Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt
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Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

Jan Assmann, David Lorton

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eBook - ePub

Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

Jan Assmann, David Lorton

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Year
2011
ISBN
9780801464867

PART ONE

IMAGES OF DEATH

{CHAPTER ONE}

Death as Dismemberment

1. The Opening Scene of the Osiris Myth

In ancient Egyptian tradition, at least as it is preserved to us, the Osiris myth was never recounted as a coherent whole; rather, it served as a source of allusions for a large number of religious texts. We may, indeed we must, conclude from these allusions and circumstances, that it was not a coherent story but rather a sequence of scenes that was unmistakably rooted in the mortuary cult. The only texts that furnish us with a continuous narrative are written in Greek, by Diodorus1 and especially by Plutarch.2 But in the coherence of their narratives, in their care about a single, meaningful, stimulating story, these authors seem to have strayed far from the Egyptian form of the myth.
The myth had both a prehistory and a starting point. The prehistory is never narrated in the Egyptian texts, yet it is the necessary precondition for all that follows. Osiris was king of Egypt, the successor of his father, the god Geb. Unlike his divine predecessors in the royal office—the sun god Re, the air god Shu, and the earth god Geb—Osiris did not come to the throne as an only child but rather with a brother and rival, Seth. That was his undoing. But his salvation lay in the fact that he also had two sisters, Isis and Nephthys. And there was also Horus, who brought the number of the children of Nut to five, though strictly speaking, he was the child of Osiris and Isis. For the time being, we shall leave aside this contradiction. That the “children of Nut” were five in number was ritually conditioned. It corresponded to the constellation of ritual roles into which the complex phenomenon of death unfolded: the murder, the sacrifice, the two mourning women, and the son.
Osiris’ rule plays a great role in Egyptian texts. They almost always speak of him as ruler of the realm of the dead, an office he assumed only as a dead god, and almost never about his earthly kingship, which he exercised over gods and men in the world above as successor of Geb.3 Osiris’ reign came to a violent end, for he was slain by his brother, Seth. Thus did death come into the world, confronting the gods with a great problem. This is the prehistory, of which there is no coherent narrative in the Egyptian texts.
As stated above, we encounter the actual myth, which begins at this point, not as a continuous narrative in the texts but as a cycle of scenes. The first scene depicts the slain Osiris, his life destroyed and annihilated in the grossest of ways. For Seth did not just slay Osiris, he hacked him to pieces and threw the individual limbs into the water, with the result that the Nile carried them to various places throughout the land. This is the first image to which we shall turn: death as dismemberment. It depicts death in its physical, bodily, biological form of manifestation. This scene is the common theme of a large corpus of texts, which do not actually describe it but rather presuppose it as the trigger for various actions whose aim is to cope with this catastrophe. Just as it was Osiris’ undoing that he was the first of the divine rulers to have a brother and thus a rival for the throne, so his sisters became his salvation. Isis, his sister-wife, was the first to take action. She traversed the land to collect his scattered body parts. A hymn to Osiris from Dynasty 18 (stela Louvre C 286) narrates her actions in the form of two scenes:
1. Isis’ search and her care for the body:
Isis the powerful, protectress of her brother,
who sought him tirelessly,
who traversed this land in mourning
and did not rest until she found him;
who gave him shade with her feathers
and air with her wings;
who cried out, the mourning woman of her brother
who summoned dancers for the Weary of Heart;
2. The conception, birth, and childhood of Horus:
who took in his seed and created the heir,
who suckled the child in solitude, no one knew where,
who brought him, when his arm was strong,
into the hall of Geb—
the Ennead rejoiced:
“Welcome, Osiris’ son,
Horus, stout of heart, justified,
son of Isis, heir of Osiris.”
Isis’ activities with regard to the corpse of Osiris culminate in the posthumous conception of Horus. In the accounts of Diodorus and Plutarch, Isis recovered all the body parts of the slain god except for his virile member, which had been swallowed by a fish. She was thus obliged to replace this member with an artificial one that she was able to make into the instrument of a posthumous insemination. The Egyptian texts, which seldom mention this scene, know nothing of this detail. The locus classicus is a passage in Pyramid Texts spell 366:
Isis comes to you,
rejoicing for love of you,
that her seed might issue into her,
it being sharp as Sothis.
Horus, the sharp one, who comes forth from you
in his name “Horus, who is in Sothis,”
may it be well with you through him
in your name “Spirit in the ᾏnᾏrw-barque.”
Horus has protected you
in his name “Horus protector of his father.”
The pyramid text describes the transition from the first stage of salvation from death, which is concentrated on the image of death as dismemberment and on the corpse of the deceased, to the second stage, which has to do with the image of death as social isolation and is concerned with the restoration of the social person of the dead individual. Isis and Nephthys are the protagonists of the first phase; it ends with the conception and birth of Horus, who assumes direction of the second phase as “Horus protector of his father.” We shall discuss these matters in the next two chapters.
The texts do not speak of Osiris’ condition but rather of the actions aimed at remedying it. They speak of searching and finding, of gathering and putting together, of joining the head to the bones, of reinserting the heart, of replacing discharged fluids, of mourning Osiris, transfiguring him, and breathing life into him, in short, of a host of activities, all of them related to the body of the dismembered god, and in which we can easily recognize the mythic counterpart to the embalming ritual. Behind them lies not an actual dismemberment and rejoining of the corpse, as some scholars once assumed, but rather a specific image of the body, one that was quite characteristic of Egyptian culture and of the ancient Egyptian style of thinking.

2. The Egyptian Image of the Body

The image of death as dismemberment is derived (a) from the Egyptian image of the body as a multiplicity of members joined through the connective medium of blood into a living unity and (b) from the counterimage of redemption from death through collecting, joining, uniting, and knotting together. Here, we touch on an area of extremely basic cultural attitudes, which Emma Brunner-Traut, in particular, has dealt with in studies that have major theoretical implications.
In her influential book FrĂŒhformen des Erkennens (early forms of conceptualization), Brunner-Traut postulates a psychological, cognitive basis for certain especially striking peculiarities of Egyptian art, which she sets in parallelism with other phenomena in Egyptian culture, as well as with the art of other primitive peoples and with forms of children’s art.4 She groups these peculiarities together under the rubric of the “aspective.” This erudite concept, which is the opposite of “perspective,” designates a purely additive stringing together or aggregating of elements without organizing, structuring principles that would make them appear to be parts of a superordinate whole. These peculiarities are particularly clear in Egyptian art; Brunner-Traut, though, would like to see in them a trait that reaches far beyond art and into Egyptian thought, perception, and conceptualization in general. According to her theory, Egyptians cast a dissecting glance at the world, one that perceived only individual details and was incapable of seeing larger unities. In other words, they did not see the forest for the trees. Thus, in the case of the body, they saw a “marionette,” an aggregated multiplicity of individual limbs, not an organic whole controlled from the center outward.5 “The body is ‘put together,’ ‘knotted together’ out of a number of parts; it is, so to say, what we call a ‘marionette.’”6 In language, this dissecting style of thought is expressed in the lack of generic terms. Thus, for example, there is no word for world, cosmos, mundus. Instead, Egyptians said “sky and earth.” Egypt was “Upper and Lower Egypt.” Egyptian grammar has few conjunctions; the typical form of joining clauses is parataxis. Brunner-Traut qualifies Egyptian society as an “aggregated” society that had no structure but was rather an aggregated mass of individuals, an agglomeration of individual persons.7 This mass was hierarchically assembled, to be sure, but no one could “survey this whole and understand it as a unity and in its all-around functional interdependence.” The hierarchic construct was not fitted together into a “structure” but merely into an aggregate, an “aggregation (Latin grex, “herd”) of individuals but not into an organic body in which all the parts are reciprocally related to one another and thus woven into a whole by means of warp and weft.”8 These are astute observations. Without doubt, behind Brunner-Traut’s concept of the “aspective” stand deep, far-reaching insights into certain central phenomena of ancient Egyptian culture and their inner relationship. The psychological, cognitive interpretation, however, is too one-sided. It is true that the Egyptians cast a dissecting gaze on the world; but at the same time, there was always a question of connective principles, and these were what mattered most to them.
With the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, we can distinguish two different forms of thinking about the relationship between unity and multiplicity: the “organic” and the “mechanical,” or perhaps better, the “connective.”9 What Emma Brunner-Traut rightly notes is the absence of the organic model, in which the relation between the one and the many is conceived after the model of an organism, whose parts are functionally interdependent. In this model, all the parts of the whole work on one another, every movement and change is to a greater or lesser extent taken up and reflected by all of them. This model seems in fact to have played no special role in Egypt. We do not encounter collective identities such as clan, tribe, kinship group, or people, which are regarded as organically predetermined. Such units must of course have existed in prehistoric Egypt, as in all tribal societies, but under the Egyptian state, they retreated into the background, at least in the official semantics. This semantics was so universally dominant that it allowed for no “organic” forms of social grouping outside the bureaucratic-administrative and priestly, and later also the military, professional hierarchies. Brunner-Traut quite rightly maintains, “Extended families, as we still often find them in the Middle and Far East, did not exist, not even kinship groups with a collective identity through a series of generations.”10 But that did not mean that the individual was to be understood as an isolated element in an “amorphous” or “aggregated mass.” Here, the connective model comes into play, the concept of a medium that binds elements thought to be unbound into a comprehensive unity. We have a definite impression that the connective model was in the service of the state and the form it assumed, that of a pharaonic monocracy. The Egyptians developed a sort of connective ethic aimed at binding the individual into the structure of the state. To the principle of the aspective, which does not perceive a unity as such but rather breaks it down into its components, there corresponds a “connective thought” that inquires as to the binding elements. With regard to the theme of death, the presence of connective thinking is especially clear on two levels: on that of the Egyptian image of the body, which has to do with dismemberment and piecing together, and on that of the Egyptian image of social structure, which has to do with isolation and integration. As in many other societies, in ancient Egypt there was a correspondence between the image of the body and that of social structure.11
In this chapter, we shall first con...

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