The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

So far as these ceremonies go, man began, we judge, by thinking first of securing for the dead an everlasting habitation. And so he covered his grave with an immense pile of earth.[91] The pile grew greater and greater, and at last, as we saw, it took the shape of the pyramid. Then came the entrance-chamber or porch to the tomb, in which the survivors offered sacrifices to the dead to keep him alive by the smell of the burnt offering.

The Egyptians had very little power of abstracting the idea of the immaterial soul from the material dead body. At any rate, they did not (for a long time) conceive the soul as a purely immaterial being. They thought of the immortal part of man as a sort of double of the mortal part. This double they called his ka. The ka could not exist without some material form, and therefore they took infinite pains to provide it with a body of some kind. They mummified the dead body so as to make it last as long as possible. But besides that, they made numerous images of the dead; sometimes (if his state could afford it) large statues of wood[92] or stone. And in addition to these they made a vast number of smaller images, generally of pottery—those little mummy figures in blue or green pottery,[93] of which we find such endless quantities buried in the tombs. There was usually a secret chamber or passage practised in the tomb to contain these mummied figures, and it was so arranged that the scent of the sacrifice might come along it.[94]

All these ideas belong, we see, to the most stationary notion of the dead. If they were followed out logically, the soul would be considered as tied for ever to the mummy, which lies below in a dark chamber, or to the little images in their small passage within the wall of the tomb. But the Egyptians did not carry out this idea logically. For we find prayers upon the walls of their earliest tombs, that Osiris should give to the dead, sheep, oxen, and farm-labourers, and ‘sport,’ or corn, and wine, and dancers, and jesters—all the pleasures, in fact, which he had had in life. Therefore the dead must really have been thought to have the power of life and motion as he had enjoyed it upon earth, inconsistent as such an idea is with the constant enchainment of the ka to some material belonging, to the mummy or to the image of pottery.

The
journey of
the dead.

Wherefore it came about that the Egyptians began to have a sort of notion of two souls—one the half-material ka, which remained in the tomb; the other of an immaterial nature, which moved about.

But this notion of two souls arose because the Egyptians were more precise and logical than most peoples have been in their speculations as to the future state. Among other races we see a constant confusion between the idea of resting in the tomb, and the idea of journeying to another land generally in the wake of the sun. And the food and drink placed on the tomb, instead of being the simple nourishment of the dead, were designed merely as a temporary provision for him on his way to the land of souls.

The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is all but universal; and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, with its wonderful Book of the Dead, gives as much weight to this side of belief as to the other notion of resting in the tomb. To lengthen out the soul’s journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and give incident where all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As a rule, the cities of the living in Egypt lay upon the eastern bank of the Nile; the tombs, the cities of the dead, on the left or western bank, generally just within the borders of the desert. Wherefore, as the body was carried across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance towards the sun, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the ‘Palace of the Two Truths,’ the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the deity.

In these two notions we have, I think, the germ of almost all the most ancient belief touching the soul’s future. A confusion between the two notions would imagine the soul making a journey through the earth to an underground land of shades. So far as we know, this was the prevailing feeling among the Hebrews. Old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speak of going down into the grave,[95] a place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode.

Journey to
the sky.

Finally, a third element—if not universal, common certainly to the Aryan races—will be the conception of the soul separating from the body altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these elements are found to exist and coexist in early creeds, and the force of the component parts determines the colour of man’s doctrine about the other world.