Ancient Egyptian Religion—Mother of

Neoplatonism and Christian Orthodoxy

 

by Karl W. Luckert

Copyright 1991, 1999

 Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective was a book published in 1991 by the State University of New York Press. It has since gone out of print. All the while, inquiries about its availability are on the increase. Inasmuch as no scholar likes to see his most significant piece of work die a premature or unnecessary death, I have begun to revise its five portions to be displayed as separate "booklets" (or "pages") on the Internet. I have no illusions that this fresh exposure will in some miraculous manner make the content much easier to read. But as it was, the original book had a serious flaw that hereby can be remedied. The 1991 edition roams enthusiastically across no less than five academic disciplines. Not all the readers have appreciated this scope and complexity—and among potential reviewers only a courageous few have accepted the challenge. Inasmuch as the Internet presents itself as a perfect medium for virtual illusions I shall pretend here, for a while, that the book's five sections are separate booklets that can stand by themselves. So, for the time being my 1991 publication has become again a manuscript in progress. This means, what you read here today may not be exactly what you will find here tomorrow.   

 

 

Heliopolis and the Process of Theologizing

 

The ancient Egyptian cult center Junu, named On in the Hebrew Bible, was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks in recogni­tion of the fact that the sun god Ra (Helios in Greek) presided there.[1] Junu is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts as the “House of Ra.” Nevertheless, there was another and more mysterious dimension to Heliopolitan Ra theology; it was Atum.

 

Many basic Egyptian notions, of thinking about gods, animals, and humankind together, definitely do date back to a most ancient hunter-gatherer stratum of  "prehuman flux" mythology. However, the basic Helio­politan theological notions themselves belong later in the evolu­tionary sequence of Egyptian culture and religion. They correspond to pursuits of domestication and grand-domestication. Nevertheless, the basic Heliopolitan theological notions could have been formulat­ed already by the founder of the First Dynasty (ca. 3,100 B.C.E.). Overall, the theology of Junu was well suited for the justifica­tion of imperial grand domestication by which, specifical­ly, the lower and upper Egyptian realms have been united and a great variety of regional cults accommodated.

 

As a system of thought, the theology of Heliopolis has been put on record during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2494–2181 B.C.E.) on interior walls of seven large pyramids. This theology thereby survived in the masonry afterworlds of divinized pharaohs. Together their inscriptions have been published as the “Pyramid Texts.”

 

Pyramid inscriptions reflect a time when Heliopolis was the major cult center of the united kingdom. Atum was the name given to the God of gods who was the source and essence of all other Egyptian gods, and of everything else. Atum's dynamic self-manifestation through the modalities of his lesser divinities, of his world, and even of his distant human progeny—especially through those divinities who gave birth to pharaohs as legitimate representatives of the god­head—that is what Egyptian high theology has been all about.

 

The Helipolitan version is the clearest formulation of any Old Kingdom theology we have; though, by modern standards it could scarcely be praised as “systematic.” Somehow it became the dominant orthodox strain of thought by which subsequent Egyptian religious notions and rites were oriented.

 

          Generally in Egyptian religion, later theological formulations showed a need to embrace their antecedents, to accommodate them as well as they could. It has been precisely this tolerant and endless incorporation of older theological statements that, to this day, has held our understanding of Egyptian royal religion in suspense.

 

          Western minds that are accustomed to disjunctive logic may see in ancient Egyptian religion only an irrational conglomeration of outdated magic-theological notions. Pronouncements made about any one Egyptian god apply to other gods as well. Yet, this apparent theoretical untidiness is not the result of faulty Egyptian logic. Such an impression derives mostly from the fact that Western scholars hitherto have read the Egyptian theological statements as explaining “gods of polytheism,” or more precisely, as an incoherent collage of idols that had to be defamed in opposition to what has become Hebrew monotheism and Greek rationalism.

 

           All the while, however, the blending of divine natures and functions could have been understood easily by the simple fact that, for learned ancient Egyptians, there has persistently been a single God who has staged the entire combined polytheistic show. No less than nine divine names were fused at Heliopolis into a single Ennead, a Ninefoldness. On what basis could a Christian scholar classify his own theological “Trinity” as monotheism and keep insisting that the Heliopolitan “Ennead” belongs to polytheism? The “monotheism” of the pharaohs had no difficulty sponsoring, embracing, and absorbing lesser provincial deities throughout Egypt as additional members or offspring of the divine Ennead. Lesser cults, in turn, were supported by imperial Horus descendants of that same ninefold divinity.

 

 

Written Sources reflect the Religion of Priesthood,

Royalty, and Aristocracy

 

          The oldest substantial amounts of ancient Egyptian written materials, containing religious information, are inscriptions on the walls of the royal pyramids (2494–2181 B.C.E.)  of the "Old Kingdom" and in patrician coffins extending into the "First Intermediary" (starting 2250 B.C.E.). They are named, accordingly, the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. Before they were composed into writing, these ancient religious ontologies had been centuries in the making. Needless to say, the product of such a long process has had plenty time to become complex. And try as I may to simplify these ancient thoughts, the end-result always looks complicated enough to challenge even the most devoted student. These matters demand a reader's sustained and undivided attention.

 

           The academicians' grasp of ancient Egyptian religion is patchy at best; but then, timidity and willful insistence on faddish impossibilities would probably be worse than incomplete grasping. In ancient Egypt, as anywhere else in the world's civilizations, the first strata of written religious texts have belonged to an elite—to royalty, to their priestly and aristocratic collaborators, to their entourage of retainers and officials.

 

          The religion of the common people in ancient Egypt generally has not fared well in historical reconstruc­tions. Most of what has been said so far about the lives of the common people still had to be based on information that could be inferred from statements made at the tip of the imperial hierarchy, and then mostly from the funerary cult by which royalty and aristocracy memorialized itself for subsequent scrutiny.

 

           The lacuna in our knowledge of popular ancient Egyptian religion becomes especially painful as we move into the first millennium B.C.E. But by and large, Egyptian religion beneath the ruling classes has remained silent throughout the ancient history as well. Only at the apex of the hierarchy were sufficient central tenets of faith expressed in writing, or were memorialized in monuments bold enough for survival. When, during the last millennium B.C.E., foreign armies periodically clipped the Egyptian apex, records concerning the Egyptian mysteries of gods and life after death necessarily slowed to a trickle. Only later, in the broader Hellenistic ferment, have some Egyptian cults erupted and spread forth into Mediterranean daylight. The imperialistic nations who were the keepers of books during the centuries of Egypt's decline, who produced the books of which some were destined to survive, were not interested in the “superstitions” of colonized Egyptian natives.

 

 

Genealogical Fallacy vis-à-vis Divine Emanation

 

          The political dimension of the Heliopolitan theological system has been the subject matter of frequent academic discussions that need not be belabored here in their entirety. A single such commen­tary suffices to make a preliminary point. Rudolf Anthes has concluded that the theologians at Heliopolis postulated a genealogy of five genera­tions of gods, and that they did so to establish the divine and primeval character of the ruling king. Accordingly, the lineage of Horus, of the god with whom ruling kings of Egypt were identi­fied, “encompasses cultivated land and desert, heaven and earth and whatever is in between, as well as the ocean out of which Atum arose.” The Heliopolitan theogony therefore may be understood as a “systematic demonstration that all the world was identified with, or belonged to the realm of, Horus.”[2]

 

          As reasonable as such an explanation of political divine claims may appear by standards of modern political theory or Greek mythic genealogies, it is also a fact that Heliopolitan priests have included in this realm of Horus all conceivable aspects of their cosmos. They pursued this habit of inclusion far in excess of what an Egyptian king actually could hope to rule. This happenstance invites us to examine the larger cosmic dimension specifically with regard to its religious comprehensiveness.

 

          It appears that our Western preoccupation with the metaphor of a divine “genealogy,” after the manner in which kings used to keep track of their authoritarian ancestors, thus far has unduly hindered our under­standing of the larger Egyptian cosmic-political order. A discussion of the Heliopolitan theogony ought never lose sight of the fact that an Egyptian deity, a greater-than-human reality confront­ing human­kind, although he or she may alter his or her manifestation from time to time, or even may prefer invisibility, will never really cease to exist during all these transformations. As soon as this simple fact is recognized, the Heliopolitan “sequential genealogy” that Anthes has postulated evaporates from view. The supposed “generations” of gods thereby are rediscovered as an ongoing process that “generates” a multitude of ba mutations that, in turn, are all expressions of one timeless eternal God or ka essence.

 

          The Egyptians called the invisible life force, that spark of life that energetically manifests itself from within, the ka. They named outward manifestations, which in human awareness and epistemology register as phenomena or as phenotypal mutations of that life force, the ba. Both ka and ba are what we might call soul. A ba, appearing along the outer reaches of divine ka emanation, is a visible, shadow-tainted, and estranged unit of ka, whereas a ka unit by itself may be characterized as a relatively pure participant within the original plethora of divine essence. The ka represents divine essence, and as such it exists in and emanates from the divine source of all being.

 

          True to the ancient “prehuman flux” mythology of hunters and gatherers, the gods of Egypt continued to appear in any garb or ba they desired—of any animal, fish, bird, plant, or other natural phenom­enon—as well as in the human figure of a ruling pharaoh.[3]

 

          They also could appear in prehuman flux “twilight,” in half-dress, as half-animals or half-humans. In contrast to the gods, humans were enabled substantially to transform their ba only by way of dying. In this manner Egyptian ghosts in animal or half-animal form, who have gotten caught up in the condition of prehuman flux alongside the gods, lingered in Egyptian memory throughout the ancient period. They were known to appear in the shape of animals or half-animals in accordance with the ancient mysticism typical of hunter-gatherer religiosity.

 

          The entire plethora of Atum's generative emission or flux does mean, therefore, that within the larger Egyptian cosmic scheme of things we are not contemplating five “generations” of divine person­ages. Nor are we faced with an assembled pantheon of separate individual deities. Instead, we behold with our very human eyes the manifestations of a single godhead along his more or less visible periphery—a periphery that, as far as can be perceived at our low level of existence, is an ever-evolving play of light and shadows. But all the while the one God of gods remains, within and in himself, eternally the same source of all being.

 

          Heliopolitan theology, or ancient Egyptian orthodoxy, is best approached from its two oldest strata of extant data; namely, the funerary literatures that have survived as pyramid and coffin inscriptions. Excerpts and phrases from funerary liturgies, comprising spells for good fortune in the hereafter, were inscribed on royal pyramid walls and on patrician coffins. The oldest among these texts, in the pyramids, were intended to establish a hallowed intellectual context for the return of a deceased pharaoh to his new state of fulfilled godhood. Thus, by and large the Pyramid Texts delineate the royal soteriology (doctrine of salvation) of returning from an estranged human condition to a more unified and divine mode of existence.

 

          The road “thither” corresponds exactly to the road that has led a human ka portion or life-soul “hither.”[4] This is to say that soteriology, in accordance with Heliopolitan theology, traces the cosmogony in reverse. And inasmuch as the greater-than-human cosmos in ancient Egypt was deemed personal and divine, cosmogony (story of the cosmos) equaled theogony (story of the gods)—and soteriology was the theistic theory of salvation.

 

          The entire theological system can be visualized as a flow of creative vitality, emanating outward from the godhead, thinning out as it flows farther from its source. Along its outer periphery this plethora of divine emanation diffuses into what begins to appear as the light and shadow realm of our material world. It becomes visible. Next, beyond this periphery of visible

matter lies the realm of nonbeing that, in Egyptian mythology, was conceptualized as watery chaos, or Nun. Thus, the boundary realm between divinely generated being and nonbeing is what contains our apparently concrete experiences of the world, life, and death. From a Western point of view this ontology could be called a philosophical idealism, where it not for the fact that the dichotomies of “ideas and things” and “mind and matter” are not applicable here.

 

          Along its outer periphery the plethora of divine existence, of generation, of emanation, of being, and of life—namely, the divine current of ka radiation—becomes visible as a multitude of ba apparitions. Along that outer periphery it meets with nonbeing, is stunned by nonbeing, and as a result curls inward on itself. Individualized and estranged ka units, that is, ka sparks in ba manifestations confronting nonbeing, may swirl for a while about, along that outer periphery of divinity, as ghostly apparitions in lostness and confusion. But these ka souls also may be meaningfully reoriented to again travel homeward to the source of their being, the godhead.

 

          While the sole and hidden deity has thus been generating and giving birth to its self-emanations, in external visibility as if it were an ongoing process of  “exhaling,” this same sole divine source has also continually been “re-inhaling” its own life essences. Along the outer edge of human ontology and epistemology these essences, perceived as finite manifestations, have been stunned by the kiss of death and nonbeing. They are thereby purified, turned around, or “resurrected” with the help of religious funerary rites. Divine generation and emanation from the godhead, and the nostalgic return of estranged individual life-souls to their former source, therefore happens along a busy two way dimension.

 

          The creative descending emanation ends in the cul-de-sac of life made manifest, as if being caught up in the curve of a U-turn. The entire road of creation leads hither from God to finitude; the road of resurrection and salvation leads home again toward the heart of God.

 

 

Divine Emanation proceeds through Five Levels, or Hypostases

 


The First Hypostasis (Level 1)

 

          At the starting point of genera­tional flow one may, in Heliopolitan manner, visualize the source of all being as manifesting itself concretely in the form of a phallic primeval hill, Atum, on the rise. His creative emission or emanation may be visualized, more aptly perhaps, as Ra who is the rising, radiating, and life-evoking phoenix or sun deity. For a still clearer ancient perception, one may visualize our world from the vantage point of the sun god, or even from the vantage points of descending sun rays. At the turbulent terminals of their emanational paths, at their points of impact on nonbeing, these sun rays evoke for us here on earth certain sensations that cause the phenomenal or material world around us appear with substantiality and with color—even us to ourselves.

 

          The notion, of Atum as a hill rising from the chaotic waters of Nun, was sublimated to account as well for the presence of therio­morphic as well as anthropo­morphic generation or procreation within this world. The rising hill of Atum was a rising phallus. As such it was replicated on consequent masculine hypostases like Shu, Geb, and Osiris. Atum's fondling hand itself became the prolific vagina of Tefnut, Nut, and Isis without ever ceasing to be Atum's own hand.

 

          All these generative divine “organs” in successive hypostases, male as well as female, could be contemplated in singular androgynous as well as in plural form. The Heliopolitan Ennead in its entirety was nine as well as one. It also manifested itself in any number between one and nine—and beyond those.

 

           In the beginning Atum arose from Nun, the chaotic primeval waters (see Figure 5). Nun is the inconceivable and chaotic nothing, a moist void that at best can only be described as being “potentially” there. By contrast, when Atum arose as primeval Hill amidst Nun, he was the first solid someone or somebody. Not unexpectedly, this rising Hill was visualized by male priestly storytellers as being principally a masculine generative deity. And again not unexpectedly, it turned out that Atum's sanctuary at Junu had been built exactly on this primal and cosmic hill.[5] Many scholars have alerted to the fact that the recessions of floodwaters from the Nile valley bottomland, annual events before the Aswan Dam was built, have displayed through millennia the reemergence of hills and land for Egyptian cultivators.

 

          Although the exact experiential moment when Atum became identified with the sun god Ra can no longer be determined, it already was standard practice in the Old Kingdom to refer to these polar manifes­tations together as a single Atum-Ra. Cosmologically, one can visualize the two together, as Sun rising above the primeval Hill. In time the hidden Atum was contrasted with the radiant Ra of daytime visibility. That is to say, Atum in his original hidden form corresponded then to the sun god who has just set to hide again in darkness. Politically, the upward and sunward orientation of Egyptian kings as Horuses (see Levels 4 and 5 later), as falcon deities soaring toward the sun, provided an easy directional association of royalty with the rising Ra. By logical extension this orientation accomplished a fusion of the rising Hill with the ensuing Ennead. Being Horus-Ra, and being supported by the solid masculine hill-power of Atum, the Egyptian god-king hoped to survive death and to rise in solar glory and splendor.

 


Figure 5. In the beginning, within chaotic Nun, Atum arose as primeval hill.

Ra emerged as phoenix or sunburst above Atum. Together they comprise Atum-Ra,

the total godhead of  Heliopolitan theology.

 

 

The Second Hypostasis (Level 2)


          Heliopolitan mythology and theory of evolution begins with an androgynous conceptualization of the divine generative process, it develops from there in the direction of a sexual process of generation. Shu and Tefnut, male and female together, are the second hypostasis in the emanation and manifestation of Atum's pleasure (see Figure 6). Shu and Tefnut sometimes are mentioned together as Ruti, a pair of divinities who become visible in the ba apparitions of a male and a female lion. Thus, though Heliopolitan theology is basically monothe­istic, at the second hypostasis it may be character­ized as being ditheistic or dualistic. Any single “One” being contemplated by an analytic human mind, sooner or later, will reveal its two, three, or more aspects.

 


Figure 6. Atum spat forth Shu and Tefnut, Life and Order, to expand himself and

to prepare the realm for life and offspring. Their invisible union, which defies illustration,

has generated Geb and Nut.

 

Whereas the “Ruti” dualism represents a convenient accommo­da­tion to the local cult of Leontopolis, Shu and Tefnut in their indigenous Heliopolitan context still were thought of as forming a trinity, together with Atum, from whom they both proceed.[6] Within this trinitarian frame of reference, Shu personifies the masculine “phallus-­semen-life-breath” extension of Atum, whereas Tefnut personi­fies the feminine hand-womb-mouth-order dimension. Both dimensions together continue the creative activity of Atum's original “spit­ting,” which had generated and brought them forth in the first place. And in this manner they, in turn, generate a next hypostasis, one that would exhibit slightly more visible (or more easily imaginable) contours.

 

          Atum in the form of High Hill created Shu and Tefnut, a brother and sister pair of twins. In terms of cosmographic visualization, Shu pushed forth from the solid Hill as a force of life—as a soul-charged divine breath of air. Within

Shu, and to the limits of Shu, there arched together with him a kind of feminine “order” or “firmament.” In the Hebrew creation story this firmament was established by God for the orderly purpose of separating the waters above from those below (Genesis 1:6–7). Theologians at Heliopolis knew this firma­ment or “order” as Lady Tefnut, or Lady Mahet. It was she, now, who delimited and held back the all-enveloping domain of chaotic Nun. 

 

          This entire trinitarian portion of the Ninefoldness and All-God, Atum together with Shu and Tefnut, at the demise of ancient Egyptian culture was transposed by Plotinus into Greek-looking philosophy: into One Father (Atum), Mind (Mahet), and Soul (Shu). Around that time it was also transposed by Christian theologians into Father (Atum), Son (Shu), and Holy Spirit (Mahet).

 

          Modern connoisseurs of origin stories may be baffled by the very basic anthropomorphic demeanor of Egypt's high god, Atum. Egyptian theologians were no Indo-European dualists; their material world was not hopelessly severed from a qualitatively separate and superior spiritual realm. Much less were they dualists subscribing to later Zoroastrian or Manichean conceptualizations that distinguished sharply between personal Good and Evil.

 

          These ancient Egyptians felt only slightly uneasy about cultivating a masturbation metaphor in their high theology. Their uneasiness stemmed not from a realization that sexual prowess was unbecoming of a God-of-gods. On the contrary; it stemmed rather from the fact that God's sexuality could be imitated somewhat at the lowest human level, at a scale far too small to be kept lastingly in reverential focus. They therefore broadened their sexual metaphor in light of analogous emission processes—spitting and expectora­tion—which, it turned out, were scarcely more endearing to later Indo-European dualistic theological sensibilities.

 

 

The Third Hypostasis (Level 3)


          Geb and Nut are the manifest divinities at this level (see Figure 7). Together they represent a hypostasis in which anthropomorphic conceptualization and cosmological visualization have come together. Ancient Egyptian artists themselves have drawn our illustration for this hypostasis. They were in the habit of drawing the contours of Geb and Nut in various degrees of anthropomorphism and sexual explicitness. The preceding illustrations in this book, depicting more elementary hypostases, were drawn as backward projections based on descriptive statements.

 

          Geb as Father Earth and Nut as Mother Sky, nevertheless, constitute an anomaly among the mythologies of humankind. In most other cosmogonies the Sky is Father and the ever-bearing Earth is recognized as Mother. But Egyptian royalty has identified itself unambiguously with the life-evoking splendor of the sun. Kings preferred to be born from on high, “trailing clouds of glory” as William Wordsworth would have said.

 


 

Figure 7. Geb as Father Earth is represented in person and by his emblem, the

Great Cackler, on the left. He rises to meet Mother Sky, Nut, who arches above him. Their father Shu, on the

right, proceeds to separate them. Together they illustrate the Egyptian cosmology-theology in the

anthropomorphic mode Twenty-first Dynasty Papyrus of Tameniu, British Museum. Drawn after Ions.

 

          The geo-focal myth that describes the emergence of Atum as a rising hill, or a rising phallus, has given direction to the generative nature of all subsequent hypostases. It has established the primacy of the masculine dimension of Atum-Ra as godhead in the personae of Shu, Geb, and Osiris. It has kept Egyptian royal masculinity anchored solidly on earth and has bestowed upon pharaohs the authority to administer and to rule “the heritage of Geb”; that is, the visible earth. The pharaoh as a divine predator and Horus-falcon, having been born from on high, thus was empowered to rule all that lived or grew on earth. By extension, he also ruled everything that was mummified and buried in it.

 

          From Level 2 onward in the creative process, the texts read as though the deity is emanating by way of perpetual sexual union between its Shu and its Tefnut aspects. Cosmographically speaking, from the perspective of an earthling observing Level 3, it also would have been difficult to perceive how far the body of Geb, the male, reached and where the body of Nut, the female, began. Some descriptions given in Pyramid and Coffin Texts nevertheless are very explicit theography—pornographic theography in fact.[7] That such a very intimate engagement has lead to pregnancy and offspring in another hypostasis should come as no surprise.

 

          All the while, no negative valuations have been intended by these stark depictions. The visible world, which was the subject matter of graphic, sculpted, and scribal depictions, was never more than low-intensity divine reality. Our low-intensity material world is perceived by human eyes as being generated, by ka energies, from shadow contrasts over against what ontologically speaking amounts to even less—chaotic Nun or nonbeing.

 

          Atum, that is, Shu and Tefnut together, procreated Geb and Nut. These two offspring together constitute the more or less “visible” Father Earth and Mother Sky. Cosmographically, it may be said that the creative emissions of Atum, by which Shu and Tefnut have come to occupy a joint visible realm of life and order, have with the appearance of Geb and Nut come into sharper focus. Father Geb can be felt, seen, and understood much more easily than his still invisible father Shu. His concrete outlines can clearly be discerned and can even be modified by human hands and skill. Mother Nut can be visualized as well. In the azure sky she can be seen as being there. Though, everyone will admit that seeing her, and her attempts at concealing her nudity, requires a healthy dose of masculine imagina­tion—which, we may safely assume, presented no real obstacle to Egyptian priests.[8]

 

          In this manner the godhead Atum displays his otherwise hidden nature, channeled through the still invisible personae of Shu and Tefnut. His essence appears diluted, of course, as it is made visible in the ba modes of Geb and Nut. But all such light-and-shadow apparitions happen for the benefit of human eyes whose ability to perceive is limited to that outer boundary of Nun-tainted reality.

 

 

The Fourth Hypostasis (Level 4)


          With Mother Sky and Father Earth now having come into better focus, the Egyptian world was ready to have still more specific divine births occur. From Geb and Nut were born two brother and sister pairs of twin gods: Osiris with Isis, and Nephthys with Seth (see Figure 8). These twin pairs were envisioned anthropomorphically or, sometimes, were seen as existing in a twilight condition of prehuman flux. As gods at Level 4 they appeared and operated understandably on a smaller and more visible scale than their great parent(s). At this level of specificity the Egyptian godhead sponsored and renewed divine-human kingship in the world of Egyptian planters and domesticators—in the visible realm that was the lowest visible level of his emanation.




 

Figure 8. Seth and Nephthys, Osiris and Isis. These children of Geb and Nut

occupy the lowest rank in the Heliopolitan Ennead, at Level 4; they exist low enough to participate more

intimately in the human experience of life and death, at Level 5. Drawn after Bonnet, and Erman (1934).

 

 

          Gods of this fourth hypostasis, or “generation,” function primarily along the outer edge, the turnaround curve and perimeter of divine emanation. Nephthys, as goddess of the home fire, was credited with having suckled and nurtured young Horus kings. Seth, as god of desert heat and of enemy lands, has been saddled with the blame and responsibility for having death occur. He was the one who stopped living Horus kings dead in their tracks; and he transformed them into corpses, that is, into Osiris natures. Because this involves a bonafide male member of the Ennead, one can assume that Atum's phallus somehow was also present for Seth—but the “sexual” distin­guishing mark of Seth happens to be a hunter's or a warrior's phallic aberra­tion: a deadly weapon with which to stab and to kill. By contrast, Osiris is the real phallus bearer of this generation of Enneadean gods. He procreated all subsequent Horus-kings of Egypt while Isis, as divine mother, gave fresh birth and nurtured the offspring of Osiris.

 

 

The Turnaround Realm (Level 5)


          The gods who may be men­tioned together with the outermost generation of the Ennead, and in association with the “turnaround realm,” played major roles in Egyptian funerary proceedings, at least in so far as these proceedings were overshadowed by Helipolitan theology. Foremost among these lesser gods may be mentioned Horus, Thoth, and Anubis (see Figure 9). Horus represented any duly installed Egyptian king—a divine falcon-king. The ibis-headed Thoth was scribe and keeper of the divine words; he was later in Memphite theology rediscovered as tongue of the All-God, Ptah. The ibis-headed Thoth and the jackal-headed Anubis belonged to some kind of lower or “lesser Ennead.” At the same time, Horus in the “turn­around realm” became associated more personally and intimately with the “great” Ennead. As the son of Isis and Osiris he seems to have functioned at times almost as the Ennead's “tenth” member.

 


    

Figure 9. Left to right: Horus, Thoth, and Anubis. Drawn after Erman (1934).

 

 

          Of course, in the Heliopolitan perspective these lesser gods are created, like everything else in the cosmos, by that same emanation that also generates the primary hypostases of the Ennead it­self. Everything that now exists comes into existence as Atum. In Atum's emanation all creatures live and move and have their being.

 

          The cosmos was generated by Atum alone, first; and from that point on simultaneously by the trinity composed of Atum, Shu, and Tefnut. By the same divine breath of Shu and presence of Tefnut was generated the visible cosmos—by Atum himself or by his trinity simultaneously—for the All-God to become increasingly more apparent to humankind as Geb and Nut (see Figure 10).

 


Figure 10.  Directionality and levels in Heliopolitan theogony and funerary soteriology

 

           It just so happened that various Egyptian local traditions cultivated additional divine manifestations and saviors who had to be reckoned with. The wise theolo­gians of Junu knew how to accommodate them all in their system. Some of these divinities found new roles to play along the lower end of an already variegated Enneadean emanation. They found new ways “to surf,” as it were, on the waves that rolled along the outer perimeter of Atum's emanation. They helped reverse the fates and redirect the movement of ka sparks, of life-souls, who had become estranged from their source and gotten caught up in the shadow play and confusion that exists in the vicinity of moribund bodies.

 

          Some such lower gods were called upon to serve as preparers, guides, and conveyors of life souls during funerary proceedings. Anubis was undertaker; and Thoth officiated as priestly scribe. In performing their saving tasks these extra gods interacted with some of the lower among the divinities of the Greater Ennead. Turn­around assistance frequently also was provided by Nephthys and Isis. The significance of Horus to Egyptian soteriology and the funerary cult increased during the Intermediary Period (2181–2040 B.C.E.), when patricians availed themselves of royal Heliopolitan soteriology. In Coffin Texts the god Horus is recognized as a living savior symbol unto whom, on his way home to the godhead, a deceased's soul could attach itself for easier travel. For some returning souls Horus even had become the focus of mystic re-identification with

divinity.

 

          The ability of Horus to function as a son of God and savior of humankind is underwritten by Heliopolitan imperial mythology. Horus, the divine falcon-king of United Egypt, was a son of the god Osiris and of his mother Isis who, for the

purpose of enthronement rites, embodied the Egyptian throne. Every divinely installed Egyptian king was ceremo­nially reborn from her—upon that throne. Then, when a ruling god-king of Egypt came to the end of his career, he was transformed. First his pulsating human body was transformed by Seth into an Osiris kind of ba, a corpse apparition. His ka was thereby liberated from its own shadow. He was “reborn” from his human appearance or ba to return to the godhead and live purer.

 

          When a deceased pharaoh was put into his coffin he represent­ed the potentially creative and masculine Atum-Shu-Geb-Osiris “phallus” dimension. Isis—and we may refer to her as representing the feminine Atum-Tefnut-Nut-Isis “hand” dimension—hovered over the entombed royal body of Osiris to be impregnated by him.

 

Inside on many ancient Egyptian coffin lids was painted an image of Isis. This practice obviously refers to the Osiris-Isis myth involving Osiris's sexual resuscitation, Isis's conception, and the expected birth of Horus. As will be shown later, in Coffin Text Spell 84, the soul of a deceased person may be expected to issue forth from Isis anew as her son Horus and then journey homeward. As a result she gave birth later, as throne, to the new Horus falcon-king. That these combined wedding-burial and enthronement rites still repre­sent Atum's selfsame emanation becomes evident when one contemplates the Heliopolitan system in its entirety. 

 

          Repeatable cycles, of God begetting a son to rule the human realm of Egypt and returning this son again unto himself, are what gave to the Egyptian grand domestication system an enduring rhythm through the millennia of its known history. An offshoot version of this Egyptian stability, enveloped by a slightly modified version of Helipolitan trinitarian theology, took shape in subsequent Western history—it stabilized Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire.

 

 

The Homeward Journey


           In Pyramid Texts, as well as in the Coffin Texts later on, Helipolitan “theogony” or “cosmogony” are explained only incidentally. The primary concern of all ancient Egyptian funerary texts is, necessarily, the journey of ka souls homeward to the godhead. Therefore it has become necessary for us to discuss “generation and emanation,” and even the “turnaround realm” as preliminary and as derived conceptualizations.

 

          Levels 6 through 9 can be understood more easily by turning directly to the textual data. Excerpts from Pyramid and Coffin Texts, which will be presented below, will provide direct imagery and samples from Egyptian soteriology. Materials that are as foreign to modern minds as the funerary utterances of several millennia ago are best understood when they are left to speak for themselves. Extensive commentaries tend to obscure what in the original context might seem only quaint.

 

          The commentary in the next two sections will be kept to a minimum. It can be abbreviated further with the help of the reference numbers introduced in Figure 10. These numbers will help link theogonic hypostases (Levels 1 through 4) with “way stations” along the soul's journey homeward to the godhead (Levels 6 through 9).

 

    All the while, it will be good to keep in mind that reference numbers for hypostases, along the generative flow of divine life force, correspond to numbers assigned along the homeward path in the following manner: 1 corresponds to 9, 2 to 8, 3 to 7, and 4 to 6. The number 5 is left to represent the Turnaround Realm in which the material world, life, and death are experienced physically and to some extent visibly. The use of these numerical codes makes our exposition of Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts considerably easier.

 

 

 

Heliopolitan Theology in the Pyramid Texts

 

          This section focuses on a small selection of pyramid texts that may be useful for sketching Heliopolitan theology logically and coherently. Critics of our present approach to ancient Egyptian religion, who hitherto may have prejudged Egyptian "polytheism" vis-à-vis Hebrew "monotheism," probably will want to insist on the absolute individuality of each and every Egyptian divinity. But, be that as it may, this writer is saddled with the historical and human obligation to visualize ancient peoples in light of how they themselves might have lived out their finitude vis-à-vis greater-than-human realities—or might have accepted their temporality in light of their own glimpses of eternity. Hebrew religion, Greek philosophy, and Christian theology are latecomers. From their respective places in history they have no parental claims over early Egyptian religion.

 

          Logic is not abandoned when one tries to understand human existence the ancient Egyptian way; namely, from the perspective of divinely radiated energy and life, from within emanations of divine purpose and pleasure, or from sun rays which in turn engender what we, nowadays, regard as being more "substantial" protoplasm and genes. The ancient stream of a godhead's conscious emanations surely will outlive our finite spans of memory, our schizophrenias and mental traumas. Eternity itself will arbitrate between moribund analytic and disjunctive reasoning, on one hand, and the type of holistic reasoning which was cherished by Heliopolitan priests on the other.



Pyramid Texts 1248-49


          The portion of liturgical utterance that follows affirms the self-createdness of Atum and suggests a method by which the godhead might reasonably have generated or given birth to his next hypostasis, Shu and Tefnut. Concerning Levels 1 and 2 we are given an anthropomorphic explanation of the theogonic and emanational dimension of Egyptian mythology.[9] 

 

Atum is he who [gave pleasure to himself] in On. He took his phallus in his grasp that he might create orgasm by means of it, and so were born the twins Shu and Tefnut. May they put the King between them.[10]

 

          Kurt Sethe's translation suggests the primeval givenness of the phallus-in-hand situation, a creative process, rather than the volition of God to create in that manner:

 

Atum ist der [von selbst] entstand, der mit sich onanierte in Heliopolis. Dem sein Phallus in seine Faust gelegt wurde, damit er sich geschlechtlich vergnüge mit ihm, und geboren wurden zwei Kinder verschiedenen Geschlechtes, Shu und Tefnut. Setzen sich nun den N. zwischen sich.[11]

 

          This soteriological utterance delivers the returning king directly into the arms of the godhead, at Levels 8 and 9, which, of course, correspond to Levels 2 and 1 along the path of emanation. More precisely, the king is placed smack between Shu and Tefnut. He has returned to the primeval moment, or to the primeval condition, at which and in which all subsequent gods and life-souls have had prior existence. Atum's emanation as Shu and Tefnut constitutes a trinity. One must keep in mind that both aspects of the deceased, his Shu and Tefnut relatedness, are subsequently engaged in creative sexual union and that between these two is no empty space for a separate royal personage to coexist. The king therefore is mentioned here as being "set among the gods" after the manner in which all gods and hypostases blend into one another. Being an Osiris spark of ka, the deceased king henceforth is contained in the All-God and participates in his creative self-emanation, more intimately now than prior to having suffered death. In the final analysis, the king who is "set among the gods" is situated "within the godhead." He returns home to the source of all being, at Level 1 and 9.

 

 

Pyramid Texts 1652-55


          The royal pyramid dedicated by the words that follow here has been built in the realm of ontological turnaround, at Level 5. All the while, the theogony is invoked along its entire dimension. The entire creative Ennead is mentioned in its full spatial presence (Levels 1-4). This is done to arrange a mystic primeval union of the king's pyramid with Atum himself. It was understood that, by dying, the ruler will have achieved a mystic union of sorts, with the edifice he had built. In it he was to rest as an Osirian corpse. It is Atum's own embrace that bridges or collapses the distance from Level 5 through 9:

 

O Atum-Khoprer, you became high on the height, you rose up as the bnbn-stone in the Mansion of the "Phoenix" in On, you spat out Shu, you expectorated Tefnut, and you set your arms about them as the arms of a ka symbol, that your essence might be in them. O Atum, set your arms about the King, about this construction, and about this pyramid as the arms of a ka symbol, that the King's essence may be in it, enduring forever.

 

O Atum, set your protection over this King, over this pyramid of his, and over this construction of the King, prevent anything from happening evilly against it for ever, just as your protection was set over Shu and Tefnut. O you Great Ennead which is in On—Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Seth, Nephthys; O you children of Atum, extend his goodwill to his child in your name of Nine Bows...

 

 

Pyramid Texts 167-78


          Defeated by Seth at Level 5, the Egyptian Horus-king was transformed into the condition of Osiris who exists at Level 4 and 6. It is noteworthy regarding the liturgical utterance that follows that its writers have not found it necessary to acknowledge the god Osiris—apart from the presence of the mummified body of the king. Had they done so, Osiris would have been invoked between the lines that address Nut and Isis. This means that the presence of a dead king, in his funerary rite, was deemed sufficient recognition of the presence of the god Osiris. It also suggests that during his funeral the deceased king was already firmly counted as having been fused with a member of the Great Ennead.

 

O Atum, this one here is your son Osiris whom you

have caused to be restored that he may live...

O Shu, this one here is your son Osiris...

O Tefnut, this one here is your son Osiris...

O Geb, this one here is your son Osiris...

O Nut, this one here is your son Osiris...

O Isis, this one here is your brother Osiris...

O Seth, this one here is your brother Osiris...

O Nephthys, this one here is your brother Osiris...

O Thoth, this one here is your brother Osiris...

O Horus, this one here is your father Osiris...

O Great Ennead, this one here is Osiris...

O Lesser Ennead, this one here is Osiris...[12]

 

 

Pyramid Texts 1660-62


          Inasmuch as the temple compound at Junu contained two sanctuaries, one for Atum and another for Ra-Herachte, the duality of the godhead as "rising Ra" and "setting Atum" seems to have been an early aspect of the Heliopolitan cult. Therefore, even at its cultic core has the theological oneness of the godhead contained this directional East/W