It was thus that the Egyptians sought to make themselves homes in the next world, and to secure all the comforts and pleasures of their earthly life in the life which was to come. Nevertheless, the pious Egyptian did not expect to remain for ever as an Osiris, or as a god in human likeness: he rather hoped for ever-increasing freedom, for the power of taking other shapes and transforming himself at will into quadrupeds; or into birds—such as the swallow or the heron; or into plants—more especially the lotus; or even into gods.[51]
This is no doctrine of compulsory transmigration such as used to be freely ascribed to the Egyptians on the strength of the statements made by Herodotus[52]; there is no question here of souls being forced to assume fresh forms in which their purification is gradually worked out and their perfection achieved. To the Egyptian transmigration was not the doom of imperfect souls, but a privilege reserved for such as had already attained perfection. Again and again the texts assert that the blessed may assume any form and visit any place at will; body and place can no longer enthral him. He may travel round the heavens with the Sun-god Rā, or arise from the shades with Osiris in the “divine night” of the 26th of the month Khoiak (i.e. at the winter solstice); he is even as a god, nay, he is himself a god, able to live in and by Truth, actually taking it, indeed, as food and drink.
The power of the soul to incarnate itself at pleasure became one of the chief reasons for embalming the body. As we have seen, the preservation of the body was held to be necessary because the mummy was supposed to be the material form of which the Osiris was the essential reality. But this temporary need might have been met in simpler fashion, since the journey of the Soul to the Hall of Judgment was accomplished in a comparatively short time. There was, however, a further need for which provision had to be made. The soul might sometimes visit the mummy, again take up its abode in its former body, and, animating it anew, return to earth under that form and thus revisit the spots where once it had dwelt. To this end it required an earthly and tangible body, and this was supplied by the mummy. If the mummy were destroyed, then the soul not only lost one of the forms in which it might incarnate itself, but that one with which its interests were naturally most closely connected—that one which linked it to earth and best enabled it to exhort the survivors to remember the funerary offerings, and to see how it fared with those whom it had been obliged to leave behind. The destruction of the mummy did not involve the destruction of the soul, but it narrowed the soul’s circle of activity and limited its means of transmigration.
This doctrine gave rise to the necromantic theory that a soul might be compelled by means of magic formulæ to re-enter its body, and to speak through the dead lips. The magician who had brought this about could then stipulate for all kinds of favours before restoring the soul to freedom. It is true that such an attempt was reckoned highly dangerous; and, according to a tale dating from Ptolemaic times, a royal prince named Setna,[53] who had succeeded in the undertaking, paid heavily for having sought to make the spirits of the dead subject to him, when, through his own imprudence, he was overpowered by those whom he had invoked.
The above sketch of the eschatology of the Ancient Egyptians is drawn from their own religious texts. As to the origin of that system and the transformations which it had undergone before reaching the form under which it is known to us we are as yet entirely ignorant; but it is obvious that it must have developed gradually and assimilated many originally heterogeneous doctrines. For instance, the Ka and the Osiris must surely once have had the same significance, and not have been considered as two different factors of the dead man’s being until time had brought about the fusion of two theological systems—in one of which the Ka was regarded as the spiritual Doppelgänger, or Double, while in the other it was named the Osiris. All attempts at solving these and similar problems connected with this subject are, as yet, mere hypotheses. As far back as Egyptian history has been traced the people appear to have been in possession not only of written characters, national art and institutions, but also of a complete system of religion. As in all other departments of Egyptian life and thought, so with the Egyptian religion—we cannot trace its beginnings. In the earliest glimpse of it afforded by the Egyptian texts it appears as perfect in all its essential parts; nor were after-times able to effect much change in it by the addition of new features. What greatly intensifies the deep historical interest of Egyptian eschatology is that it testifies not only to the fact that a whole nation believed in the immortality of the soul four thousand years before the birth of Christ, but also that this nation had even then succeeded in clearly picturing the future life to themselves after a fashion which may indeed often seem strange and incomprehensible to modern minds but to which we cannot deny a certain consistency and a deep spiritual connotation.
We shall not here discuss the many analogies subsisting between Egyptian belief and the religious systems of other nations and times, nor yet its great differences from them; and it is for the sciences of anthropology and comparative religion to determine to what extent the Egyptian doctrine of immortality originated in Egypt itself, and how much was brought there by the Egyptians from the common home which they had shared with the Semites and Indo-europeans.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The whole process of embalmment is briefly described in the Rhind Papyrus, edited by Birch, London, 1863, and by Brugsch, Leipzig, 1865. The procedure of the taricheuts is described in a Vienna papyrus, edited by Bergmann, Vienna, 1887, and the conclusion of their operations in a Paris papyrus and a Bûlaq papyrus, edited by Maspero, Pap. du Louvre, Paris, 1875. For the transport of the mummy, see Dümichen, Kal. Insch., pl. 35 sqq. The minutely ordered ritual for the ceremonies at the door of the tomb was published and investigated in Schiaparelli's admirable work, Il Libro dei Funerali, Turin, 1881—1890.