WHAT
EGYPT STILL HAS TO TEACH US
Normandi
Ellis ©2000
Within
the dark recesses of Ancient Egyptian tombs one often finds images of
the dead seated before a burgeoning tray of cakes, fowl, onions, melons,
breads and beer as if prepared to feast at a grand meal. The impression
most tourists have of this image is that the ancient Egyptians looked
forward to entering a heaven filled with good things to eat and drink.
The second impression one has is of priests and relatives gathering to
make food and beverage offerings at the tomb of the dead, in the naive
belief that the soul of the corpse would actually eat this food.
We
make the mistake of judging Egypt by what we assume they knew. Perhaps,
I think, there is more to this feasting image than a childish faith in
a departed spirit that needs to be eternally fed. Perhaps, indeed, their
understanding of the spiritual realm exceeds our own gross material interests.
I recall the tomb portrait of
an ancient woman named Nefertiabet, high priestess and daughter of a pharaoh.
She sits before an offering table wearing the leopard skin that signified
her initiation into the mysteries of Osiris. None but the highest office
priest or priestess wore the panther skin robe, which was the emblem of
having "passed through the skin," meaning of one having died and been
reborn in her lifetime. Her closed hand seems to gently tap her heart,
as if reminding us that the message of this feast resides there, within
the breast of each soul. The feast lies spread before her, but rather
than reaching for it, she meditates upon it. What could such a feast represent?
When I was attending an Episcopal
Church service the other evening with my family, there came a moment when
the congregation performed the ritual of "Passing the Peace." In essence,
one reached toward another member of the congregation and said, "Peace
be with you." Someone grasped my hand and said softly, "Peace," and I
replied without a momentÍs hesitation, "Em Hotep." That was the
Egyptian word for "peace." It was also the Egyptian word of offering.
It was written on the doorway of every tomb with the hieroglyph of the
unrolled mat on which sat a cup of beer and upon it a loaf of bread. A
moment later, I watched the priest unroll the altar cloth and uplift the
chalice and hold it above the "host," or a circle of bread. I suddenly
realized I was witnessing a ritual that was not only a recreation of the
Last Supper, but was a ritual that predated Christ, extending back 5,000
years.
I remember Alberto Villoldo telling
me that the secret of the Peruvian shaman was his ability to see all the
world as sacred. His mentor told him, "The problem with Westerners that
they believe they have been kicked out of the garden. They live their
lives as if they had been thrown out of the realm of the divine. But the
shaman knows that we always have existed and still exist in the Garden.
Life is a feast. You are invited to dine."
That statement conveys all the truth about what the ancient Egyptians
believed about the neters (gods and Goddesses). The ancient Egyptian
word "Neter" swims through a sea of etymological soup, moving through
the Coptic Christian "netjer" into the Greek "netcher" and
coming to us in English as "nature."
These
ancient people inhabited a world that was spiritually alive and vibrant
from horizon to horizon. Wherever one stood, one existed in a land imbued
with magic. The gods and goddesses revealed their secret selves in the
natural beauty and mystery of the world: the movement of sun, moon and
stars, the mountains, desert and river, the birds, fish, cattle, sheep,
leopards and jackals. There was no event in heaven or on earth that they
did not observe keenly to understand its spiritual implications. The disappearance
of the Dog Star Sirius for 70 days during midsummer, then its reappearance
on the horizon at dawn was seen to coincide with the rising of the Nile,
and thus with the myth of Isis regenerating Osiris her husband who became
the Nile itself. There was no event in human life that was not also a
manifestation of the life of the neters. The ritual mourning that
accompanied the death of a spouse mimicked the mythic mourning of Isis
for the death of her husband. Each day Ra, the sun, was reborn, and each
night the sky mother, Nut, revealed the thousand twinkling stars that
were all the souls of the living and the dead held nurtured by her body.
Imagine how different our lives would be if for every tree that was cut
to build a house, we retold the myth of Osiris, the Green Man of Egypt
- how he was trapped within the sacred tree and how that god-filled tree
was cut and carried away to become the central pillar of a great house.
What if we recognized that tree as the axis mundi connecting heaven
and earth? Would our forests be more valuable if we viewed each tree as
a divine body and each house we built as a temple or dwelling place for
the divine? The fact that Egyptian people celebrated over 300 feast days
a year attests to the fact that they viewed every day as a miracle, a
holy event. The neters were invoked and bore witness to every tilling
of the field, every sowing of seed, every cutting of the grain, every
building project, every birth and death, every rise of the constellations.
All life to the ancient Egyptians was a manifestation of Light, of the
god Ra. God of many aspects ands names - Nefertum or Kheperi when he rose
as the sun in the east, and Osiris or Atum when he set in the west - Ra
possessed innumerable bodies and souls. All forms passed away in order
to transform into other living forms of the god. Ra lived and died and
transmuted and was reborn in order "to gain knowledge of himself."1
The
ancient Egyptians saw themselves and all humanity as forms of the Divine.
Humankind was created by Ra as "his likeness that came forth from his
flesh."2 It is this same deep recognition of our own spiritual heritage
that Christ professes when he says, "The Father and I are One.
Every
part of the body of life was a part of the divine body and had a spiritual
function. One of the mummification rituals dedicated each part of the
body to a particular god or goddess, saying: "My hair is the hair of Nu.
My eyes are the eyes of Hathor. My face is the face of Ra. My ears and
lips are the ears and lips of Anubis. My backbone is the backbone of Seth.
My womb is the womb of Isis. My belly is the belly of Nut. My feet are
the feet of Ptah..." 3 and so on.
The body itself was an adytum, a temple
filled with neters, and the ancient Egyptian architect-priests
built the holy temples of the gods and goddesses upon the proportions
of the divinely infused man and woman. French symbolist R.A. Schwaller
de Lubicz called the Temple of Luxor "The Temple of Man," meaning a temple
that honored the divine power of the enlightened individual symbolized
by the Pharaoh. Schwaller de Lubicz tells us that in the quiet mind the
Temple of Man speaks, saying, "There! Thou art myself. I have conducted
thee through the universe that thou might become my Temple, my "Self-Same"
in the flesh. All the kingdoms of nature are within thee."4
More
than this, even the words we speak were considered holy. Called heka,
these "words of power" were the hieroglyphs or holy language of the gods
bequeathed to humanity from the beginning of time when the god Ptah spoke
the world into being. Being forms of the divine, bodies of the divine
body, we too had the power to speak our lives into being, to create form
from the desire of our hearts aligned with the will of the gods. Simply
saying the name of a divine being or the names of the dead had the power
to bring to consciousness all the power that being held in life. By chanting
a god or goddessÍ name, the human soul was made divine. One Middle Kingdom
burial text summarizes the power of heka by its simple declaration: "God
is my name. I do not forget this name of mine." 5
The
famed Books of the Dead make no assumption that these sacred divine
powers were the exclusive right of the dead. True, the words often appeared
on the tomb walls and within papyrus scrolls, but their intent was to
remind the living of the cyclical nature of all life. For example, I would
not assume that a man buried with his Bible was taking it with him so
that he could read it later when he has more time!
The
divine is and always was, even to the Ancient Egyptians, meant to be apprehended
here and now. It is better to learn the lessons of spiritual life by reading
The Bible, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Egyptian Book of Coming
Forth By Day in this lifetime, for then one is able to see the divine
powers manifest all around us. Then one, infused with holiness, would
treat the world everyday as sacred and holy. The Osirian Mysteries were
called The Osirian Mysteries were called The Secret of Osiris Becoming
Ra, which contained the "spells" for living and dying well. The secret
of turning death into life, of regenerating in this lifetime was the impetus
behind the mystery tradition. Light becoming light consciously understood
during oneÍs lifetime is better than learning it unconsciously after death.
Every
man is an Osiris. The chapters of these papyri are inscribed for "Osiris
(Name)." Insert oneÍs own name into the blank. This is your book. It once
belonged to Ra, and then to Osiris, and now it belongs to you. The story
of the god Osiris tells us that he held a party for the people on the
night he was murdered by his brother Seth. In the midst of music and dancing,
drinking wine and feasting, he was snatched from this earth and killed.
The parts of his body scattered along the Nile remind us that Osiris,
the divine spiritual impulse for regeneration, still appears everywhere
in the world. We are told that wherever Isis, his wife, found a piece
of the god, she built a temple in that place to honor him. It was in this
way that she re-membered him.
Osiris
is to be found in the rising river, in the greening fields, in the majestic
trunk of a tree, in the rich black soil, in the constellation Orion appearing
in the winter sky. Osiris is an omnipresent reminder that life on earth
is a gift of the divine. The body of Osiris is a sensual body, oriented
toward earthly experience. For many, this world is to be disdained because
it focuses on experience that is far removed from the spiritual realm.
Yet this feasting, boating, dancing, hiking, working fields, making love
and smelling flowers aspect of the world is engaging in the pleasure of
all life forms. Through it we come to know the spirit in a tactile way,
a method far more excellent that the rude guesses of spiritual wisdom
the mind alone makes. It takes the peculiarly transcendent, brilliant
mind of the ancient Egyptian to see that in the midst of death, there
is life. Egypt is a place that to others might seem a desert wasteland,
yet to the ancient Egyptian the focus is always on beauty, on truth, on
what abides.
We
are entering an age of the Great Turn Around. A millennium ends. A millennium
begins. I see our entrance into the Aquarian Age as an opportunity for
us all to recall the divine legacy of humankind, to remember that life
is a feast. And each time I see the Aquarian emblem of the Water-Bearer
pouring out his two jars of spiritual fluid, I see the god Osiris manifest
as the Nile stemming from its twin sources. May that water flow through
our veins. May we see the god everywhere, within our land, within our
neighbors, within ourselves. May we embrace transformation and come to
understand the Secret of Osiris Becoming Light.
Life
is a Feast. You are invited to dine.
Normandi Ellis
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Normandi Ellis Bibliography:
Awakening
Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Translated by Normandi Ellis. Phanes Press, 1988.
Dreams
of Isis: A Woman's Spiritual Sojourn.
Quest Books, 1995.
Feasts
of Light: Celebrations for the Seasons of Life based on the Egyptian Goddess
Mysteries.
Quest Books, 1999.
Footnotes:
1 Lucie
Lamy. Egyptian Mysteries. translated by Deborah Lawlor. New York:
Crossroads Publishing, 1981, p88.
2 Erik Hornung. Conceptions of God in
Ancient Egypt. Translated by John Bains. Ithica: Cornell University
Press, 1982, p. 138.
3 E.A. Wallis Budge. The Gods of the Egyptians.
New York: Dover, 1969; vol. 1. p.111.
To the ancient Egyptian it made perfect
sense to dedicate the rich flowing hair of oneÍs body to Nu, the god of
the cosmic waters; the eyes to Hathor, the light of the sky; the face
to Ra, the shining solar disk; the ears to Anubis, the Jackal messenger;
the backbone to Seth, who was the bones of the earth; the womb to Isis,
mother of the god Horus; the belly to Nut, the great sky mother who stretched
herself above earth as the Milky Way; and the feet to Ptah, the creator
god whose feet were bound as if mummified, but who nevertheless spoke
the world into being.
4 R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Egyptian
Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple. Translated by
Andre and Goldian VandenBroeck. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1985, p.
224.
5 Hornung. Conceptions of God, p.89.
