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“The sky is open. The Earth is open.
The West is open. The East is open.
The south half of the sky opens.
The north half of the sky opens.
The doors are wide open.
The deadbolts are unlocked.
And it is here that Ra appears in the horizon.”
This litany allowed the already purified deceased
to accompany Ra in his solar barge,
as he travelled the firmament in search of the solar god.
It belongs to the most popular of the sacred texts of ancient Egypt:
the Peri Em Hru, the Book of Coming Forth by Day,
more famously known as the Book of the Dead.
Those texts were written 1.500 years before Christ,
at the beginning of what was called the New Empire
a time when ancient Egypt reaches its maximum splendour.
But, in fact, they originated from older texts.
The Book of The Dead is a recompilation of several funerary writings that the ancient Egyptians
had already started to carve in tombs and temples 5.000 years ago.
The first testimonials of Ra, the sun god,
started to emerge at that time.
But other more diffuse ones were also present.
The debate must have started in trying to discover where Ra was in the hours of darkness.
The ancient Egyptians deducted that a place should exist under the firmament
where the sun could regenerate itself
and, thus, be able to re-emerge in a new dawn.
They called it the underworld.
It was home not only to the gods and the deceased worthy of eternal life,
but also to the forces of evil and darkness.
It’s the eternal struggle between good and evil,
light and darkness, life and death.
Opposing principles that cannot exist one without the other.
Maintaining the balance between the underworld and the real world
was the main concern of the ancient Egyptians.
A disruption of that harmony would destroy their existence
and, subsequently, their greatest ambition: eternity.
MAGICAL EGYPT
CHRONICLES FROM ETERNITY
For the ancient Egyptians,
the Nile was the main connection between their lives
and an infinite supply of provisions.
The progress and wellbeing they achieved thanks to that fountain of life
allowed for the creation of one of the most extraordinary civilizations that ever existed.
But its waters hid an underworld of darkness and mystery for its first settlers.
The Nile was one the spiritual paths that combined life and death,
the real world and the underworld.
Unlike most civilizations,
for the Egyptians the colour black was not associated with either mourning or sadness.
Instead, it symbolized the power of regeneration.
For them, it was a miracle that, year after year,
the Nile’s black mud fertilized their lands, following its annual floods.
“When those floods occur,
they leave behind a fertile land called the Kemet.
In fact, Kemet was the name given to Egypt by the ancient Egyptians.
It’s a very fertile land in which the Egyptians could farm their crops and live in.
Even today, 90% of Egypt’s population lives around the Nile,
which is the provider of those crops.”
They didn’t limit their observation to the sacred river.
They noticed that every year before the floods a star would appear in the firmament.
“They studied the stars exhaustively.
The beginning of the Egyptian year coincides with the reappearance
of a particular star called Sirius,
following a long period of invisibility.
That event in mid-July occurs at the same time as the flooding of the Nile,
whose waters give life to Egypt.
The appearance of the star symbolizes the celebration of the new year.”
That was a key-factor for the development of Egyptian culture.
Knowing when the floods occurred allowed them to determine the right time to sow.
That and the great projects of water channelling,
turned their lands into the most fertile lands on the planet.
The main application of that knowledge
was the development of the first and most perfect calendar
ever made in ancient times,
and which is still the basis for the one we handle today.
For the ancient Egyptians, the first day of the year was the day
Sirius appeared in the firmament.
A year divided in twelve months of thirty days each.
In order for everything to match up,
five days were added at the end of the year
the days of Anubis, the jackal-headed god.
The year had three seasons of four months each:
flood season, sowing season and harvesting season.
Two stellar phenomena
have been proven to set the rhythm of the Egyptians’ life:
the journey of the sun god Ra
that ensured both the renewal of the days and the balance between the two worlds
and the miracle of the annual flooding of the Nile,
thanks to the apparition of the goddess Sotis: the Sirius star.
The Dogon people of south Mauritania
also relate Sirius with their crop cycles.
This dance belongs to Bulu
a ceremony to favour the fertility of the land, before the first rains.
Most civilizations have personified in supernatural entities
the powers of creation and forces of Nature responsible for their survival.
And all of them have tried to communicate with their gods
or even transport themselves to the place where they lived.
The Northern Sanema,or Yanomami,
live in one of the least explored areas of Venezuela:
in the Caura basin, an affluent of the Orinoco river.
They have a curious way of travelling to the world of the spirits of the jungle.
They inhale a powerful hallucinogen called sacona, or yopo,
that they get from the bark of the Ama-ahí tree.
It’s with that that they can find their Moresby
the part of the soul that lives in their protective animal.
Like the Yanomami, many of New Guinea’s people
believe in supernatural entities that live in the jungle.
The Asaro live in the highlands near the border with Indonesia.
Known as “the clay men”, the Asaro have long since taken advantage of those beliefs,
changing into spirits to defend themselves against their enemies.
In Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca,
the yatiri pays homage to Tata Inti, the sun god.
At dawn, the holy fire’s smoke rises invoking Viracocha
the Inca god that created the world from this island.
Man prayed for the sun to come out every day,
but also wondered if it could come out on its own.
The ancient Egyptians believed that no sky,
Earth, gods, men, animals or plants existed before creation.
There was only an immense void they called Nun
that contained Atum – the beginning of all things.
In the nineteenth century, a curious papyrus was found
in the excavations of ancient Thebes,
in which Ra himself describes his own creation.
“It was I that came into existence, like Jepri.
When I came into existence, ‘Being’ came into existence.
And all beings came into existence,
after I came into existence…”
The Bremner-Rhind papyrus
and the primitive texts of the pyramids
were the first representations of the Egyptians
on the world’s creation and the origins of the gods.
“Atum became aware of himself,
and Ra, the sun, appeared.
Then he named Shu and the wind started to blow.
Afterwards, he called out Tefnut and it started to rain.
Shu and Tefnut had two children:
Geb, the Earth, and Nut, the sky.
Since Geb and Nut got married,
Nut is always over Geb
the sky over the Earth.
The stars were born from their union.
Geb and Nut begot Osiris, Isis, Seth and Neftis,
and they spawned the multitudes that inhabit this land.”
“When Ra, or the Demiurge, created the world,
he established order and justice,
and casts the forces of chaos to a distant,
separate plain of that ordered world
that just world that Ra created
and where obviously gods and men also appeared.
Nonetheless, those forces of chaos that stayed
just outside of the perfect world created never ceased
to threaten Ra and the order established upon creation.”
In their eagerness to understand the world around them,
the Egyptians started to build a complex magical universe.
From the texts of the pyramids,
written around 2.350 BC,
the scribes and priests started to update the texts
in accordance with the evolution of the religious ideas,
until the Book of the Dead came about in 1.300 BC.
Two-hundred years earlier, however,
they thought they had solved the enigma of Ra.
They deducted that two different worlds co-existed:
the one we see, and the one where Ra wandered through the night
and the deceased inhabited
a mysterious place they called the underworld.
“Besides the real world –the plain where their activities took place–
the ancient Egyptians believed that there was another world.
A world where a series of deities and other beings
lived alongside the deceased, in different levels of existence.”
“The underworld was primarily a place of darkness.
Darkness is precisely one of the main characteristics
of that place, that space.
A place where the rays of the sun
only shine when the god Ra enters it,
bringing light to the souls, beings and gods that live there.”
“On some occasions, the underworld is a fertile place
that reminds us of the shores of the Nile.
In others, is a barren, rocky place inhabited by evil beings
that jeopardize the order of creation.”
“Along with the drawings, the hieroglyphs
allow us to understand the meaning of the images.
Through this written language and the drawings,
emerges a world that describes to us the reality
from not only 5.000 or 2.000 years ago, but also beyond that.”
“Through those words and images,
ancient Egypt reaches a reality that is definitely more stable
than the actual reality of its everyday life,
for that reality as remained consistent until today.
Based on the words and the images,
we have the chance to submerge in that spiritual world
and find out even the tiniest details.”
The first depictions of the enigmatic underworld
are present in the tomb of Thutmose I
a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, around 1.500 BC.
It’s the Book of Amduat
the Book of That Which is in the Underworld,
or the Book of the Hidden Room.
The way they imagined the underworld
boggles the imagination.
The Book of Amduat shows the Geography of the afterlife,
individually detailing each of the twelve hours of Ra’s nocturnal journey.
The texts and drawings completed each other
with several funerary formulas.
Those formulas’ main purpose
was to help the pharaoh to transform himself in his journey
alongside the sun, and attain, with Ra, his daily resurrection.
“Even the lengths of the regions that the sun god passes through
are indicated. Very exaggerated lengths.
For instance, from the western door through which Ra enters the underworld
and the region of Huermes the mentioned distance is 120 Iterus
an Egyptian distance measurement unit that would correspond to 1.200 Km.”
“Ra entered the underworld through the western door of the horizon.”
“In that first hour, that entire region vibrates with joy.
After twelve hours, Ra’s light shines over the land
and all rejoice with his arrival.
Ra will also distribute fields among the inhabitant deities and beings,
organize their lives, manage their possessions and act pretty much
like a sovereign that manages and rules the territory.”
Ra travels in a barge, during the twelve hours of the night.
He’s actually represented in his Ba
his goat-headed spirit
which is standing under a dossal.
Alongside him in his barge, a crew of eight gods.
During the first hours in the barge,
Ra navigates through a river that crosses the underworld.
But from the fourth hour on, the river disappears
and Ra’s barge is towed by ropes powered by the magic of the gods.
On the seventh hour, the goddess Isis and the “Oldest Wizard”
will repel Ra’s eternal enemy: the serpent Apep.
“At the end of the journey and with Ra’s regeneration completed,
the sun god –no longer as Ba, but as the beetle Khepri–
is welcomed by Shu,
the god that separates the sky from the Earth,
and finally leaves the underworld
to enter the world of the living by the eastern door.”
It’s difficult to know what Egyptians understood by “god”.
Up until recently, we’ve tried to explain Egyptian mythology
using our own religious concepts and way of thinking,
and that was a mistake.
The main error was not to differentiate between the written language
hieroglyphs and drawings
and the oral language, which was the most important one.
Regrettably, we don’t have any sound records available.
During more than 3.000 years,
the Egyptians developed and perfected their cosmology.
But their biggest obsession was to implore the gods
to ensure eternity by overcoming the earthly death.
“One of the most interesting concepts of the Egyptians’ religious ideology was Maat.
Maat is order, justice, truth. It’s usually represented
as a feminine deity with an ostrich feather.
But Maat is actually order, just as it was established by the Demiurge,
or Ra, in the moment of creation.”
Ancient Egypt was a mythological world in which its inhabitants feared to lose cosmic order,
for that would lead them to the primeval chaos and prevent them from achieving their eternal destiny
in the magic world of the gods.
But in order to maintain the balance between those two worlds
and be able to travel between them,
they had to use the same tool the gods used: magic.
“One of the most important aspects of Egyptian religion
is, undoubtedly, the connection between magic and religious beliefs.
The Egyptians could not understand one without the other.
Every aspect of Egyptian life is connected with religion
and, therefore, with magic.”
“The creator god will, though the spoken word,
create the world and materialize what the ancient Egyptians perceived as magic.
Whenever they didn’t understand some thing or action that had happened,
they would always resort to magic, because they couldn’t comprehend a supernatural event
that wasn’t related with their earthly lives.”
“The important thing was that those texts and rituals that can be found in the texts of the pyramids
and, later, in the texts of the sarcophagus were said out loud.
That’s the importance of the spoken word. The only way for magic to really be understood and materialized is through the spoken word.”
The ones in charge of performing magic
were the great wizard, the pharaoh, and the priests.
But communication with the gods was limited to the only mortal
that possessed the magic powers needed:
the living god, the pharaoh.
“I’m Usermaatre Setepenre, Ramses Meriamon.
I came from Ra and was created by my father Menmaatre.
The Almighty himself made me great when I was a child, until I reigned.
The great ones kneeled before me when I was empowered,
both as the elder son and as Prince Heir to the throne of Gueb.”
Twice a year and thanks to the location of the Temple of Ramses II,
the sun illuminates the little sanctuary.
The king is illuminated by Amon and Ra
the two divine forms that pass onto the sovereign
the light he needs to preserve his divine nature.
The temples were one of the possible connections between the real world and the world of the gods.
The other one was, of course, the tombs and funeral temples.
The rituals and the magical ceremonies
had to take place in a space where they could communicate with the gods.
A place where the gods’ material self could be smothered with attentions and worshiped.
An Egyptian temple was not a place where the believers went to communicate with their god or pray to him,
as it happens in a Christian church or in a Muslim mosque.
It was the sacred home of the gods.
Access to the temple was completely off-limits to the common people,
who could only enter the first courtyard.
The rest of it was reserved to the priests and, of course, the pharaoh.
Although the pharaoh was the one in charge of maintaining the universal order and the cult to the gods,
the offerings made in the temples actually had to be made by another type of person:
delegates of the pharaoh.
In order to maintain an adequate cult to the deities in all of Egypt’s temples,
those delegates were the priests.
“The most important ceremonies and rituals that took place in the Egyptian temples
were carried out in this chapel
in the ‘sancta sanctorum’ of each temple,
the most recondite and secret place of the cultural building.”
“However, the preparation for the ceremonies
and the actual ceremonies themselves,
started long before dawn.
The priest would enter this chamber and approach this tabernacle
where the statue of the god was kept,
in the precise moment the sunrays would rise in the horizon.”
The priest had to carry out a series of rituals before the statue of the god,
destined to ensure his purification and nourishment.
Everyday, the clothes and foods of the divine statues were replaced.
After the ceremonies were over,
the doors of the sanctuary were closed and the priest would leave the place,
once all ceremonial proceedings were concluded.
The deities did not consume the actual food, obviously.
They would take its immaterial part, its essence
which was the basis of their nourishment.
That food was taken out at the end of the day and divided among the temple’s personnel.
The earthly homes of the gods – the hut-netcher, as the ancient Egyptians called them –
should be designed and built in order to allow a perfect connection with their divine dwellings.
The pharaoh and the priests were needed to establish the magical link,
but they required the mechanism that channelled their sorcery.
They found the necessary tools to carry out their rituals in Architecture and Astronomy.
The Egyptian temple was a door to another dimension,
and its design demanded precisely that.
The height of its ceilings, the level of its floors,
the shape and elements of the columns and its capitals,
the games of light and shadow…
Nothing was placed randomly, everything had a purpose.
Being a divine residence, it should be eternal.
Therefore, its placement, direction and building materials
had to be carefully chosen to that end.
At first, mud was used.
But, soon enough, more durable materials started to be used,
and that entailed long journeys to get them.
The builders didn’t limit themselves to creating a home for the gods.
The Egyptian temple was also a representation of the world and the cosmos.
The explanation for the extraordinary dimensions of the temples of the Nile
lies in the ideology of Egypt’s mythological Architecture.
While Greek and Roman classicists built in accordance
with the standards of human proportions,
the Egyptians built according to ‘godly measurements’.
As we already know, their primary purpose
was to worship the gods in name of the pharaoh.
To beg them manly for two fundamental things:
the perpetual regeneration of Maat – the universal order –
and the timely flooding of the Nile that made the fertility of the fields possible.
But its mission wasn’t limited to the cult.
Temples were centres of erudition and wisdom
in which the knowledge of magic was formed and initiated,
and the sacred writings were kept.
The Egyptians’ way of life depended greatly on the priests.
The measurement of time, the calendars, the festivities
and the worshiping of the gods were decided and planned inside the temples.
In all those acts, the gods were invoked through magic.
It was the way to establish the connection between the celestial dimension
and the earthly world.
However, the temple wasn’t the only access door to the underworld.
There was another more direct and definite one.
At the eastern end of Papua New Guinea,
there’s a tenebrous place the natives call The Sacred Rock.
From high above, the Kukukuku’s mummies
watch over this people of fearsome warriors.
In the Island of Sulawesi, the Toraja place human carvings
called Tau Tau to watch over the spirits of their ancestors
that lie buried between the wooden balconies.
Man didn’t settle for obtaining the approval of the gods.
We know through many cultures that his aim was to go beyond –
try to overcome death, reunite with his creator
and live alongside him for ever.
In Peru, two cultures emulated the Egyptians’ funerary formulas.
Two thousand years ago, the Moche culture
buried their leaders in pyramids with numerous objects and food,
to ensure their existence in the afterlife.
Hundreds of years later, the Chachapoyas
that lived in the surprising stone fortress of Kuelap mummified their dead.
To preserve them, they would first empty them, and then seal them.
they would burry them in several layers of cloth
that they would later adorn with traits of the deceased.
The purpose was the same:
the body had to be preserved so that its immaterial form could live in the afterlife.
The Egyptians knew that only the magic of the pharaoh and the priests
could carry out supernatural deeds and acts.
It was thanks to that magic that the universal order was maintained.
But its power could also help man to achieve his longed for desire.
The deceased had to be able to reach the world of the gods.
If they thought he had gathered enough merits
they would grant him the much desired eternal life.
But he had to be prepared for the journey.
The ancient Egyptians showed great detachment from earthly life;
they considered it a brief transit on route to eternity.
In order for that to be possible,
the human being had to be prepared for that transit.
Therefore, the Egyptians deducted that the human body
had to be made up by elements that would adapt to both worlds -
some material and others immaterial.
At the beginning of creation,
when the Demiurge creates human beings,
he gives them a body with a series of fundamental elements,
so they can face all their earthly and spiritual needs.
Prof. Dr. Dietrich Wildung
“What we nowadays call the psychosomatic state,
was referred to in ancient Egypt through several terms:
first there was a “Ka”, and then a “Ba”.
And there’s an entity called “Ach”
Some of them are connected to the physical survival after death,
and others to the immortality of the soul.
They’re complex visions that differ greatly from our western line of thought
in which we like everything to have its precise name.”
The idea of mummification was the same as that of the divine statues in the temples.
The statue served as material support to the worshiped god,
and was a link between the two planes of existence.
In order to establish communication,
his other material self had to be present.
Following that criteria, the Egyptians considered that the earthly body
also had to be preserved eternally by that process,
in order for the spiritual body to ensure its eternity in paradise.
Once embalmed, the deceased had to be prepared for the sacred journey
Prof. Dr. Dietrich Wildung
“In what concerns the burial ceremonies
as they are described in many tombs and papyruses
a crucial act is what is called ‘the opening of the mouth’.
The priest symbolically opens the mummified deceased’s eyes,
nose and mouth, reviving his senses.
The deceased can once again see
smell
breath and talk.
He regains the ability to use the senses beyond the earthly life,
and that regained ability will work for all eternity.
The deceased can live eternally.
The ceremony would take place in the first courtyard of the tomb,
where a series of purification rituals were carried out.
After that,
a curious dramatization would take place in the sarcophagus room.
One of the priests would play the role of the deceased
and had to be awakened by the deceased’s son.
Some interesting ritual instruments were used,
in the shape of adzes, knives and cotton swabs.
They would be taken to the mouth, eyes, ears and other vital parts of the deceased,
in order to revive his capacities in the afterlife.
Once in the afterlife, the deceased had to face the judgment of Osiris
the god of resurrection.
Before forty-two judges, he had to prove his moral integrity;
what is called the negative confession of sins.
Alfonso Martín Flores
“Along with the declaration of innocence of the deceased’s judgment,
another important episode that seems to happen in the room of truth,
or in the room of justice,
is the weighing of the heart.
In it, Osiris is standing under a dossal
and there’s a scale placed before him in which the heart will be weighed.
Several deities are present, like Horus or Anubis,
whose role is to accompany the deceased up to where the scale and Osiris are.”
The weighing of the heart
consisted basically of placing this organ in one of the pans of the scale
and weighing it against the feather of Maat – the goddess of truth and justice.
If the deceased’s sins weighed more than the feather,
he was devoured by Ammit
a monster that was part hippopotamus, part crocodile and part lion.
That entailed spending eternity as a ‘non - being’,
condemned to the punishment of the Egyptian hell.
If his heart weighed less than the feather,
the deceased was declared justified and blessed.
From that moment on, he would live a placid existence in the afterlife,
alongside Osiris.
The magnificent constructions that we see today along the valley of the Nile
have undoubtedly achieved the purpose of their creators.
The ancient settlers of Egypt loved the earthly life’s beauty,
but only as a brief transit en route to the true immortal existence.
To please the gods, they built to their scale,
designed their temples and tombs with mathematical perfection
in their shapes and proportions,
and aligned their contours with the sun
and other heavenly bodies.
Their obsession was to maintain cosmic order at all costs;
they could not permit everything to return to the primeval chaos.
To that end they learned to use language
and the magic power of the gods,
and communicated with them.
They discovered where the sun went at night
and how it managed to come out each morning.
And, most importantly, they discovered how to access the underworld
to be alongside the gods for all eternity.
Magic, science and religion
represent the nature of man.
His way to reveal himself before the terror of nothingness.
The struggle to penetrate the mysteries of his own existence
and those of the universe.
It’s a mixture of strange seduction and scary unease
that not only makes him aware of his insignificance,
but also allows him to feel proud
of his humble human condition.