How to Weigh a Heart. Week 8: The Egyptian Book of the Dead

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.

This week’s reading was the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Somehow I did not get Ted’s recommended translation by Susan Hollis. Instead, I had the gigantic and very, very beautiful reproduction of the complete Papyrus of Ani. This edition had a huge influence on my week "in" Egypt.

The Book of the Dead isn’t really one book; at the time of its writing (around 1300 BC) it was common to have a papyrus scroll of spells and directions placed in the coffin with the deceased. In this case, the priest Ani had died and this is his scroll. There have been many such scrolls, and pieces of scrolls, found in various tombs across Egypt. Each section of the scroll contains a text that has, for modern purposes, been called a chapter. Many scrolls have many “chapters” in common, but so far no scroll has all of them. On top of that, the chapters can be in any order. 

The chapters (are they prayers? Spells? Opinions seem split.) are, for the most part, pretty obscure. We spend some time reading excerpts, just to get a sense of them. There really isn’t a description of how a person might become “spiritualized” or “pure.” Everything is instruction for the dead in the afterlife.

Here are a few more thoughts about this reading. It might seem a little random, but this reading felt a little random, too:

• Until the Rosetta Stone was found in 1820, the text was completely unknown. The guess was that it was a book of wisdom similar to our Bible. That’s actually completely wrong—none of it is oriented toward the living. The text is all about the god Osiris, who was murdered, mourned and buried. Later myths tell of Osiris’ resurrection. The vignettes are personalized, in this case for the priest Ani (and his wife Tutu).
• Burials apparently re-enacted the death of Osiris in ritual form, delivering the deceased to the point of the weighing of the heart. There are prayers to open the deceased’s mouth, ears, and eyes in the afterlife, because all of these would be necessary to live there. There is debate whether the myth created the ritual, or did the burial ritual arise first, with the myth developing around it later to explain the actions? It’s interesting to me that we can’t know based on what the Egyptians left behind.
• Judgment in the afterlife is the literal weighing of the deceased’s heart against a feather! (I would definitely not pass.) The feather is called a ma’at, and is “Truth” or “Rightful Order.” If you are found to have a light heart, you can pass to the good afterlife, the Field of Reeds.
• The heart is the single most important part of a person, living or dead. It’s the engine of the body and the seat of both emotions and intelligence. In the afterlife it was very important not to lose your heart, even though it was now outside of your body thanks to the mummification process.
• The Egyptians saw death as the confrontation with nonexistence and irrationality. The goal of weight your heart was to travel as an akh, in the sun and in order. The Book of the Dead is a guide to thwart the chaos of the universe, and even the gods had to contend with that disorder.
• Words, images and reality were a unity in Egyptian thought. The images in the scrolls function as text, and all of it is real. In drawing or writing things, they take on reality. In fact, this was why defacing the name of a king would be regarded as a capital crime; it was no better than assaulting or murdering the king himself.
• Many gods are represented by animal faces or body parts. Interestingly, this wasn’t meant to...