in a
spectral underworld, as even Massey suggests, we are bound to suppose that their
transactions, historical or mythical, transpired on earth.
The hazy character of current Egyptological scholarship
is notably manifest in a passage from Budge dealing with the location of the
Tuat. It is clearly given in the Ritual as the gate of entry to the under-
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world. But Budge gives it as “the name of a district or
region, neither in heaven nor upon earth, where the dead dwelt and through which
the sun passed during the night.” Where else the Tuat might be, if neither in
heaven nor on earth, deponent saith not. In another place (Egyptian Literature,
Vol. I) he defines the Tuat once more. “Tuat is a very ancient name for the
Other World, which was situated either parallel to Egypt, or across the
celestial ocean which surrounded either world.” This goes far to prove that
the science of Egyptology has been but a blind groping amid ideas utterly
uncomprehended by the “learned” men in the field. Indeed Budge himself has
penned what may be called his own “confession” on this score. For its
downright candor and its general importance, it is quite worthy of insertion:
“Is it true that the more the subject of Egyptian
religion and mythology is studied the less is known about them? The question is,
however, thoroughly justified and every honest worker will admit that there are
at the present time scores of passages even in such a comparatively well-known
compilation as the Book of the Dead which are inexplicable, and scores of
allusions to a fundamentally important mythological character of which the
meanings are still unknown.” (Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. I.)
The sun passing through the Tuat depicted the divine soul
as passing through its incarnation, which being in the darkness of the body was
charactered as the “dark night of the soul.” As it entered the gate of
Amenta, called the Tuat, it crossed the horizon line dividing the region of
spirit or heaven from earth or embodiment, and there it stood in the twilight.
Budge says that “the Tuat was a duplicate of Egypt,” laid out in nomes, with
a river valley and other similar features. This should further identify it with
our earth.
In Amenta the soul was said to receive a new heart shaped
“by certain gods in the nether world according to the deeds done in the body
whilst the person was living on earth.” Here again is confusion and a missing
of the intent. The award of a new heart is not made like that of a prize on
graduation day. The larger meaning is that the whole long experience of many
lives creates a new heart, which is the resultant of the transformation of
nature that is gradually accomplished by the whole process. It is quite
impossible to draw intelligible meaning from the scriptures if we limit our
survey to a single span of earth life as a prelude to an infinite “eternity”
in its wake. Reason forbids
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our conceding to the actions of a single life on earth
sufficient moment to fix the destiny of a soul forever. Ancient theology rested
on no such irrational presumption.
Many statements aver that the soul passes into Amenta at
death. Massey felt sure that this clinched his location of Amenta in the ghost
world. He did not dream that the “death” the ancients spoke of brought the
soul here instead of taking it away. The soul’s statement that it came “to
overthrow mine adversaries upon the earth” should have enlightened him. The
soul descends here to battle the lower nature, the only adversary contemplated
in the whole range of holy writ.
The attendants of the soul in its incarnational descent
say to it (Ch. 128): “We put an end to thy ills through thy being smitten to
earth”—“in death,” Massey himself adds. But not even this brought
discovery to his mind. The following is highly indicative also:
“From beginning to end of the Ritual we see that it is
a being once human, man or woman, who is the traveler through the underworld. .
. .”19
Even though the Ritual assigned to this underworld
pilgrim all human characteristics, scholars still have missed the hint that he
was the human. Later texts give to the Manes in Amenta all the traits and
features of the earth mortal.
The solar god in Amenta is addressed as “thou who
givest light to the earth.” This again is definite localization on earth. It
was the sun-god who “tunneled the mount of earth and hollowed out Amenta,”—mistaken
for two operations when they are of course one and the same. The sun-god’s
“boring through the earth” was one of the tropes.
Instruction is derived from noting how Massey’s
erroneous idea entangled him in the following passage:
“The lower paradise of two is in the mount of earth,
also called the funeral mount of Amenta. [Identification again.] The departed
are not born immortals in that land; immortality is conditional. They have to
fight and strive and wrestle with the powers of evil to compass it.”20
His own exegesis convicts him of shallow thinking here.
For he has stated repeatedly that the soul enters his spectral Amenta with
character already formed by “the deeds done in the body.” His Amenta could
not be the arena of moral conflict or fight to win immortality.
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He has indeed called it “the earth of eternity.” It
is too late to writhe and wrestle for moral victory when that “Amenta” is
entered. The earth is the one and only theater of spiritual struggle. So he errs
in reiterating:
“The world-to-be in the upper paradise was what they
made it by hard labor and by purification in Amenta.”21
Massey’s mistake, in common with that of much general
religious opinion on these matters, lies in his affirming that after the
termination of life in the body the soul first descends into Amenta, then later
rises into Paradise. This flies in the face of all basic postulation of theology
itself. The soul descends in coming to earth, and there is no lower region left
into which it can further descend on quitting the body. Its incarnation in flesh
drags it down, its release at decease lets it free to return upward. The false
downward direction assigned to the soul on leaving earth is a perversion of true
original conception due to the loss of the meaning of the term “death” in
world religion. Profound philosophical insight corroborates the instinctive
unconditioned idea which rises in connection with physical death, that the soul
when released begins its ascent to celestial habitat. Only perverted theology
inculcated the thought of further descent when the war between flesh and mind is
over. The dissipation of that idea is ample justification for this chapter.
Another sentence pictures his entanglement in the net:
“The sub-terrestrial paradise was mapped out for the
Manes to work in, and work out their salvation from the ills of the flesh and
the blemishes of the life on earth.”
But how can he call this dark, murky, dismal underworld
of sub-terrestrial life a “paradise”? In no religion is paradise pictured as
a gloomy and forbidding place. This obsession of his, that the soul must first
go down into a region of agony and bloody sweat and fiery torture after
separation from the body and be purged of its earthly sins before it can rise
into paradise, warrants all this dissertation upon it because it is the delusion
of millions.
It is conceivable and admissible that the soul upon
release from body may need a period of time to throw off some heavier portions
of its clinging earthly mires, before it can return to the highest place of
purity. But in all reason it must be contended that the locale of such
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a stage must be above, not below, the earth life. If the
soul lingers a while on a level of purgation after life here, it is at least on
a plane one step higher than this.
The general commitments of this whole discussion are of
sufficient importance to excuse a general critique of the pious theory that life
equalizes the balance of her forces by having us commit error in one world and
do penance or make atonement in another. Almost universal as is the idea, there
is little foundation for it in the great systems of early racial instruction. It
is an excrescence on the body of saner teaching.
We must reap as we sow. “He that soweth to the flesh
shall of the flesh reap corruption.” Half the world has been hypnotized with
the belief that mankind can atone in an ethereal world for “deeds done in the
body.” Perfect justice would obviously require that we return to the same
world in which acts were committed to square the Karmic accounts engendered by
them. To work out our salvation from the ills of the flesh, the soul must at
least be where flesh is! If we are to erase the blemishes of earth life, we must
return to those conditions which constituted the nature of the problem in the
first instance. In spirit world the problem is no longer present; it has been
dissolved with matter. If we break the dishes in the kitchen we can hardly atone
by singing in the parlor. How it is presumed by an eccentric theology that we
can work out concrete problems in a world where concreteness has been dissolved,
is not at all easy to see. Those who plan to win the unfought battles of
spiritual life from a bower in Paradise had better take counsel with the ancient
wisdom. There is no heavenly “peace without victory,” or a victory without
St. Paul’s long fight. The arcane science tells modern ignorance why we are on
earth. If there was some sufficient primal necessity for our coming to wrestle
with flesh and sense in the first instance, then it must be essential that we
continue to come until these forces and natures are overcome and raised. The
wisdom of civilizations already hoary in Egypt’s time is back of that
pronouncement, and it is back of no other. The static angelic immortality of the
Christians, the “eternal spiritual progress in heaven” of the Christian
Scientists, Spiritualists and other cultists, find their rebuke and their
correction in the venerable knowledge of the ancient sages.
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on earth, so that the spirit when it entered the hall of
judgment, was, as it were, its own book of life, written for the all-seeing
eye.” This is magnificent truth that Massey states; but how infinitely more
meaningful it becomes when it is known that the hall of judgment entered by the
spirit to reap the fruits of former action and amend its ways, is not a spirit
plane after death, but this present “underworld,” to which it will return,
after a rest, to face the further issues involved in its evolution. Returning
here again and again, the soul brings its own record book of life with it,
written in its own character. Character can be built nowhere else than on earth.
No religion has ever said that we would be judged for deeds done in the spirit
world! We are asleep then and inactive, and making no Karma, as the East phrases
it. As St. Paul says, sin is lying dormant until incarnation again brings the
moral agent, the soul, into subjection to the body of sense, when “sin springs
to life.”
The title of one of the chapters of the Ritual is: “Of
introducing the mummy into the Tuat on the day of burial.” This becomes absurd
if the mummy is the corpse and the Tuat a spectral realm of wraiths. No more
than that a man can take his gold watch with him to heaven could a mummy be
introduced into Massey’s and Budge’s Tuat! The burial is the advent of the
“mummified” soul or Karast into its coffin-case of the physical body.
Elsewhere Massey equates “the pillar of earth” with
“the Tat of Amenta” and still fails to see identification. In another
connection he writes:
“Thus we can identify Eve or Chavvak, as Kefa or Kep,
the Great Mother, with Adam or Atum in the Garden of Amenta.”22
A striking pronouncement in the Papyrus of Ani should
have awakened true intelligence in his mind: “The soul, or Manes, makes the
journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex.” Where are there male and
female sex distinctions save on earth? And one wonders how the scholar could
have written the following and failed to see the basis of identity suggested:
“The mortal on earth was made up of seven constituent
parts. The Osiris in Amenta had seven souls, which were collated, put together
and unified to become the ever-living one.”
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But all students of ancient literature are aware that
earth was the place where the collecting and unifying of the seven constituent
souls of man were accomplished. Again a most direct hint of the truth was
ignored by the savants. Also Greek metaphysical science asserts that the soul
came down through nine stages “and became connected with the sublunary world
and a terrene body, as the ninth and most abject gradation of her descent.”23
Here is philosophical testimony that negates the existence of any hell or
underworld below life in the body. Any observer of human life knows that it is
possible for the soul to fall to the most abject baseness while in the body. We
are in the lowest of the hells—Amenta.
Again and again the texts say that Amenta is the dwelling
of Seb, the god of earth.
Massey states that in the resurrection “man ascended
from the earth below, or from below the earth.” The first point of departure
is correctly placed; but the alternative, meant to be an appositive, is ruled
out of court. Man was never below the earth.
In the Jewish scriptures twelve sons of Jacob go down
into Egypt for corn; in the Book of Amenta twelve sons of Ra make a journey
toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge between two mountains,
heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt of the twelve sons of Ra
make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge between two
mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt of the
mythos. All this is figurative for the descent of the twelve legions of angels
of light (sons of Ra, the Light-God) upon this planet. These are the true
prototypes of the twelve tribes of Israel, to whom the Eternal as recorded in
one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, before their descent, calls:
“The underworld awaits you with eager joy. It watches with open jaws to
receive you.” (Moffatt Trans.) In the Egyptian this is matched by the
statement that “the reptile, or dragon, ‘eternal devourer’ is his name
(Ch. 17), lurks and watches in the ‘bight of Amenta’ for its prey.” The
“bight of Amenta” accurately matches the “recess of earth” in the Greek
terminology. In another form of typology the twelve are called “the twelve
reapers of the harvest on earth, which was reaped in Amenta by Horus and the
twelve.”24 If the spiritual harvest was reaped “on earth” and “in Amenta,”
earth and Amenta must be the same place.
Massey places the habitat of those “people that sat in
darkness” and who saw a great light, in Amenta. When Horus descends to them to
bring the divine light, he is declared to “descend from heaven to the
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darkness of Amenta as the Light of the World.” How
could he be the light of the world if he did not come to the world? It is our
earth, surely, and this is once more equated with Amenta.
When Satan takes Jesus into a high mountain for his trial
(against the powers of matter) it was a place whence “all the kingdoms of the
earth could be seen.”
Horus in his coming is said to kindle a light in the dark
of death for the soul “or spiritual image in Amenta.” But he came to earth
to bring light. When he arrived at the outer door of Amenta in his rising Horus
says: “I arrive at the confines of earth.” Says Massey himself: “He was to
be the light of the world in the mortal sphere.” And when Horus comes to give
the breath of life to the inert Manes in Amenta and delivers his message, it is
declared in the Rubric (to Ch. 70): “If this scripture is known upon earth, he
(the Osiris) will have power to come forth to day and walk upon the earth among
the living.”
An important link in the chain of evidence is the
statement that the seven principles or vehicles that were integrated in one
organism to form perfect man “were all believed to come into existence after
death.”25 But as the khat or physical body was one of them, and it was
incontestably dropped from association with the others after death, the phrase
“after death” must here be taken in the peculiar theological sense
delineated in this analysis. For only after the death and burial in body could
the god begin the work of wedding the seven principles into an aggregate
harmony. We are now put in position to grasp the works that take place “after
death.” For in the light of the new-old meaning of “death” all the
experiences dramatized as occurring after bodily demise can be seen as falling
within, not outside of, the limits of earthly life. Physical birth here is the
beginning of that “death” and the events of life thus come “after (the
beginning of) death.” Even that redoubtable verse in the Bible, “It is given
unto man once to die, and after that the judgment,” does not overrule the
exegesis here advanced. The integration of the seven constituent principles in
man can not be carried on without the khat in a spirit-Amenta.
In describing the judgment of Ani (the Manes-soul) in
Amenta, Budge writes: “Ani is here depicted in human form and wearing garments
and ornaments similar to those which he wore on earth.” To
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explain this, to him, odd phenomenon, Budge weaves an
intricate conjecture that
“the body which he has in this hall of judgment can not
be the body with which he had been endowed on earth, and we can probably
understand that it is his spiritual body, wearing the white robes of the
beatified dead in the world beyond the grave, that we see.”
But what more natural than that the hierophants should
portray the personage in the drama representing the human in the likeness of the
human? The scrolls of old Egypt depicted Ani in human form and dress because it
was to him as a human being that the meaning of the drama applied. Budge (and
all others) first allocates the trial of the deceased to the nondescript astral
world and then wonders why the human character is represented as human! If the
pundits will have it that the Amenta in which the judgment trial takes place is
the realm of flitting specters, they will have to contrive as best they can to
solve the perplexities of Egyptian procedure created by their own
preconceptions. But if they will follow the indicated guidance of the symbology
employed, they will find their difficulties obviated as if by a touch of magic.
For if Amenta is our earth, then Ani may be expected to appear as the typical
human, with flesh, complexion and ornaments to match, and a little clothing if
needed!
The text says of Teta: “This Teta hath broken forever
his sleep in his dwelling which is upon earth.” This assures us that the
Amenta sleep takes place upon our earth.
Using “day” in the sense of incarnation, another text
reads: “Thou appearest upon the earth each day,” under the figure of the
rising sun, of course.
Another chapter title (132) in the Book of the Dead gives
a clue that is inerrant: “The chapter of causing a man to come back to see his
house upon earth.” And in the Saitic Recension the “house” is said to be
in the underworld. The two are then equated.
Another chapter (152) gives a quite illuminative title:
“Of building a house upon the earth.” As this “house” is the temple
which Jesus said he would re-erect “in three days,” and is the central
structure of all Masonry, it is important to note that its erection takes place
on earth.
“I died yesterday, but I come today,” exclaims the
Manes (Ch. 179).
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“He sitteth as a living being in Amenta,” affirms
another verse. These do not sound like the expressions of the real defunct.
Budge tells us that the duty of supplying meat, drink and
apparel to the “dead” was deputed to Anup, Keb and Osiris. Anup was the
guide of souls in the underworld; Keb (Seb) was the god of earth; Osiris was the
ruler of the kingdom of the dead. All three distinctly locate the region of
death on this globe.
“For the goddess (Taht-I-em-hetep) adds, Amenti is a
place of stupor and darkness, and death calleth every one to him, gods and men,
and great and little are all one to him; he seizeth the babe as well as the old
man. Yet [Budge adds] the Egyptians did not27 live wantonly, as if this life
were a preparation for a gloomy death. They lived in expectation of passing into
a region of light and glory.”
Here is powerful confirmation of the contention that the
Egyptians could not have regarded the gloomy and darksome Amenta as the region
of life after death, and that the soul ascended to realms of glory and
brightness on leaving the body instead of descending into the scholars’
purgatory—Amenta. The Egyptians were taught in the Mysteries that this life
was the Amenti of stupor and darkness, and out of it they would pass to rest and
brighter scenes in the empyrean. Budge supposes the call of “death” to be
from the earth to heaven, when it is from heaven to earth, on the thesis here
established. The call of death was the summons to bright angelic spirits to
enter the life in body. It was St. Paul’s “command.” No wonder the noted
Egyptologist has to register some incomprehension over the fact that the
Egyptians were cheery in the face of passing at death into what he supposed was
the fearsome Amenta. Pluto’s rape of Proserpine should have enlightened him.
The Grim Reaper calls all souls, when ready for the human trial, into the
kingdom of “death.” The other Egyptian designation for death is notable:
“‘Devourer of Millions of Years’ is his name.” This would indicate the
total cycle of incarnations to be of great duration, which indeed all esoteric
teaching asserts it to be. And still more significant is another title given
him: “His name is either Suti (Sut) or Smam-ur, the Earth-soul.” There is no
escaping the invincible evidence: to die is to live on earth.
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themselves which should prove conclusive as to the point
under discussion. Massey himself gives one of them:
“In the inscriptions on the sarcophagus of Seti the
earth is used as equivalent to Amenti and opposed to heaven.”28
Yet he did not see that this inscription was destructive
of his own interpretation. He says further:
“Also the sun descending into the underworld is thus
addressed: ‘Open the Earth! traverse the Hades and the Sky! Ra, come to us!”
If now mundane life be found to be the seat of all human
experience and human meaning, what must be made of the Biblical adjuration not
to lay up treasures on earth? If this life is the scene and theater of destiny,
why should it be ignored and scorned?
A part of the answer is that, to be sure, values are not
held here in permanency. Obviously they could not be, if the bodies through
which they are implemented disappear. But neither are they enjoyed forever in
the spiritual existence which the soul has in the interim between lives. But the
great and momentous question then arises: if they abide in perpetuity neither on
earth nor in heaven, where are they preserved? The answer is: in the inner
spiritual entity of the man wherever he goes; it is his permanent possession and
he takes it with him always. It is his, whether in or out of the body, as St.
Paul says. But—and this is the item of final import for man—though the gains
of evolving life are not held on earth in perpetuity, it is on earth that they
are won! And this knowledge is the sum and substance of philosophy. The soul
comes to earth to win its pearl of great price in the depths of what is called
the great sea of mortal life.
The scholar’s thesis that religious texts were written
for the benefit of the dead is the dire result of the complete reversal of the
meaning of ancient typology. All the offices of poetry vindicate the claim that
imagery uses the less real to depict the more real; a natural process to depict
a spiritual one; a fairy tale to portray the deepest living realities. But a
perverted theology used the real to depict the unreal. As to the mummy, current
misconception holds that its preservation was to suggest an absolutely unreal
future for the defunct body that could have no future and for the soul that as
certainly could not return to it. On
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the contrary, the symbolism centering about the mummy, an
entirely insignificant and unreal thing, was an elaborate device to impress on
living humanity the far more real experience of the immortal self interred in
the coffin of the fleshly body, but immortalized there.
The Books of the Dead should be pondered by the Western
world with a new intensity. For with the new canon of interpretation laid down
in the present work to guide our thinking, the title will yield a stunning
realization of the catastrophic blunder of sixteen centuries of theological
blindness. And flashing through awakened intelligence will dawn that benign
understanding that religious scripts were meant for human guidance through this
benighted land of the dead, the only Amenta, Sheol, Hades, Tophet or underworld
ever contemplated by the original framers of the grand mythos. And not the less
impressive will be that philosophical recognition, at last as at first, that man
is himself the mummy, “dead” on earth, but preserved to immortality by the
injection of the Amrit or Soma juice of the Christ nature.
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