EGYPTIAN BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
All that are in the graves shall come forth: they that have
done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have
done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.—ST. JOHN.
The ancestors of the Egyptians, when they entered the valley of the Nile,
did not come either empty-handed, or empty-headed. They brought with them
their looms, their ploughs and seed-corn, and their sheep and cattle: for
what they had been used to in the old home was what they would wish to
have in the new. They did this whether they came by land or by sea. None
of the first European settlers in the New World found any difficulty in
carrying with them their live stock across the broad and stormy Atlantic.
They brought with them also, and which was of more importance than all
the rest, their belief in an after life. We are as certain of this,
whether they came in ten, or twenty thousand years ago, as we are that,
at a geological epoch so remote from the present time that the organized
life of the Earth has since been changed again and again, there were
winds and tides, and sunshine and rain. Every branch of the Aryan family,
from the Ganges to the Thames, participated in this belief; it had,
therefore, existed among them at a date anterior to their dispersion. It
occupied in their organized thought the position the vertebrate skeleton
does in the animal organization. It was the governing idea. Everything
contributed to it, or was deduced from it: either, went to feed it,
or grew out of it. Those races of animals which have not arrived at
vertebration are the lowest forms, with the fewest specialized organs:
still they appear to have a kind of tendency towards it, or virtual
capacity for it. Just so of the mental condition of some portions of our
race with respect to this idea of a future life. There are some whose
thought is so rudimentary that it has never yet grown into this form;
but they are the lowest minds: still, even they have a kind of tendency
towards it, and of capacity for it—though, indeed, several such tribes
and people have died out without ever having attained to it. And so will
it be with many of those who, at the present day, are in this condition.
They will be swept away by those who possess the higher form of organized
thought, without their ever reaching this point in the progress of moral
and intellectual being.
If the question be asked—Why we do ourselves believe in a future
life?—the answer is—That we believe in it for the same reason that Homer
and Virgil, Cheops and Darius, Porus, Arminius, and Galgacus believed in
it—that is to say, because our remote, but common ancestors, had passed
out of the state in which thought is chaos, and had reached the state in
which thought has begun to organize itself; and because the vertebral
column of the form in which it had with them begun to organize itself
was belief in a future state. None of all of us, whether dwellers on the
banks of the Ganges, the Thames, or the Nile, could any more get rid
of, or dispense with, or act independently of, that formative column of
thought, than our animal constitution could of its formative column of
bone. Belief in God, in moral distinctions, in personal responsibility,
in the supremacy of intelligence—that is to say, that it is intelligence
which orders, and co-ordinates God, the universe, and man, would all be
powerless and unmeaning, were it not for this belief in a future life.
These, and others beliefs may feed and support it; but it acts in, and
through them, and gives them their chief value. It puts man in permanent
relation with God, and the universe. Hitherto with us nothing else has
done this. Without it these other beliefs would have been mere chaotic
elements of thought.
We must see this in order that we may understand the life, the mind,
and even the arts of the ancient Egyptians. Nothing about them is
intelligible if their belief in a future life is lost sight of; for this
it was that made them what they were, and enabled them to do what they
did. The connexion with it of their greatest achievement is close and
evident. As an instrument of human progress, language, of course, takes
precedence of everything. Nothing would be possible without it. But, if
man had stopped short at the acquisition of language, not much would have
been gained. Something more was needed, and that something was the art of
writing, which is that extension of the uses of language, without which
no serviceable amount of knowledge could have been attained, or retained.
Without this little could have been done. With it everything became
possible. The further we advance by its aid, the longer, and the broader,
and the more glorious are the vistas that open before us. Now, of this
we are certain, that the ancient Egyptians discovered this art. The idea
of the possibility of speaking words to the mind through the eye, and
rendering thought fixed, and permanent, and portable, and transmissible
from generation to generation, of committing it, not to the air, but to
stone, or, still better, to paper, first occurred to the Egyptians. And
they were the first to give effect to the idea, which they did in their
hieroglyphic form of writing, out of which afterwards grew the hieratic
and demotic forms.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. It
contained in its single self the possibility of the whole of science,
art, law, religion, history, beyond their merest rudiments, which were
all that would have been attainable without it. It contained all this as
completely as the acorn contains the oak. Where, and what would any and
every one of them now be were it not for that discovery? Indeed, what
does it not contain? There are now 31,000,000 souls within the United
Kingdom, had it not been for that discovery probably there would not have
been 3,000,000. Neither the readers nor the writer of this book would
have existed. None of the existing population of Europe would have seen
the light. Other combinations would have taken place. Europe would be
sparsely tenanted by tribes of rude barbarians—only a little less rude
in its favoured southern clime. The New World would be still unknown.
On the day some Egyptian priest, perhaps at This, thought out a scheme
for representing words and sounds by signs, Christianity, the British
Constitution, and the steam-engine became possible. With respect to so
great, so all-important a discovery, one on which the destinies of the
human race so entirely depended, every particular of its history must
be deeply interesting. Of one particular, however, at all events, we
are certain: we know where it had its birth. And this is what has made
so many in all times desire to visit Egypt. It was that they wished to
see the land of those who had conferred this much-containing gift upon
mankind—not all of them seeing this distinctly, yet having a kind of
intuition that the wisdom of the Egyptians was a mighty wisdom to which
civilization, through this discovery, owed itself.
We know, too, another particular, and that is, that this discovery was
first used for sacred and religious purposes; and it must have been
invented for the purposes for which it was first used. We can imagine
what prompted the thought that issued in the discovery. We can trace out
what it was that set the discovering mind at work. It must have been some
idea in Egypt that was more active, and so more productive than ideas
that were stirring in men’s minds elsewhere. It must have been some need
in Egypt that spurred men on more than the needs felt elsewhere. And this
idea could only have been that of the future life; and this need that
which arose out of this idea, the need of recording the laws it prompted,
and the ritual which grew out of it; and of aiding, embellishing, and
advancing in their general laws, their religious observances, their arts,
and what afterwards became their science and their history, the whole
life of the people which was struggling to rise into higher conditions,
more worthy of their great idea.
But we must give some account of what the Egyptian doctrine of the future
life actually was. Fortunately, in the Book of the Dead, we have for its
historical reconstruction the identical materials the old Egyptians had
for its construction in their own moral being. This Book of the Dead
was one of their Sacred Scriptures. Its contents are very various and
comprehensive, and are quite sufficient to give us a distinct idea of
what we are in want of here. It is divided into 165 sections. Its object
is to supply the man, now in the mummy stage of existence, with all the
instructions he will require in his passage to, and into, the future
world. It contains the primæval hymns that were to be sung, and the
prayers that were to be offered, as the mummy was lowered into the pit of
the catacomb or grave; and the invocations that were to be used over the
mummy, the various amulets appended to it, and the bandages in which it
was swathed. These bandages had great mystical importance. Some of them
have been unrolled to the length of 1,000 yards; and we are told that
there is no form of bandage known to modern surgery of which instances
may not be found on the mummies.
What has now been mentioned forms, as it were, the introductory part of
the book. The rest is devoted to what is to be done by the mummy himself
on his passage to, and entrance into, the unseen world. It taught him
what he was to say and do during the days of trying words, and on the
occasion of the great and terrible final judgment. An image of the
rendering of this awful account had already been presented to the eyes
of the surviving friends and neighbours at the funeral. It was a scene
in which the mummy had often taken part himself in the days of his own
earthly trial. The corpse, on its way to the grave, had to pass the
sacred lake of the nome, or department. When it had reached the shore
there was a pause in the progress of the procession, and forty-two
judges, or jurymen, stood forward to hear any accusations that any one
was at liberty to advance against the deceased. If any accusation could
be substantiated to the satisfaction of the judges, whether the deceased
were the Pharaoh who had sat on the throne, or a poor peasant or artizan,
the terrible sentence, to an Egyptian beyond measure terrible, was passed
upon him, that his mummy was to be excluded from burial. The awful
consequence of this was 3,000 years of wandering in darkness, and in
animal forms.
But, supposing that the mummy had passed this earthly ordeal, he was then
committed to his earthly resting-place; and this Book of the Dead, either
the whole, or what was deemed the most essential part of it, was placed
on, or in the mummy case: sometimes it was inscribed on the sarcophagus.
These were the instructions which were to guide him on the long, dread,
difficult course upon which he was about to enter. He will have to appear
in the hall of two-fold Divine Justice—the justice, that is, which
rewards as well as punishes. Osiris, the judge of the dead, will look
on, as president of the court. He will wear the emblem of truth, and the
tablet breast-plate, containing the figure of Divine Justice. The scales
of Divine Justice will be produced. The heart of the mummy will be placed
in one scale, and the figure of Divine Justice in the other. The mummy
will stand by the scale in which his heart is being weighed. Anubis, the
Guardian of the Dead, will watch the opposite scale. Thoth, who had been
the revealer to man of the divine words, of which the Sacred Books of
Egypt were transcripts, will be present to record the sentence.
The book contains, for the use of the mummy, the forty-two denials of
sin he will have to make in the presence of this awful court, while
his heart is in the balance, and the forty-two avenging demons, all
ape-faced, symbolizing man in the extremity of degradation, with reason
perverted and without conscience, and each with the pitiless knife in his
raised hand, will be standing by, ready to claim him, or some part of
him, if the balance indicates that the denial is false. These forty-two
denials have reference to the ordinary duties of human life, such as all
civilized people have understood them; though, of course, as might have
been expected, the forms of some of these duties are Egyptian, as, for
instance, that of using the waters of the irrigation fairly, and without
prejudice to the rights of others: an application to the circumstances
of Egypt, of the universally received ideas of fairness and justice,
which the working of human society must, everywhere, give birth to. The
denials also include, as again we might be sure they would, the mummy’s
observance of Egyptian ceremonial law.
There is still a great deal more in the book. The mummy will have to
achieve many difficult passages before he can attain the empyrean gate,
through which those who have been found true in the balance, for that is
the meaning of the Egyptian word for the justified, are at last admitted
to the realms of pure and everlasting light. This gate is the gate of the
Sun, and this light is the presence of the Sun-god. There will be many
adversaries that will be lying-in-wait for him, seeking to fasten charges
of one kind or another upon him, and to destroy him. The book tells him
how he is to comport himself, and what he is to do, as each of these
occasions arise. There are certain halls, for instance, through which he
will have to pass. These halls he will find inhabited by demons, but they
are a necessary part of the great journey. And the entrance to them he
will find barred and guarded by demon door-keepers. Here mystical names
and words must be used, which alone will enable the mummy to get by these
demon door-keepers, and through these demon-inhabited halls. These names
and words of power he will find in the book. We here have traces of the
thought of primitive times, when men regarded with wonder, deepening into
awe, the supposed mysterious efficacy of articulate sound.
One demon, in particular, will endeavour to secure the mummy’s head. In
a hellish place he must cross, a net will be spread to entangle him. He
will have to journey through regions of thick darkness, and to confront
the fury of the Great Dragon. He will have to go through places where
he may incur pollution; through others where he may become subject to
corruption. He will have to submit to a fiery ordeal. He will have to
work out a course of carefully and toilsomely conducted husbandry, the
harvest of which will be knowledge. He will have to obtain the air that
is untainted, the water that is of heaven, and the bread of Ra and Seb.
The book will give him all the needful instructions on these, and on all
other matters where he will require guidance.
Bunyan’s _Pilgrims Progress_ enables us to understand this Book of
the Dead. The aim of both is the same. Each presents a picture of the
hindrances and difficulties, both from within and from without, and of
the requirements and aids of the soul, in its struggle to attain to
the higher life. The Egyptian doctrine places the scene in the passage
from this life to the next. The Elstow tinker places it, allegorically,
in this life. But this is a difference that is immaterial. The ideas
of both are fundamentally the same. The consciousness to which they
both appeal is the same. The old Egyptian of 5,000 or 6,000 years ago
received the teaching of his book on precisely the same grounds as we
ourselves at this day receive the teaching of the Pilgrim. With how much
additional authority does this discovery invest these ideas! The mind
must be more or less than human that arrays itself against what has, so
overwhelmingly, approved itself _semper, ubique, et omnibus_.
The antiquity of the book is very great. Portions of it are found on the
mummy cases of the eleventh dynasty. This shows that it was in use 4,000
years ago. But this was very far from having been the date of its first
use; for even then it had become so old as to be unintelligible to royal
scribes; and we find that, in consequence, it was at that remote time the
custom to give together with the sacred text its interpretation.
All collections of Egyptian antiquities contain copies of this book,
or of portions of it. Several are to be seen in our British Museum. Of
course this abundance of copies results from the nature of the book,
and the use to which it was put. It was literally the viaticum, the
itinerary, the guide and hand-book, the route and instructions, for the
mummy to and through that world, from which no traveller returns. Each of
its sections is accompanied by a rubric, and generally illustrated by a
vignette, directing, and showing the mummy, how the section is to be used.
I know nothing more instructive and more touching in human history than
one of these old Egyptian Books of the Dead, with its doctrine, its
invocations, its hymns, its prayers, its instructions, its rubrics, its
illustrations. All its images are of the earth earthy. How could it be
otherwise? The soul that has kept all the commandments, that has been
tried in the balance and not found wanting, that has fought the good
fight to final triumph through all the dangers, and temptations, and
pollutions, that beset its path, reaches at last only a purer ether and
eternal light.
It is easy to endeavour to dismiss all this with cold indifference, or
with a cheap sneer. But those who placed this book by the side of a
departed relative had hearts that were still turned towards those they
could never any more behold in the flesh. All their care and thought
were not for themselves. And, too, they believed in right and truth, in
justice and goodness. And because they believed in them, they believed
also in a world and in a life of which those principles would be the law.