The Journey in the Duat

The Journey in the Duat

 

In the farthest, most remote corner of a great desert valley, is hidden the tomb of the king Tuthmosis III, who died in Egypt about 1425 BC.  The tomb is cut deep into the mountain, and when it was shut, all was total darkness within.  No natural light fell inside.  Yet, on the walls of this tomb, someone has painted the most fabulous tableau of fantastic creatures and men that seems to tell a story.  A story about what?  A story to be read by whom, in this utter darkness?

This painting is the oldest religious literature known on earth.  It captures writings that date back at least one thousand years before Tuthmosis III.  The mysterious painting is known to us as The Book of What Is in the Duat, or the Amduat.

Modern scholars usually translate the word Duat as the “afterlife” or “netherworld” or similar words meaning a realm encountered after this life we know on earth.  The common belief is that the painting offered instruction to the dead king as he rose from his coffin.  That is a natural interpretation, since, after all, it is found in the king’s tomb.

But it is most certainly wrong.

The king (pharaoh) would not need such instruction, since he was fully informed during his entire life, by his priests, of what was expected in life and in death.  He would have known this entire mosaic, because it was his tomb, after all, and he would have known every detail of what went into it, and what it meant.  He supervised the selection of items for his own tomb during the entirety of his reign.  Furthermore, how would he read this in the pitch dark?  And we know that the Egyptians believed that after death, each person received a divine life review and judgement (known as the weighing of the heart—the heart representing the person’s soul).  But that completely essential aspect of life after death is nowhere to be found in this tableau.  And this “judgement” took place quickly after death—no prolonged journey and obstacle course.   Also, there is nothing in the tableau that “instructs” the soul of the dead king what actions he must take during this journey.  He is not instructed, for example, “when you come to this door, you must say these magic words to get through.”  There is nothing like that.  Finally, thieves and priests entered this tomb without fearing that they might encounter the spirit of the dead king.  The inspectors commented that the provisions supposedly left for the king in his afterlife were untouched; “the beer is not drunk, and the bread has not been eaten.”

No, this is something else.  More profound.

 

 

 

The Book of the Duat

The mural is divided into twelve panels that represent “hours.”  Each hour is further divided into three or four horizontal rows of figures.   Each hour is a very complex tableau jammed with figures that we know represent Egyptian “gods.”  These gods and goddesses seem to have been manifestations or aspects of one great and supreme god, Re (usually pronounced Rah), who created the universe.  Re was referred to as:  self-created, all-powerful, supreme, One.  The Egyptians believed there was a more mysterious creator, Atum, who humans because of their inherent limitations could not know.  Atum was known as “he who is the totality” and whom “no man knows and no god sees.” (1)  In one rendition, Atum spoke a word and instantly the whole creation came into being, including the gods.  But Re was the supreme creator that men and women could encounter and could know personally.

The Egyptians depicted each of the gods with unique symbols.  Sometimes a particular animal was chosen to represent a god, for reasons we do not know.  Re was depicted not only as a human figure, but also as the sun, or a disc representing the sun.  Another symbol for Re was the eye.

 

A God of Light

Marine Sergeant Steven Price, 23 years old and critically wounded, lay on a stretcher waiting to be taken into the operating room.  He says he became “totally detached” from his body and floated up near the ceiling.  He turned toward the brick wall, which suddenly became a light.  “The light was there and it had come to get me.  The light is the brightest thing you have ever seen, yet it’s not penetrating in any way.  I can’t describe the light. . . . It is a mother cradling her baby with love, only a million times more than that and that is all of the love there is.”

Today we are quite familiar with the “near death experience or NDE” as it has come to be called.  The experience is common in all cultures.  At least eight million Americans have had a near death experience.

Most commonly, those who have had the experience recall going through a tunnel and meeting the light.  A few record suddenly seeing what looks like the night sky filled with stars, but they realize the stars are souls.  They may meet a dead friend or relative.  They want to stay, but are told that they must return.  Generally, when they do return they are more spiritual and compassionate.  And they have lost all fear of death.  Price says:  “You don’t know what it is to live until you’re not afraid to die.”  When he talks about the light, his eyes fill with tears.  “It took me 20 years to be able to call the light God.” (2)

Most assuredly, the ancient Egyptians were familiar with this Light, and they called it Re.  The Egyptians did not worship the sun, but naturally adopted the sun and its daily journey as a metaphor for Re and the spiritual journey of life.

In the Book of the Duat, the central figure is Re underneath a canopy or tabernacle.  For the Egyptians, this symbolized the human body.  The text refers to the figure as the “Flesh.” In other words, this was a human entering this journey.  And God was inside him or her.  Not only in the Amduat but elsewhere the Egyptians referred to “god who is in man.” (3)

In the Upanishads of ancient India (written beginning around 800 BC), an anonymous holy teacher was recorded as saying:

“Know that Brahman (God) is for ever in thee, and nothing higher is there to be known.

God is found in the soul when sought with truth and self-sacrifice, as fire is found in wood, water in hidden springs, cream in milk, and oil in the oil-fruit.

Words cannot describe the joy of the soul whose impurities are cleansed in deep contemplation—who is one with his Atman, his own Spirit.  Only those who feel this joy know what it is.

May we know the Lord of lords, the King of kings, the God of gods:  God, the God of love, the Lord of all.”  (from the Svetasvatara Upanishad, Mascaro translation) (4)

Fifteen hundred years after the Amduat, the Jewish holy man in Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth, said:  “For see, the Kingdom of God is inside you.” (Gospel according to Luke, Richmond Lattimore, translation).  And his disciple, the Jewish Roman citizen Paul of Tarsus (Saint Paul) said:  “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version).

The texts of the painting repeatedly refer to the hidden, secret, and mysterious nature of the Duat.  So it was something that even the Egyptians were required to struggle with to understand.  For example, one text says:  “This is the plan like the one drawn by the god himself.  It is useful for him who is on earth.  Very correct like their mysterious representation in painting.”  (Alexandre Piankoff translation, as quoted in West, The Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt).  (5) Note that the painting is “useful for him who is on earth,” not for someone in the afterlife.  From the divine perspective (“heaven”), this world is the underworld, the netherworld.

In addition to the God within every human, the Egyptians believed every soul in this world was immortal.  The Greek historian Herodotus, visiting Egypt around 450 BC, states:  “The Egyptians are in fact the first to have claimed that the human soul is immortal and that each time the body perishes, it enters at birth another living being.” (6)  In the Upanishads it is stated thus:  “Atman, the Spirit of vision, is never born and never dies.  Never-born and eternal, beyond times gone or to come, he does not die when the body dies.” (from the Katha Upanishad, Mascaro, trans.)   The holy Christian writer Walter Hilton (1343-1396), writing two thousand, eight hundred years after the Amduat states: “[A] soul is a life–deathless and invisible—having power in itself to see and know the supreme truth and to love the supreme goodness that is God.”  (7)  The Egyptians referred to the soul within the human as the ba, and the god within was called the ka.  The goal of life for each person was to unite his or her ba with the ka, to make them one.

At death, each person receives a life review and a divine judgement, known as the weighing of the heart, as mentioned.  Most people are then “recycled” back into this world in order to continue their spiritual growth journey.  But some who have reached union with God, who have become sanctified souls, are no longer reincarnated but “graduate.”  Such a person “becomes a star and joins the company of Re, and sails with him across the sky in his boat of millions of years.” (Piankoff).  In the Upanishads:  “He who has not right understanding, is careless and never pure, reaches not the End of the journey; but wanders on from death to death.  But he who has understanding, is careful and ever pure, reaches the End of the journey, from which he never returns.”  (from the Katha Upanishad, Mascaro, trans.).

There was a third possible outcome.  If a soul in its life on earth revealed no sign of the divine Spirit within, then that soul was thrown to the crocodile god Ammit (symbolizing death) and basically obliterated (scattered into various primitive animal and plant forms) at the conclusion of the judgement. The Egyptians regarded this outcome with horror. (West, The Travelers Key to Ancient Egypt).

Before launching into this journey, we must briefly focus on the central myth in Egyptian civilization:  The death of the god Osiris.  This story has many forms and is mostly recorded by outsiders to the civilization, such as Plutarch, so the accuracy of their details may be questioned.  But the basic story is this:  Osiris is tricked and murdered by his brother, the wicked god Set, who cuts up his dead body into 14 pieces and buries them throughout Egypt.  Isis, the wife of Osiris, searches throughout the country and gathers all the pieces and re-constitutes Osiris, but he is still dead.  She has intercourse with the dead Osiris and gives birth to Horus.  Horus battles Set for a long time and finally defeats him utterly.  That is the story, and it was known and understood by all Egyptians throughout the thousands of years of Egyptian civilization.  It was the foundational myth.  But what does it mean?  We shall very soon discover.

The person, Re-within-the-canopy, stands in a boat surrounded and guided by the gods, the divine forces, and the spiritual journey of this life begins with the first hour.  We will not comment on every hour, but only focus on some key features of this journey of the soul, in this life, as understood by the Egyptians.  Furthermore, so much of it is obscure to us, and even when it can be translated, we cannot understand it.  But the salient features are pretty obvious.

In the first hour the boat is launched.  The pilot is Opener of the Ways and the helmswoman is She Who Guides the Barque.  There is a Lady of the Barque and many others.  There are gods who “open the doors for the Great Soul,” others who “open what is in the earth,” some who are praising Re, and some who “lead the Great God.”  In the second hour, the great goddesses Isis and her sister Nephthys are now in the prow and lead the way.  There are symbols of change from one form into another in this hour.  The texts emphasize sowing into the earth—in other words, the seed that must “die” to bring about a new life.

In the early stages of the spiritual journey, the soul moves quietly toward God.  If a conversion to God’s way takes place later in life, usually in adulthood, rather than simply continuously from childhood, the early process can be quite appealing.  Walter Hilton writes:  “For at the beginning of conversion a person who is disposed to abundant grace is so vitally and perceptibly inspired, and often feels such great sweetness of devotion, with so many tears in compunction, that he sometimes feels as if he were half in heaven.”

This delightful period does not last and is not meant to last.  The delightful phase is meant to begin a bonding process with God.  It is God’s call to the soul.  But after this initial sweet period, the soul must begin the arduous process of spiritual growth, and God leads and guides that.  This period can be very laborious and tiresome, because the soul has long been attached to the ways of the world and needs to be detached from them.  The soul experiences great resistance to this detachment.  Sometimes we are masters of our human nature and often it is the master of us.

The task of the soul in this early life is to establish a strong, secure, loving relationship with God.  When that task has reached a point where the person has complete faith and trust in God, and has begun to see God’s actions in his or her life, and knows for certain that he or she loves God and is pretty sure he or she  is loved by God, something very strange happens.

In the third hour of the Amduat, the place for the soul in the barque is empty, and the preceding boat carries a mummy.  The scene seems to signify that the soul is dead.  This hour is called “She Who Cuts Up the Souls.”  A passage above reads:  “This is what they do in the West:  roast and hack to pieces the souls, imprison the shadows, annihilate those who are not, who belong to this Place of Destruction.”  The Great God calls to the “mysterious souls who are in the following of Osiris” to rise from the dead and live.  The Great God says, “I have come here to see my bodies, to pass in review my images which are in the Duat . . . . Thy soul, Osiris, is destined for the sky, thy body . . . is destined for the earth.”  Osiris figures and symbols are abundant.  (Piankoff, trans. in West, Traveler’s Key).

The fourth hour shows a dramatic passageway down through the entire scene from top to bottom.  It is called the “mysterious road” leading down into the “Imhat Necropolis.”  Our soul hero has descended into the pit, in darkness.  Prominently at the top of this scene, as if he is in charge, is Set.  Remember him?  Khepri, the scarab beetle and symbol of change, is born.

 

Darkness

In the spiritual journey of the soul in this life, this period (hours three and four) is known as the Dark Night of the Senses, as Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) titled it in his great works The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night.  The great spiritual writer Walter Hilton records that the soul is “troubled and vexed by various temptations, and well tried through tribulations of the spirit . . . . And that shall be inward through fear, doubts and perplexities, so that the soul nearly falls into despair, and it will seem as if forsaken by God and left altogether in the hands of the devil, except for a little secret trust that it shall have in the goodness of God and in his mercy.”  The soul can be “punished by sickness of various kinds or through feeling itself tormented by the devil.”  “Nevertheless, the soul would rather be in all this pain than be blinded with the false love of the world:  for that would be hell to such a soul.”   (7)

Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)  declares:  “The grief that is felt here is not like that of this world . . . such grief doesn’t reach the intimate depths of our being as does the pain suffered in this state, for it seems that the pain breaks and grinds the soul into pieces . . . .”  (8)  Sound familiar?

A kind of numbing of the senses and the intellect takes place.  The person no longer experiences emotional attachment to what it receives through the senses.  So, for example, a person might see a beautiful sunset, and his or her mind says:  Yes, I know it’s beautiful, but there is no corresponding emotional joy or thrill at it.   And this will be true for all senses. Likewise, the person can no longer do work with the mind that it was used to doing before, such as works of meditation.  In fact all the things of religion that it used to love are now dead to it.

This is the death of the old spiritual person so that a new person can be born.  As the Katha Upanishad states:  “When the five senses and the mind are still, and reason itself rests in silence, then begins the Path supreme.” (Mascaro, trans.)

But doesn’t this sound like clinical depression?  Saint John explains the signs that differentiate this condition from depression, laziness, etc.  For example, in depression the person is shut down usually across the board and has no love or enthusiasm for anything.  In the Dark Night the person deeply loves God and is saddened and puzzled by why God seems to have rejected and abandoned him or her.  The soul fears that it is slipping backward spiritually into a love of the world or worldliness because it no longer has any affection for the things of God.  All the rest is stripped away.  (9)

Saint John also warns that persons who are close to this soul, or who should professionally know better (such as religious counselors), will confront the soul and say that it is all depression or that they must have done something horrible that God is punishing them in this way.  This is another torment for the poor soul going through this.

But why?  What is the point of this?  Walter Hilton writes:  “Our Lord does all this for the great benefit of the soul, in order to drive it out from rest in carnal living and to separate it from the love of the sensuality, so that it might receive spiritual light.”

Holy moly!  Does everyone have to go through this?  John says:  “For God does not bring to contemplation [the next stage] all those who purposely exercise themselves in the way of the spirit, nor even half.  Why?  He best knows.”  Further he states:  “Yet we cannot say certainly how long the soul will be kept in this fast and penance of the senses.  Not everyone undergoes this in the same way, neither are the temptations identical.  All is meted out according to God’s will and the greater or lesser amount of imperfection that must be purged from each one.  In the measure of the degree of love to which God wishes to raise a soul, he humbles it with greater or less intensity, or for a longer or shorter period of time. . . . Yet, as is evident through experience, souls who will pass on to so happy and lofty a state as is the union of love must usually remain in these aridities and temptations for a long while no matter how quickly God leads them.”

 

After the Darkness

Suddenly the drama of the soul enters into the fifth hour and hope rises.  The gods tow the barque forward with a rope, and Khepri, the beetle, pulls the rope upward.  A new life is bursting from the earth (where it was buried).  Isis and Nephthys, shown as birds, cling to the bulging mound.  In older versions of the text, this mound of earth is called the Night.  The accompanying text reads:  “In peace, in peace!  Lord of Life!  In peace.  Thou peace of the West!  In peace, thou opener of the earth.  In peace, thou cleaver of the ground.  In peace, thou who art in heaven . . . . Heaven is in peace, in peace!  Re is bound for the beautiful West.”  And: “ . . . the Holy Place of the land of Sokar, the Flesh, the body in its first manifestation. . . . He who knows it, his soul will be in peace. . . .” (Piankoff and West, Traveler’s Key).

Now the soul is called “to remain in rest and quietude even though it may seem obvious to them that they are doing nothing and wasting time. . . . All that is required of them here is freedom of soul, that they liberate themselves from the impediment and fatigue of ideas and thoughts, and care not about thinking and meditating.  They must be content simply with a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God, and live without the concern, without the effort, and without the desire to taste or feel him.”  (John of the Cross, The Dark Night).

The Dark Night of the Senses can end quite calmly.  The soul is left in relative peace.  This is the narrow gate that leads from one spiritual state to another, a new life.  Within Christianity, persons in the earlier state are called “beginners.”  Those entering the new life are called “proficients” and this new life stage is termed “contemplation.”  In a final stage they are called “perfect.” John of the Cross says:  “For when the appetites and concupiscences are quenched, the soul dwells in spiritual peace and tranquility.  Where neither the appetites nor concupiscence reign, there is no disturbance but only God’s peace and consolation.”

John describes eight steps in the ascent to God in this new stage of life.  The steps mark increasing intensity of love for God and intimacy with God.

The primary task in this new life is to acquire a radical humility.  This is a genuine humility, the opposite of the normal human kind that basically goes about presenting itself as humble:  “See everyone how humble I am?”  That is mere hypocrisy.

Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), one of the greatest spiritual writers in Christianity describes it like this:  “take delight in being unknown and unregarded.”  (10)  The soul begins to reject and abandon all that the world tries to sell to it as important:  wealth, power, position, honors, the approval of others.  Walter Hilton says that the soul has “no more savor or delight in worldly pleasure than in a straw, but finds it bitter as wormwood.”

This turning away from attachment to the things of the world is considered the gate through which the soul must pass into contemplation and advancement in spirituality.  Hilton says:  “This dying to the world is this darkness, and it is the gate to contemplation. . . . There can be many different ways and diverse practices leading different souls to contemplation, for there are diverse exercises in working according to people’s various dispositions and the different states they are in, such as seculars and those in religious orders.  Nevertheless, there is only one gate.  For whatever exercise a soul may have, unless he can come by it to this knowledge and to a humble feeling of himself—mortified and dead to the world as regards his love, and able sometimes to feel himself set in this restful darkness whereby he can be hidden from the world’s vanity, and to see himself, what he is—indeed, he has not yet come to reforming in feeling, and does not have contemplation in its fullness.  He is very far from it. . . . But the man who can bring himself first to nothing through grace of humility, and in this way die, he is in the gate, for he is dead to the world and lives to God.”

As a help to this increasing humility, God sends the soul a kind of life review, bringing up to the person all his or her past hurts and harms to others, selfishness, and cowardice.  This is like a running review of one’s life given over the course of this contemplation period.  As John of the Cross says:  “That it [the soul] is full of evil and sin is as clear as day to it, and even clearer, for, as we shall say further on, God is the author of this enlightenment in the night of contemplation.”  Elsewhere he writes:  “Through this humility acquired by means of self-knowledge, individuals are purged of all those imperfections of the vice of pride into which they fell in the time of their prosperity.  Aware of their own dryness and wretchedness, the thought of their being more advanced than others does not even occur in its first movements, as it did before; on the contrary, they realize that others are better.”   Thomas a Kempis writes:  “Thus You show me my true self, what I am, what I have been, and what I have become; for I am nothing, and did not know it.”

Looking back upon our life, we are likely to respond, “How could anyone be that stupid?”  But there it is.  Yet this life review is not experienced as painful, but rather as enlightening.  It helps to free us of any exalted feelings we may have had about ourselves.

About this whole process, Teresa of Avila, uses the image of the silk worm that enters into the darkness of the cocoon, and emerges suddenly as a beautiful butterfly, flying free.

Walter Hilton advises that if we seek to make spiritual progress in this new life, we should learn to think like this:  “I am nothing. I have nothing.  I want only one thing.”  What is that one thing?

In hours six through eight of the Amduat, the constant theme is the change of one form into another.  The soul is back in his or her boat and Isis propels the craft with her magical words.  A text addressed to Osiris reads:  “Thou art a soul, thy soul is made spirit on earth.”  At the base of the scene (seventh hour) Horus appears on a throne.  The texts in the eighth hour refer to the “hidden forms of Horus, heir to Osiris.”  Isis the Weaver is also prominent, in other words converting thread into fabric and changing one thing into a greater thing.  Opponents of the progress of the soul are defeated.

The ninth hour, which is especially obscure, continues the theme of change of form, such as bread and beer.  In the tenth hour the emphasis is on the “spiritual arising out of the material and the temporal.” (West).  Horus leans on a staff and calls to figures adrift in the waters:  “the drowned ones, the overturned ones, those who float stretched out on their backs, who are in the Abyss. . .”  That is, Horus tells the fallen that they do not need to lead their lives like this, nothing prevents them from reaching the safety of the land.

In the eleventh hour Horus is fully developed and triumphant.  He has defeated the enemies of his father Osiris.  Finally, in the twelfth hour, gods hail the risen Osiris.  A mummy, called Image of Flesh, is cast aside.  He is “the mysterious form of Horus in complete darkness.”  Horus, hidden in the human life, is now free.  The material (flesh) has become spirit, Horus.

 

The Ninth Step

As noted, John of the Cross describes eight steps in the soul’s ascent to God in contemplation.  But there is a ninth step.  He says:  “The ninth step of love causes the soul to burn gently.  It is the step of the perfect who burn gently in God.  The Holy Spirit produces this gentle and delightful ardor by reason of the perfect soul’s union with God.”

What is this union?  Teresa of Avila says it is like rainwater that has fallen into a river—the two waters, once distinguishable, have become one thing, the river.  John of the Cross writes:  “So great a union is caused that all the things of both God and the soul become one in participant transformation, and the soul appears to be God more than a soul.  Indeed, it is God by participation.”  The Katha Upanishad summarizes it this way:  “When all desires that cling to the heart are surrendered, then a mortal becomes immortal, and even in this world he is one with Brahman.”

The ancient Egyptians would say that the person’s ba has become united with his or her ka.

But before this can happen, John says there occurs another Dark Night, the Night of the Spirit.  According to him this is even more terrible than the experience in the Night of the Senses, because it reaches to the very core of the person’s soul and purges it of everything in the spirit that is not God.  Again the soul feels very abandoned and unwanted by God, and desolate.  When it is done, the soul is as perfect in this life as it is possible to be.  Thus, the Night of the Spirit is the transition to the state of perfection as the Night of Senses was transition to contemplation and the “proficient.”

 

Osiris, Isis, and Horus

We can now understand the great Egyptian myth, known and understood by all Egyptians.  Osiris represents all persons who are in the beginner state of spirituality (the vast majority).  Horus represents those who have graduated to proficiency.  Isis is the divine force that guides this transformation in the soul.

John says:  “After arriving at the ninth step in this life, the soul departs from the body.”

The Egyptians would say that such a soul “becomes a star and joins the company of Re, and sails with him across the sky in his boat of millions of years.” (Piankoff)

And why does this tableau appear in the king’s tomb?  We do not know, but it is like other decoration in the tombs of the kings:  It is a statement of spiritual truth; and the king wanted it in his tomb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion, translated from the German by Ann E. Keep, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1973, pages 23, 26.
2. Gerald Renner (The Hartford Courant), “The Out-of-Body Experience,” The Washington Post, January 18, 1990, page B5.
3. Erik Hornung (John Baines, translator), Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1982.
4. The Upanishads, translations from the Sanskrit by Juan Mascaro, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1965.
5. John Anthony West, The Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995.
6. Herodotus, The Histories (Edited by Robert B. Strassler, Andrea L. Purvis, translator), New York, New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
7. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, Book Two (translated from the Middle English by John P.H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward), Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1991.
8. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. II, The interior Castle, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980.
9. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1973.
10. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, London, England:  Penguin Books, 1952.