by J H Brennan
There follows a long, complex conjuration, repeated seven times, after which the child is required to open his eyes and look into the bowl. If the boy confirms that the god is beginning to appear to him, there follows a briefer finishing incantation, after which the god might be questioned. But not directly. Any communication, questions or answers, is passed on by the child.
To most modern ears, this sounds like superstitious hocus-pocus, but experience shows that scrying techniques of this sort, which include the use of black mirrors and (usually blue) water bowls with or without the oil, produce results. Staring fixedly into the bowl can engender a trancelike state, possibly due to self-hypnosis, during which visions will typically occur. Even the placing of lamp and flaming censer is significant. A variation of the technique, which requires a candle and mirror, is used to this day by occultists attempting to investigate past lives.4 The use of a young child as a medium is confirmed time and again in later magical texts, based on the presumption that an immature mind is more open to this type of experience. The discovery of the technique, wrapped up though it might be in Egyptian religious and magical beliefs, confirms that when their gods withdrew, the culture of ancient Egypt was familiar with at least one workable method of continuing communication with spirits. There were others.
According to Sir Wallis Budge, onetime Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and still considered an important authority on the culture, Egyptians believed that divine powers often made their will known through dreams.
They attached considerable importance to them; the figures of the gods and the scenes which they saw when dreaming seemed to them to prove the existence of another world which was not greatly unlike that already known to them. The knowledge of the art of procuring dreams and the skill to interpret them were greatly prized in Egypt as elsewhere in the East, and the priest or official who possessed such gifts sometimes rose to places of high honor in the state … for it was universally believed that glimpses of the future were revealed to man in dreams … [among those] recorded in the Egyptian texts may be quoted [that] of Thothmes IV, king of Egypt about B.C. 1450 …
A prince, according to the stele which he set up before the breast of the Sphinx at Gizeh, was one day hunting near this emblem of Râ-Harmachis, and he sat down to rest under its shadow and fell asleep and dreamed a dream. In it the god appeared to him, and, having declared that he was the god Harmachis-Khepera-Râ-Temu, promised him that if he would clear away from the Sphinx, his own image, the drift sand in which it was becoming buried, he would give to him the sovereignty of the lands of the South and of the North, i.e., of all Egypt. In due course the prince became king of Egypt under the title of Thothmes IV, and the stele which is dated on the 19th day of the month Hathor of the first year of Thothmes IV proves that the royal dreamer carried out the wishes of the god.5
The perceived relationship between gods, spirits, and dreams is underlined by an account of demonic possession inscribed on a stele discovered in the temple of the god Khonsu at Thebes. During the fifteenth year of the reign of Rameses II, the Princess of Bekhten, who was the younger sister of the king’s favorite wife, became ill and was diagnosed as having fallen victim of demonic possession. Her father consequently dispatched word to the king, begging him to send a god to help.6
Rameses was in Thebes when the messenger arrived and went directly to the temple of Khonsu Nefer-hetep where he asked the god to send his high priest, also named Khonsu, to Bekhten to exorcise the demon. The account on the stele gives no details of how the king communicated with Khonsu Nefer-hetep, but does record that the god agreed to the request and imbued a statue of himself with a “fourfold measure of magical power” to help with the cure.7 (Since Rameses reigned from about 1303 to 1213 BCE, there may have been records or folk memories of the era during which statues spoke with spirit voices.) A procession of six boats then set off down the Nile, accompanied by a retinue of chariots and horses on each bank, the lead vessel carrying the magical statue, with images of different gods occupying the others.
Several months later, the party arrived in Bekhten and performed a magical ceremony over the ailing princess.8 The demon immediately left her and struck up a remarkably friendly conversation with the god, during which they agreed to hold a great festival in the demon’s honor. This was duly done and the demon then happily left the country.
The ruler of Bekhten, a remote African principality some distance from Egypt, was so impressed by the god’s performance that he determined to keep him from returning to Egypt. The stele records that Khonsu Nefer-hetep did indeed remain in Bekhten for three years, four months, and five days. But one night the Prince of Bekhten dreamed the god had turned into a golden hawk and flown back to Egypt. When he awoke, the priest Khonsu confirmed the god had departed and advised that his chariot should be sent after him. The Prince of Bekhten agreed and sent the vehicle back loaded with gifts that were later housed in the temple at Thebes.
This story was not the only oddity to surface when archaeologists began to investigate ancient Egypt. Among the strangest was the practice of writing letters to the dead. Egyptian religion focused largely on survival of physical death. Tombs were known as Palaces of Eternity and those who could afford it ensured they were spacious and well enough equipped to provide a comfortable environment in which to spend the afterlife. “Thou shall exist for millions of millions of years,” promised the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And the dead continued to exert an influence on the living—or so the living believed. Any misfortune visited on widows, widowers, or other survivors was attributed to neglect, even malevolence, on the part of the recently departed, who were failing to defend their loved ones as they should. It made sense to send them written reminders of their duty and practical results were confidently expected.
The letters themselves were usually inscribed on ceramic vessels, but papyrus or linen could also be used. They were then “posted” in a tomb, although not necessarily the tomb of the recipient. The afterlife, with its Palaces of Eternity, was seen as a continuum. The letter writers had absolute faith that their missives would find their way to their proper destination. What was written obviously varied from person to person, but enough of the letters have been discovered to show some typical patterns. One was the complaint that relatives were trying to defraud the rightful heir of the deceased’s estate. Legal action might be threatened, but not necessarily against the relatives. One of the letters indicates that the writer was a widower convinced his current misfortunes were due to his late wife’s ill will. In it, he takes pains to remind her what a model husband he had been, staying faithful to her, employing the best possible physician when she fell ill, then providing a first-class funeral and formally mourning her for a full eight months when death finally claimed her. Three years had passed since then, during which time he had not remarried, nor so much as touched any female member of his household, yet she had seen fit to behave like someone who could not tell right from wrong. In the circumstances, he found himself with no alternative but to mount a suit against her in the Divine Court of the West … a legal institution that formed part of the realm of the dead.9 The obvious question, of course, is whether this could be seen as a practical approach. If so, the aggrieved husband must have been convinced that some method existed by which he could visit the afterlife and return to tell the tale.
For conventional Egyptologists this idea is absurd, as is the tale of the possessed princess. But perhaps we should not be too hasty in endorsing these conclusions. First it is beneficial to take a closer look at the individual central to the Bekhten story, although mentioned only once in Budge’s account —the priest Khonsu.
Priesthood, in ancient Egypt, meant something very different from what it does today. We are accustomed to thinking of the clergy in terms of religious vocation, belief in God, pastoral duties, and so forth. In ancient Egypt, however, God was incarnate in the person of the pharaoh, whose duty it was to carry out the multiplicity of religious practices
that ensured the country would continue to function in an effective manner. He was, in theory, obliged to perform every ritual in every temple throughout Egypt, but since, god or no god, he could not be everywhere at once, his priesthood stood in for him. No vocation, particular spirituality, or special relationship with the Almighty was involved. Nor was there anything remotely resembling pastoral work—the common people never entered the temples, let alone worshipped there. The priests were simply civil servants who carried out the duties Pharaoh could not manage for himself. Many of those duties were magical in nature.
But Egyptian magic, as Budge is quick to remind us, dated “from a time when the predynastic and prehistoric dwellers in Egypt believed that the earth, and the underworld, and the air, and the sky were peopled with countless beings, visible and invisible.”10 There are distinct echoes of the shaman in Budge’s description of the typical priest-magician:
The temple at Philae
From the religious books of ancient Egypt we learn that the power possessed by a priest or man who was skilled in the knowledge and working of magic was believed to be almost boundless. By pronouncing certain words or names of power in the proper manner and in the proper tone of voice he could heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life, and bestow upon the dead man the power to transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity. His words enabled human beings to assume divers forms at will, and to project their souls into animals and other creatures; and in obedience to his commands, inanimate figures and pictures became living beings and things which hastened to perform his behests. The powers of nature acknowledged his might.11
The Egyptian priest was required to abstain from sex before embarking on a magical operation, the same prohibition observed by the pagé in Thévet’s vivid account of shamanic practice quoted earlier. While the wearing of animal fibers such as wool was strictly forbidden, the sem-priest (high priest) was required to wear a leopard skin as a mark of his office12—reminiscent of shamanic practice in tribal Africa. Is it possible that the religion of ancient Egypt was, in its later manifestations, a return to shamanic practice, albeit modified by the specific needs of the times? For mainstream Egyptologists, the answer is a resounding no. Egyptian religion is well known and well studied. The consensus sees it as an exotic, faith-based creed, partly focused on funerary customs and preparations for the afterlife, partly on the ritual activities of the pharaoh, which guaranteed the well-being and prosperity of the state. Nonetheless, there are pointers in a different direction.
What are now known as the Pyramid Texts were a series of writings carved into the walls and sarcophagi of the Saqqara pyramids during the fifth and sixth dynasties of the Old Kingdom, between 2465 and 2181 BCE. The oldest of them have been dated, with reasonable certainty, to the period between 2400 and 2300 BCE but may reflect an even earlier oral tradition. Since they were discovered in 1881 by the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, the texts have generally been interpreted as a series of spells or “utterances” used to guide a dead pharaoh through the afterlife in his journey toward the heavens.
There are two problems with this interpretation. The first is that the texts were discovered randomly, with no way to tell for certain in what order they should be read: thus any picture of the pharaoh’s journey can be no more than guesswork. The second is that the texts themselves insist the pharaoh is not dead. Utterance 219, on the south wall of the sarcophagus chamber, begins with the words:
Texts discovered at Saqqara point to shamanic practice by the Egyptian pharaohs.
Atum, this your son is here … whom you have preserved alive. He lives! He lives! This Unas lives! He is not dead, this Unas is not dead! He is not gone down, this Unas is not gone down! He has not been judged, this Unas has not been judged!13
This jubilant passage, varied to address different gods, is repeated no less than twenty-two times, emphasizing again and again that the king is not dead. In Utterance 223, he is told to stand up, stir himself, and have some beer and bread. For conventional Egyptologists, these passages represent little more than a state of denial, a refusal to accept the reality of death, expressed in the pious hope that the king somehow survived in an afterlife. But the final sentence of the text as quoted above seems conclusively to give the lie to this interpretation. In Egyptian religion the dead were escorted by the god Anubis to the Halls of Judgment where their souls were weighed against a feather. This had to happen before they could proceed to their reward or punishment. There was no other way for a dead person to continue his journey. Yet the text clearly states that Unas has not been judged. If he was dead, for him to proceed without the final judgment would deny everything the Egyptians believed about the afterlife. The logical deduction, as the text itself insists, is that what is being described here are not the experiences of a dead king but of a living one.
Naydler reminds us that “death was, for the Egyptians … a realm of invisible forces, powers and beings. It was a spirit realm that existed in a more interior way than the outwardly manifest world that we perceive with our senses, but is nevertheless regarded as completely real” and “[this] spiritual universe of the ancient Egyptians … [has] a great deal in common with that revealed in the literature of shamanism.”14 Rather than describing the postmortem fate of a deceased pharaoh, is it possible that the Pyramid Texts actually refer to a shamanic journey carried out while he was very much alive?
According to Harner and Eliade, the shamanic universe consists of three “worlds,” the Upper, Middle, and Lower. The Middle World is the familiar physical plane in which we live. The Lower is the home of animal spirits. The Upper is the realm of the gods. A shamanic journey to the Upper World would typically begin with an entranced shaman allowing himself to be carried upward by the smoke of a campfire or, in more recent times, a censer or incense stick.15 There was also the possibility of entering nonordinary reality to discover a ladder or a flight of steps linking earth and heaven. Utterance 365 of the Unas texts reads, “The earth is beaten into steps for him towards heaven, that he may mount on it towards heaven, and he rises on the smoke of the great fumigation.”16 Had he previously visited the Lower World and made contact with his power animal,17 he might learn from it, among many other things, the ability to shape-shift, which he could then use to take himself anywhere he wished to go. The coronation text of Thutmosis III describes him as rising to heaven in the form of a falcon.18 When he reaches the Otherworld, he might find himself undergoing a complete dismemberment by demons or gods followed by a mystical reassembly that again conferred powers. Utterance 117 of the Unas Texts begins with its own description of this experience: “Osiris Unas, receive your head …” And Utterance 213 emphasizes above all that the pharaoh was not making this journey as the soul of a dead man: “O Unas, you have not gone dead, you have gone alive, to sit on the throne of Osiris, your scepter in your hand that you may give orders to the living, the handle of your lotus-shaped scepter in your hand.”19
What is emerging here is a very curious picture indeed. It is a picture of ancient Egypt as a shamanic culture writ large. Where, in more primitive communities, the shaman transported himself to the spirit worlds for the benefit of his tribe, in ancient Egypt, the king transported himself to the spirit worlds for the benefit of the entire country. His ability to do so, like the shaman before him, was the ultimate source of his authority and power. That he could walk among the withdrawn gods, and return to earth unscathed, was the root of his divinity, which means a civilization that endured for some three thousand years did so under constant spirit guidance. But lest we are tempted to conclude that the structure of ancient Egypt is too remote to have any relevance to the present day, it may be useful here to introduce the earliest known foundation of a religion that remains to this day a major driving force in twenty-first-century culture.
The Hebrew prophet Moses was a teacher and leader who, in
the thirteenth century BCE, delivered his people from Egyptian slavery and in so doing founded the religious community of Israel. As such, “his influence continues to be felt in the religious life, moral concerns, and social ethics of Western civilization.”20 Although seldom mentioned or examined from anything but a purely faith-based standpoint, that influence was ultimately based on communications from a spirit voice.
The origins of Moses’s story are lost in the depths of history. Even the term Hebrew, in its original form of Habiru, had nothing to do with ethnicity or race but referred instead to a class of people who lived by providing various services for hire. As such they were a familiar sight in Egypt for many generations, apparently well assimilated culturally. But it would be wrong to view even the earliest of Hebrews as a scattering of freelance tradesmen. They clearly comprised a unified class within the overall society, living mainly in their own district, Goshen, and as years went by their numbers grew21 to such an extent that they came to be perceived as a threat to the ruling authority. Who that authority was remains a matter for conjecture, but the best guess of modern scholarship points to Seti I, a pharaoh who reigned from 1318 to 1304 BCE. Whether or not this is correct, there is much more certainty that one or another Egyptian pharaoh moved to enslave the Hebrews and attempted to control their numbers by means of a brutal cull of newborn males. When the plan was first put into practice, the main instruments of the cull were to be Hebrew midwives—among them Jochebed, Moses’s mother, and Miriam, his sister, herself still a child—but when the women refused to cooperate, the Egyptians sent bailiffs to seek out the babes and drown them.22
