The Egyptian Conception of Immortality: The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911Reisner, George Andrew
Religion
The Egyptian Conception of Immortality: The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911
Reisner, George Andrew
Eschatology, Egyptian; Immortality
However this may be, it is clear that the craving of the king for
a special immortality, for an exalted future life, found its
justification through the Osiris-Isis myth. Horus was the
successor of Osiris as lord of the earth and the living. The
kings of Egypt were the successors of Horus. The chief name of
the king was his Horus name; Menes was the Horus Aha, Cheops the
Horus Mejeru. When the king died, he became Osiris, and passed to
the kingdom of Osiris. He passed through the underworld with the
sun-god, abode there as Osiris, the god-king, or sped to the
heavens to the celestial gods. Thus comes the entering wedge
of a great change in the conception of immortality--an ordinary
immortality for the common man, a special divine immortality
for the divine man, the king. [It appears probable that the
deification of the king and the assumption of a divine immortality
for him was prior in time to the statement of these beliefs in
the terms of the Osiris story.] Even at this early age, it
was, of course, clearly stated that the king must be righteous,
morally satisfactory in the eyes of the world and of the gods.
The gods, as always, were on the side of the moral code, and
especially on the side of the organized religion. It is
perhaps significant that the chief sins of the kings of the
Fourth dynasty, so execrated by the Egyptian priests in the
Ptolemaic period, were sins against the great gods. The other
charges are for the most part plainly slanders. In practice every
king whose family remained in power was justified before gods and
men, and took his place among the gods in the islands of the
blessed in the northern part of the heavens.
The dead body was laid in the grave, supplied with all these
magic texts which were to restore and revive the soul and guide
it across waters and through dangers to the place of Osiris. But
the chapel was not wanting, the cult of the _ka_ was maintained,
the statues were placed in the hidden room, the food and drink
were brought daily to the door of the grave. Thus, while a
special immortality was evolved for the king, the funeral customs
continue to show the same service of the _ka_ as in the earlier
period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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