THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.* THE English student of comparative
religion may now obtain, through the medium of Dr. Budge's learned work, a fairly complete knowledge of the central ideas of the religion of ancient Egypt. We cannot say a complete knowledge, for the most learned Egyptologist living does not possess that. The storehouse of Egyptian antiquities is every year yielding new material to the great scholars, mainly French and English, who are engaged in laying bare for us the treasures of Egyptian civilisation ; but there is much yet to be dis- covered with respect to origins. So far, however, as positive knowledge extends, these volumes provide us with material sufficient to determine generally what were ancient Egypt's fundamental religious beliefs. The present work is divided into three parts. One gives us the actual text of The Book of the Dead in its original hieroglyphics, a second provides an introduction, notes, and translation, while a third supplies a vocabulary by which the non-learned reader can himself secure a key to the sacred mysteries. The translation is as literal as it may well be, and the introduction is a very great aid to what would otherwise be immense difficulties in the text. Coloured reproductions from the Papyrus of Ani add to the interest of the work, and help us to understand better many of the allusions in the ancient text.
• Th. Book of the Dead : the Chapters of COM111Q Forth by Day. An Engligh Translation, with Introdu”tion, Note.. by E. A. W Budge, Litt.D., D.Lit. 3 vols. London: KeAan Pau', Trench, and Co. Phi.]
Egyptian civilisation seems to have been essentially a great, complex, hierarchical structure, organised by the priesthood, and based on religion. To some degree this may be said of other forms of ancient civilisation ; but the unique features of the wonderful and powerful life of ancient Egypt are its endurance for thousands of years with no really fundamental change, and its vivid conception of life beyond the grave, which almost made of life here a preparation for that which is to come. The priesthood of Egypt was the most learned and powerful in the ancient world; and doubtless, by its cultivation of the common belief of the people in the resur- rection and future life, it secured its hold over them and per- petuated its authority. But the belief itself does not seem to have been merely contrived for that purpose, though, probably, it was so utilised. It was a belief coeval with Egyptian history so far as we know, and it remained unchanged through thousands of years. The Book of the Dead may be said, roughly, to cover some four thousand years of history, and during all this time the essential beliefs were the same. There is nothing, so far as we know, comparable with this solidity of social and religious structure in the annals of mankind, and therefore Egyptian religion has a somewhat deeper significance for us than that of a merely antiquarian character. Environed as we are by the absorb- ing secularism of modern life, existing as we do in mush- room cities, and living in and for the present, no kind of culture is more valuable than that which exhibits to us a nation calmly perpetuating its being for thousands of years, its mind bent on the unseen world, its thoughts directed to conduct, to the judgment of the soul, to the rising of the dead. The cold hand of this immense antiquity is laid on
the fevered pulse of our too shallow life ; and, if only for a brief hour, we are calmed and hushed and carried out of our noisy years into the "being of the eternal silence." This, we think, is what the study of Egyptian religion may do for the modern man.
The hymns and religious texts which comprise The Book of the Dead form a collection of compositions inscribed by the Egyptians on the walls of tombs and sarcophagi to ensure the happiness of the dead in the under-world, where all souls were brought before the judge Osiris, to be dealt with according to their deeds done in the body. These hymns and texts are known as the Theban Recension of The Book of the Dead, copied by the scribes for themselves and for the people of rank from about 1600 to 900 B.C. The greater part of the texts belong to the group called by the Egyptians "Chapters of Coming Forth by Day," and the remainder are hymns, rubrics, Sm., "which were," as Dr. Budge says, "believed to increase the wellbeing and happiness of the dead, and to give them greater strength to resist the attacks of foes, and to withstand the powers of darkness and of the grave." Without burdening our- selves with the many questions of scholarship which are suggested here, and with some obscure problems and apparent contradictions raised, which are, however, of secondary importance, what, in the main, are the religious beliefs held by Egypt during a period of probably five thousand years ?
The life of ancient Egypt, we have said, was dominated by the thought of death and the life beyond, and Egyptian eschatology was, from one point of view, not dissimilar from that of St. Paul. Thou sowest bare grain, says the Apostle, and God giveth it a body, and so is it with the resurrection of the dead ; and then we have the familiar differentiation of the natural and the spiritual body. This belief was held in Egypt. The preservation of the body was held necessary to the functions of the future life, and so embalmment was a religious duty. Bat the Egyptian no more held than did St. Paul that this natural body would be resuscitated, but rather that it contained the germ of the spiritual body or sahu, which was able to ascend to heaven, and dwell there with the gods. To enable this body to rise, however, the material body con- t-aining its germ must be preserved, and to this end the custom of embalming tended. The tomb was held to be tenanted not merely by the natural body, but also by the Ica, which was a kind of abstraction of the attributes of a man, and which, Dr. Budge says, is equivalent to the Greek EratoLoy,— i.e., shape, phantom. Offerings were placed for the ha in the tomb. The Egyptian analysis of man was complex ; for, in addition to the khat or natural body, the sahu or spiritual body, and the ka or phantom, there was the ba or soul, the heart or ab, which was believed to be the source of good and evil in man, the khaibit or shadow, the khu or translucent envelope of the spiritual body, which ascended into heaven, the sekhem, which is apparently sometimes "form" and some- times power," and the ren or name. This latter was con- ceived as of vital importance, for if a man's name was in any way blotted out, it was believed that he ceased to exist. This analysis of the human constitution seems to present some aspects akin to that of theosophy. But did these various parts of the total personality always exist, or did some of them only come into existence after death ? This is an obscure problem ; and it is probable that, although Egyptian belief was always fundamentally the same, there were stages of religious consciousness, and that, as analysis became more complex, more members of the spiritual body were enumerated, and more sprung into being after death.
The story of Osiris is wrapped in mystery ; but we know that, after his suffering and death, he became in the Egyptian mind the judge of the dead before whom the soul came in the under-world. It would seem at times as though the evil soul never came to any resurrection at all, but was annihilated. The soul is judged according to the deeds done in the body, the justification being that no command of the gods, as inter- preted by the priests, has been disobeyed. The qualification is ethical and ceremonial. Dr. Budge says that the idea of repentance and consequent purification seems not to have been an element in the religion of Egypt ; but there is a passage in chapter clxxxix. which admits of the idea : " Hail, ye who turn back the blossoms upon yourselves, ye whose transgressions are done away with, whose faces are holy." In the main, however, the inwardness both of Christianity and Buddhism are absent here ; the deed, not the thought, is the main fact in judgment : it is more like a human tribunal where inward intention can never be fully probed. Osiria is eternal, the son of the earth-god and the sky-goddess, but he is not self-begotten and self-born, like Ba, the god of the sun, and he has an offspring, Horns. The judgment of the soul before Osiris consists in the weighing of ab, the heart, the source of good and evil, in a balance with the form of a feather, symbolising right and truth. If the balance is exactly even, the justified soul is led to the presence of Osiris, seated on a judgment seat with Isis and Nephthys standing behind him, and the children of Horns standing in front on a lotus. A very excellent repro- duction of the Papyrus of Ani illustrates the whole scene of the hall of judgment. If the heart does not weigh true, the "devourer of the unjustified" consumes the sinner. When does this judgment take place ? The Egyptians did not believe in a general Judgment Day ; all the evidence goes to show that the judgment by Osiris takes place after the death of each individual. Apparently the efficacy of prayer for the deceased was believed in, and such prayers were recited by the priests at the tomb during the period of embalming, which eccupied from seventy to a hundred days.
The conception of heaven was material, we may say grossly no,—" the delights and pleasures of this world were believed to be forthcoming in the next, and a life there in a state of happiness which depended absolutely upon material things was contemplated." Thus in one prayer for life in heaven we read : "Let me live upon bread made of white barley, and let my ale be made from red grain, and may the persons of my father and my mother be given unto me as guardians of my door and for the ordering of my territory." The latter portion of this passage and other passages show that future recognition of friends was contemplated. The heaven of ancient Egypt was an actual counterpart of Egypt itself, a Eat, fertile land intersected by canals and streams of running water; and a late belief placed the abodes of the just in a land to the west or north-west of Egypt. But material happiness and earthly good apart, the central idea of heaven is undoubtedly that of purity. Take this hymn to the spirit of Pepi :—" Hail, Pepi, arise, stand up ! Thou art pure, thy ka is pure, thy soul is pure, thy sekhem is pure ! Thy mother cometh to thee, thy mother Nut, the mighty creatress, cometh to thee, and she maketh thee pure, 0 Pepi !" The entrance to heaven was apparently aided by magic as well as by prayer, the Egyptians believing that the utter- ing of every word is followed by some effect, good or bad. A prayer uttered by a man pure and good is answered favourably ; a curse pronounced on a man or beast in the name of a hostile supernatural being works harm. The singular mediaaval custom, which forma the motif of Rossetti's poem, "Sister Helen," by which the burning of a wax model was supposed to injure the living type, had its counterpart in old Egypt, for the Egyptians held that the ka of a living person could be transferred to a wax image by the repetition of formula3. The magic must have given great influence to the priesthood, who were, indeed, more firmly entrenched than any other priestly class known to history. But perhaps that power was in the main wisely used. At any rate, by its means a wonderful and elaborate civilisation was built up and sus- tained for many thousands of years ; that civilisation being all based on the preparation of the soul, by just deeds and ceremonies, for a blessed future, as blessedness was then and there conceived. The priestly power and the ethical test of life (conceived, however, as merely static, not as dynamic) appear to us to have been the basis of Egyptian life.
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