Legend
Soul-ideas of the Ancient Egyptians*
These ideas are of especial interest to us, since they were cherished in the very infancy of civilisation; or, at any rate, were received by the first historically-known civilised people.
The metaphysical conceptions of the Greeks yield evidences of their derivative characters. A study of more ancient writings than those of Plato and Aristotle leads us to fountain heads of Athenian learning. Trading communication with Phoenicia opened up that Oriental means of intelligence. India was only known through a Phoenician medium before the Alexandrian epoch. Chaldean wisdom reached the Ægean Sea through Tyre and Tarsus.
The soul-ideas of Greeks can be traced distinctly enough to the Vedas and Zendavesta. But ancient as those writings of the Aryans of India and Persia undoubtedly are, and more remote than had at one time been imagined, they are both thousands of years younger than the Sacred Books of Egypt. Without entering upon the question of how far those Aryan forefathers of ours were indebted to the land of Ham for their knowledge, it will be admitted by every one that the investigation of Egyptian notions brings us nearer the real youth of mankind than any inquiries elsewhere.
Two thousand years before Troy, or even Babylon, Thebes was flourishing; and before Thebes, Memphis and the Pyramids, existed. Excepting such colossi as the Pyramids and the great Sphinx, the buildings of Egypt, whose ruins we see, are absolutely of less antiquity than some parts of the Egyptian Scriptures in our possession. Portions at least of that Bible may be assumed 2,500 years older than the books of Moses.
The Egyptians, unlike the Hebrews, were a metaphysical race, and at a very early period had settled to their satisfaction the dogma of the soul’s immortality. Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Dr. Birch, and such French authorities as MM. Lenormant, Pierret, Deveria, Kouge, &c., are agreed that the religion of Egypt was fixed in character at the age of the Great Pyramid.
The Egyptian Scriptures consist of several books. The most complete copy of the so-called Ritual of the Dead has 165 chapters. In Abraham’s time there were 150 chapters. Baron Bunsen dates some of the most ancient portions from the very foundation of the monarchy. Several chapters are seen written upon the coffin of a queen who reigned during the Pyramid days.
What, then, do these ancient writings declare about the soul?
In the first books of the Jewish Scriptures there are no references to the fate of the soul. On the contrary, the very central idea of the Egyptian Bible is the Resurrection. The renewal of man’s existence after death is unmistakably blazoned forth in the earliest chapters preserved to us.
The Pantheon of Egypt, the most primitive of all known mythologies, is the purest in regard to morals, and the most philosophical of remote speculations. The spirituality, so to speak, of Egyptian gods and goddesses is as superior to the classical conceptions of Greece and Rome as these may be to the most degraded of African fetishisms. Osiris, Isis, and Horus, it is true, had their part to play on this earth. That part was associated with refinement of feeling, and the honourable display of noble qualities calculated to elevate man to heaven, and to extend his charity on earth. But other gods and goddesses—all variously-named attributes of abstract Deity—existed apart from this world, though in no locally-enthroned Olympus. They were thus spiritual in essence.
A people whose divinities were immaterial would naturally attach immateriality, as commonly implied by that word, to their own thinking powers.
Some think Egyptian ideas were like those now prevailing among Buddhists. The latter admit five distinct parts of man, each of which disappears after death. But the essence of these, or human desires of the individual, may be said to reappear in another state or body, different from the deceased, and yet, in a sense, the perpetuation of himself. As Gautama Buddha was only a reformer of his country’s faith, and no mere originator of opinions, he may have thus developed in his sermons the ancient creed of Egypt.
A number of Egyptian words for soul have received a variety of interpretations, as it is difficult to translate terms of abstract qualities. But the ordinary word for soul is sahou. This is described by M. Deveria in almost Buddhist phraseology: “It was a new being formed by the reunion of corporeal elements elaborated by nature, and in which the soul was reborn, in order to accomplish a new terrestrial existence.” Re-incarnation was distinctly taught in Egypt, though not, as far as we see, in the very earlier periods of religious history.
The sahou was pictured as a bird. In some cases it is being carried off from a dead body by another bird, or spirit, its special convoy to a fresh sphere. One very ancient human figure has been discovered, on the breast of which is represented a human-headed dove, to denote the coming resurrection of the deceased. The emblem of the Holy Spirit was thus early recognised.
The sahou is, also, pictured as a bird, with a human head, returning to the mummy. After the man’s decease, it had gone to Amenti, or Hades. There it had endured the discipline of purgatory, becoming purified of its earth defilement, and it was now hastening to re-unite itself with a something in that corpse. What was the attraction?
Along with that preserved body was the ordinarily invisible quality, well known to Spiritualists of all ages, and called by various names. This something was attached to the frame. Egyptians speak of ha, khou, ha, khaha, akh, apart from the mummy. One authority says the sahow went to the Amenti; another thinks the ba was the traveller. One supposes ka to be the animal soul; khaba, the astral form, or shadow; akh, the terrestrial intelligence; and ba, the higher soul. But there is a general agreement that one soul, or portion of a soul, passed through the necessary forms in Hades for pardon and purification, while the other was retained in or with the mummy.
The priest said or sang a variety of prayers or incantations over the corpse, with the avowed object of keeping the members alive, though in an inactive, latent state. It was possible, as in the case of the dead Osiris, for a part of the body to re-develop activity. The very care taken to preserve the frame, so marked a feature in the customs of Egypt, was intended to retain the presence of that spiritual body, while the other, or duplicate, soul was on its disciplinary tour somewhere else.
The resurrection necessitated the union of the soul that remained with the mummy to the sahow, or soul, that had passed the trials of purgatory. That union was, in fact, the true resurrection. After the final judgment below, the soul joyfully rejoined the spiritual body, and rose with it, as believed, to the mansions of glory. This idea, so strictly in harmony with the fifteenth chapter of the first of Corinthians, was accepted in Egypt ages before the call of Abraham.
The hope of the Egyptian was that he should rise again, as Osiris arose from the dead. That god was not only his Saviour, but his representative. The deceased himself became Osiris by name; and being, as supposed, related to that deity, he must necessarily live after disappearance here.
The King-worship of Egypt was at first the deification of man after death; and, subsequently, even before death, as he personified the god Horus, or rising sun, the first fruits of the grave. The King was adored because his soul was in some mysterious sense Divinity itself. The act of coronation, or, rather, the consecration service attending it, had as miraculous an effect upon him as the consecration of eucharistic bread by the Egyptian priests. These religious persons, though not themselves divine, could, by their prayers, turn the bread cakes into the real flesh of Osiris or Isis, and the soul of the King into the soul of Horus the I god.
Egyptian magicians declared themselves endowed with the spirit of some one particular celestial being; in the name of that deity they authoritatively called upon another of the heavenly powers to obey their will. All the ordinary opinions of modern Spiritualists were recognised in Egypt. Spirits hovered about the mummied body; spirits influenced, and even possessed, the living; spirits could be called or driven forth by mediums; spirits foretold events and wrought wonderful deeds. At the same time it must be observed that the Egyptians did not receive Demonology or Black <... continues on page 8-76 >
* A paper read last Monday night before the British National Association of Spiritualists.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Soul-ideas of the Ancient Egyptians* by Bonwick, James, London Spiritualist, No. 324, November 8, 1878, pp. 223-4
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 324, November 8, 1878, pp. 223-4