Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative TheologyClarke, James Freeman
Islamic
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology
Clarke, James Freeman
Christianity and other religions; Religions
An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred and twenty-fifth,
called the Hall of the Two Truths. It is the process of "separating a
person from his sins," not by confession and repentance, as is usual in
other religions, but by denying them. Forty-two deities are said to be
present to feed on the blood of the wicked. The soul addresses the Lords
of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to
specifications. He says: "I have not afflicted any. I have not told
falsehoods. I have not made the laboring man do more than his task. I have
not been idle. I have not murdered. I have not committed fraud. I have not
injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of
the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not cheated by false
weights. I have not kept milk from sucklings. I have not caught the sacred
birds." Then, addressing each god by name, he declares: "I have not been
idle. I have not boasted. I have not stolen. I have not counterfeited, nor
killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor
despised God in my heart." According to some texts, he declares,
positively, that he has loved God, that he has given bread to the hungry,
water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the
abandoned.
Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing. The cost
of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the
position of the deceased. When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed,
the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple,
which represented the passage of the soul over the infernal stream. Then
came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris. The
priests, in masks, represented the gods of the underworld. Typhon accuses
the dead man, and demands his punishment. The intercessors plead for him.
A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed
in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth. These proceedings are
represented on the funeral papyri. One of these, twenty-two feet in
length, is in Dr. Abbott's collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New
York. It is beautifully written, and illustrated with careful drawings.
One represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in
judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.[162]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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