DeConick A.D

25
THE MATRIX OF ANCIENT SPIRITUALITY
“He who was alive yesterday is dead today,” they said. “What is evil to a
person’s mind is good for a god” (Pritchard 1969, 435).
Submission for Eternity in Egypt
Servant spirituality structured the Egyptian religion, too, where the human
being is so marginal that the mythology does not bother to mention
the creation of humans, or does so only in passing, as creatures that
emerged from the unintentional tears of Atum (Lloyd 1989). Atum is the
primary self-generated god, the first to come out of the primordial darkness.
He is relieved when his brother and sister return to him after leaving
him alone for a time. It is from the tears of relief he sheds at his reunion
with them that human beings spring, unplanned. In one such mention,
it is remarked that the tears were wept out of anger, suggesting that the
human race is a product of Atum’s rage and misery (Faulkner 2004, spell
714). In another version of the story, it is tears of sorrow and loneliness
that produce human beings, suggesting that the human race is a product
most sorrowful and pitiful (spell 1130).
In some accounts, humans are molded from mud or clay by the creator
god Khnum, who makes them on his potter’s wheel, continually producing
bodies of children yet to be born. At their births, the ka (life breath)
is breathed into them. Death occurs when the ka departs from the body
to take up residence in a statue or portrait of the person in the tomb. It
is difficult to render fully the meaning of ka into English because we have
no similar concept today. It is considered to be the person’s vitality and so
is rendered as a twin or double of the individual.
In addition, the human being has a ba , an individual capacity to move.
It assumes immense importance after death, when the corpse can’t move,
and it must be released from the body through a ritual called the Opening
of the Mouth. The ba is depicted as a bird or animal manifestation of
the person, which can leave the tomb and roam the earth and sky during
the day, returning to the underworld every night to be reunited with the
ka (figure 1.2).
Once the person had been properly mummified, the unification of the
ka and ba resulted in the separation of the akh from the corpse. The akh
is the glorified afterlife form of the person, the deceased reconstituted as
a being of light. The akh was like a roaming ghost.