Pyramid texts on line (Unas: cannibal god)

the present English version of the Unas text

The present English version of the Unas text makes use of the hieroglyphs to choose between alternative views on the text as proposed by Sethe, Mercer, Piankoff, Faulkner & Allen. It pays homage to their magisterial translations and is indebted to them. Especially in the case of an Opus of such scope as the pyramid texts of Unas, the present author claims no authority over a "new" English translation of this monumental work, and presents his work as the ongoing result of constantly (re)studying direct (the hieroglyphs) & indirect sources (new translations), and amending his choices. For the goal of these Ancient Egyptian studies is not to translate Egyptian texts ab ovo, but to bring together a basket of texts allowing us to appreciate Ancient Egyptian wisdom teachings and clarifying the relationship with Greek philosophy (cf. Hermetism and the Hermetic Keys). Because these texts only exists on the WWW, amendments can always made without cutting trees.

The contemporary school of egyptological literalism equates the earliest temporal layer of any text with its historical date of composition, mistrusting the presence of literary antecedents. In the case of the Pyramid Texts, they would agree to push the date of inception with a few centuries (the margin of error for this period being ca. 100 years), but try to avoid a Predynastic figure, which is not supported for all the texts. Indeed, comparisons with the architectural language of the period, makes it likely that under Pharaoh Djoser, the Egyptians had the conceptual framework of the Pyramid Texts at their disposal. King Djoser, the "inventor of stone" and his vizier Imhotep, the "great seer" (or prophet) of Re at Iunu, "the Pillar", layed the foundations of the Old Kingdom "canon" ruling all aspects of the life of the elite, including writing, sapience, art & religion. To project the beginning of the IIIth Dynasty (ca. 2670 BCE) as the date of inception of most (not all !) of these texts is altogether a reasonable guess.

Here is Sethe's standard edition of the Pyramid Texts (1910) and Mercer's translation (1952).

Summarizing :

aim of the texts : to assist the divine king in his royal cult, both during his life on Earth (namely through Lunar regeneration), and in the afterlife (to ascend to Re) ;

spatial semantics : there is a spatial symbolism at work in the actual placement of the texts in the chambers, passage-way & corridor : Lunar Duat (sarcophagus room) and Solar Akhet (antechamber) are at work in four directions : West (Duat, sarcophagus, false door, dusk), North (Imperishables, the sky of Re), South (cyclic stars, the inundation) & East (Eastern Horizon, rise of Re). The texts circumambulate the theme of the king's glorious being, both as a living Horus (a reigning monarch), a living Osiris (rejuvenated by the Sed festival) and, finally, a divine ancestor, a "power of powers" and "image of images", a god one with Atum ;

composition : the texts form a literary unity insofar as they represent a careful and conscious selection out of the available body of ritual utterances (cf. those found in the tomb of his successors plus very likely others). They are not narrative and do not represent the actual funerary ritual, nor the pyramid complex. As a ritual and magical anthology, they bring together all what is needed to bring about for the divine king his regeneration (in the Lunar Duat) and ascension (via the Solar Akhet) to the stellar Imperishables. The composition is not available as a linear narrative. There is matter of choice guided by spatial semantic, although an overall story-line is discernable ;

cognitive limitations : to back the unstable concepts of pre-rationality, a regression into myth is a common strategy, as are conservatism, contextuality and multiple approaches. As a lot of these myths are meaningless today, some connotations may seem pointless to a contemporary reader. Careful study of the images and the actual hieroglyphs used is often rewarding but seldom conclusive ;

hermeneutical typology : the Unas text contain short pieces of drama, hymns, litanies, glorifications, magical texts, offering rituals, prayers, protective charms and divine offerings. They invoke the regeneration of Osiris King Unas, the ascension of King Unas, his arrival in heaven, settling in heaven, eating the deities, etc. Predynastic, Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, Osirian, royal, funerary, ecstatic, magical, occult & funerary registers can be isolated, making its unity and integration (in one tomb) even more remarkable ;

date of inception : the beginning of the IIIth Dynasty (ca. 2670 BCE).

6. The role of Osiris in the Unas text.

In the Old Kingdom, the king affirms the divine status of his "Ba" by partly assimilating the Lunar deities of old (Hassan, 1992). The royal nation state is given an administrative body, with Memphis as royal residence and focus of culture. A patrilineal system is invented, lasting for more than three millenia. Its state approved mythology was largely based on the Solar and stellar considerations. But, in the more popular strands of the Egyptian cultural form, the Lunar, contextualized, wandering, matriarchal line of transmission (of which the original root is Upper Palaeolithic) was never relinquished, as we can see in the First Dynasty Abydos burials. Without the female side of Nature, no balanced equation is possible. The divine king is nurtured by the milk of the goddesses and in all major dynastic turns, the role of women was of extreme, if not decisive, importance.

Dynastic Egypt remembered the mythical family of (Lunar) Osiris, his wife Isis and their son Horus. People identified and played the dramatic episodes of their lives, including in their musings his assassination, dismemberment, restoration, resurrection and rejuvenation. The mystery of his becoming the "king of the Duat" completed the picture. Whether Osirian faith was already popular in the Early Dynastic remains disputed, although a Predynastic origin of Osirian faith concurs with the fertility cults of the Neolithic (the "Bull of his Mother" pointing to his role as consort of the great Neolithic fertility goddess), both agrarian (grain, flood) as communal (just ruler). But this remains largely speculative. Re had given to Osiris a separate jurisdication, a kingdom of his own, and so he was feared by humans & gods alike.

The "djed" may point to a crucial link between history and Prehistory : this backbone of Osiris serves as a mortuary amulet of stability and everlastingness. It is a necessary aid in the transformation of the human body into the spiritual body of glory assumed by the dead in the afterlife. With it, the shamanistic beliefs of old are maintained but refined. The divine dead bone is there to transmute. The restoration of the body of Osiris and his "resurrection" in the noble, spiritualized, beautified and stellar body ("sAH"), given by Isis thanks to Re and Thoth, is completed when Osiris receives the Eye of Wellness (the Left Eye) from Horus, the Lunar Eye of Re. Restored, resurrected and resuscitated, Osiris then becomes the "king of the Duat" and, receiving a jurisdiction of his own.

The "djed" Pillar Festival was held annually. It was a time of enthusiasm and rejuvenation for the people. On the first day of Shomu, the season of harvesting, the priests raised up the "djed" Pillar, and all payed homage to the symbol. People conducted mock battles between good and evil. Oxen were driven around the walls of Memphis ...

"Although the god Osiris is not attested by name until the Fifth Dynasty Pyramid Texts, the probable antiquity of many of these texts makes it not unlikely that he was recognized at an earlier period, perhaps under the name Khentiamentiu. A central element of the later Osiris myth, the pairing of Horus and Seth, is attested from the middle of the First Dynasty." - Wilkinson, 1999, p.292.

The majority of cemeteries were situated to the West of the Nile, the region where the Sun set. Already in the Neolithic, the West was the principal mortuary direction. Deceased Badarians faced West (ca. 5000 - 4000 BCE). The Solar horizon had been assimilated. The steady rise of kingship and piecemeal centralizations followed. Dating to the Late Predynastic Period, Khentiamentiu, "the Foremost of the Westeners", the god of the Abydos necropolis, was depicted as a jackal. He also navigated Re's nightly voyage in the Duat. His cult was popular in the First Dynasty (cf. seals of Kings Den and Qaa). Heliopolitan theology associated him with Osiris, who also bore the epithet "the Foremost of the Westeners". We have to wait until the First Intermediate Period before Abydos becomes a cult centre explicitly dedicated to Osiris.

In the Heliopolitan account, Osiris belonged to the last generation of deities, those sustaining the mythical kingdom of plenty of Atum-Re, the sole, unique creator of it all. Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys are the differentials or natural types covering the ideal state of affairs for human beings. Osirian faith appealed to the common majority.

"The four children of Geb and Nut are not involved in this description of the universe. They establish a bridge between nature and man, and that in the only manner in which the Egyptians could conceive such a bond - through kingship. Osiris was the mythological form of the dead ruler forever succeeded by his son Horus." - Frankfort, 1978, p.182.

As the "Bull of his mother", he represented the myth of the "perfect king", empowered not by patrilineal logic, but by the self-possessed and unalienated power of the great goddess and her dark secrets of resurrection, rejuvenation and rebirth (associated with the Duat rather than the sky). His assassination by Seth evokes the discontinuum of moral evil ("isefet"), rooted in a natural divine will to harm, hurt and cause suffering for the sake of dominion, love of power and the persistent gratification of perverse desires (cf. the Isis & Horus cycles of the Delta). It underlines the power of evil and destruction, and invokes the fragility of life and order, in all directions under seige by evil, annihilation, death and chaos. The tragedy of evil's power does not lead to pessimism, for in Egyptian thought, the soul of chaos is the author of light, life and order. If chaos itself is to be avoided, not so its efficient, auto-generative potential. The latter regenerates the deities and sustains creation. This distinction drawn a line between the blind lust to destroy (as in "Apophis", the giant snake of destruction) and the divine will to harm (or "Seth", who controls the snake).

"But it will be discerned at once that the Osiris myth expressed those hopes and aspirations and ideals which were closest to the life and the affections of this great people. (...) In the Osiris myth the institution of the family found its earliest and most exalted expression in religion, a glorified reflection of earthly ties among the gods." - Breasted, 1972, p.37.

Paradoxically perhaps, a pyramid tomb is not an expression of Osirian faith as profound as the "Heb Sed" or "Sed festival", in which the divine king assumed the costume and insignia of Osiris, enjoying the same resuscitation by Isis and Horus. This does not (as Egyptian thought teaches) exclude Osirian components, connotations or assimilations (such as a subterranean chamber). But the Pyramid Age was of Heliopolitan inspiration. Pharaoh finally adheres to his own divinity ("son of Re") and evidences his authority on a gigantic scale. In the Pyramid Texts, Osiris is present but at times avoided. King Unas passes-by Osiris (and is, as the latter, resurrected in the Duat as "this Osiris King Unas"), but does not stay in the Duat. As a bird or as incense, he flies away to be transformed into a stellar spirit, joining his father Re in the sky. A strange division is, at times, maintained between Osiris in the Duat and Re in the sky. In the pre-rational mode of cognition, such conceptual tensions are left unresolved.

Nothwithstanding royal this-life rituals, a pyramid complex was, after the king had died, the tomb of a divine king of Egypt, and so the focus of a temple complex, with a dedicated priesthood and regular priests, daily maintaining the Ka of the deceased king to gratify its Ba or soul and clearing a safe passage to and fro the tomb. As such, a royal mortuary temple was an spirito-economic motor, employing people and redistributing goods for the sake of a spiritual economy of transformation of material offerings into "food" for the Ka of the king, who would bless Egypt. A funerary complex was also a "false door" or "gate" allowing the enlightened spirit of the deceased (justified to realize the station of the Akh-spirits) to return as Ba and/or Ka. This divine presence of the spirit in its tomb on Earth, is always indirect (never absolute). It happens through the intermediate states of consciousness, such as the Ba and Ka of the divine son of Re.

The pyramid ensured Maat, the turning of days and seasons, as well as a "good Nile". How ? It allowed the deceased king to "transform" ("kheperu") into an "Akh", a glorified spirit-being of light, effective and equipped in the afterlife. The pyramid was his way to ascend. Arrived in heaven as an Akh, the king allowed his divine incarnation to pass to his son (from Osiris to Horus) and the pyramid "is better understood as the meeting point of life and light with death and darkness" (Lehner, 2001, p. 20). After mummification, it became a "cosmic exchange engine" set in motion by the appropriate funerary rituals, bringing the glorified body ("sah") into being (cf. the ritual of "Opening the Mouth"). As an Akh-spirit, the deceased king could then choose to bring down his souls and doubles on Earth. If so, he would use his tomb and mummy as a point of entry into the physical plane of existence. In this way, the presence of the ancestor could continue to influence the living, in particular the new Horus-king. The names given to the pyramids or associated with them, reflect the crucial spirito-economical role of royal tombs : "horizon", "radiant place", "endures", "flourish", "established", "pure", "divine", "perfect" etc.

Indeed, the focus of any tomb, including the king's, was the "false door" and adjacent "offering place". This imaginal gate was the point of departure to or return from the Netherworld. The success of this bi-directionality of the justified, blessed deceased in the afterlife (from the tomb to the sky and back) depended on the funerary rituals, as well as on the offerings placed in the tomb. During their daily rituals, the priests (endowed by the son) fed the Ka of his father and placed the sacrifices near the "false door". In this way, the "lowest" point of the transformational chain would be kept active. The subtle energy (or "Ka") of the offerings gratifies the Ba and attracts the attention of the Akh, who returns in the tomb in its "sah", completing the cycle by uniting with the mummy. This ideal of Egyptian religious life was only attained by the deities and the justified dead. Pharaoh ascended, while common men hid ...

Can may be argued that, in order to operate properly, every state needs to stay in touch with its people. So the Heliopolitan, Solar Atum-Re assimilated (before the Vth Dynasty) a human generation of deities, namely Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys, entangled in a Lunar family drama ? Already present since ever, they would then become the great-grand children of Atum-Re, and represent the human side of the "Golden Age" of Egypt, the epoch when the gods reigned on Earth, a time when the eternal equilibrium of the First Time had not yet been broken by Seth. This was the time of Osiris, the Lunar deity of vegetation, reigning over the whole of Egypt, making her living, healthy and prosperous, bringing bread & wine. By doing so, the theologians of Atum-Re assimilated the popular (Predynastic) Lunar cult, and made it part of the royal ritual, especially in terms of the physical regeneration & resurrection of the divine king (during and after life), whereas the latter's ascension remained Solar and spiritualizing.

"While there is some effort here to correlate the functions of Re and Osiris, it can hardly be called an attempt at harmonization of conflicting doctrines. This is practically unknown in the Pyramid Texts. (...) But the fact that both Re and Osiris appear as supreme king of the hereafter cannot be reconciled, and such mutually irreconcilable beliefs caused the Egyptian no more discomfort than was felt by any early civilization in the maintenance of a group of religious teachings side by side with others involving varying and totally inconsistent suppositions. Even Christianity itself has not escaped this experience." - Breasted, 1972, pp.163-164.

Although historical traces of Osirian faith predating the Pyramid Texts are sparse, popular Osirian beliefs must have, during the previous Dynasties, slowly infiltrated the Solar state religion. Had Predynastic religion identified Osiris with the fertile waters of the inundation, with soil and vegetation (cf. Orion and the Dog-Star in the South, the direction of the inundation) ? The ever-waning and ever-reviving life of Egypt's soil through the Nile was entrenched by the story of the murder & resurrection of Osiris and the triumph of his son Horus over Seth, the evil uncle. As a result, and despite its popular origin, Osirian faith entered into the most intimate relationship with the ideology of divine kingship, causing a fundamental tension no pre-rational structure could resolve. When, in the "classical" Middle Kingdom (XIIth Dynasty), proto-rationality blossomed, and Osiris, as netherworldly god of the dead, was increasingly seen as the nocturnal aspect of Re (cf. the New Kingdom Solar theology, the Amduat).

So, although the religion of state was Solar and focused on the divine king, the Pyramid Texts evidence an ambiguous relationship with Osiris, the god of the common people and popular beliefs. The Predynastic Osiris cult, probably local to the Delta, involved a forbidding, stern & repellent hereafter. Osiris was a Nile-god and a spirit of vegetable life, a harvest-god. But, as a king of Egypt, he had been killed by his brother Seth, recovered and restored by his wife Isis (with the help of the secret name of Re) and resurrected by his son Horus, who avenged his father by overcoming Seth in a battle presided by Thoth. When Osiris migrated up the Nile from the Delta, he was identified with the old mortuary jackal-god of the South, "the First of the Westeners" (Abydos, Assiut). His kingdom was conceived as situated below the western horizon, where it merged into the Netherworld, the Duat. He became the king of the dead below the Earth, the "Lord of the Duat", monarch of a subterranean kingdom.

"... in the Solar faith we have a state theology, with all the splendor and the prestige of its royal patrons behind it ; while in that of Osiris we are confronted by a religion of the people, which made a strong appeal to the individual believer. (...) In the mergence of these two faiths we discern for the first time in history the age-old struggle between the state form of religion and the popular faith of the masses." - Breasted, 1972, pp.140-141.

According to Breasted, nothing in these primordial myths proved Osiris to have a celestial afterlife. As in the New Kingdom Amduat, a millennium later, he enjoys a juridiction of his own, one powerful enough to alert the gods. Indeed, the Pyramid Texts evidence survivals from a period when Osiris was even hostile to the Solar dead. There are exorcisms intended to retain Osiris to enter the Solar tomb with evil intent.

"May Osiris not come with his evil coming. Do not open your arms to him ..."
Pyramid Texts, § 1267, utterance 534.

However, the popularity of Osiris among the common people forced the theologians to incorporate him into their Solar creed. In this way, Heliopolitan Solar theology got slowly Osirianized. Eventually, these tensions would be resolved in the Middle Kingdom, which in turn gave rise to the New Kingdom books of the Netherworld.
SOLAR RE - DIURNAL LUNAR OSIRIS - NOCTURNAL
the eternal cycle of dawn/dusk/dawn
the seasonal cycle of the Two Lands the perpetuity of darkness - the Nun
the local, monthly cycle of agriculture
Re-Atum hidden in Nun
the diffused, efficient principle of Nun Osiris is created by Re-Atum
Osiris is left behind in the Duat
Bi-sexual Atum is self-created within Nun
simultaneously s/he generates the Ennead
he, the Lord of Eternity mostly passive himself, Osiris is reassembled by Isis &
healed by the Eye of Horus
Atum thrones the Akh-sphere Osiris thrones the Duat
Atum belongs to pre-creation
Atum is the sole Lord of Creation Osiris is bound to creation & the Duat
Osiris receives a separate jurisdiction
Atum is the spirit of matter or the awareness of consciousness (of itself) Osiris is the matter of spirit or the substrate of consciousness : energy.
Atum refers to eternity-in-everlastingness
the recurrent hatching within Nun & the
indestructible, primordial nature of light Osiris refers to everlastingness and the endurance of absolute sameness, the backbone of being, the prima materia
"neheh"
the Akh "djedet"
the Ba, the Ka
Antechamber
Re chamber Burial-chamber
Osiris room

The resurrection of Osiris by Horus and the restoration of his body was affirmed to be the king's privilege. The Osirian hereafter was celestialized. Osiris was now called "Lord of the Sky" (PT, §§ 964, 966a) and the king was announced to Osiris in the sky precisely in the same way as he had been announced to Re in the Solar theology. Hence, we find the king ascending to the sky and then descending among the dwellers in the Duat (PT, § 1164), implying that the Duat became (via the North) somehow accessible from the sky. In the Osirian cult, the Duat became the lower region of the sky, in the vincinity of the horizon, below which it is also extended (Breasted). An important link between Re and Osiris was the former's death every day in the West, the place of the dead. The dead king and the dying Sun corresponded well, as did the resurrection of Osiris (as king of the dead) and the dawning of the Sun (as the child Harpocrates, who is the father of the king of the living).

"The fact remains, then, that the celestial doctrines of the hereafter dominate the Pyramid Texts throughout, and the later subterranean kingdom of Osiris and Re's voyage through it are still entirely in the background in these royal mortuary teachings. Among the people Re is later, as it were, dragged into the Nether World to illumine there the subjects of Osiris in his mortuary kingdom, and this is one of the most convincing evidences of the power of Osiris among the lower classes. In the royal and state temple theology, Osiris is lifted to the sky, and while he is there Solarized, we have just shown he also tinctures the Solar teaching of the celestial kingdom of the dead with Osirian doctrines. The result was thus inevitable confusion, as the two faiths interpenetrated." - Breasted, 1972, pp.159-160.

The Pyramid Texts evidence the emergence of a composite doctrine. But what used to be viewed as a separate "Osirian" destiny of the king "has more recently been recognized as one aspect of his celestial cycle - the regenerative phase through which he passes before 'rising in the eastern side of sky like the Sun' (Pyr. 1465d-e)." (Allen, 1989, p.1).

7. Egyptian versus Greek initiation.

Egyptologists like Morenz, Piankoff, Mercer, Frankfort, Faulkner, Assmann, Hornung or Allen have good reasons to stress the difference between the Greek and the Pharaonic perspective on initiation (from the Latin "initio", introduce into a new life) and the mysteries (from the Greek "muoo", to close lips or eyes, i.e. hidden, secret ; "mustès" = "initiate").

The Egyptians maintained a series of rituals aimed at "a constantly renewed regeneration" (Hornung, 2001, p.14) of (1) the divine king and through him the whole of creation, and of (2) their supreme deity, Atum-Re, situated as the Unique, Self-Begotten Great One at the core of a henotheist constellation of deities, or "cosmic beings, the elements and forces of nature. As such, they existed on a scale far removed from that of ordinary human beings." (Allen, 2000, p.55).

At best, the Greeks, like the Egyptians, induced the point of death (assumed the "death posture") in order to glimpse into Darkness and "see" the divine to be renewed. But they had no "science of the Hades" as in the Amduat. The active continuity between life and death found in Egypt, of which funerary rituals and the interaction between the living and their dead (cf. the letters to the dead) are examples, contradicts the closed and separated interpretation of the Greeks, fostering "escapism" (the "body" as a "prison" out of which one needs to escape, the "Hades" as a place of shades, divorced from the plane of Earthly life). In Egypt, no "new" life was necessary. Potentially, death is "more" life. For both life and the afterlife depend on identical conditions : offerings ; either directly to the deities through the divine king or indirectly to the Ka of the deceased, gratifying the Ba. If dualism fits Greek religion, triadism rules Egyptian theologies (while duality takes on the dual "form" or "land"- ruled by the "third", or "nswt", the divine king, the "tertium comparationis").

By the exclusive funerary interpretation given to the religious literature of Ancient Egypt (Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Coming out into the Day, Amduat, Book of the Heavenly Cow, Book of Gates, etc.) these great scholars evidence Hellenocentrist prejudice. Although the Platonic philosopher "preparing for death and dying" is like the initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries (cf. Phaedrus and Phaedo), and so may come to the point of death to see into the invisible (spiritual) worlds, as did the Egyptian initiate and the Shaman of old, the Greek knows that he will never find wisdom in all its purity in any other place than in the next world.

So, according to these authors, sustaining the Hellenistic approach of contemporary Egyptology regarding religious experience in Ancient Egypt, the initiatic, this-life experiences of the king, of his priests and of his worshippers, found in the religious text and on the monuments of Egypt, do not reflect direct spiritual experiences, but are imaginal constructions and wishful thinking about the afterlife, the dogma being : Ancient Egyptian religion is funerary & mortuary. This position is rejected.

It is not because a text is found in a tomb that it is necessarily funerary. In Egypt, the king and his high priests encountered the deity "face to face" every day. He was a god on Earth, in the Duat and in the sky. His energy had no limitations and with it he sustained creation by offering the right order of nature (cf. the Great Hymn to the Aten). There was no question of initiation being linked with the separation caused by physical death. Physical death (of Osiris, the divine father) was the gate to a resurrection for the benefit of the living (Horus, the divine son). But the living king (Horus) could also ritually assume death (as "Osiris King N") to resurrect (himself and Egypt) while his physical body had not died (as in his Heb Sed festival). This assumption of the death posture is a universal characteristic of the spiritual process of emancipation of Homo Sapiens sapiens (cf. the Ars Obscura of the Hidden Chamber).

"As we have already seen, it is perfectly feasible for the same pyramid to have been use both for the Sed festival, 'secret rites' and then subsequently as the tomb of the king." - Naydler, 2005, p.109.

Indeed, the validity of an exclusive funerary interpretation of the Pyramid Texts (or for that matter of the complete corpus of religious texts, popular in Egyptology the last 50 years, has to be addressed : is there a mystical dimension or direct experiential contact with the divine beyond the first three studied by Egyptology (Assmann, 2002) ? To wit :

the cultic : the local, political residence of the deities, either as belonging to a particular place and/or as state deities functioning as symbols of the collective, political identity ;

the cosmic : the emergence, structure & dynamics of the sphere of their action ;

the mythic : the sacred tradition, or "what is said about the gods", their cultural memory as set down in myths, names, genealogies etc.

the mystic : the direct experience of the deities or the objective spiritual realities encountered by the divine king, his priests and worshippers ?

For Moret (1922), the Egyptian mysteries revolved around the concept of "voluntary death", experienced before the actual physical death of the body. This "dead posture" preludes spiritual rebirth or "peret-em-heru" : going out into the day ... For Wente (1982), the New Kingdom Amduat and Book of Gates bring "the future into the present", so that rebirth "could have been genuinely experienced in this life now". And this, most likely through festivals, pilgrimage & personal piety. In these latter contexts, Osirian faith allowed non-royals to have direct spiritual access to the Duat, the world of magic and of the dead. The Books of the Netherworld are usually very explicit about this.

"He who know these words will approach those who dwell in the Netherworld. It is very very useful for a man upon Earth."
Amduat, concluding text of the Second Hour.

"The mysterious Cavern of the West where the Great God and his crew rest in the Netherworld. This is executed with their names similar to the image which is drawn in the East of the Hidden Chamber of the Netherworld. He who knows their names while being upon Earth will know their seats in the West as a contented one with his seat in the Netherworld. He will stand among the Lord of Provision as one justified by the Council of Re who reckons the differences. It will be useful for him upon Earth ..."
Amduat, introductory text of the Ninth Hour.

These texts point to a this-life magical knowledge (assisting the mystical quest for union with godhead, a return to the "first time" of the "Golden Age"). And once we acknowledge the presence of a mystical dimension, we beg the question of how to operate the magic ? Is there a particular series of rituals enabling one to experience the objective spiritual realities behind three thousand years of spirituality today ?

"And so the study of ancient Egyptian religion may lead us to conceive of a task that we have to fulfill in the present day. This task is to open ourselves once more to those realms of spirit that we are presented with in the mystical literature of Egypt. This could lead to the possibility of a new Egyptian-inspired Renaissance, in which Western spiritual culture is given fresh vigor by its reconnecting to its Egyptian roots. While it would make little sense to try to resurrect the religion of ancient Egypt today, the spiritual impulse that issues from ancient Egypt into contemporary culture may nevertheless encourage us to persue paths of inner development appropriate to our own period in history ..." - Naydler, 2005, p.329.

Of course, the first thing to do is to lift the funerary restrictions put on the available corpora. Although found in tombs, they move beyond funerary concerns (cf. Wente, 1982), but also put into evidence an experiential register, albeit in ante-rational terms, and in initiatic (cf. Duat) and ecstatic (cf. Akhet) mindsets.

Egyptian initiations, unlike the Greek, were not meant to release the applicant from the solid chains of the world and its destiny, quite on the contrary. The initiate entered the invisible Duat at will and was free as a bird to stride and experience. He also returned, completing the standard cycle of human spirituality en vogue since the Cro-Magnon. The Egyptians understood the revitalizing logic of plunging into the darkest night of the spirit-world and particularly focused on regeneration, rejuvenation and rebirth both in this life and in the afterlife. This happened by an "embrace" of objective spiritual principles projected upon recurrent natural cycles (like Horus and Osiris in the myth of Osiris, or the Ba of Re and the body of Osiris in the Books of the Netherworld).

In Egyptian, the verb "bs" ("bes") has two nuances : inductive and secretive :

inductive : to introduce, bring in, install ;

secretive : to initiate, reveal.

What is revealed should never be said. It is a secret, or "bs" again, but with one more determinative added (that of a papyrus scroll, indicative of words related to writing and thinking). The "secret of secrets" was the secret image of the deity or "bsw" ("besu").

"I am a priest knowledgable of the mystery,
who's chest never lets go what he has seen !"
Chassinat, 1966, pp.11-12.

With the verb "bes", Middle Egyptian points to the Egyptian initiate as someone who had seen the hidden image of the deity "face to face", triggering a secret experience. Transformed, he or she had received more life-power (balancing the natural depletion), and had become thus more complete. The initiate had gone and come back, and was prepared for the afterlife. He had faced judgment, had been regenerated and transformed on Earth as he would be in the afterlife. After death, he was ready for his ascension, and would escort Re in the sky. Osiris would not be able to lay his hands on him as he escaped the Lunar world and entered the Solar.

Clearly then, the "initiates" were foremost the divine king and those Egyptian priests who belonged to the higher priesthood. Only they were allowed to enter the sanctuary of the temple and perform rituals there (the offering hall, the ambulatory, the inner sanctum). Only one member of this higher priesthood saw the deity "face to face", enthroned in its naos at the back end of the inner sanctum. This high priest was the representative of the king, the divine "son of Re" and the "Lord of the Two Lands".

Another word for "secret" is "StA" ("Shtah"), also meaning : "secretive, mysterious, inexplicable, hidden, hidden away." "Shtahu", in epithets of divine beings, refers to the mysterious secrets themselves. In Greek, the word "mustikos" (root of "mystic, mystical, mysticism") also means "hidden". But in the Greek mysteries, the afterlife was depicted as a realm of shadows and any hope of individual survival was deemed ephemeral. Nobody escaped destiny, except the deities and the lucky few elected. The latter "escaped" from the world and its sordid entropic fate, misery and possible "eschaton" : a world-fire invoked by these wrathful deities themselves, unforgiving of man's tragi-comical sins, but able to recreate the world in a whim ! Escape from this fated comedy was offered through the Greek mysteries dedicated to certain Deities. They would erase the cause of the heaviness of the soul and its attachment to Earth, and end the cycle of metempsychosis, the successive return of the soul in other physical bodies. Both perspectives (a negative view on matter and reincarnation) are absent in the Egyptian mindset.

"... what appears in the fifth century is not a complete and consistent doctrine of metempsychosis, but rather experimental speculations with contradictory principles of ritual and morality, and a groping for natural laws : the soul comes from the gods and after repeated trials returns to them, or else it runs forever in a circle through all spheres of the cosmos ; sheer chance decides on the reincarnation, or else a judgement of the dead ; it is morally blameless conduct that guarantees the better lot or else the bare fact of ritual initiation that frees from guilt." - Burkert, 1985, p.300, my italics.

The Greek spiritual experience was rational (decontextual). But with the end of the Polis States, a great fear had taken hold. Late Hellenism was flooded by astral fatalism and Oriental mysteries adapted to Greco-Roman standards and tastes. Deities or demons were invoked to erase a preassigned fate or to control destiny. The Greek initiate, a God or Goddess, was deemed "liberated" from nature. The Egyptian initiate was "deified" by nature.

Egyptian initiation was not redemptoric (elimination of guilt), did not intend to break away from the (inexistent) cycle of reincarnation, nor invite its adepts to leave the material plane without ever returning. The Egyptian adept did not enter the sanctuary with a confused idea about death. His initiatoric this-life rituals intended to prepare him for what was bound to happen in the afterlife. Osiris was the prototype of this Lunar quest. Thanks to a "general rehearsal" of what would happen, the adept would have no surprises in the afterlife. Indeed, the laws of life (the deities) were operational in the afterlife as well as on Earth, and the spirits of the deceased existed together with the living, albeit on another plane of existence (cf. hylemorphism). The efficient adept escorted Re in the sky. All other initiates remain in the Lunar Duat and find their use in the dark kingdom of Osiris.

As a temple ritualist, the Egyptian initiate, in order to be transformed and "see" the deity directly, never leaves his physical body behind in a passive, trance-like state (compare this with what happens in the Hermetic Poimandres or in Classical Yoga). Fully awake, he enters into a deeper, more profound, mysterious layer of reality and contacts this plane directly, alone and without intermediaries, except for the doubles (Kas) and the souls (Bas). Rituals make his body fully participate in this inner experience.

A marked contrast with the Greek mentality ensues : the Greeks had assimilated a rational, formal distinction between the conditions of becoming and those of being, between potentiality and actuality (cf. Plato and Aristotle). In general, matter was perceived as "gross" and more in tune with the world of becoming. Concepts, ideas and their contemplation were deemed of a "higher" order, which meant done for their own sake (decontextualized). Linear order was the standard of Greek conceptual rationality and the afterlife was envisaged as a gloomy land of no return, alien to the living. The body was negative and had to be made passive in order for it to "see" the Divine light. Only in its death was true liberation found (later, this Greek prejudice was made dogma by all three "religions of the book"). But, because of the difficulties involved with magic and initiation, most men are meaningless shades in the Hades ("hidden" as Pluto). Hence, the Greek mysteries anticipate a rupture between the living and the dead. Let this difference stand out : the Egyptian mysteries anticipate a continuation of communication between the diurnal and nocturnal sides of creation. In Greek thought, dualities easily become oppositions (contradictions, antinomies, etc.). In the Egyptian way of life, dualities always remain complementary.

"The living are not at the mercy of the dead ; the shades are without force and without consciousness. There are no ghostly terrors, no imaginings of decomposition, and no clatterings of dead bones ; but equally there is no comfort and no hope. The dead Archilles brushes aside Odysseus' words of praise, saying : 'Do not try to make light of death to me ; I would sooner be bound to the soil in the hire of another man, a man without lot and without much to live on, than ruler over all the perished dead.' In the dreary monotony everything becomes a matter of indifference." - Burkert, 1985, p.197, my italics.

The regular movements of the planets followed precise geometrical conditions. These were suggestive of the "perfect forms" of the world of ideas (or those perceived by the "active intellect"). Hence, in the Greek mysteries, astrology was used to divinate destiny and fate ("heimarmene" and "ananke"). Magic was addressed as a means to overcome one's preassigned fate, wiping out unluck, etc. Finally, theurgy came into being. A decisive release from the forces of fate & mortality was invisaged by working directly with the Deities. In Gnosticism, which had many branches, a "special knowledge" was aimed at. Again the material world appeared in negative, depreciative terms (cf. evil as "privatio boni" in Neoplatonism and Roman Catholicism on original sin and the cause of evil).

"And when, by drawing on repressed or non-Greek traditions, mysteries began to feed on the hopes of individuals with universal speculation and sought to overcome the chilling isolation of man in death, this was for a long time more a complement than a dangerous rival to the Greek system." - Burkert, 1985, p.203.

In the Egyptian conception, commoners sought a happy life to satisfy their souls (cf. the Discourse of a Man with his Ba), while priests were consecrated in (local) induction rituals (leaving the "ultimate" experience to the high priest). Is it possible that the higher priesthood also participated in the Osirian mysteries of death and resurrection, held in major temples of Egypt, like those of Abydos, Busiris and Karnak ? Such ritual activity would prepare them for the afterlife and transform them into "initiates" on Earth (adepts "justified" while alive) ?

"Follow the god as far as his place,
in his tomb which is found at the entrance of the cavern.
Anubis sanctifies the hidden mystery of Osiris,
(in) the sacred valley of the Lord of Life.
The mysterious initiation of the Lord of Abydos !"
Griffith, tombe I, 238, lines 238-239, ca.XIIth Dynasty.

But Egyptian and Greek initiations had this in common : both involved a confrontation with a symbolical death, followed by a new state of being alife. In Greek, "teleirtan" (to die) and "teleisthai" (to be initiated) are alike.

"to die, that is to be initiated"
Plato

CENTRAL PLAN OF THE TOMB OF KING UNAS

The Unas Text is divided in thirteen sections :

I (226 - 243) l II (23, 25, 32 - 57 / 72 - 79 , 81 - 96, 108 - 116 / 117 - 171) l III (213 - 219) l IV (219 - 224) l V (204 - 205, 207, 209, 210 - 212) l VI (23, 25, 32, 199, 200 & 244 - 246) l VII (247 - 253) l VIII (254 - 260) l IX (260 - 272) l X (302 - 312) l XI (273 - 276) l XII (277 - 301) l XIII (313 - 317 & 318 - 321)

Unas text in English

"<" or ">" between numbers = sequence of the text
"<" from right to left (facing right) or ">" from left to right (facing left)

Unas Tomb in Detail