SIX
JOURNEYS THROUGH THE NETHERWORLD
Ancient Egyptian literature implies that certain “prepared” beings are able to experience life on earth in a way that ensures their progress in a desirable direction. For these individuals, entering into the Duat was a natural event in the course of life and was designed to promote the wellbeing of the spirit. In Egyptian times there were schools for training “prepared” individuals such as the pharaoh and members of his family, his advisers, and his administrators. Teaching initiates to intentionally navigate the challenges of the Duat is the primary purpose of the Book of Coming Forth by Day. Although less is known about the Sumerian culture and traditions, their myths dealing with journeys to the netherworld are consistent with the Egyptian concepts. Separating one’s consciousness from the physical body in life (which happens automatically in death) can lead to personal development in the spirit world, which may be the key to the awakening of higher consciousness.
The Egyptian concept that individuals can experience the conditions of the Duat was gradually lost until recently, when new questions about this practice were raised in various ways. Most recently, in the late twentieth century the medical community directed attention to phenomena that have become collectively known as “near death experiences.” The results have significantly affected the form and outlook of contemporary palliative care. These experiences have also affected attitudes of a number of current writers toward life and death. Some of them have been influenced by the growing knowledge of what “Western” observers formerly considered “Eastern” philosophies and religions, primarily those from Tibet, China, India, and Japan. But earlier, from the middle of the twentieth century in Europe, extensive studies at both the psychological and mystical levels were referred to by writers such as P. D. Ouspensky, Henri Tracol, and Michel Conge. A number of them discuss the basic teachings of Greek-Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, who worked in France and the eastern United States between 1923 and his death in 1949.
Tracol says that one of Gurdjieff ’s principal teachings was embodied in the phrase “To awake, to die, to be reborn.”1 This sentiment is said to have arisen in Gurdjieff at least partly through his experiences and studies of Ancient Egypt and his contacts with priests in the Near East, including Anatolia. A phrase reminiscent of it, “Dying before you died,” is quoted by Peter Kingsley in his book Reality, based on the mystical writings of Parmenides (born circa 515 BCE) and Empedocles (circa 495–435 BCE).2 Both are known as Phocaeans, a central Mediterranean cultural group that originated in eastern Anatolia and that particularly revered the Greek god Apollo. Kingsley, along with other modern writers whose works appear partly inspired by Sufism, agree that the “rediscovery” of this ancient Greek work concerning incubation gives an impetus to the need felt in more recent times to develop a new sense of what constitutes consciousness, with particular regard for understandings expressed in the thirteenth century CE in the writings of Jelaluddin Balkhi, known as Rumi.
Consciousness is the term for a property that can appear in life, but is difficult to define. Although it is widely recognized and used in relation to living, breathing, thinking humans, it has long been considered as something independent of the physical body and so can continue in some form outside of the body. The authors that we cite above all seem to agree with early Christian understandings that this property is also approachable as a new level of perception during our existing lives, although this requires a form of “preparation,” perhaps comparable to what used to be called “initiation.” Kingsley identifies it with fifth-century BCE accounts of the word incubation. To quote a friend of the authors, “It is not really a question of ‘Is there life after death?’ so much as ‘Is there life after birth?’”
Ancient Egyptian Literature and Traditions Regarding Consciousness
The concept of a consciousness available for cultivation in ourselves appears to have been a central belief of the Egyptians. Their culture, construction, art, and literature strongly support their conviction that consciousness exists beyond our living, breathing, everyday lives. Through a highly structured ritual life, the pharaoh of Egypt was “prepared” by his education. He continually practiced on behalf of the people, as the divine representation of the neters Horus and Osiris. Naydler finds ample evidence for this point of view in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom.3 Indeed, current research suggests that they can be interpreted as showing practices similar to what we call shamanism. At all stages of the Egyptian civilization, the role of shaman, or at least of something comparable, is expressed in the apparent participation by the pharaoh in “higher” spiritual powers on behalf of the people. These efforts apparently depended on his special ability, developed during his preparation, to ascend to the highest levels of the spirit world, where he would be able to utilize special “magical” powers. The myths indicate that, as a result, he could heal physical and psychological illnesses on earth, helping disadvantaged souls reach toward the highest spiritual levels.
Whereas Egyptian myths concerning other states of consciousness, as represented in the Late Period (circa 500 BCE), were once dismissed by Egyptologists as meaningless boasting, with improved understanding of Egypt they are now being more seriously examined and studied, even though many remain far from well understood. It is important to note that such mystic states continue to be witnessed and reported as recently as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have been studied and evaluated by Mircea Eliade4 as well as by Paul Brunton.5
The Egyptian texts that were first extensively translated in the time of Budge6 and Sethe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries*9 were identified as funereal texts. They are certainly texts that address the soul entering the spirit world at different levels of existence, hence Budge’s misnaming of the Book of Coming Forth by Day as the Book of the Dead. The information that we have at our disposal about them is not much greater now than it was twenty-five years ago. However, during that time new researchers have observed that these texts also discuss life on earth and have started to reinterpret what they find in them accordingly.
Here we develop more explicitly the concepts of consciousness, rebirth, and the awakening of higher consciousness, as implied in Sumerian and Egyptian myths. Both civilizations exhibit features that direct our attention to the limitations in today’s common beliefs and understandings. Based on recent research developments (many presented in publications referenced in this book), it is now possible to identify the beliefs of the soul and spirit developed in ancient times. Both ancient and new publications on esoteric subjects support a strengthening of our perceptions of our experiences, that is, the strengthening of consciousness, or the awakening of higher consciousness.
Creation Symbols That Accompany the Creation of Atum
The Heliopolitan version of the Egyptian creation myth summarized in chapter 2 calls for a clearer recognition of our “sense of self.” It emphasizes what we refer to as the esoteric aspects of the myth. That is, in the arising of Atum we are called to recognize parallels between what is told in the story and the development of awareness in ourselves, an awareness that allows us to distinguish between the truly animate and the more automatic, even illusory, material aspects of the world. The Egyptian writing contrasts the external physical world and the consciousness within us. This is an important departure in our study of myth. The myths themselves deliberately invoke the arising of this internal sense of self. Recognition of this sense is a critical step in understanding creation myths, one that is necessary to the appreciation of the arising of an animate god in the universe. This is made most discernible in the Heliopolitan creation visions, and is also implied in the teachings of the other major centers of myth development.
We detect something comparable in an important fragment of the Sumerian culture as recorded in the later Babylonian myths:
When yet no gods were manifest,
Nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed,
Then gods were born within them.7
This brief statement calls for us to consider when Anu and Tiamat, the initially existing fresh and salty waters, became mixed in their “turbulent efforts” to unite. This is the image for the first creation of the gods. The phraseology indicates, however, that in parallel with the Egyptian understanding, the Sumerians perceived particular influences, additional to the external concept of creation, that must have been invoked through inner awareness. In the absence of other Sumerian sources, we appeal to Egyptian material for assistance with interpretation.
Although these concepts are not clearly defined in the Egyptian myths either, the Heliopolitan account indicates that something of critical significance is called for if we are to successfully interpret creation mythology. The internal conditions associated with the events attendant on Atum’s awakening are key to our understanding the accounts that follow it. In other words, something preceded his sense of awakening, which is critical to the actions and interactions of the neters addressed in the Book of Coming Forth by Day.
The Duat
Through a transition made possible by the combined influence of the neters of magic, cosmic unity, love, and justice, the pharaohs of the late Fifth and Sixth Dynasties were able to enter the world of the spirit and act for the benefit of humankind. We are invited, through the Pyramid Texts, to turn our attention in this direction, toward the Duat, a mystical place beyond our physical world. The Duat, sometimes spelled with a “w” as Dwat, exists for the process of the person’s higher spiritual bodies of the ka and ba to join together to form a person’s akh.
Figure 6.1 shows the Duat, represented as the body of Nut, which forms a passageway through which the sun moves at night. The sun, Ra, is swallowed by Nut at sunset, proceeds through her body at night, and is reborn into our world (below her body) in the morning at a larger size. This complex image includes themes of time, place, and spirit. We are thus able to appreciate some of the difficulties of the early translators of the myths when they tried to describe the place in which our meeting with the spirit world would take place, or to discern what would be encountered there. Our difficulties have only increased because, by the time we picked up the threads of the stories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the clear distinction between esoteric and exoteric that the ancients knew was no longer fully appreciated.
The Duat is quite an “other” world. We refer to it as the nether-world. Figure 6.1 shows the neter Nut stretched above, swallowing the sun on the left and giving birth to a larger renewed sun on the right. Her body contains stars and shows the passage of the sun through the Duat throughout the night. It does not show a physical earth with a starry heaven above; it represents the world as an esoteric state. This explains why the description of the Duat is so obscure and indefinable.
Figure 6.1. The Duat as the body of Nut.
From Naydler, Temple of the Cosmos, figure 2.13.
The physical world does not appear in this figure. Obviously, but also importantly, the Egyptians did not consider the physical world to be the main focus of esoteric creation. What we consider to be the real world of daily life exists parallel to the Duat. The Egyptians viewed individuals as having various levels of being, the higher levels of existence being attracted to the main stream of creation ruled by Osiris in the Duat.
Osiris, who was king in the human world before Horus, showed humankind the elements of “real” civilization. But his jealous brother, Seth, attempted to destroy him through trickery. Seth represents the implacable power of entropy, which destroys all of creation when the magic of perception has been lost. After Osiris’s “death” he became king of the Duat. Exoterically, the story of Osiris has been seen as dealing with the spirits of the earthly dead, who must pass through the Duat on their journey of ascent from the human world through the sky to become united with the eternal spirit of light. Esoterically we see the myth dealing with the discrimination within oneself in supporting a path toward our higher consciousness through passage via the Duat. Failing to distinguish between esoteric and exoteric views of the world can certainly lead to confusion. We have presented two difficult-todistinguish points of view of this world, and even if they are sometimes regarded as virtual psychological opposites, they require reconciliation at a level that is most vital to our understanding.
Naydler’s interpretation of the Duat as a world that occupies the same space between the stars and the earth as our manifest world, but is not visible to us except under unusual circumstances, satisfies the conditions symbolically suggested by figure 6.1. The image shows the sun passing through Nut’s body at night. Our “daytime” world is below Nut’s body, and into it the sun is born with the dawn. Figure 6.1 further shows the sun entering the unmanifest (night) world, the Duat, within the body of the sky, Nut, with our manifest (day) world below her body in the “space” between Nut and Geb, which was created by Shu when he separated the lovers.8
Our understanding of the cosmology of Egypt is further enhanced if we trace the replenishment of Ra in his journey through the Duat. Various illustrations in temples and royal tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty show Shu’s role in maintaining the separation of Nut and Geb. In many of these representations of Nut, Shu, and Geb, Ra is shown as a small round sun that enters Nut’s mouth as she swallows him at sunset in the western sky. He proceeds through her body during the night and is reborn from her, in the east, at dawn, significantly larger than when swallowed. During the day Ra is carried across the sky by the various ships that conduct the neters on their daily passages. He then returns to the western sky, diminished in size after his daytime work, to be swallowed again at sunset for resuscitation.
Illustrations of the creation process, such as in figure 6.1, often show Shu or Heka supporting Nut’s body to reiterate the ancient Egypt belief that they are important spiritual intermediaries. They maintain the air and the space that allow the soul and the spirit to be manifest between earth and sky. The Duat is the place in which the human soul continues its journey of development. Nut, the sky, is a higher spiritual being who was separated during creation from her earthbound lover, Geb, whose spiritual energies, as described in the Pyramid Texts, are directed toward developing the material world. Heka and Shu, who introduced the breath of life into the universe, along with the place where it dwells between heaven and earth, are intermediaries between the earthly material plane and the Duat, where the soul travels to its highest levels represented in the stars in the body of Nut. These same stars are arranged in constellations that reflect the world of the gods. At the higher levels are manifest the mysterious forces that arose with the initial acts of creation of Atum, who represents the arising of the original state of self-awareness.
The figure’s depiction of Ra’s reentry into Nut during the night suggests a necessary and repeated entry into some aspect of the spiritual world for rejuvenation. In the case of the sun, this act of reentry supports its role of giving sustenance during the day to the human kingdom. But as we will show later the Duat lies within the body of Osiris, where being “within the body” is symbolic of Osiris being ruler of the Duat. The important message for us is that Ra, the sun, is revitalized each night in the same place that the souls of humankind go after death. That is, the Duat is a place where these spiritual bodies receive parallel forms of resuscitation and development in relation to one another on their journey from the human world. This journey of growth takes them toward their ultimate place in the higher world of light, illuminated by Ra.
This explanation helps us understand that the Egyptians regarded creation not only as something that happens to neters at the beginning of the universe or to humans at the occasion of a new birth on earth. Here we are being directed toward an additional and esoteric aspect of creation. It applies likewise to our self-awakening during our lives and to the revitalization and development of souls during their passage through the Duat.
In summary, Ra’s involvement in re-creation assists us in understanding the important but subtle dimensions of Egyptian mythology. We are here led toward an appreciation that the sun itself, which by day shines on the earth, imparting life support to all creatures, needs to undergo a renewal during the nighttime. In passing through the body of the sky, Nut, a life energy, whose source is in the light, supplies it with a new vitality, indicated by the larger size of the newborn morning sun. All of this highlights the significance of the Duat, in which this resuscitation takes place. In fact, because the sun passes through the same world that souls pass through at night, we learn something of the process of purification and rejuvenation that the souls go through in the Duat. This process is clearly part of the transformation envisioned by the Egyptians that allows the soul to enter the Duat, the esoteric kingdom of the everlasting ruled by the resurrected god Osiris. Beyond the Duat must reside what we call the “One”—the highest level of consciousness known to us.
It thus appears that the world of the Duat is primarily one in which souls are conferred a new sense of life that enables them to continue their development and passage to the world of the sun. These creative powers must exist in this life, but are not familiar to us, partly because they emanate from and have their source in the higher world of the universal “One.” In our materialistic lives we are very far from that.
It is a very different impression from what has been conveyed to most of us by stories about “the afterlife” that developed in other early cultures. In them, it is implied that the afterlife is a place of darkness, great difficulty, and even evil, leading to suffering for spirits; a place to be avoided if at all possible. This does not represent what is found in these tales of the Egyptians.
Reflections on the Nature and Effects of Entropy
We cannot help but speculate that the view of the “afterlife”—as presented in the modern day Western cultures as an evil place designed to make adults expose their past follies and irresponsibilities for which they are held responsible and punished by a god—was likely passed to us by individuals who never experienced the vision needed to allow them to appreciate our individual capacities for development in this world, or the consequences of such development. In the absence of knowledge of Egyptian beliefs, or possibly because of the loss of Egyptian civilization, Western society appears to have substituted moral tales, perhaps believing that humans require discipline from an external force. The Egyptian Duat, in fact, presents complex images of a sophisticated development of consciousness that offers new possibilities, hence new hope, in an existence in which we can scarcely believe because it contrasts so sharply with the pessimistic views to which we have been exposed out of ignorance. Our first responsibility here is to better understand what is said in the Egyptian sources. We may then be in a position to inquire more realistically about the source of our misunderstandings.
We must not, however, jump to any conclusions. We suggest neither that the transition to higher levels of consciousness is simple or easy, nor that it takes place without effort. In fact, the Egyptians indicate that this passage requires a long and serious preparation before tasting higher consciousness as well as afterward. Nor is the passage through the Duat guaranteed to produce any long-term changes in being that might meet our expectations.
What we have noted up to this point is that the Egyptian view of the world that follows a life properly balanced by the feather of Maat does not feature punishment of the human soul. We believe that the Egyptian tradition offers a more realistic esoteric path of hope and of future possibility. This corresponds better with expectations of wholeness or completion, ideals that may be expressed through art, music, or even religious ecstasy, which might parallel in some ways ancient shamanic experiences. Such phenomena may still be recognizable in the great medieval Chartres Cathedral in central France and in the caves of prehistoric people near Bordeaux, France. Such perceptions may also arise during visits to the mysterious remains of prehistoric structures in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, or in the highly developed religious structures of Asia, such as in India, China, and Japan.
The signs given in ancient art and architecture, given as encouragement, are so nearly ubiquitous that they must surely command our serious attention. One cannot but ask whether the “modern” neglect of this evidence from the ancient past is not a true illustration of entropy, the degeneration and dissipation of our inner attention, which is a result of our busy human lives in the “ordinary” physical environment.
The Challenges of the Duat
In what follows, we attempt to enlarge on our discussion of the Duat with reference to recent translations of the Egyptian myths. In the next section we will review briefly the rather different but parallel direction suggested by the Sumerian myths, which have also been newly translated.
The travails that are encountered in the Duat seem established to impede or possibly even stop the journey of souls, especially in the case of souls that have not sufficiently prepared themselves for such encounters.*10 Perhaps it is sufficient to point out that this journey is similar to that of purgatory, a purification state that is taught in some branches of Christianity. Naydler points out that in this journey, after the lower form of soul, the ka, has been set free of the body and has grown accustomed to its strange new circumstances, it joins the ba, and together they can undertake further efforts at purification by overcoming the challenges in the Duat.
The Egyptians taught that three stages are necessary for ultimate transformation. First, the soul must learn to actively recognize the horrendous images that may come to it in the Duat in the form of strange beasts, perhaps with a dreamlike aspect to the encounter. Some appear as known creatures, such as crocodiles, snakes, wild pigs, or fish, while others are unknown monsters, such as deformed monkeys with horrible faces, threatening rabbits with exaggerated, large teeth, or beasts similar to wild boars, with a vicious intent to attack—images one might encounter in childhood nightmares. These images, seemingly conjured from the imagination, must be objectively recognized in order to stop them. Recognition results in blocking their energies and depriving them of the ability to take “independent” initiative.
The second stage is to enter into a struggle with an opposing force, with the aim of mastering it; there is no intention to kill it. For this the aspiring soul must recognize that this force, perhaps one of the strange beasts, want to steal its heart or eat the magic in its belly. The soul therefore must, at the third stage, turn the threat aside with any diversion that can deflect it from its aim. This act of deflecting the opposing force is sometimes shown in pictures as “the turning of the head” of the threat, which results in the negative energy of the opposition being absorbed by the soul that caused the turning, thus appropriating the energy for its own purposes. For this encounter, the soul is prepared by magical “spells” learned from the Pyramid Texts or the Book of Coming Forth by Day. The following spell appears in the Book of Coming Forth by Day:
Get back! Give way!
Get back you crocodile fiend!
You shall not come against me!
For my magic lives in me.
May I not have to speak your name
To the Great God who has allowed you to appear.9
We see that the prepared individual recognizes its opponent, verbally blocks its approach, and offers a threat of its own. In such a way does the ba encounter and dispose of the threats of the beasts and other imaginary objects to be found in the Duat. To exercise the needed objectivity, the Book of Coming Forth by Day teaches that the soul needs to have previously learned the names of the beasts. They can then be recalled, named, faced, and stopped, as though they were real, enabling the soul to continue its passage through the Duat, rather than stagnate within it. This task may even require that the soul gather equipment before death. In the imagery of the Egyptians, besides learning the names of the expected forces, it may be necessary to meet them with the support of an imaginary knife or spear.
The Book of Coming Forth by Day, chapter 31, says:
As the sky encloses the stars
and as magic [heka] encloses all that is within its power;
so does my mouth enclose the magic which is in it.
My teeth are knives of flint,
and my back teeth are fangs filled with venom.
Oh you crocodile who would swallow my magic,
you shall not take it away!
No crocodile that lives on magic
Shall take my magic away!10
And from chapter 32 of the Book of Coming Forth by Day:
That which exists is in the hollow of my hand,
that which does not yet exist is in my belly.
I am clothed and equipped with your magic, O Ra . . .
My face is open,
My heart is upon its seat,
and the uraeus serpent is with me day by day.
I am Ra, who through himself protects himself,
and nothing shall cast me down.11
These quotes show just some of the challenges as understood by the Egyptians in having our soul develop beyond our ordinary consciousness. We don’t get into the specific concepts of what the “crocodile” images represent, but they can be seen as dream images that we all experience in our lives today. The repeated mention of magic in these verses, and elsewhere in the stories of the Duat, is essential to understanding the meaning of the journey through the netherworld. We deal with the concept of magic more fully later in the next chapter.
With this we complete our brief survey of the properties and possibilities of the Duat. It is an internal world in which a person, starting with an awareness of its Self, prepares to use what help can be found in order to recognize both what it has been and what it might become. Equipped with perception and other tools, the soul begins its passage through the Duat to what dwells beyond it. This further world is the world of light in which an enlivened Ra shines forth as the sun.
This ends our snapshot of the world created by the great god Atum, who through his awareness was able to assemble his own “parts” and give rise to the sense of himself as a living presence in the undifferentiated sea of Nun. In this way the mythology of Egypt seems to point to a wisdom that enables those who can understand it to transcend their ordinary lives and manifest at a higher level of being.
Concepts of the Netherworld in Sumerian Mythology
The Egyptian myths treat the soul that enters the Duat as a new creation, born into a new and different “world,” with particular characteristics that enable a new level of being and fresh possibilities. The Duat exists in the space between earth and heaven. This is the same space that Shu opened, and it exists in parallel with our world, yet it is not discernible to us except in certain instances. It can be conceived of as an unmanifested metaphysical world, with links to spiritual ideals. In this sense it is a conceptual world that we seem able to explore through the Egyptian myths. Our question here is whether the same is true of the Sumerian myths.
In approaching this question, we cannot escape facing our limitations in exploring these complex ideas. For some, concepts of life after death come from relatively undeveloped, “fundamentalist” religious views that in Western society were once commonly taught to children. Such views are resurgent in the Western Hemisphere today. Other views of the afterlife result from attempts to make religion more “scientific,” as we see in Christian Science, formed shortly after World War I. The scientific outlook has also arisen in other forms since then. Some notions of the afterlife may be closer to motifs touched on by fairy tales or science fiction. They seem to be completely unrelated to the Egyptian perceptions about the nature of the world entered after “death.”
The Sumerian myths shed yet another light on the netherworld and provide an alternative view about how and why such beliefs may have arisen. In this section we review a Sumerian story of the world entered beyond life. It contrasts somewhat with the Egyptian Duat. In Sumer, this place is called by translators either the underworld or the netherworld. Aspects of it are revealed in an early myth translated in full by Kramer, which he titles, “Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld.”12 It was retranslated, without a title, in the ETCSL, a translation that enables us to confirm that this netherworld is indeed the same kur that is spoken of in the list of mes, discussed in chapter 2.13
In this myth, Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and battle, whom the mortal shepherd Dumuzi wooed and won as his wife, decides to descend into the kur. She is a daughter of the moon god, Nanna, and is a sister of the sun god, Utu, as well as a sister of Ereshkigal, the goddess-ruler of the netherworld. In the Sumerian accounts, the sisters, Inanna and Ereshkigal, are said to be bitter enemies, and in keeping with this, there arises in Inanna the jealous and ambitious whim to displace her sister, become mistress of the netherworld in her stead, and possibly to raise the dead! While as adult humans of a modern society we may dismiss such stories as fantastic, they might, if implanted early enough, form part of a fabric of unconscious associations that in our adult life affect our attitudes without enabling us to identify the source, unless it is incidentally presented to us in a myth.
In this story, the goddess Inanna realizes the difficulties of her undertaking and takes elaborate precautions to protect herself. At the beginning of her preparations, in seven cities she abandons what appear to be minor gods. She seeks out and collects the “seven divine decrees” so that she can take them with her.14 She collects “the crown of the plain,” a scepter of lapis-lazuli, an impressive array of jewels and smaller stones of lapis-lazuli, other jewels that sparkle, a gold ring, a breast plate, and all the garments of ladyship.15 Finally, she puts ointment on her face, and then:
My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth; to the netherworld she descended.16
Thus prepared, Inanna walks toward the seven gates of the netherworld accompanied by her faithful attendant, Ninshubur. Before approaching the gates she commands him to return to Sumer, and if, after three days and three nights, she has not returned, to personally raise a loud lament in the assembly halls of the gods. He is to visit in turn each of the three chief cities of Sumer—Nippur, Ur, and Eridu—and with loud and intense lamentations beg the gods whose temples are in each one—Enlil, Nanna, and Enki—to stand by her and “let not thy daughter be put to death in the netherworld,” nor let the things that she has with her be ground, broken, chopped up, or otherwise destroyed.17 She ends her instructions to Ninshubur with the words:
Father Enki, the lord of wisdom
Who knows the food of life
Who knows the water of life
He will surely bring me to life.18
Events transpire much as she expects. She arrives at the door of the netherworld, where she acts and speaks “evilly” (which seems to mean that she tries to deceive Neti, the chief gatekeeper, about her real intentions). She demands that he open the doors of the netherworld for her. He does not recognize her, but when she declares herself to be the “queen of heaven, the place where the sun rises,” he agrees to consult with his mistress, Ereshkigal.19 He describes Inanna and her preparations in full detail to his queen and receives instructions to admit her, one gate at a time, and for each gate Inanna must “define its rules.”20 The result is that Inanna is indeed admitted, but at each gate, to her great surprise, she is successively stripped of all her protective accoutrements. When she protests, she is admonished not to question the rites of the netherworld, with the result that when she comes to where she is required to kneel in front of Ereshkigal, she is completely naked. She thus finds herself, without even the symbols of power, humbled before the queen of the underworld, seated upon her throne and accompanied by seven of the Annunaki, who are called “judges.” They pronounce judgment upon her and fasten “their eyes, the eyes of death, upon her.”21 She is thus turned into a corpse and hung from a stake. Only Enki takes pity on her plight, wondering why she undertook this adventure. Without the prejudging that we might find appropriate, he assembles the necessary food and water and gives them to two newly created beings, who go to where her corpse is hung. After consulting with Ereshkigal and winning favor by pitying her painful conditions of existence, they are allowed to administer the food and water sixty times to the corpse, thus bringing Inanna back to life.
The rest of the story, including her ascent from the netherworld—which is allowed only on the condition that she replace herself with a soul from the world above—is known mostly from disconnected fragments of a number of clay tablets, some of which belong to other myths. Notable among them are those that discuss the choice of her husband, Dumuzi, the Shepherd King, as her replacement in the netherworld. He does his best to escape, but fate will be served, and after a num-ber of almost effective getaways, he and his devoted sister are required to equally share annual sojourns in the land of death. This sharing of responsibility may be a reference to the relation of Dumuzi and his sister to the cycles of harvest and dry seasons in Sumerian agriculture.
Evaluating the Differences between the Sumerian and Egyptian Netherworld
It is evident from even this cursory review that this strange tale from Sumer, written five thousand years ago, reflects or perhaps exaggerates characteristics that in our time we have somehow come to expect of such a mysterious place as the netherworld, or the underworld, or the world of death, or perhaps the now rarely mentioned hell. The consequences for Inanna and her associates, involving bouts with death, strife, suffering, and evil, interspersed with periods of initiative and life, have reached us almost as archetypes of a mystifying, none too kind, and unstable existence that may follow death. Some doubts must remain as to whether Western concepts are really inherited from the Sumerian or the later Babylonian views of the world after death. They are remarkably similar to views promulgated in much more recent European literature, such as Dante’s Inferno.
The Sumerian tale recounted above presents a slightly different picture of the underworld than that of the Egyptian Duat. While we need to recognize that we have left out of the comparison the difficulties that may be encountered by new candidates in the Duat, we also see in the Egyptian myths that antidotes are provided for prepared candidates, for which we cannot find parallels in Western religious history. Thus even at the outset of this comparison we must recognize that there are significant similarities between the Sumerian netherworld and views to which we have been subjected as children. We therefore need to clarify the overall significance of both Sumerian and Egyptian mythology to our own time.
While the tales recounted by the Sumerians seem initially very different from those of Egypt, there are significant similarities of detail. For example, while the myths of Sumer speak of the individual participants as though they are men and women, all are actually gods, as are the participants in the Egyptian myths. Like the Egyptian myths, the myths of Sumer are concerned with humankind only as a collection of people, rarely as individuals, at least until after their death.
It thus becomes important to the comparison to recall impressions we have formed from the portrayals of individual gods. It is impossible to escape the sense that the gods of Babylon have the nature of large, long-lived, and powerful but wayward children. These impressions originate from characteristics of the corresponding Sumerian gods, although in this story about Inanna’s descent, some of what is told about them seems to border on parody or humor. The exception is Enki (the Babylonian Ea). Aside from him, even the greatest of the Sumerian gods frequently exhibit erratic or unpredictable, childlike behavior that causes them to give in to impulse rather than to objectively assess situations to avoid difficulties. It is as though all the myth writers of Mesopotamia regarded the gods as unconsciously motivated to display extreme behaviors. Gods can’t expect to entirely escape fate or to control the inevitable or unknown, but in the Sumerian and Babylonian mythos, they show the opposite of what we have come to view as godlike behavior.
This impulsive lack of control comes as a shock if we expect gods to demonstrate the best attitudes and behaviors. In Egypt we are presented with gods that for the most part correspond to these highest principles of being, rather than fallible persons (except for the god Seth, whom we have identified as entropy, and those associated with him in his counterproductive activities). The Sumerian gods might then be expected to exhibit similar higher levels of being, rather than the base self-aggrandizement displayed in particular by the major goddess Inanna.
Stories from the latter part of Egypt’s New Kingdom seem to deliberately go beyond the serious into the realm of humor. Some of them may have been told as entertainment but contained hidden meanings. It is not clear the extent to which the Sumerian tale we just reviewed is a product of similar entertainment mixed with hidden meaning.
Faced with such contradictions to our expectations, it is necessary to question our own naïveté. In this Sumerian account, Inanna’s extreme behavior reflects a primitive “reality.” But do not our ideas and our ideals about ourselves and our objectives generally contrast with the evidence of “man’s inhumanity to man,” animals, and nature alike? How do we justify avarice, continual wars, and the destruction of the habitat of beasts and humankind, which we freely admit underlie the whole Western economic system?
The characters of the gods of Sumer highlight the difference between our ideals, of what we routinely believe we are, and the deficiencies, as seen in our day-to-day behavior. Is this presentation of a dichotomy between our ideals and our behavior an admission of faults? Or is this myth a recognition of the outcome of the misfortunes that accompany our infinite capacity to justify our own existence and our habits? These myths were told time and time again in public celebrations and were truly familiar to their audiences. They must have been aware of the subtleties and were able to differentiate between reality and parody. How are we, so removed from the first presentations of these myths, to exercise an appropriate sense of nuance that can sufficiently probe the intentions of the mythmakers?
It must be remembered that the displacement of the Sumerians by Akkadian tribes led to battle, struggle, and suffering. Thus, while we are serious about our wish to perceive in these myths the finer qualities to which thoughtful people can subscribe, we are forced to recognize the influences of war, conquest, and subjugation. The myths seem to represent what might be characterized as family feuding, not the overriding devastation that must have been wrought by armies of the invading societies. The final struggles of Sumer continued for centuries, eventually resulting in replacement of the entire original society by the Akkadians and then the Babylonians. We need to be aware of the many societal changes that took place to adequately understand and compare the stories from the region.
We must also call attention to the turmoil that pervaded Egyptian society between the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. There was substantial upset of the political and social situations throughout Egypt that led to struggle, destruction, and upheaval, which strongly contrast with the prosperity and sophisticated culture that appeared in the New Kingdom, eliciting admiration from visitors of other Mediterranean countries, especially Greece. In some accounts the visitors appeared after the flower of civilization had begun to decline, but even in the late periods, Egypt still evinced a higher civilization, one that must have required the religious and mystical support ascribed to the neters Heka and Maat. In other words, we cannot realistically hold to any idea that Egyptian society was less subject to violence than Sumerian society or our own.
We can, however, in the Egyptian myths perceive the remarkable and persistent development of the characteristics of the neters. This capacity for growth and continuity on the part of the mythmakers was not lost during periods of invasion or nonhereditary pharaohs. While Egyptian civilization over the centuries may have experienced setbacks and reversals, from our perspective, across the span of ages, we see the enduring and complex persistence of their world. In the organization of their centralized society into major administrative nomes, or provinces, they clearly maintained a concept of order and responsibility in contrast to Sumerian society, with its battling city-states.
Perhaps the very different social organizations account for the difference in Sumerian and Egyptian views of humans and neters. Equally possible is a basically different initial concept that arose from esoteric elements. Such differences are difficult to pin down by observers from outside the cultures. We can only accept the evidence that we can find.
It is thus important to us to try to place Inanna’s expedition into the netherworld in a proper perspective. While struggle and chaos seem to characterize the Sumerian social and religious scenes, we are continu-ally brought back to a remarkable contradiction: the opposing influence exhibited by the great god Enki. He doesn’t fit into the superficial mold occupied by the rest of the Sumerian and Babylonian gods. His quiet, considerate, and kind actions are so strikingly different from the strife created by the loud words and louder actions of the other deities that we cannot help seeing the necessity for Enki, who appears as the only possible vehicle for reconciliation of the many conflicting and arbitrary actions of the other gods. We noted in chapter 2 that he was also the principal custodian of the mes.
We are particularly fortunate to have access to this remarkable list of mes. It assures us of the capacity of the Sumerian mythmakers to understand the ramifications of their stories, which we are not easily able to appreciate from this tale of Inanna and others like it. The course of Inanna’s descent to the netherworld may be our best evidence for a possibly wider scope of meaning below the surface, which is necessary to appreciate the paradoxes in the behavior of Enki in relation to the the gods. In the story of Inanna’s descent, are we not led to see the consequences for humans if we insist, as she does, on finding ultimate salvation in a world of materiality and power?
Only in the light of the whole body of Egyptian and Sumerian myths can we begin to understand the subtlety and precision that is required for their assessment. Such a view displaces our initial impulse to jump to conclusions about the level of perception evident in these ancient myths. Viewing the myths as a whole might even help us recognize elements of wisdom that appear only through a broader perspective. The Egyptian and Sumerian accounts of the development of spirit, and our perceptions of the ordinary levels of externalized mechanical or sleeping individuals, suggest that many lines of approach may need to be used to awaken us to the very different levels of being that are suggested by the pharaohs’ journeys through the Duat and Inanna’s decent to the netherworld. The two traditions in these earliest myths, taken together, help convince us that they truly understood the full range of perceptions and articulated a clear awareness of higher consciousness.
Egyptian Symbolism of Time
To understand Egypt is to understand the events so dramatically enacted during the rise of Christianity, including the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God. Some believe that our daily life, mechanical and uninspired, is truly a death, and that the death of such a life is the only possible beginning of a real life. This is not about the sought-after “life after death” of the literalist-moralist who expects individual reward in a “heaven” peopled by a bearded God and gauzy-winged angels. This is instead a life that recognizes a “necessary death” of much of our unrecognized assumptions about ourselves and about what we say is necessary for the resurrection of being into reality.
In considering our previous explorations it must be evident from the idea that a god can be both mother and daughter or both father and son of another god that we are not dealing with familial relationships or sequences of birth and death that we find within our physical universe. We are not dealing with ordinary ideas of time.
In the hymn to Ra’s arising in the Book of Coming Forth by Day, translated by Budge, we read:
Homage to thee. . . . Thou risest, thou shineth,
making bright thy Mother Nut [who] doeth homage to thee with both her hands.
The Land of Manu receiveth thee with content.22
Later, we have:
Hail Tatunen, One, creator of mankind and of the substance of the gods. . . .
Praise Ra, lord of heaven . . . Creator of the gods,
and adore ye him in his beautiful Presence as he riseth in the “atet” boat.23
In both cases, we expect praise to Ra for his rising in the eastern part of heaven at the beginning of day. In the text this is given as the title of the hymn. But instead, our attention is almost immediately directed to Manu and shortly afterward to the atet boat. Manu is a symbol for the west, and the atet boat is the boat of the setting sun. What kind of “rising” are we talking about?
Evidently, from the very beginning of this hymn of praise, we are invited to a different perspective. We have to realize that the rising of the sun in our day must be the setting of the sun in the day of another. Similarly, the setting of our day is the rising of our night, often a symbol for the Duat and also for the unconscious. These considerations are natural enough in the Book of Coming Forth by Day, and they are interwoven into the relations between Osiris, his son, Horus, and the dead person for whom burial ceremonies are being celebrated. But here, at what is generally considered to be the first part of the text, our concept of time is confronted by this contradiction. This is hardly an accident.
We translate from Budge,24 chapter 17 of the Book of Coming Forth by Day,
Who is this? It is Tmu in his disk,
or (as others say),
it is Ra in his rising in the eastern horizon of heaven.
“I am Yesterday; I know Tomorrow.”
Who then is this? Yesterday is Osiris, and Tomorrow is Ra, on the day when he shall destroy the enemies of Neber-tcher [Lord of Entirety], and when he shall establish as prince and ruler his son Horus, or (as others say), on the day when we commemorate the festival of the meeting of the dead Osiris with his father Ra, . . .
Who then is this? It is Osiris, or (as others say), Ra is his name, even Ra the self-created.
“I am the bennu bird [phoenix] which is in Annu, and I am the keeper of the volume of the book of things which are and of things which shall be .”
Who then is this? It is Osiris, or (as others say), it is his dead body,
or (as others say), it is his filth. The things which are are and the things which shall be are his dead body; or (as others say), they are eternity and everlastingness. Eternity is the day, and everlastingness is the night.
Here we see that the “day” is defined as the moment of the meeting of yesterday and tomorrow. In this sense Osiris, who is also specifically addressed by his special name, Neb-er-tcher, which literally means “Lord of Entirety,” is presented to us as the symbol of the eternal now, that is, the present moment. In other places in the text this is emphasized differently, with Osiris hailed as King of the Everlasting, who exists for millions of years, or Lord of Eternity, thus pointing to two different concepts of the passage of time: the everlasting world and the present eternal moment, which is the now, perhaps the time of the unmanifested world of the Duat.
While it is evident that these texts include an understanding of the fact and significance of death in this world, it is equally apparent that their discussions are not solely limited to the possibilities for the dead person. Rather, attention is specifically directed toward concerns about the nature of time and the manner in which we observe it; we are invited to consider a special concept of living time.
In our world, moments of death are made up of heightened sensitivity for all who are directly associated with them. The Egyptian texts seem to require that we acknowledge the need for such sensitivity for the fruitful contemplation of the situation. This is undoubtedly why modern people consider such texts to be associated with death and burial rituals. In such a state, we are uniquely capable of contemplating philosophical questions: What is yesterday? What is tomorrow? What is the nature of now? What is the meaning of an eternal day that is described in such terms as millions of years, everlastingness, and eternity? And who, then, is Osiris, who was killed, torn into parts, and reassembled, and then worshipped as the living Lord of Entirety, the equivalent of Ra, great god of the day and the sun?
Can there be any serious doubt that the intent of these passages is to make reference to the glimpses of eternity and wholeness that we are sometimes blessed with in relation to special events of our lives? Such special moments of awareness seem also to be spoken of in the New Testament, at the very beginning of the Gospel of John, in relation to the idea of creation. In this gospel we are given glimpses of the kind of time we call eternity, and reminded that it is associated with the creation of the Word that is made flesh. The same theme seems to be evoked in these Egyptian texts, where we are pointed toward the creation of a wholeness of being in eternity, as opposed to parts of a body in time—living or dead. That is, we are dealing with a sense of ourselves and of existence that is found as a new creation between the death of yesterday and the life of tomorrow, between our memory and our plans.
Those of us who are relatively unaccustomed to dealing with matters of the spirit should take considerable care before denying the possibility that in these remarkable texts the Egyptians, whose entire cultural development seems to have revolved around such concepts, were drawing attention to moments of participation in spiritual matters. We propose here that our most profitable course in pursuing the meaning of the Egyptian myths is to at least tentatively conclude that they were meant to help reawaken our awareness of those barely discernible differences in levels of existence that, while recognizable, and hence available to us, are differences that we forget and neglect in our preoccupation with events or objects in the physical world.
Our day-to-day world makes strong demands on our attention and actions so that we may satisfy the requirements for physical survival. The Egyptian texts make it clear that we must also address another aspect of reality. It is presented as a different aspect of time or existence, one in which what is eternal is not the infinite extension of the “arrow of time”25 in our ordinary life. In these texts we are being invited to consider a dimension of experience in which the “re-creation” of being that exists for millions of years is taking place within the eternal now.
The Egyptian texts indicate that an experience of this other dimension of time is essential to an understanding of the significance of our existence. However, it is clear, from the references to Osiris as the Lord of Entirety, that even more is involved. To make this explicit, we need to make an excursion into the details of the mystery inherent in the great myth of Osiris as it has come down to us, partly from Plutarch’s retelling, but supplemented where possible by what is implied in the myths and hymns involving him. We need to remain very sensitive to our capacity for experiencing our own inner nature, one that we sometimes realize is outside the “normal,” which is to say the ordinary, experience of ourselves.
Summary
The Egyptians and Sumerians both show evidence of serious concern with the conscious development of the soul and spirit. In the myths, the material life that takes place on our physical plane was believed to also exhibit characteristics that show the influence of higher levels of consciousness operating within us during our lives. These come from the realms of the soul and spirit. The forces of creation responsible for our world have included within this material world hidden aspects and dimensions of which we are not ordinarily aware. These forces of creation may even enable souls to make use of special properties of preparation, enabling entry into extraordinary dimensions of experience.
The Pyramid Texts and Book of Coming Forth by Day provide accounts and information about the travels and transformations to which the soul could be subject in its development. This information speaks of the capabilities to develop, through experiences in the Duat and beyond it, toward one’s ultimate individual purpose. The Egyptians saw this as becoming united with the light- and life-bestowing properties of the eternal sun itself.
In this chapter we have also briefly considered aspects of the quite different styles of presentation: the mystical and poetic approach found in the Egyptian myths compared with the storytelling, prose style of the Sumerian stories. We conclude that both societies understood dimensions of being that go beyond ordinary modern Western concepts. The pursuit of those lost elements in our lives is what led the authors to these explorations.