Egyptian soul
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In Egyptian thought, the human soul is made up of five parts: the Ren, the Ba, the Ka, the Sheut, and the Ib. In addition to these components there was the human body (called the ha, occasionally a plural haw, meaning approximately sum of bodily parts).
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[edit] Ib
One of the most important parts was the ib, or heart. To Ancient Egyptians, it was the heart and not the mind that was the seat of emotion and thought. This is evidenced by the many expressions in the Egyptian language which incorporate the word ib, Awt-ib: happiness (literally, wideness of heart), Xak-ib: estranged (literally, truncated of heart).
This word was transcribed by Wallis-Budge as 'Ab'.
[edit] Sheut (shadow)
A person's shadow (šwt in Egyptian) was always present. A person could not exist without a shadow, nor the shadow without the person, therefore Egyptians surmised that the shadow contained something of the person it represents. For this reason statues of people and gods were sometimes referred to as their shadows.
The shadow was represented as a small human figure painted completely black as well as a figure of death, or servant of Anubis.
[edit] Ren (name)
A person's name (ren in Egyptian) was given to them at birth and would live for as long as that name was spoken, which explains why efforts were made to protect it, placing it in large amounts of writings. For example, part of the Book of Breathings, a descendant of the Book of the Dead, was for ensuring the survival of the name. A cartouche (magical rope) was often used to surround the name and protect it. Conversely, the names of deceased enemies of the state, such as Akhenaten, were hacked out of monuments in a form of damnatio memoriae.
[edit] Ba (soul/personality)
The 'Ba' ('b3') is in some regards the closest to the Western notion of the soul, but it also was everything that makes an individual unique, similar to the notion of 'personality'. (In this sense, inanimate objects could also have a 'Ba', a unique character, and indeed Old Kingdom pyramids were often called the 'Ba' of their owner). Like a soul, the 'Ba' is a part of a person that lives after the body dies, and it is sometimes depicted as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the 'Ka' in the afterlife.
The word 'bau' (a false plural of the word ba) is based on this concept. It meant something like 'impressiveness', 'power', and 'reputation', particularly of a deity. When a god intervened in human affairs, it was said that the 'Bau' (plural of 'Ba') of the god were at work [Borghouts 1982]. In this regard, the king was regarded as a 'Ba' of a god, or one god was believed to be the 'Ba' of another.
[edit] Ka (life force)
The Ka (k3) was the concept of life force, the difference between a living and a dead person, death occurring when the ka left the body. The Ka was thought to be created by Khnum on a potter's wheel, or passed on to children via their father's semen.
The Egyptians also believed that the ka was sustained through food and drink. For this reason food and drink offerings were presented to the dead, though it was the kau (k3w) within the offerings (also known as kau) that was consumed, not the physical aspect. The ka was often represented in Egyptian iconography as a second image of the individual, leading earlier works to attempt to translate ka as double.
Julian Jaynes in his theoretical work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind suggests that the "ka" originally was a hallucinated god-voice similar to that experienced in schizophrenia. According to his theory, most people were not fully conscious in the early ancient period, and hence his theory is regarded as fringe by the mainstream.
Giacomo Borioni proposes in his work "Der Ka aus religionswissenschaftlicher Sicht" that, according to Friedrich Junge, the Ka was the "self" of a human being.
[edit] The soul in Egyptian afterlife
Death occurs when a person's life-force (ka) leaves their body. Ceremonies conducted by priests after death, including the "opening of the mouth (wp r)" aimed not only to restore a man's physical abilities in death, but also to release a ba's attachment to the body. This allowed the ba to be united with the ka in the afterlife, creating an entity known as an "Akh" (Axy, meaning "effective one").
Egyptians conceived of the afterlife as pretty much like normal physical existence--but with a difference. The model for this new existence was the journey of the sun. At night the sun descended into the Duat (underworld). Eventually he meets the body of the mummified Osiris. Osiris and the sun, re-energized by each other, rise to new life for another day. For the deceased, their body and their tomb was a personal Osiris and a personal Duat. For this reason they are often addressed as "Osiris". For this process to work, some sort of bodily preservation was required, to allow the Ba to return during the night, and to rise to new life in the morning.
" The Book of the Dead", the collection of spells which aided a man in his afterlife existence, had the egyptian name of the "Book of going forth by day". They helped people avoid the perils of the afterlife and also aided their existence, containing spells for "not dying a second time in the underworld", and to "grant memory always to a man".
The tomb of Paheri, a 18th dynasty nomarch of Nekhen, has an eloquent description of this existence, and is translated by James P. Allen as:
Your life happening again, without your ba being kept away from your divine corpse, with your ba being together with the akh ... You shall emerge each day and return each evening. A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall be told: "Welcome, welcome, into this your house of the living!"
[edit] References
- Allen, James Paul. 2001. "Ba". In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce Redford. Vol. 1 of 3 vols. Oxford, New York, and Cairo: Oxford University Press and The American University in Cairo Press. 161–162.
- Allen, James P. 2000. "Middle Egyptian: An Intorduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs", Cambridge University Press.
- Borghouts, Joris Frans. 1982. "Divine Intervention in Ancient Egypt and Its Manifestation (b3w)". In Gleanings from Deir el-Medîna, edited by Robert Johannes Demarée and Jacobus Johannes Janssen. Egyptologische Uitgaven 1. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. 1–70.
- Borioni, Giacomo C. 2005. "Der Ka aus religionswissenschaftlicher Sicht", Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien.
- Burroughs, William S. 1987. "The Western Lands", Viking Press. (fiction).
- Friedman, Florence Margaret Dunn. 1981. On the Meaning of Akh (3ḫ) in Egyptian Mortuary Texts. Doctoral dissertation; Waltham: Brandeis University, Department of Classical and Oriental Studies.
- ———. 2001. "Akh". In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce Redford. Vol. 1 of 3 vols. Oxford, New York, and Cairo: Oxford University Press and The American University in Cairo Press. 47–48.
- James, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Princeton University.
- Žabkar, Louis Vico. 1968. A Study of the Ba Concept in Ancient Egyptian Texts. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
