In the middle row of this scene on the walls of the tomb of King Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings, the sun-god Ra, standing in his solar boat, faces the gates of the Duat.
Even as legendary a magician as Setne balked at a trip to the underworld. It was one thing rummaging around tombs and talking to ghosts – that was all in a day’s work. But venturing into the actual realm of the dead was another thing entirely. What happened after death had to remain a mystery, even to a sorcerer-prince. Or did it?
In another of the Setne tales, we find our hero relaxing at home when he sees two funeral processions pass by. The first is clearly for a rich man: a train of priests and mourners accompany a beautifully bedecked coffin towards a fine tomb, where the choicest meat, best beer, and finest linen will be left as offerings to his spirit, together with alabaster vessels of the purest perfume oils. Behind this luxurious procession, Setne spies another: a rough-woven mat encases the body of a poor man, being carried alone to a humble grave. Angered, Setne rails against the injustice of life and death. Why should the rich enjoy a blessed afterlife, while the poor, who had no access to mummification rites or funds for an elaborate burial and funerary offerings, were deprived of any kind of eternal existence? Setne’s precocious son, Sa-Osiris, suggests that they go to the underworld to see for themselves – a journey so dangerous that it can only be done with the help of Sa-Osiris’s own magical powers. Sometimes it helps to have a wizard for a child.
Lo and behold, the afterlife has served up just desserts. The rich man with the flashy funeral has been condemned; Setne and his son witness him wailing in eternal pain because his eye socket has been used as the pivot on which one of the many gates to the underworld swings open and shut. It’s the poor man, laid in an unmarked grave, who stands shining and dressed in pure white cloth, having passed successfully through the judgment and joined the gods. Both men’s actions, behaviour, and character during their lifetimes determined their fates after death. All the expense and effort that went into building and decorating a tomb, filling it with luxurious goods, and having your corpse embalmed, wrapped, and sealed in an elaborate coffin (or three): these were all for nothing, if you hadn’t lived honourably in your time on earth.
If equipping a tomb wasn’t enough to secure eternal life, why did so many ancient Egyptians keep doing it? One reason, of course, is that it’s always the living who bury the dead. That means we have to look to Egyptian society at large to understand practices like mummification, funeral rites, and tomb decoration. These practices reflect much wider beliefs about the supernatural, not only those of the deceased. Such beliefs were central to how the Egyptians made sense of the natural world and its cycles of birth, death, and renewal. The afterlife had its secrets, to be sure, but secrets were a magician’s speciality. Dealing with the dead was a lot easier with expert help, as we’ll see on our own tour through the underworld.
The underworld, the netherworld, the afterlife, the great beyond, heaven and hell: there are so many ways to refer to what we can only imagine – what happens to us when we are no longer alive. In ancient Egyptian, the dead occupy an otherworld called the Duat. In some ways, the Duat resembled the natural world that the Egyptians knew. But in other, quite important, ways, it was an alternate reality, where bizarre creatures and strange spirits that defied the laws of logic lurked.
For a place that could only be imagined, not experienced, the Duat had some surprisingly specific features. Maps, images, and texts detail its landscape of caverns, deserts, dangerous rivers, and fiery lakes, each with its own terrible name. The Duat was a land of shadow and darkness. It was ice cold, or blazing hot. The ground could tremble and shake, and booming noises split the silence. Obstacles, traps, and tortuous paths made it difficult to get your bearings. Yet the Duat had an eerie familiarity as well. It was a mirror-image of the land of the living. A warped mirror, to be sure, but like the natural and the supernatural, this world and the next could not exist without each other.
The Duat was often imagined as being located somewhere in the west, the land of the setting sun and therefore associated with the dead. Yet the Duat was not contained within a single cardinal point. It encompassed the entire cosmic landscape through which the sun-god Ra had to travel overnight in order to be reborn in the east at dawn. This journey through the Duat and the twelve hours of the night was the theme of many of the so-called ‘Underworld Books’ found on the walls of royal tombs in the New Kingdom, parts of which were also copied onto other objects. These compositions contain such complex images and complicated hieroglyphic inscriptions that Egyptologists are still working to make sense of some of them today.
Like all gods, Ra travelled in a boat, surrounded by an entourage of gods and demi-gods to help navigate, sail the boat, and protect him. In the Duat, Ra faced the ferocious serpent Apep, the embodiment of chaos and disorder, whose movements could make the earth tremble. Defeating Apep is at the core of many magic spells, which often identify the magician with the gods from which he draws his power, in opposition to the evil forces that Apep represents. The regeneration of Ra happened in the middle of the night, when the sun-god’s boat passed through the secret canyon where Osiris was buried. It was the mystic union of the two gods that restored Ra’s strength as dawn approached, resetting the cosmic cycle of renewal for another day.
In the middle row of this scene on the walls of the tomb of King Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings, the sun-god Ra, standing in his solar boat, faces the gates of the Duat.
To aid in their own regeneration, the dead were equipped with amulets and spells to help them find their way through the Duat, which was a risky place for anyone who wasn’t already dead or divine. There were plenty of other Duat-dwelling demons who were named in magic spells, classed variously as enemies, adversaries, and the unjustified dead. These malevolent forces reversed all normal behaviour, feasting on excrement and facing backwards as they moved, with their body parts in all the wrong places. They were creatures who should be avoided if possible, or, failing that, kept at bay through the powers of magic.
What Setne saw in the Duat complicates any assumption that the ancient Egyptians believed you could buy your way into a blessed state. An eternal existence awaited you, but if you weren’t properly prepared, it could be one that you, or your surviving relatives, might live to regret.
The dead were supposed to be in the Duat, whether judged ‘true of voice’ or otherwise. Trouble was, some of them lingered in the land of the living long after they died. They reappeared unexpectedly, anxious to protect their tombs, or looking to offer an unsolicited opinion from beyond the grave. All this to-ing and fro-ing from the underworld was a hazardous side-effect of the wishes expressed in collections of funeral magic like the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, or the Book of Going Forth by Day. The blessed dead wanted to be able to move freely between the Duat and the world they’d left behind – which might present problems for those who still lived in it.
The spirits of the dead might have gone to the underworld, but their mortal remains were fairly close to hand. Cemeteries lined the desert edges of the Nile valley, their tombs often in plain view from village houses. Even in the fertile Delta, where agricultural land was at a premium, there was always room for a cemetery, usually located just outside a town. At some settlements, such as Gurob in the Fayum Oasis, newborns were buried at home, placed under the floor of a house they never knew, while at the village of Deir el-Medina, near the Valley of the Kings, there was a dedicated burial ground for infants and very young children. The very poor – like the man Setne saw, wrapped in a simple reed mat – might have had no proper burial at all, or at least not a burial that has left any trace for archaeologists to find.
While cemeteries were kept separate from residential areas, they were close enough to reach on special feast days, when families went to picnic and pray among the tombs of their ancestors. Those who could afford it paid cemetery priests to make regular offerings and recite prayers before the dead all year round; saying the name of the dead person in these prayers was especially important, given the strong link between a person’s name and his or her identity. And of course there was nothing to prevent anyone from visiting an ancestor, family member, or friend, at any time. In fact, it was encouraged, and graffiti left inside the painted upper chapels of some New Kingdom tombs record visitors admiring the artists’ work and honouring the tomb owner’s memory.
For the most part, ancestral spirits were a force for good and a source of pride. Family lineage and reputation were vital to ancient Egyptians’ sense of social identity. The good spirits of the dead were known as akhu, the ‘shining’ or ‘illuminated’ ones. Becoming an akh was the ultimate goal of the funerary rituals carried out for the dead, but as the story of Setne and Sa-Osiris suggests, to be among the blessed dead, a person should also have demonstrated a kind and generous character in life. To honour their ancestors, the Egyptians kept memorial shrines in their homes. A particular kind of sculpture, showing just the head and linen-wrapped shoulders of the deceased, was sometimes set up in these shrines to commemorate a particularly revered ancestor. Its form resembled the hieroglyph used to write the words ‘god’ or ‘mummy’, which would be appropriate for the otherworldly, semi-divine akh it was meant to represent. Through the magic of offerings left for the bust and the prayers recited in its presence, it was hoped that the akh would bless the home and family and keep them safe from harm.
Even good ghosts like the akhu could be a cause for concern. They were ghosts, after all, so their behaviour was unpredictable by nature. But still worse were the spirits known as mwtw (rhymes with ‘tutu’). This was a generic term for the spirits of the dead, but one often used with a negative connotation – the mwtw were ghosts with ill intentions. They were blamed for many illnesses, mental anguish, and nightmares. Surviving spells show the kind of magical intervention required to banish the mwtw and other malevolent spirits:
Oh male adversary or female adversary, male akh or female akh, be far away from So-and-so! Oh male mwt or female mwt, you will not come!
The magician went on to tell these evil forces that his client has already taken out their hearts and offered them up to ‘The Striker’, a rearing cobra who hissed protective fire from her mouth. Now known by the Latin word uraeus, from the Greek ouraios (‘tail-standing’), itself derived the ancient Egyptian iaret, this was the cobra who sat on the foreheads of kings and deities. But it seems that the awe-inspiring uraeus could protect ordinary Egyptians, too. At the end of the spell, instructions in red ink told the magician to recite the text over four clay cobra figures ‘with flames in their mouths’, placing one in each corner of the room where people slept. Perhaps the clay cobras served a double purpose as night-lights, with a wick lit in oil to banish the deepest darkness.
What made the mwtw, in particular, so hostile to humans? Some mwtw may have been the ghosts of people who died violent or untimely deaths, and in later eras of Egyptian history, spells were sometimes placed in the tombs of such victims to guard against this. Perhaps they were those who had not been judged ‘true of voice’ and blessed with an eternity of peace. But any spirit could turn nasty, even a dear departed relative whose burial you had seen to yourself and whose offerings you had topped up, faithfully, for years. Well, more or less.
When troubles started to plague an Egyptian household, a niggling doubt could creep in. What if the ghost of a parent, a sibling, or perhaps your first wife, was causing all the trouble? The solution was to write the dead person a letter, or more likely, get the local scribe to compose it for you. Better yet, have the scribe write it on a pottery bowl or vase that you could fill with offerings of food and drink and leave in the tomb chapel. Such letters could also be written on sheets of papyrus, potsherds, or stelae. In one, a widower worried that his deceased wife was making him ill, though he asks about her own comforts first:
A communication by Merertifi to Nebitef. How are you? Is the West taking care of you as you wish? Now, since I am your beloved on earth, fight on my behalf and intercede on behalf of my name. I did not garble a spell in your presence, when I was perpetuating your name on earth. Remove the infirmity from my body! Please become an akh-spirit for me so that I may see you before my eyes, in a dream, fighting on my behalf. I will then deposit offerings for you at dawn and equip your offering table for you.
Some writers were even more blunt with their dead relatives. One son demanded that his dead parents seize hold of and stop whatever mwt was troubling him: ‘The two of you are there [in the Duat], only looking after your own interests,’ he wrote, chastising them for not looking after their offspring on earth. Another husband could have exercised greater tact in a long diatribe to his dead wife: ‘I didn’t divorce you when I became successful’ perhaps isn’t the most persuasive argument to use against a woman you believe to be ruining your life from the beyond. Nor, I suspect, were there special Duat points for not sleeping with the housemaids, as the same man added in his defence. Personally, I hope the spectral recipient of this letter, an akh named Ankhiry, ignored her husband’s pleas for a while longer.
Even from the Duat, the dead maintained relationships with the world of the living – whether the living wanted them to or not. There were blessed dead, vengeful dead, and dead who could turn one way or the other, depending on what ailed them (or you). Becoming an akh-spirit – the good kind of ghost – was the ostensible goal of mummification and a good burial, but it seems that becoming such a luminous soul wasn’t a one-step, one-off process. Like many forms of ritual, it required regular renewal so that the effects of the transformation didn’t wear off, and regular offerings to honour the ancestors and stay on their good side. Magicians were called in to help control the spirits of the dead in part because magicians had the tools to protect themselves from any evil spirits with ill intentions, but there was another reason that magic was an apt response to troubled spirits from beyond: magic had helped them get there in the first place.
Mummies are the most famous example of ancient Egyptian magic. But they are also the most poorly understood, thanks to fanciful Victorian fiction and Hollywood hype. The so-called ‘curse of the mummy’ twisted ancient magic into horror stories about Egyptian mummies that come back to life to seduce or, more often, take revenge on hapless archaeologists. But these stories are more revealing of the anxiety Western audiences felt about meddling with ancient graves and interfering with modern Egyptian sovereignty, after the colonial and imperial endeavours of the 19th and early 20th centuries, than the ancient Egyptians’ rationale for mummification. In any case, if a mummy ever did feel like going on a rampage, some Egyptologists surely have had it coming to them.
Mummies are misunderstood for another reason, too. Egyptologists have long assumed that the goal of mummification was to preserve the body in as lifelike a way as possible, so that the dead person’s spirit form (or forms) could recognize which body to return to in the tomb – which often got crowded, since tombs held entire families and might be reused over long periods of time. One problem with this explanation is that nobody but the embalming-priests ever saw the preserved corpse, and even they couldn’t be sure it would stay in that state forever. Many mummified bodies are little more than skeletons. Preservation of muscle tissue, skin, and hair depends on the exact embalming process used, which varied greatly over time and in different places.
Moreover, once the corpse itself was embalmed, by whatever means, it was wrapped in hundreds of metres of linen bandages and shrouds (often including the deceased person’s clothing), placed in at least one coffin (and up to three or four), sometimes covered again with a shroud, and finally sealed away in the farthest reaches of a tomb, or at the very least a nice big hole cut deep into the ground. Coffins tended to show the deceased transformed into gods, rather than their earthly selves, but inscriptions gave the dead person’s name. The average spirit should have had no trouble recognizing its mummy and finding a safe place to rest among all the layers of coffins and wrappings.
Anubis attends to a wrapped mummy under the embalming tent, in the tomb of the artist Sennedjem at Deir el-Medina.
Mummification makes more sense if we think of it as a religious ritual – and if we remember that religious rituals were intricately connected to magic rites and Egyptian mythology. Washing the body was the first stage in caring for the dead, a practice common in many cultures, and on around the fifth day after death the family delivered the corpse to the embalming-priests, who did their work in a structure called the ‘pure place’, or wabet. In some cases, especially from the New Kingdom onwards, the embalming-priests removed the inner organs to stave off decay. The best quality mummifications involved doing this through a slit in the left side of the body, which was the ‘unlucky’ side of the body – and the most awkward side, anatomically, from which to work unless the embalmer used his left, equally unlucky, hand to reach into the abdominal cavity. The Greek visitor Diodorus wrote about this process after spending time in Egypt in the 1st century CE. According to his account, the poor priest who cut into the abdomen was chased out of the embalming tent afterwards, as if he had become tainted by doing the deed. The cut was made with a flake of obsidian sharpened to a knife edge, and an obsidian amulet that perhaps represented the fingers of the embalming-priest was often placed over the wound in the first layers of the mummy wrappings. The Egyptians would not have known that obsidian derived from the lava of ancient volcanic eruptions, but they nonetheless considered it a material with magical potential, thanks to its rarity (it was sourced from Ethiopia) and its strangely shiny, dark character.
What happened next in the embalmers’ workshop involved the same materials that were used to purify the air in temple sanctuaries and anoint the statues of the gods who lived there, namely the burning of incense, cleansing with natron salt, and anointing with oil that was perfumed with precious resin. Incense kept the air sweet-smelling, while natron was a common detergent and bleaching agent in ancient Egypt. It also worked as a desiccant. There are different theories about how it worked in embalming (and there were probably different ways of using it, in any case), but if the embalming-priests packed the corpse with natron and left it for some time, the salt drew moisture out of the body, further arresting the process of decay. Soaking the body in a natron solution is another possible method, as if the embalmers were brining or pickling the dead. In fact, Greek writers called the Egyptian embalming-priests ‘the picklers’.
Amulet in the form of two fingers, to protect the embalming incision.
Next came the application of oils, the ‘balsams’ from which our word ‘embalming’ derives. The sweet-smelling resin of myrrh trees was heated with plant oils to create a rich, perfumed substance. Not only was the oil applied to the skin of the body, but it was also layered with linen bandages as the wrapping part of the mummification process began. Some mummies were so thickly impregnated with resinous oils that when they were unwrapped in the 19th and early 20th centuries (when unwrapping was standard practice), the procedure became more of a chiselling, to break through the hardened substance. The mummy of Tutankhamun, for instance, was stuck fast in its innermost, solid gold coffin from the resinous oil that had been poured over it, and the famous gold mummy mask was stuck over the wrapped face of the young pharaoh. Excavator Howard Carter and his colleagues heated up knives to soften the ancient resin and prise the mask off the head, after detaching it from the king’s body.
The total length of time a proper mummification took was seventy days, a number that corresponded to the time it took for certain constellations – the decans, from the Greek word for ‘ten’ – to travel across the sky from the eastern horizon to the west. A new decan appeared in the east every ten days, just before dawn. Egyptian astronomers identified each of these constellations with a god or goddess and related them to ideas about the night sky, the Duat, and rebirth. The decans could be represented inside the lids of coffins or on the ceilings of tombs, emphasizing the connection between the dead person’s mummification and hoped-for rebirth and the cyclical renewal of the universe itself. Embalming the corpse took up to forty days from the day the person had died, leaving a good thirty days in this seventy-day ritual for the important stage of wrapping the body in all those bandages and shrouds.
Mummification obviously involved some pretty big ideas, including some magical ones. While the embalming and especially the wrapping processes were being carried out, a reading-priest (the khery-heb) was on hand to recite the necessary ritual formulas. Word and action went together, as in any magic rite, and the circular action of wrapping the body – finger by finger, limb by limb – helped embed protection and wholeness right into it. Placing amulets over the body at different stages of the wrapping was another magical procedure. In the Late Period (c. 650 to 350 BCE), some mummies had hundreds of amulets secreted among their wrappings, both on the body and in between the layers of linen. Obviously, the fact that we know about these amulets means that their protective power had its limits. Ancient tomb robbers were not averse to attacking mummies in search of precious stones and metals, while in more recent times, anatomists and archaeologists unwrapped mummies with such enthusiasm that the amulets are sometimes all that survives.
Front of a funerary amulet for Hatnefer in the shape of a scarab, a common protective symbol.
The types of amulets that were placed within the mummy wrappings changed over time, but common examples included the red carnelian tyet knot, the djed pillar (often in blue-green faience), and a scarab placed on the chest, inscribed with a spell imploring it not to testify against the deceased at the judgment. Amulets representing the Four Sons of Horus were often placed over the abdomen. Each of these minor gods was associated with a different part of the viscera that were removed in the most thorough form of embalming: stomach, lungs, liver, and intestines. The Four Sons were also painted on the midsection of coffins and, in many elite burials, took the form of jars in which the mummified organs were stored. Sometimes all of the Four Sons had human heads, but often they had a range of human and animal heads, in keeping with Egyptian conventions for representing otherworldly beings. Imsety, protector of the liver, always had a human head; Duamutef, for the stomach, had a jackal head; Hapi, for the lungs, had the head of a baboon; and Qebehsenuef, for the intestines, had a falcon’s head, taking after their father.
Back of Hatnefer’s amulet, inscribed with a spell compelling her heart to speak well of her at the judgment.
Painted wooden stela that shows Tabimut, at right, praying to several divinities, including the Four Sons of Horus at left.
The power of magic went beyond caring for the corpse itself. Magical methods were also employed to help the deceased find peace in the Duat. For the spirit to live contentedly, as we’ve seen, regular prayers and offerings were required. However, a degree of magical insurance could be built into the burial. Paintings of banquets or bountiful harvests on tomb walls, stelae inscribed with prayers that promised offerings to the spirit, or models that showed the production of food, beer, and cloth, could all help make perpetual funerary offerings a magical reality. Representing ideal offerings in words and images meant that they could be activated, by magic, to help keep the tomb’s spirits well-nourished and well-disposed.
While an elaborate burial was no guarantee of a happy eternal existence, as Sa-Osiris and his father Setne saw during their visit to the underworld, the most privileged members of ancient Egyptian society clearly commissioned a barrage of magical techniques in hopes of securing an optimal afterlife. Mummification was a privilege and a sacred rite, and even if it became more common over time, the poorest and most marginalized of people will not have had anything like the kinds of burials that make news headlines or fill entire museum galleries. Magic shows us clearly that Egypt in ancient times was neither a happy-go-lucky place, nor a society of equals. For some, death will have come as a relief, whatever lay beyond.