Both our organs of perception and the phenomenal world we perceive seem to be best understood as systems of pure pattern, or as geometric structures of form and proportion. Therefore, when many ancient cultures chose to examine reality through the metaphors of geometry... they were already very close to the position of our most contemporary science.
—Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, 4
The escarpment that runs along the west bank of the Nile before the river breaks into what were once its seven deltas is lined with a series of geometrical experiments that took place over a brief period of a few hundred years in early dynastic Egypt. The experiments were worked out as geometrical problems of volume and alignment. A number of them didn’t work in execution. Some collapsed. Some were “bent.” But ultimately the goal of thought perfected into form was attained by means of the hidden mathematical keys to the structure of life on earth: pi and the golden mean, in the great pyramid at Giza, which is aligned with absolute precision with the North Star. The pyramids represent the working out of a system of geometry derived from triangulation using the stars. This method of triangulation connecting earth with heaven involved what we have come to call the Pythagorean Theorem, a method of calculation in which the triangle enables measurement. The religious system based on measurement that Pythagoras represents, whether or not he was an actual person, belongs not to the Greeks but to the Egyptians, who perfected the giant triangular form as the three-dimensional resolution of the squaring of the circle. The subject of the text on the gables is the iconographic translation of this religious tradition, the translation of perception into form: the eye at the top of the pyramid, relating this oldest of religions to the Masons or geometers, the founding fathers of America, who put the eye at the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill as if to say “measurement began our might.”
Linear time has a beginning and an end. Circular time is a pattern. The idea of history and progress, of an end of days, of looming disaster, belongs to linear time. But the circle is the realm of eternity. Pi is an imponderable. It is a kind of mirage. You are always approaching it, and yet it always recedes. It is the most useful mathematical instrument to have, but it is inherently inexact. It is the perfect illustration of the reality of an idea. It doesn’t exist and yet it exists. Pi continues ad infinitum, which means you take it out to as many places as you want but you’re still not there. Mathematics and science depend on exactitude, and with pi you can never arrive at exact knowledge. You cannot know what pi actually is. Pi is in fact infinity.
The text in the monument follows the motion of circular time, the motion of the turning sky. It reads from right to left in a counterclockwise direction, moving from north to west. The text now continues onto an isosceles triangle rising to the highest point of the central room within the monument, mirroring an isosceles triangle of text on the east side of the room. A new chapter has begun: the tone perceptibly changes to one of formality. The subject is more complex and relates to the architecture of the monument itself.
The west gable of the antechamber presents a progression of statements, some clothed in poetic imagery, some not, the ultimate point of which is the final verse: death is the pure sound of the wind in the reeds; it is emptiness. All that remains is the pattern. The point is the geometric underlay. The text is not merely descriptive but presents a layered meaning having to do with eternal life as the patterning of the energy body, and as the patterned movement of stars, signaling the turning of the sky and the seasons.
The question of orientation arises again here: how is the text fitted within the monument? This is the highest point of the west wall, a triangular slab of text at the top of the room, and the top of the writing in the room. It is mirrored by a triangular slab of text on the east wall. The central feature in this triangle on the west side is the rising of the hieroglyphic lotus, the brilliant bluish-white light of Sirius rising from the Nile, flickering like a living flame upon the horizon.
The dark sky mirrors the swirling flood, where the pool of lilies glittering on the flooded land recalls the Egyptian conceit that stars are blossoming, an eerily accurate perception of photosynthesis, that greenness is light. The perception is captured in the word sha sha, which occurs in both hieroglyphs and Arabic as the verb meaning both “to blossom” and “to appear in the dark,” and in the origin of blossom in the Greek verb blast. The green fields they are stars, the stars blossom out of the dark as flowers blossom out of the black ground. Al Azhar, the rose, is Zuhra, the planet Venus. Noah is the word in hieroglyphs for “flood.” Susan is the hieroglyph for “lotus.” Both words appear in this verse. The story is contained in the word itself. Susannah bathing among the lotuses is the lotus, rising up before the aged shades. The subject of the west gable is the still water after the flood, the beauty of ultimate stillness. The east gable is the thunderstorm.
The two gables represent the polarity of male and female, in keeping with the Egyptian technique of twinning. The lotus is the female. The lotus is the throne. The lotus has nine petals. The nine gave birth to you. Nine is three rising up: the triangle given three-dimensional form. The prayer flags are three, then nine, then eighteen, then twenty-seven, demonstrating a system of proportional increase and the essential relevance of the number nine. The meaning of nine is now pursued on the west wall of the antechamber, as the meaning of the two and the four was riddled out on the north wall. The square root of four is two, the square root of nine is three. They both represent three-dimensional increase, the form rising from the pattern. What is sought is the magical key, the pattern that lies beyond form, the invisible, eternal structure of life.
Verse 1
The pool of lilies glittering on the flooded land would seem to be a reference to the Pleiades, the star cluster on the shoulder of Taurus, the name of which comes into English from the Greek word pleiw (to sail), the sailing stars. In Arabic they are tiara (the birds). The Pleiades have nine visible stars.
The first line on the gable begins where the last wall left off, with the eye. Hieroglyphs favor the noun, much as poetry favors the noun. First you look at the thing. Then you consider what it does. The action follows from the thing. In much the same way, as always in writing, the first line presents the idea. The north wall ends with the introduction of the concept of the emergent eye, with the chant Your eye is his, his eye is yours, the eye is green. Here the concept of the eye is immediately taken up and elaborated upon. The eye is green. That the eye is greenness is indicated in the entranceway: the eye is the essence of the reeds. The eye is understood as both the animating miracle of life in things and the recognition of the thing in the mind, the naming. There is no separation between the two functions of the eye, for the intrinsic quality of the eye is light. The eye is sight, what enables sight and what is seen, the essential nonduality of knowing as being.
Thus the eye in you is you, your essence, your child: the falcon.
In other words the falcon is the eye, meaning the eye goes out. We know that the eye goes out because of vision, the mind sweeping out into the world, the first circle is the eye, the sweeping wave of the mind. The eye can be read as a verb or a noun, but there is no object in the line for the transitive action of a verb. There is undoubtedly a false distinction between verbs and nouns superimposed on the Egyptian, which may have intended a thing to have the shading of both, for the shading, not the crisp definition, gives life to the word. The underlying grammatical question distinguishing the two is the reading of the wave to indicate whether the eye is a noun or a verb. The wave, the letter n, is the connecting element in hieroglyphs. It is understood as the preposition in or of, but it functions as the subtle element that connects one thing to another. The wave connects the noun to the noun in the genitive and dative and the action of the verb to the noun. Two waves following a verb indicate that the action has passed, the verb is in the past tense. But here it is impossible to say which is intended, as the eye is a thing and its nature is motion. Ambiguity is the point, as in the following line:
The great tremble as they see you rise with the book in your hand.
The book is the sword: The words book and sword in hieroglyphs are the same word (sh’t/shot). The distinction between them is made by the ideogram, the determinative, which can either be a book, a rolled papyrus bound with string, or a sword. Here both determinatives are included in the word. The papyrus is commonly used as a determinative to indicate a concept, an abstraction. One might think, though, that here a book, in the basic physical sense of an actual book, is what is meant. The book is this book. It is being read aloud. The religious ceremony depends on the book. The activation of the concepts presented in the book, the progression of the religious ceremony, happens when the words that are written in the book are read aloud. There is also the possibility that the words written on the wall of the sealed tomb were considered to be potent and active, able to read themselves aloud in the dark. The book offers something that the sword cannot: eternal life. Hence the book is more powerful than the sword. And it is more likely in this context than the sword: for if it is a sword, what sword? Weapons have not been mentioned in the text. The transformation of the dead soul into a star has nothing to do with combat. The book, on the other hand, is the instruction, the critical importance of which in the transformation is referred to throughout the monument, for the book, the words, are making this happen, at this moment. Thus the book is the sword that enables the conquest of death, much as Manjushri, the avatar of the intellect, holds a book in one hand and a sword in the other. A book is an axe to break the ice, one might say, of the Pyramid Texts, which have been frozen in stone for more than four thousand years. The word carries the living thing concealed across millennia.
The snowy egret, or cattle egret, is a bird so common along the Nile that it is called the abu kherdan, the friend of the farmer. Its nests fill the eucalyptus trees that line one of the main streets in Cairo, Taha Hussein Street. Its whiteness covers the rich green fields of the countryside where the birds fall in flocks across the wide expanse of emerald alfalfa like flakes of snow. This bird is the sign determinative for the verb sda (to tremble); a detailed miniature of the egret follows the spelled-out word. The use of the bird in the word indicates the subtlety of perception in hieroglyphs, for it is not the bird itself that trembles but its delicate long white feathers that tremble in the wind.
The Dwat: This primary word and concept occurs here for the second time in the text. The Dwat is the starry dawn, the blue-green luminosity of the sky that precedes the dawn. The word is a hand with a looped cord and an encircled star, as though the star has been captured by the hand, by the mind.
The nine gave birth to you: There is much to suggest that the nine are stars, in the passages where they appear:
The pelican rising foretells the nine, the great pelican twin
A sailor in the sky sees the truth the nine holy aspects of the distant falcon
May he rise, Unis, as the shining light rises
O great holy nine, the wondrous gold one is raised high...
Unis grasps the crown from the holy nine
The nine give their arm
Among the nine the cormorant leaps up
Nine great holy ones, this is what Osiris gives you
May Unis be granted the nine lest he be destroyed
The miller of the holy nine in the temple
The subject throughout is the paradox of coming into being without physical mammalian birth, and appears here as Unis rises between the thies of the nine. The hieroglyphs are the pictures of two thies, mnit. The phrase seems to indicate that paradox is what is intended: the nine are diffuse yet give birth as a single entity.
Verse 2
The cobra and the vulture are the river and the desert: The two animals represent the two opposing realities that are Egypt, north and south, wet and dry, river delta and rocky desert. The vulture is the immense griffin vulture, the terrifying baanib, with a wingspan of ten feet, a bird that soars up to eleven thousand feet in the sky. It is the bird that designates the words for both “death” (mut) and “mother” (mut), equating the two. Death is the mother. The mother is death.
Of malachite born is a reference to the sky having the essence of greenness, of life; the greenness of the sky is jewellike, it is the color of precious stones, the emerald, turquoise, malachite stars. The antechamber ends with a description of the malachite land, a pure land made of precious green stone. The khadira, or green forest where the stars are jewels in a vision of pure green light, is captured in a verse that appears in the nearby Pyramid of Tety:
Sung to the great She who strides across the sky:
Sew emerald, turquoise, malachite stars
And grow green, that Tety grow green, green as a living reed
Three concepts of coming into being are used on this wall:
ms: “to give birth”: the paradox of birth without physical birth, it is related to the word for “to rotate”
khpr: “to manifest” (spontaneously)
kma: “to be formed” (as if by hands; the hieroglyph is the boomerang, a thing that is cast out by hand and comes back)
This is another illustration of how the hieroglyphic disc of light cannot possibly be the sun or “the sun god Ra” but refers to light itself. If the disc is used to mean the sun, this line would read: “carried high on the path of the sun Unis rises as a star.”
Truth, ma’a, is introduced here for the first time, spelled with a ruler and marked with a feather, meaning it has no weight or physical substance but resides in the measurable underlying pattern.
The mantric pi: The use of pi on this gable and at the end of the east gable on the opposite wall, where it stands alone, makes it clear that pi is used not as a part of speech but as a sound. A chant indicating that pi is a magical formula is indicated by the command Do as commanded, followed by the movement of the corpse, indicating that pi is used to prompt the dead to life.
The mill, ndj: The turning sky is a mill wheel. The reference to the mill wheel following the repeated image in the verse of the iwn nywt clarifies the concept in this key hieroglyphic phrase. The nywt is the wheel, within which is the iwn, the axis.
Manifested in the enclosure of arms: The hieroglyphic picture is of embracing arms, bending inward at the elbows. This is how the infant is formed, born, and comes into being with the mantric sound. The arms are the arms of the stars, the Dippers.
Broken exhausted weary: A standard, formal address to Osiris that also appears in the passage to the sarcophagus chamber. The inert corpse is unwilling to come back to life. It is weary, asleep, broken, exhausted, yet, much like the Frankenstein monster, it is told to rise, to get up. It is an irony, for the corpse cannot get up, but the rising up of the energy within it is unstoppable.
The eye is the bread: The previous wall ended with the greenness of the eye and the words may the bread fly up to the houses the houses of Egypt. Now the eye itself is the bread; it is both time, as the creator of food, and beauty, as what is seen: the beauty of the sky and its stars. The phrase can also be translated rise in the mill that makes your bread, if the eye is read as a verb.
The nywt p: The circular surround of p. There is no other possible translation. It cannot be the unfindable “city of p,” or “city of pe.” The nywt, the circular surround, might be translated as “mandala” (from the Sanskrit for “wheel” or “circle”).
Orion: The master of storms, the constellation that rises at the time of rain; the word orion means “rising.”
Set: Chaos is the force behind everything, out of which everything comes. Everything in hieroglyphs is tum; the Arabic word tum denotes a sense of both “complete” (as in the common doubling expression of this word in Egyptian Arabic today, tamam, “completely”) and “final,” meaning the negative (as in the idea of something being over, hence no more). As a word in hieroglyphs it means “the universe,” “the all.” This word appears throughout the Pyramid Texts and has been translated arbitrarily, sometimes as the negation of a verb, and sometimes as “the god Atum.” Verbal phrases in the hieroglyphic text have been routinely translated as “gods.” In this passage Set lifts the tum. Set does not lift the god Atum. Nature lifts the universe, the wheel of the stars, and with them Orion, and with him time, and with it everything that lives on earth: Geb is Gaia, the earth as matter. The father, the earth, like Osiris, is what decays.
Form: Kma, the boomerang, is the hieroglyph for “to create.” The verb is illustrated by a throw stick that goes out and comes back, an image that gives form the sense of spinning, being spun on a wheel. Orion, Taurus, and the Pleiades are visible in the blue-green light of the dawn, the Dwat, at this key moment of the year.
The gates of dawn: Waiting for Sirius to rise. The hieroglyph of the lotus is in the column on the uppermost point of the western wall.
O aged shades: The shades are ostrich feather fans, used to cast a shadow. This is the word for “shadow” and “shade.”
Verse 3
Joy: The wordplay is on lilies and joy: seshsesh, seshen, and reshret, the sound of the lilies quietly rustling in the light wind. Unis becomes joy, rsh, which resembles the word rsh (to smell), conjuring the delicious scent of the flowers, as he enters the surround, the ring of fire.
The truth is within the fire: The transforming fire, the realm of origin; the false, the material, matter, the heavy, what decays, belongs, falls to the earth.
The cobras that guard the night: Of the great flood that rises with the great one (Sirius). Cobras emerge in heavy rain and flooding that forces them up out of the water-soaked ground. The star, the snake, and the lotus rise. The intrinsic quality of all three is rising: pure are the stars of his appearance.
Verse 4
The kas = energies, reassembled as hearts = centers. The hieroglyphs are three kas and three hearts with the verb “to reassemble,” according to the method within the book. The hieroglyph for wisdom is a prayer shawl; the holy book is a scroll and a prayer flag.
Verse 5
The path of sprouting green: In the hieroglyph for “path” here the mounds (the mounds of earth left by the receding flood) are sprouting.
In the middle of the turning: The middle of the turning is hnw (enclosure) phr (turning). The hieroglyph is a twisting thread or path, and here introduces the idea of the labyrinth, the turning path of the stars.
The head of the blossoming time: Would that ntr, divine agency, give back the head of the (blossoming) time of sharp Sirius that cuts its throat under the sharp knife (of the horizon). There is a wordplay here on spdt (Sirius) and spd (sharp). The line illustrates how a story is a code, here used to describe the watching of the arc of stars, cut by the horizon at dawn, as a segment of time.
That cuts the throat: The image is of the slaughter of a bull; the head of Taurus is separated from Orion by the horizon. This is the head of the blossoming time. The sense here is immediate, as in the west wall entranceway: would that the bull rise, would that the sky now give back the bull’s head, and with it the body of Orion, and Sirius. It is the man with the bull’s head, Orion and Taurus together on the horizon, a designation for a segment of time within the labyrinth, the twisting path of the stars. The labyrinth is the circuit of the labros, the double axe that is thunder.
Is the circuit with the head of the bull and Orion: Orion is the rain, the bull is the thunder; this is the arc of the visual measure of the stars that mark the growing season, meaning a span of time is measured by the dial-like movement of the arc of stars. Give to Unis the burning ones, or hurrying ones: the hieroglyphic word is ss (with a suggestive sound, like sizzle) with the meaning of both “burning” and “hurrying.”
The spindle: The verb “to spin” is marked with the hieroglyphic picture of a spindle. The word is introduced here and frequently used from here on about the sky. The three fates spinning the thread of life are the three seasons spinning the thread of stars.
Verse 6
He flows forth as a white bird: An arresting image captured by the beautifully drawn hieroglyph of an egret, the interchangeable white bird that stands for the soul.
Lift up your face, stars in the dawn: The shore of light is the luminous horizon used here, as later in Lucretius and Edmund Wilson.
The living words: The hieroglyphs are alive because they survive death.
Verse 7
The west gable ends with this verse, in which the hieroglyphs are clumps of reeds:
Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes,
Pure is the light in the field of rushes
Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes,
Pure is Unis, who is washed in the field of rushes
The arm of Unis is in the bright arm of Night
Iw seshw sw
Iw seshw sw
It is the sound of the wind. The words mean let him be free, let him be free or he is empty, he is empty.
Shu: The sound of the wind, whoosh, the word for “wind” and “air” and “free.” The wind is conjured as if by shamanic mimicry; the tactile sense of the concept arises in the sound. The feather defines the word. A feather is weightless, hence it is empty. Because it is weightless its motion is a delicate mechanism for indicating the strength, direction, and speed of the wind. You cannot control the path of a feather through the air. This is why the feather defines the word for “truth.” This phrase can also be translated as he is the wind, echoed in the Egyptian Sufi phrase chanted over and over as a self-intoxicant, a yogic breathing technique: huwa hawa, huwa hawa—“he (huwa) is the wind (hawa),” the hidden nature of the divine is the word nefes (to breathe). It is the word nefs (“self and soul”). The soul as breath is weighed in the scale against a feather. The swelling flood of the dawn drowns the reeds. What is left is the sound of the wind.
Verse 8
The west wall of the antechamber is the invocation of the bull. This passage offers an explanation of the spelling of the bull as the ka: it is the thunderstorm, pure electrical energy suddenly released. Such a storm feels even now like the dangerous, threatening presence of an enraged bull that pauses to paw the ground, and charges erratically forward with frightening force and speed, ever closer, in an approach of inescapable danger. A thunderstorm can kill. And yet it brings the rain that brings all life.
This is the great force in the dark that exists although it does not know it, the bull of double brilliance, thunder and lightning. Here the text admits that it does not know what it is—is it the bull, is it Osiris—then it states, if nothing else it is the eye, the disembodied intelligence of the universe. Myrrh is used to conjure this presence, precisely as on the east wall of the entranceway, where the presence was first introduced. A circle with two lines follows the introduction of the bull in the verse. The hieroglyph has been understood to mean a place name, Nekhen or Hierakonopolis, but why would the name of a faraway place be stuck in this powerful verse? It seems to be a reference back to the earlier passage, as the two passages clearly echo each other. There the double nature of the bull was indicated by two shining discs of light. Here there is a single disc with two lines in it. Fire and heat first came to earth from the horn of the bull striking the ground, from lightning. The passage begins with a signal or stage direction for burning incense and directing its smoke; the hieroglyph is idy, the picture of a hand with the smoke of incense pouring off it. Then there is a first invocation:
great unknown spirit from the dark
qhaw ka r qhat (the phrase involves the blurring of q, h, and k, gradations of which are often confused in Arabic regionally) qhaw ka (mourned spirit) r qhat (from the tomb—the hieroglyph is the picture of the tomb). This is a poetic phrase where the words run together and echo each other.
The eye that is upon the throne: Osiris.
The eye is the thunder: In the story of “The Destruction of Mankind” in the Ramesside Book of the Divine Cow, the divine being sends down the eye in order to destroy mankind, “let it take the form of... ,” meaning the eye manifests in different forms.
The energy of the dead is absorbed into the powerful force conjured on this wall: not the belief that there is a bull in the sky but a sense description of the violent electrical force that exists, although it does not know it. This is an honest appraisal of a great force of nature that acts, and creates a result, as though by intention. It can be characterized, but it is not a character. This is the opposite of myth. It is not about personalities but about trying to conjure with words the essence of the force. And it explains the iconography of Osiris, a name for an unnameable thing: the directing intelligence and power of the inextinguishable force of nature, in which death and decay are simply a passing phase. It is not life versus death, or faith in a life after death. It is the inevitability of life, and the irrelevance of death.
One can feel the eerie power of the invocation of this spirit, the inevitability of the rising energy of life from the dissolution of mere matter, mere form. Jane Harrison in Themis gives this insight into the iconographic riddle pursued here:
Pythagoras, Porphyry tells us... underwent a purification... by a thunderbolt or thunder-stone... not so strange an implement of purification as it might at first sight appear. Celts or stone-axes over a large portion of the civilized world are... taken to be thunderbolts... Porphyry then goes on to enumerate the various ceremonies gone through during initiation. Pythagoras had to... go down into the cave... there he had to spend thrice nine days, and then at last he was allowed to gaze on the throne... Was the throne really empty?... Zeus in human shape was not seated thereon... but his throne may... have been tenanted by a symbol... even more powerful than... himself—his thunderbolt. The thunderbolt was to the primitive Greek not the symbol or attribute of the god, but itself the divine thing... The human child completely replaces the thunderbolt... child and thunder-stone were one. When Kronos was about to swallow Zeus, what is it that Rhea gives him and that he really swallowed? A stone in swaddling clothes. By such a stone was Pythagoras purified... We have definite evidence that in certain mystery-rites thunder was actually imitated by bull-voiced mimes... Aeschylus [describes them in a fragment from] the lost Edoni, “And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from a drum an image as it were of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread.”
Lifted from the father: The eye is lifted from the throne. The falcon is lifted from the corpse, the earth. The hieroglyphs form a poetic line, doubling the sound in “father,” ft, fet m ift, much as the English translation does in the line lifted from the father.
Earth, do not speak to him: Call him back. Do not look back lest you be contaminated by the gravity of earth. The earth pulls back the rising star of light and heat into cold decaying matter.
Lest he fall: The verb is wakh (fall); it is the same word in Arabic and appears in English as the star Vega, waqia, literally, “the falling one.”
Finding on his path (the path of the rising star): The language is poetic and the quality is fragmentary: lifted up from his father the earth, earth do not speak to him lest he set/fall. The story is Orpheus and Eurydice, that the words will draw one back.
Finding on his path... water (Gmy m wat f wnm f nefsw mwmw): Gm, “to find,” is the curlew, with its scimitar beak in the sand; the y makes it a participle: gmy m wat, finding on his path, his wnm, his food.
Nefsw mwmw—the same phrase appears in the “Cannibal Hymn” on the east gable, finding on his path his food, the breath of the wind, nfs, and water water, mw mw; the Arabic word for “water,” moiya, comes into English as the letter m, which is the picture of a wave. Here the word is doubled because it is a pun on mymy, the name of the giraffe, the hieroglyph that immediately follows it in the column, connecting the two words in the visual pun. The giraffe is the verb “to see beyond,” “to foresee.” What is foreseen is the pelican. This coded line is an astronomical riddle. The pelican rising presages the nine, the great pelican twin.
He flows forth as an egret, he rises as a pelican: The pelican, like the stork and the egret, the crane and the ibis, is a white bird that rises from the earth. Once these white waterbirds rose in the thousands and fell like snow on the Nile. What are the nine that comprise the great pelican twin, and how does the pelican relate to the giraffe? As one begins to see that the poem is a progression of specific astronomical references, a good guess is that this line and its iconography, which appears on predynastic combs and knife handles, may indicate that the Pleiades were used as a calendric sighting device, presaging the rising of the head of Taurus with Aldebaran, its red eye, directly beneath it on the diagonal of rising stars. We continue to go back into the dark night, back in time. The word psdj (nine) is a pun on the word psdj (to shine).
The pelican rises, presaging the rising of the constellation that twins the actual bird. The double meaning is that the pelican presages water. The dove in Noah’s Ark is the shining white seabird. When you see the white pelican you know that water is near; when you see the Pleiades rise at dawn you know that the flood is imminent.
A sailor in the sky... the distant falcon: This wall is an invocation of the bull. The bull is preceded by the Pleiades. There seems to be some sort of regular pairing of the pelican and the giraffe. They appear together on a predynastic knife handle and two combs, one marked with a star that would seem to indicate that it is a calendric device involving the reading of stars. The coded meaning is signaled in this verse. In the hours between midnight and dawn in mid-July, the star groups rise in this order: the Pleiades on the shoulder of the bull, the head of Taurus, then the headless body of Orion, then at the moment of dawn, Sirius, rising as bright as a flickering planet on the horizon.
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion: Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season: or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth: Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?
Is Job 38 a refutation of the Pyramid Texts?
Tantra: the spell of the twenty-seven ta ntr: The word ta-ntra appears here in the text: the holy ground. The twenty-seven refer back to the first verse on the east wall of the entranceway where the twenty-seven netcherw, holy things or spiritual aspects, obey the words that are being read aloud, with the burning of myrrh and the invocation of the bull of double brilliance. Here the words of the spell are doubled, repeated for power:
mdw di = spell given
ntrw ta = tantra
dni dni = dam the dam
dmdj dmdj = reassembled reassembled
sma sma = joined together joined together
mr mr = the canal canal
Dam the dam
Of the reassembled, reassembled
Joined to the light
Within the canal canal.
The serpent appears as the letter dj in the word reassemble, but its picture is the clue to the riddle of what is happening. It is an unusual composite hieroglyph, repeated twice: the picture of a serpent with a feather on its back, rising above the tomb, is the energy of life translated into air/space/emptiness. The feather is the sign for both floating up and truth. In this spell, as in Tantra, the body is conflated with the sky, the spine with the Milky Way. Intense heat is being generated within the body to make the serpent rise. The riddle of the Milky Way as the spine is the hinge into the sense of nonduality, the way into the cosmos. The serpent of life is prompted by the words of the spell to rise in the dead body, and then become the rising eye that is the pervading force of power and movement in the sky.
The serpent is the bird: The hieroglyphic serpent has wings, and rises into the air over the dead body. The dam and the canal are Egyptian inventions for the mastery of water. Here they contain and preserve the sweet influence of Pleiades: the flood and the rain. Then the verse puts the canal in the body. It is the vessel out of which the two sons flow, the banks of which are scorching hot.
Secret are the ways: The physical methods of Tantra are secret and difficult to achieve: the generation of intense internal heat that prompts the rising and emergence of the internal serpent. The paradox has to do with the essence of alchemy, water and fire. Water would normally be in a canal, but fire and light are in the canal in the sky, and in the canal in the body.
What is in the jar flows out: the body is a broken jar: The hieroglyph is a picture of a broken water jar and occurs again as the body in the passage to the sarcophagus chamber. The jar contains two sons, Caliban and Ariel, garlic and sapphire, the darkness of earth and the blueness of sky, the dark serpent and the white bird. The movement of both, the sliding of the snake, the gliding of the bird, are implied in the flowing out. The sound grows from one word to the next: mskt skr is the beaten (skr) Milky Way. The Milky Way is both beaten, in the sense of trodden, and beaten in the sense of beaten metal.
The idea of becoming something that is already there: one becomes the twin of Osiris, and with this has the power of Osiris, the power to overcome death. This “one lord” is both concrete and ineffable, both simple and profound, and raises the question of what Osiris actually is, the rotting corpse resolved into energy. The corpse contains the serpent, the white serpentine spinal cord, the source of the body’s movement, electricity, sense perception. The snake sheds its skin as the electrical energy of the spinal cord moves upward from the spine. The similarity of the umbilical cord to the spinal cord suggests an Egyptian etymology for the non-Greek word omphalos (a word that is used to mean “the center, the eye, and the navel”) as m pr, “what rises.” This would explain why omphalos means “the eye,” and also “the center,” and also “the thing that rises up” (and comes into English as “umbilical,” the cord of life). The text goes from the sky back to the body, with the Tantric spell, then back to the calendric arc of water stars that contains the bull.
The circuit with the head of the bull and Orion is the Labyrinth: The Minotaur in the Labyrinth is Orion, a headless body of a man, joined with the bull’s head of Taurus on the path of the sky. The two constellations form the calendar sign for the growing season. The Labyrinth, the circular path of the labros, the double axe or thunder, is the path of the stars in the growing season when the Minotaur, literally, the “threatening bull,” is seen in the sky. Herodotus describes having seen the original labyrinth, still intact, on his visit to Egypt, as a temple of myriad small rooms, as though the king would act out the progression of the Minotaur through the rooms or thrones of the stars, as a sort of ritual progression or dance.
The monkeys in the circuit are the heads: The three monkeys are where the head should be on Orion, the three faint stars. Thus he is able to tie on another head instead, the head of the bull. It is Unis who ties the head. Unis is merged with Orion. The circuit with the head of the bull and Orion must be restored for the growing season to commence, and it is about to come back; within its garments are all the offerings it gives you. Its garments are the moving stars. Time is not separable from the evolution of forms, the integrated net of things coming into existence and passing away. The rain star is Aldebaran, the red eye of the bull; the horn of the bull is lightning. The entire passage conveys the column of stars: Aldebaran to Sirius, causing and mirroring the events on earth. The eye is lifted by the falcon. The turning sky lifts the eye. Hsf, the hieroglyph here, is the spindle. The sky is spinning. The Greek motif of the three fates having between them a single disembodied eye spinning out life as a linear thread to be cut are the three seasons, the precincts of stars that dominate each season, spinning the thread of rising stars, lifting the eye. The original Egyptian version is circular. The bull flows out into the spinning sky. Flow here is shp, the word used for the two sons flowing out of the body. The sky is a green marshland. The hieroglyphic details of the marsh are exquisite. The verse opens into a passage echoed fifteen hundred years later by Hesiod, advising farmers to pay attention to time as the interweaving of the stars and plant and animal life on earth. The poem then turns the bull in the sky into the actual animal. The timing of plowing in the rich, black earth of the overflow of soil from the Nile flood, with the domesticated, castrated bull, followed by the time of planting the seeds, is signaled detail by detail in the circuit of stars. The bull in heaven prompts the bull on earth. The bull in heaven, domesticated for use, mirrors the bull on earth, harnessed to the plow.
A second invocation begins with the burning of incense and, like the invocation of the bull, refers back to the passage on the east wall of the entranceway. Now the falcon of old is conjured, the horizon of the falcon of flame. On the east wall of the entranceway the words are Unis becomes the bull of double brilliance in the midst of his eye. His mouth is stable in the heat. Unis has the horn of the Lord of the South, the falcon of old. In this first passage it is clear that the falcon and the bull are one. The falcon has horns and is from the south. There are clear indications from the invocations on this wall that the Pyramid Texts belong to a cattle cult from “the old days” beyond the Nile Valley. One looks to the predynastic archaeological site at Nabta Playa in the Western Desert a hundred miles west of Aswan, where stones are set up in a ring as an astronomical observatory, and around them are elaborate cattle burials. The passage explains the iconography of the bull on the Narmer Palette, and suggests strongly that this is the same system, where the king is identified with the bull of heaven. The hieroglyph appears in the phrase that states that the soul of the king as the bull is the open eye of the storm, whose father is the wind. The storm is nshny; the hieroglyph is the wild dog facing the arc of lightning, over which arches a rainbow. This is called the power of the perception of the falcon, that is, the tracking of stars, which tells you what time it is: what the weather is going to do.
Al-debaran: The red eye of Taurus is a common word for “bee” (like Deborah, the bee, or prophetess, in the Old Testament). The color red is like the red pain of the sting of a bee, and the red rage in the eye of the bull. Taurus also contains al nath, the wasp.
Verse 10
Its essence is an eye thrust out: The eye is created from the fire of his serpentine light body, its essence is an eye thrust out. If the initiate is not prepared for this process, the rising of the heightened electricity of the internal eye will burn you. This is a description of the generation of internal heat that accompanies the rising of the internal serpent. This passage explains both the fire-breathing dragon and the third eye. The fire-breathing dragon is the third eye, consciousness as a shadow of electrophysiology.
A sailor in the sky sees the truth: Ma’a (truth) is the subject of the next wall. Again in this line the word for “truth” is paired with and closely resembles the word maa (to see). In other words, the truth is seeing.
The keening of his sister, the green serpent: This is readable, both visually and aloud, as the Egyptian lament tradition, which exists among Egyptian peasant women to this day. It is a kind of ritual improvisational poetry filled with imagery and repetition that sounds like the shrill sobbing of inconsolable grief. The poetry is a kind of formalized grief that functions as catharsis.
He has gone to the sky with the wind with the wind: The hieroglyph for “wind,” repeated down the column, is the full sail, the wind, the wind. Whether this means he is lifted up to and across the sky with the wind or he has dissolved and is in the wind, is empty space, no longer exists, lies in the key phrase—we don’t know whether he crosses the sky or ceases to exist; we don’t know, but in essence the elements of his body flow upward to the sky. The serpent, his sister, is the Mistress of P, the sound that prompts the transference of consciousness in the Tantric death ritual called pe-wa. As a commentary on the pe-wa process states, when you strike your breast and say the syllable pe, your spirit goes to the sky. The ultimate sound is the wind that sweeps it all away, the ultimate truth. Beneath the flow of the wind, the flow of motion, all the cyclical changes of the world are measured in moments as degrees on the horizon.
The wall seems to focus on the rising of the Pleiades and Aldebaran, here called the rain star. The line They see this as the bull in the sky explains what the Egyptians are doing: they are coming up with a system of visual cues for reading the sky and tracking time. The entire passage explains how the sky mirrors the earth in the production of food via the circuit with the head of the bull and Orion. In the midst of this turning labyrinth is the path of sprouting green: the rising stellar arc of the Pleiades, Taurus, Orion, and Sirius. In it the bull is three things: Taurus, thunder, and the bull on the ground, gelded as an ox that plows the fields. All three result in the crops that become food.
The most remarkable element on the wall is the presentation of a Tantric formula, called on the wall the ta-ntr, in which the reassembled body is joined to the light, the body becomes light. It is the generation of the light body. Tantric methods are specific instructions to be followed to the letter, a closely guarded secret because they are dangerous. The canal in the body becomes scorching hot as the vessel out of which flow the two sons, the serpent and the bird.
Verse 1
The two truths: The south wall is the initiation ceremony for the soul as it is admitted into the sky. It begins with a discussion of the two truths, the ultimate emptiness of the human being who has died, and is reconstituted as light. This entity is now presented to the primary forces in the sky. These forces are introduced as riddles—It is said of you: he is pain—within an introductory formula that is a palindrome, he knows you, you know him, and a tongue twister, stchtchw irchtsw stchsw irchtw, again showing the use of words as multifaceted, magical vehicles that make things alike, and make things happen. The dead soul, his flesh washed away in the lake of the wolf with water from the arms of light, is introduced to great Isis, who first appears in the form of the hieroglyph itself: a chair he climbs up on as a little child. She gives him her breast so that he may drink the milky-white light of the stars and never thirst or hunger again. The soul of the dead king then undergoes the initiation. As in a Tantric initiation, the initiate merges with the mother in order to be reborn. The mother is the sky. The child is the rising star.
The first word is the foreleg of a cow, a name in hieroglyphs for the Big Dipper. The foreleg is followed by three reeds, the common word in hieroglyphs for what it represents, phragmites, the marsh reed. It has been interpreted here as the word for “father” (ift), because the assumption has been that the text must be about fathers. But the most significant element in the word for “father” is missing here, the horned viper, the letter f. Hence the reading of this line is more likely to be what the line visually represents: O by the foreleg in the reeds. The other translation, by the strength of the fathers, does not seem terribly relevant, while the field of reeds has just been described on the previous wall. The reeds are the stars. The foreleg of the cow in the reeds is the swinging of the arm of the great clock of the sky. Hence the hieroglyphic phrase would introduce the instruction that follows, explaining the fact that the turning of the sky means a separating out of the elements of the composite, revealing the truth that underlies reality: ultimately there is nothing there. This is the concept of time as a revolving wheel, captured in the death of St. Katherine (the name of the highest mountain in Sinai) on the wheel that tears the body apart. The essential theme is the turning of life into death into life, a series of stages of transformation. It is not a conceit but an actual unfolding, where words are used in a measured, repetitive way to effect the transformation.
Ma’a herw the truth is vibration, sound: The truth has a voice. One is deaf to the voice of the truth. This is the phrase discussed in verse 7 on the north wall, the vibration of truth that is the goal of a life. Are they deaf to the truth of the voice in the eye?
The line has the dimensions of both the actual and the abstract. The sound of the eye is thunder, as established on the previous wall. Thunder is the bull, the hidden power in the sky. The eye was invoked as the bull of double brilliance on the west wall, and here is its voice. But the phrase here, considering what immediately follows it, seems to mean, are they unaware of the truth of physical reality, the nature of life and death? The reality is this: there is a cutting apart.
This is a central concept in the Tantric physiology. The male and female essential drops of moisture in the composition of the physical person are separated at death. The Tantric idea is that one is formed from two coalescing drops of moisture that reside at the heart, the white drop of the father, and the red drop of the mother. Hence one is inherently both male and female, and this knot, these joined essential elements, separate when the wind enters the central channel in the process of dissolution at death, as a stage in the rising of the internal serpent that becomes the light body. The word for the drop of moisture in Egyptian, which appears here in both the masculine and the feminine in this line of hieroglyphic words, is an onomatopoeic word for “spit”, tf, tftftftf.
This is a hearing—an obeying—of the two truths: The hieroglyphic verb “to hear” is the picture of an animal’s ear drawn back, as an animal will pull its ear back in a posture of listening and obedience, hence the word conveys the concept of not only listening but responding and obeying. The sentence is plain and straightforward. These are common hieroglyphic words. They are well-known, and here they can only be translated in a way that belongs to the philosophical debate tradition of Buddhism; there is a hearing of the two truths, an obeying of the principle of the two truths. Ma’aty, “the two truths” (ty is the dual form in hieroglyphs as in Arabic), embodies the essential Egyptian conception of twinning, of inherent duality. But more than this, the two truths are one of the central perceptions of Tantra: the nature of conventional (material) and ultimate (pure energy) reality. One might say that they are heaven and earth. Much as Thoreau and Emerson saw heaven as the world itself, pervaded with light, only we do not see it, the Tantric strives to see the two realities at once, the world of form and the underlying light of its dissolution.
The wind is the witness or Emptiness is the witness or It is emptiness: The onomatopoeic line echoes the end of the west gable, iw seshw sw. Here metrw is the word for “witness;” iw shw metrw, emptiness is the witness. The text continues in the language of a Tantric instruction, the Egyptian version of which is physical reality: the wind itself is all that is left of a living thing. The line recalls the line in the last verse on the east wall of the antechamber: the two gates made holy, they whose form is air and moisture. These are the gates to the realm of form. There is a pun on the words for “instruction,” wdj, and “separation,” wdj. The separation is the instruction.
Beloved country: ta mr: The phrase ta mr, “beloved country,” is the Egyptian name for Egypt today, Masr.
Ma’at, the embodiment of truth, marked with a feather, is the continuous, measured uncontrollable movement through space that is the natural order of things. The truth is the innate order of the universe that underlies life on earth as a physical reality. It is visible at any time and contradicts the assumption that death is the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is the underlying order, and its pervasive beauty. Even disorder is ruled by, folds into, and emerges from the ultimate order. They are the two truths. The breakdown of the physical body at death is the mystery of form and emptiness. The wind is the witness, even as the death rattle itself, the expiring of the person through the mouth, the voice of the truth of the life energy leaving the body.
The truth is in the fire: A sailor in the sky sees the truth. The sailor is a star made of fire. As in Heraclitus, the ultimate reality is the fire of transformation.
He is reunited within the waters: The hieroglyph for “woman” is a vessel of water. The sky is the great mother, the dappled wild cow with its milk of white light, its water of life.
He is reassembled within the mystery, the waters: Elaborates the spell on the west wall, reassembled and joined with the light; the body is a broken jar. What it contains flows out.
The rising cobra: The spinal cord, the electrical essence of which sails across the sky.
The truth is brought to him raging within the waters alive: Dndj (rage) is the energy rising from the body as a snake. The hieroglyph for “rage” is the picture of a cobra rising from the skull of the bull. Rage, the primary quality of the bull, is the raw electricity usable in the manipulation of the energy in the body. The line seems to indicate that the soul as the initiate becomes the bull, and that the truth is the water of life, hidden in the sky. The Greek spelling of the Egyptian word for “truth” is moira, fate, which also means a measured section of the zodiac.
The refuge is in his eye: The text on the south wall is constituted of differently structured poems, some of them short and rhyming, as though to break the rhythm or seriousness of the overall content. This is a short embedded poem around the pun for “refuge,” nht; refuge in nkht (strength).
The sky is a mill wheel: Bread is brotos, the Greek word for “mortal,” what keeps one alive, as aesh in Arabic is both “bread” and “life.”
The sky is a dappled sail: The quality of time is variegated. The sky is dappled with stars. The hieroglyph sab (dappled) is the skin of an animal with the tail hanging down, recalling the love of the dappled, the dappled horses drawn on the walls of Lascaux.
Give him the attainment of the words: The importance of the words themselves is made clear, for the words effect the transformation: bring him the words.
This is the first time in the text that things are meant to be repeated, four times, or seven times; hence one is entering a section of the text that is a significant ritual, and must be spoken in precisely the right way for effect. The next step in the initiation is protection: saying the words to effect the protection of the entity throughout the ceremony. The following step is the prompting of the descent of the light body, the invisible twin: he has broken the knots of the spine.
Here the hieroglyphs are accurate representations of the vertebrae. Then the line, echoing the same line in the passageway to the sarcophagus chamber, what is in the jar flows out.
The dead body is a broken water jar.
The soul is the green new shoot of his marvelous mother in the green fields of the stars, in an implicit conflation of plant and animal life. The text continues to elaborate on the nature of the two truths. The dead soul, Unis, becomes the departing of what is at once the essence of earth and the essence of wind, a paradox containing the contrast between the material and the air. In a further step it becomes fire in the wind. The spinal cord is the part of the human body that is understood to contain the contrasting elements of matter and electricity. The hieroglyph for pulling out the essence is the familiar device used even today for unspooling yarn. The image is of pulling, as though pulling out yarn. Thus the person is unraveled; as the spinal cord can be pulled from the body, the light body contained in the spinal cord is pulled out.
To the ends of the limits of space
Unis travels with the wind
The horizon kisses the king
Shen: The hieroglyph for “nose” is the word for both “smell” and “kiss.” The holy forms open their swaying arms, a lovely image of the moving constellations. His face is to the east, the ascending path; he travels the path of the rising stars.
The open eye of the storm: The eye is open: the hieroglyphic eye here has horns—horns mean “to open,” the open eye of the storm.
Orpheus:
Orpheus, Osiris, and the other daimons who are torn in pieces and put together again [are simply] the Year.
—Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis
The second part of the text on the south wall of the antechamber is taken up with an extended repetitive liturgy that has clear affinities with Orphism, a religious cult introduced into Greece in the sixth century B.C. The earliest reference to Orpheus is in a fragment of Simonides (fr. 567) from that time, a verse that resonates with the imagery on the west wall of the entranceway:
And birds flew up around his head
And fish rose out of the blue-black water
At (the sound of) his beautiful song
Orpheus is the bridge between shamanism and poetry. Like Solomon, who controls the winds and the birds, Orpheus draws nature to himself. He goes into and out of the land of the dead alive, and ultimately is torn to pieces by a stream. The question has always been where does he come from. Orphism is associated with Pythagoras. The two religious brotherhoods in Greece strongly influenced the literary movement of the time, the poetry of Pindar, the linguistic formulations of Heraclitus. These religious brotherhoods had the elements of what we now associate with Eastern monasticism: celibacy, vegetarianism, nonharming, a belief in reincarnation, intense focus on scholarship, memorizing, memory. Pythagoras embodies one aspect of this system: mathematics. Orpheus another: poetry. What is the purpose of poetry, a form of writing that begins as the riddle? Poetry can be known by all and understood by few, can be hidden in plain sight. Orpheus is not a person or a myth but an initiate in this ritual of the knowing and remembering of the soul. Orpheus as the embodiment of the ma’a herw, the true sound or vibration, both music and poetry, explains the nfr hieroglyph. It is the lyre of Orpheus that means both beauty and emptiness.
The outlines of the doctrine and the accompanying myth seem to have been roughly the same for the Orphics, Empedocles, Pindar, Hesiod, Plato and others... This rough uniformity suggests that the doctrine... entered Greece already formed and did not undergo its stages of development there... These new doctrines were embodied in poetry, often with attributions to Orpheus or other legendary poets. Plato regards inspired poets as equal revelatory sources with priests and prophets... The Orphic initiate is sometimes buried with a small gold plate engraved with the necessary words... The soul must perform a preliminary or partial demonstration of memory, by carrying over the confusing threshold of death certain lines. In one version the soul, approaching the guardians, is to declare: I am a child of earth and of starry heaven, but my real nature is of heaven alone. You know me... Sometimes the formula involves declaring the name of the guardians as a sign that one has known them in the past and hence belongs to their company.
—Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, 104–10
The secret cult of life in death is the Osirian cult of the snake, Ophis. The cobra hieroglyph rises from a basket, drawn up by the sound of a flute, suggesting an essential relationship between sound and form.
The universe of moving and static things is knit together by... resonance... moving inside them, continually making an indistinct sweet murmur like the humming of a bee... or like a swarm of black bees drunk on honey, whose resonances evolve the fifty letters, and from them, all poetry and all realized form.
—Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra, 202–203, 204,
quoting the Prapanchasara
Verse 3
As in Plato’s doctrine of recollection, knowledge is memory, and memory is release. The connection between words and things is memory. Memory is electricity, the lighting up of the mind. This formula of recognition is introduced as the first of three liturgies in the Pyramid Texts. It begins as a tongue twister, consisting of wordplays on the verb rekh (to know), with a quality of magical sound and visual palindrome:
Stchtchw rchtsw stchsw rchtchw stchsw rchtchw
Stchtchw irchtsw stchsw irchtw
You know him, he knows you
The soul is introduced to the luminous entities in the sky. They are: the sun, the moon, Sirius, the stars in the dawn, the bull of heaven. There is a possibility that st, rather than simply being a particle that emphasizes the introductory pronoun, is a verb, and that this is a carefully worked out formula in which the verb st means “to kindle,” “to light”: You light up that he be made known/He lights up that you know.
The invisible movement of the vowels shading the words, shifting the meaning, creates the sense that the arrival of knowledge is a reconciliation between subject and object as all forms merge. Thus will I know even as also I am known. Rather than a name, a riddling description, posed as a question, introduces each celestial entity:
It is said of you, or, is it not said of you?
The sun: greatest of all who set
The moon: he fulfills the one
The falcon: he is pain
The stars: you are wide awake
The bull of heaven: he who quakes
The falcon is pain, for it prompts the flood that drowns people in their homes.
The moon here is Thoth as the ibis, with its scimitar beak as the lunar crescent, and its luminous white back. The meaning of the ibis is the crescent moon that becomes full: it fulfills the number one. The moon is the model for the system of mathematical fractions in Egypt.
The bull of heaven as the name nhp is a pun. It can mean he rises at dawn, or he protects the dead, or he is the one who quakes. The phrase may be meant not to suggest one instead of the other but to suggest all three.
Unis becomes your departing: This is the breakdown of the body into its aggregates—earth, air, fire, in the electric nervous system, the essence of the spinal cord, which contains all three elements as it leaves the body. This is a way of saying that the body resolves itself into its elements and returns to the one, the essential light energy, and that eternal life is inevitable, not the personality, the moral behavior, the human success or failure. It is the physical reality of the composition of the body. The film of personality and circumstance is only a story. To confront death is to confront the dreamlike quality of life as a story that dissolves at death, or resides in words alone, in memory.
Who is Unis after all? Unis is simply the one who is going, the person who has died.
Poetry arises from this shamanic, integrated sense of the world. Shamanic mimicry conjures thunder, the flight of birds. Shaman is from the Sanskrit word shru (to hear), from shramana (a hearer). We must be silent, so that we may hear the whispering. The falcon, the prayer flag, and the circle of fire are universal shamanistic motifs. “Pythagoras coined the word philosophy to mean a special, introspective, or religious life: yoga, the shamanistic Orphic bios.”
Verse 4
The verse begins by repeating a line with slight alteration as though a wheel is set turning the two embracing horizons; let him cross. The verse then proceeds into the realm of fairy tale, in which the hero is the soul, dressed in a leopard skin, holding a flail. The soul is now introduced to the ancient ones, the stars themselves, who announce him to the great serpent, the secret life energy that surrounds the universe. They grant him entrance to the fields of stars across the river of light, the river of memory. It is a fairy-tale geography, an imagined, jewellike celestial topography. His sister is the star Sirius, who enabled him to fly up into the sky on the north wall. The verse ends with the formula that declares the initiation to have been a success, with the final line: He is the infant child of the blue-green light of dawn.
Verse 5
An invisible double hovers near and is set free at the moment of death. The idea survives in Egypt today as the qarin, the spirit twin. Here the double is conjured into being with words identifying its parts, its living arms and legs emerging from the dead body, as if by naming or imagining the arms and legs one drifts into them, becoming light, laughing; the soul becomes Osiris, the living dead. The text then shifts into a delightful, lovely light verse of dancing up into the sky. The soul flies up, papapa, as a bird and alights as a beetle. The hieroglyph on the wall is the elaborated picture of a beetle, with long antennae curling into inward spirals. The beetle is a visual pun, meaning not only the insect but to spontaneously manifest, to come into being out of thin air, khpr, “to take form.”
The ancestors who do not know nonexistence are the stars.
Verse 6
The verse begins with the image of a golden star rising in the east, Sirius rising at dawn. Unis rises as the star, followed by the letter p standing alone. The nine are first invoked, as though recognized; Unis then grasps the crown from the holy nine. The image again suggests the Pleiades rising above Sirius on the diagonal.
The soul is an infant, newly born as a star. Isis now appears, with her wild double Nephthys: the sky nurses the star with its light. As in the general method of the text, the image is briefly glimpsed and then becomes the subject of the subsequent verse. The image is presented lightly, and then returns with a deeper meaning. The infant soul feeds on the milk of the Milky Way. In the Orphic system the Milky Way is the spring of memory.
Osiris is not named in the verse, but the verse contains some of the most interesting and vivid imagery of Osiris: his great eyes are the gates of souls. He ties the knots. The knot is the kernel of existence, what enables the doubling, the complexity that becomes a thing. Always a knit of identity. Osiris wipes away the flesh from the life force with water from the arms of light. He washes him clean in the lake of the wolf. The defining hieroglyphic pictures are of a lake and a standing wolf. The lake of the wolf is the wild sky; the falcon, cosmic order, turns the sky, but the sky itself is wild. Osiris releases the life force of Unis into the lake of stars. With two fingers, as in verse 2 on the north wall, he makes him rise, and as in the earlier reference, one does not know whether this is simply a mudra for blessing or whether something else is intended, as two fingers together are a basic measurement in Egyptian, like an inch. The verse becomes a very powerful invocation of Osiris.
Verse 7
Unis as the initiate is an infant in the ceremony. He is brought to life, as elsewhere in the text, by means of clouds of incense. The incense draws the holy ones, who are asked first to smell him, then to love him. Isis is invoked (as though invocation is an imagining, a making real), then approached. Unis is described as an infant crawling forth and up onto her knees, as though Isis is simply the hieroglyph itself, the chair. Mother of little Unis, give this your breast that he may cross it over his mouth, that he may drink from you your milk of shining white light of eternity, the light of the stars.
Verse 8
The soul is imagined sailing in the boat of the sky with the stars, the holy ones. Isis is asked to come to him, to his very hair, with great tenderness, and to accept him. What follows is an accounting of his life, familiar from religious ceremonies everywhere. He has been purified. He has resolved all disputes. He no longer has enemies. No one can say anything against him. The power of words is again emphasized; there are no negative words out there anymore.
Verse 9
As he rises in the void... the green lotus: This verse portrays the sky as the wild cow on the greening desert hill, the sky that greens the desert hill after the rain. The soul unites with its mother, the night dappled with stars, the dappled cow high on the desert hill, as the white storks spiral down in vast flocks to whiten the land, the land, the land—a yearly sight in the Nile Valley. The stork rises as the individual soul and descends as a column of stars whitening the land with their light.
Sirius is now called the falcon dog star, indicating that these ideas work together and are the same: the guide that leads the soul to heaven.
Verse 10
Hierogamos: Raised up, united with her, the gate of the water.
The wall ends as the soul merges with Isis, the sky, the nature of which is the hidden water that enables all life. The connection of water with life is expressed in the hieroglyph for “woman” as a vessel of water. The hieroglyph for “child” is saghair, the Arabic word for “small” and for “child.” In keeping with the actual physical dimension of what is described, this passage suggests that this moment itself is the gate of the rain that falls from heaven, and of the conception and rebirth of Unis as the star. Unis unites with the mother and becomes the child within her, as the Tantric initiate unites with the mother in order to be reborn. As in Tantra, the holy vision is opened to the initiate by means of the rising of the heightened electricity within the body, the internal serpent, prompted by real or imagined union. The rising of this energy prompts the birth of the eye, omniscience, the child or successful fruit of the practice. Thus it is only when the initiate merges with the mother that he sees the holy aspects revealed. On the following wall, the east gable, the initiate is reborn as the eye itself, the thunder. The release of water is the result. Isis becomes the cow on the greening desert hill in order to conceive the baby bull. As a child is conceived and then born, the soul follows the meaning of the words, into the womb of the innermost room, and then out of it into the broader realm of space. In that sense the text reads ingeniously both backward and forward, and has the quality of time being reversed, as a progress of mysteries revealed in a sequence that has the sense of a journey.
The east gable is the most powerful part of the monument and of the written instruction. The language of the poem on the gable begins with hieroglyphic words that mimic the sound of thunderclaps. This triangular slab of text mirrors the rising of the lotus on the west gable. There the sense is of stillness, the quiet nature of still water. Both gables point up and indicate the star rising. The two facing, contrasting poems present the dual nature of the sky: violent motion and pellucid calm. The east is the thunderstorm, the birth of thunder, the bull, the disembodied eye. The idea that the sky itself is food is the original perception of time.
The east gable is covered with a single long poem that begins with a passage that is reminiscent of King Lear on the heath. The meaning of the passage arises in its sound. The sound conjures thunder. Gp is the hieroglyphic picture of a rainstorm, pt of the sky; ihy is the word for “rattle” as a noun, and “shout” as a verb. These are words that can be translated both as nouns and verbs; they are perfectly plausible as vivid nouns: the violent sky, the bones of the horizon quake, as in a thunderstorm, and then, immediately after the thunder and lightning, there is silence, and an exhaustion in the air after the electrical charge. It is the exhaustion of the mother after giving birth. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
A brief line in the translation has defined the former approach to this piece of writing. It begins with something seen repeatedly throughout the text, the prayer flag followed by the sign “to live”: the soul is a living holy thing. This familiar hieroglyphic phrase is followed by the phrase m itw f, made up of common hieroglyphs discusssed earlier in this book: the owl (m), the reeds (itw), the horned viper (f). The question for the translator has been, what is itw? It is the picture of three reeds and spells the word for “reeds” but has been translated as “fathers,” the idea being that if mothers are mentioned, there must be fathers. If itw is to be understood as “fathers,” the translation would then be a living holy thing with or as his fathers. Yet this simple phrase has been understood to mean, in a wild stretch of English colloquiality, lives on in the sense of eats his fathers. One looks to the following phrase for clarification: wshb mwtw f, the wild bull of his mothers. The word wshb (wild bull) is fully spelled out and cannot be mistaken. Yet it has been translated instead as wsh (chew). Thus the Egyptological reading of this line is that the dead soul eats his fathers and chews his mothers. Hence the poem on the east gable is called the “Cannibal Hymn.” The verse then states that the soul becomes neb (the all; the detested wolf); a picture of a standing wolf, as in the phrase lake of the wolf on the west wall, is followed by the word bwt (detested). This phrase occurs again on the north wall of the sarcophagus chamber, where death is the detested wolf. The detested wolf is nature, the essential nature of the universe. Yet it is the most precious, most powerful thing there is. The word for “power” is the scepter with the dog’s head.
The sense of the extended poem on the east gable of the antechamber is essentially this: Unis, the dead soul, having merged with the mother, the sky, is now reborn as the active power in the sky understood as an active intelligence, the eye, individuated as thunder, the bull. This active intelligence turning the sky by means of arms and legs, the Dippers turning the stars, is the creator of all life, of the food that sustains mankind. Thus the arms stir the sky as a vessel of food.
The star rising in the east is the star in the east: What is being described is a thunderstorm. Not the god of a thunderstorm but the storm itself. It is described as a birth, as someone giving birth, the screaming, and then exhaustion of someone giving birth; the sky is a single entity, the mother, giving birth, she is giving birth to the wild bull, the thunder as the star Canopus rises in the east.
He is the all within the throne: the power in the sky. Pan as the child of the Great Goddess.
The wild bull of his mothers: Brings to mind the Bacchae, the mother fondling her son as a wild bull. Dionysus, literally “the new god,” is the wild bull born of thunder as his mother Semele is fructified by a lightning bolt. She is struck by lightning and dies giving birth to Dionysus.
Unis becomes the all (the universe itself, the nature of all, wild nature), the detested, uncontrollable, feared wolf, feared because it is uncontrollable. Whose mother does not even know his name, as he has no mother but exists as pure energy in empty space, yet he is the most precious thing in the sky. He is the power [on the horizon]. As no father gave birth to him [tum is the negative here, rather than the “god” Atum], he gives birth to one more powerful than he. It is a riddle or paradox. The wild dog is chaos, the painted wolf, Lycaon pictus, shown on early slate palettes as the surround of the sky, within which is the serpent, the circling path of light, energy, its eyes, the sun and moon and stars.
The detested wolf is also the star that signals the season of storms. It is the white bird on the luminous horizon, Canopus, rising as one of the two brightest stars in the sky; it quivers as a mass of light on the horizon as no other star does, strangely resembling a white bird, a dove of light, coming to Mary as the conception.
Unis becomes the bull of heaven, he lives in the form of every star
He is the engine of heaven, the pervasive force, the spirit.
As the wild bull in the reeds, he feeds in the pastures of stars, filled with spiritual power from the surrounding fire, the fire that surrounds the horizon, the sunset and the dawn. Unis becomes the full vessel, the vessel that contains the stars; the sky, the arm, the back are in the sky itself. Unis becomes his hidden name; when you say the name the great one rises. Then the eerily Christian phrase, the prince of peace, he is the bread and the drink (the offerings are pictured, the loaf, the jar of fermented grain): he is the food of all mankind, for the source of all food resides in the natural turning of the sky.
The poem then shifts into the imperative: this is what is happening, open the instructions, the instruction is close enough to the ritual instruction in Tantra to make it recognizable as a ceremony for the emergence of the light body. The instruction suggests the reason for the inclusion of elaborately carved ceremonial flint knives in predynastic burials. They are to cut off the head of the emerging serpent of light. So seizing the hairs on the top of the head in the dark they tie them for Unis.
The hair is tied back so the serpent can rise from the head. In Highest Yoga Tantra, Daniel Cozort writes that before beginning the meditation session, one binds one’s limbs with cloth or rope. Then one rolls one’s eyes upward (closing them halfway) and holds one’s observation on the upper opening of the central channel (between the eyebrows). This is the ajna, the third eye, where the head of the emerging serpent appears in Egyptian iconography.
This is similar to the spell of the twenty-seven netcherw of earth, in that it obviously involves the manipulation of energy in the channels of the body. The phrase holds one’s observation means concentrate one’s energy at this particular place; meditative focus is a way of concentrating energy, suggesting perhaps that the Egyptian kings trained for this in life.
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Unis burns as wood in the fire of the stars: What follows is a riddle reminiscent of the riddle of the Sphinx, and perhaps the source of it, as this riddle is also about legs as markers for three phases of time: morning, evening, night. The two lights at dawn, great in size near the horizon, are small in the dark of the night.
Thus he is the arrow: This is a riddle. The answer: Sirius and Canopus are markers, netchers, flags. The marker is the arrow that points to the turning. The legs of the women are the turning, the Dippers, whose turning as legs and arms turn the seasons, much as the pun on sbk (crocodile) and sbkh (legs) on the first wall was used to indicate that the meaning of the legs is movement itself; the movement is the vessel of food that the seasons bring. Thus he is the arrow as Canopus, who goes around the sky as the legs of the women, the Dippers, turn it, like the hands of a clock. In other words the answer to the riddle is again that the sky is a clock. The image is one of perfect clarity and is emphasized by the repetitive line the arm goes round the arm goes round the arm goes round. It is a clock. His food is an immaterial presence; the two lions, air and moisture (nefsw mwmw), are the gates of form.
The ancient ones burn on his hearth: The stars, the thousand that go around with him on the winding paths of the starry sky with Orion. Unis rises again; his flesh, his existence, is absorbed into the light of the dawn.
He has broken the knots of the spine: Here are anatomically perfect hieroglyphs of vertebrae. The energy has risen up and broken out of the spine. Then the remarkable following lines:
He receives the essence of the stars,
He feeds on red, he absorbs green
This is the correct appraisal of the spectrum of light: he licks the moist essence of light until his flesh is flooded with it; the essence of the stars is color, red and green. He is transformed into light, the mind of pervasive holiness.
Verse 2
This verse contains the mantric pi and the remark that the mummy is nothing but a dry shell, as Unis rises away from it, rising, rising, remaining, remaining.
The gable ends with an image typical of Egyptian humor and sweetness, a nod back to the first verse on the north wall, what is the dead man doing: he is dancing in the sky. The sky is a single multifaceted entity: hence he lives in the form of every star. Ultimately the eye itself is light. The eye is light itself. This key to the development of world religion is presented in the vehicle of poetry. Therefore one needs to approach the key not as a historical artifact but as poetry that is carefully constructed as a vehicle of truth. The vehicle of truth is metaphor. The poem is sacred because it is where the metaphor exists. Without this careful construction of words, the metaphor does not exist. The words mirror the shifting reality of the child that rises from the corpse, inert Osiris, the seat of the intangible yet determining eye that is at once a serpent, a bird, and the fierce, unstoppable bull of life.
The east wall below the gable is covered with twenty-six short riddles that are getting at the concept of the snake, the rising serpent, and what it is. The final verse in the antechamber is the resolution of this mystery.
Verse 3
Extraordinary hieroglyph of a bull with two heads, one at either end above a door. The door that opens both ways is death. Death is the door to the realm of both earthly decay and heaven, form and formlessness. The door in the monument is also indicated, for the soul, as a newly conceived entity, goes both into the womb and out of it. A secret is given away in the line. The question of orientation is itself a riddle, and the riddle is solved. The door is the door both in and out: the text can be read in either direction, both backward and forward.
Verse 4
You create your eye as it destroys you: The sound of the line is as important as the meaning; it is like a tongue twister: irek irek irtek irek seksek.
Verse 5
In the grave itself, the life force in his testicles rises: Anatomical hieroglyph of testicles. There is a pun on qhr (falcon) and shr (testicles) (what is underneath). The commentary quoted in verse 2 on the east wall of the entranceway explains the reference—the generative life energy in the body is identified with the clear liquids in the bodily channels: semen is understood as the clear fluid in the spine, the spinal fluid; the fluid, with the energy, has been reversed and flows upward. This is the creation of the eye, omniscience, at death, hence it destroys you. The formula for rising, like the rising of stars, is hr sbn, used in the imperative for both the falcon and the life force.
Verse 6
The arm of Babay strikes, and within it is the thunder: The serpent is introduced here as an actual presence. That Babay is Orion (with its meaning as a calendar sign of rain and storms and the flood) is confirmed by verse 29.
The thunderstone as a hieroglyph, the template for the ceremonial vajra, the labros, the double-headed axe that is the thunder, appears first here. The hieroglyph is of the picture of a fossil squid, a belemnite, Greek for “what is thrown down,” related to the word ball. The Sahara is the dry bed of an ancient sea, filled with hills of oyster shells and colored sea clays, and the white bones of the sea turned to stone. Much as fossil pine sap called amber (electra, electricity) was seen as broken shards of lightning that fell in the sea, the fossil squid was thought to be a thunderstone thrown down from the sky. The question of why there is so much about rain and thunder in the Pyramid Texts suggests that the system, and possibly the poem itself or parts of it, comes from an earlier time and place, Nabta Playa, the miniature Stonehenge in the Western Desert, with an astronomical clock of giant stones set up amid the graves of bulls and cows.
Like hieroglyphs themselves, the religious system belongs to the drying up of the desert in the Neolithic, to the herders moving east, praying for rain, as the desert lakes and semiarid scrub are dried up and disappeared, and finding at last the miraculous Nile with its yearly flood and black earth. There were in the desert sacred black stones that fell from the sky, as did the black meteorite in the Kaaba and the round black stone ceremonially brought to Rome as Cybele, the great mother.
Release him O serpent,
The rising serpent releases and becomes the light body
Verse 7
Out there it is dark: They all go into the dark, the dark interstellar spaces. The ways of Thoth are the known arrangements of stars, the paths, the rising and setting of the recognized star groups; beyond them it is indeed dark. Thus the word mrw (canals, artificially made ways) is what the mind has made of this. The sound of this verse is like a lament, like fear, ti ki ta ha ti kki ti kki, it is dark it is dark.
Verse 9
This is an invocation, as well as a riddle, in which appears the Arabic word for “star,” kawkab.
The lion is the engine in the house that is the body: There is the house of the star that is burning, and then there is the secret flesh in the house of the body; the secret flesh is moving moving as the awakened serpent, moves up and out to the house of the star. The wordplay is on n’y—a word that means both “move” and “snake.”
Verse 10
The praised gold: As in alchemy the goal is gold; the rising energy becoming light is described as the falcon flesh becoming gold as it rises. In this verse is the first mention of the flesh as rising burning, as light, as gold, conjuring Pindar’s alchemical line:
ariston men udor, o de xrusos aithomenon pur
ate diaprepei di nuktes
The most precious thing is water,
The next is gold, burning like fire in the night
Verse 11
The thunder is given to Unis, whose hands spread across the sky.
Verse 12
It is important that the mouth not be filled, as something needs to emerge from it.
Spa, the centipede, is in the house. The hieroglyph is the perfectly executed picture of a centipede. One does not want the centipede to be in the house. It is another poisonous thing that bites. The natural response is “get it out.” However, the point is the name, for “centipede” in hieroglyphs is a pun on the verb s-pa (to fly away). Thus the house as the body contains the ability to fly away. The two energies fighting within the body would seem to be the dark serpent (characterized here as a centipede) and the white bird. The verse plays out the concept of the Arabic word dud (worm), as a category of creeping things. The category runs from the particular to the general. The serpent is a creeping thing, the centipede is the internal serpent, it is itself the rope rising up within, and the lion as the engine of the body. Thus two conflicting energies are rising up, the serpent and the bird that is light.
The verses on the east wall are riddles on the irony that the rising snake is also the bird of light, a white bird breaking free. The verses conjure and describe the darkness and danger of the serpent, the whiteness of the bird, how they are both within and struggle with each other, and how they are both the same thing, the inner eye that becomes the rising soul.
The idea that the rising serpent bites is elaborated upon in the final resolution of the text on the west gable of the sarcophagus chamber. There are two voices in the sequence of verses: one is telling the serpent to rise, the other is telling it to go back. The house is the body, the word in hieroglyphs is pr. As a verb it means “to rise.” In the Pyramid Texts it is typically not spelled out, it is only the picture of a house with an open door, hence it could be a verb or a noun, depending on the context, either “house” or “rise.” The rope, nwh, is both male and female, perhaps energy channels like the ida and pingala in the Tantric physiology. The hieroglyphs in this sequence of riddles present a progression of naturalistic representations of different birds that shine white in the sky, the ibis, the vulture, the plover, the pelican, as the rising light body. In this verse the white bird is the ibis.
Verse 13
The riddles are all presented in different voices, as though by different presences, as though there were a surround of different voices posing them, the wise men surrounding the child with gold and incense and myrrh. Or perhaps a group of different writers presenting different aspects of the thing, a loose range of metaphor describing something real: death. This is a particularly lovely riddle about the nature of the eye, and how it relates to emotion and writing. There are in you things made of alabaster, two alabaster cups. The alabaster cups are the actual, external eyes, as opposed to the inner eye. This is a verse in praise of the eyes, as the home of tears and of perception. The book of the writer is ntaw ssat, ssat, the avatar of writing. The eyes are the home of the heart. Although this is a sacred text from long ago, it is a very Egyptian verse with a contemporary sensibility. In the deeper sense of keeping what is dead alive—the writing itself is its life. Thus the verse conflates the physical eye in the body and its water of tears, with the eye as the intelligence of the sky that prompts the flood. The fertile field is the heart, with its relation to the seeing, feeling eye. The fertile field comes from the flood. The fertile field of the heart is watered by tears that give rise to poetry, as the fertile field watered by rain gives rise to greening crops.
Verse 14
Glittering white as the vultures you are free: The Egyptian vulture is white against the deep blue desert sky. The herons glide back and forth across the waves. The alabaster bodily eye is now freed as a white bird.
Verse 15
The mother is the lion (the gate of water), a play on “lion” and “gate,” a reference to the south wall; he unites with his mother, enters the gate of water; see verse 29, the two lions/gates made holy, moisture and air, as Isis/Aphrodite (born from the foam) rises from the sea.
Verse 16
This is a riddle. The answer is, the eye is, not actually an eye, it is the internal snake. The snake as an animal is uniquely silent. The cry of the kerawan, the Senegal thicknee or stone curlew, is pure, thrilling, pervasive sound. It is the sound that defines the Nile Valley at twilight, the eerie rising and falling of a prolonged scream, like the cry of the curlew in Yeats. The miniature representation of the Senegal thicknee in this verse has the thick knees of the actual bird. The snake has two faces: the rising inner eye is both a snake (in the body) and a bird (leaving it), hence in making itself known as a poetic conceit it borrows the voice of its twin, the bird. Unis does not see he has an eye within; as in the Buddhist philosophical conundrum, the eye cannot see itself. The inner eye is not Unis but transcends him. Like life emerging from stone, conjured in the hieroglyphs themselves, the eerie harmonic crescendo of the bird rises out of the dark tomb: Aaeeeeee.
Verse 17
Hr sbn as the free circular motion of birds, so the life force slips out of the body.
The bull, the bird, and the snake are the same thing: the rising life force. The life force is now told, is prompted, hr (to emerge, come out, rise, spin away).
Verse 18
This description will occur again; the rising face meets another face as the serpent is absorbed into the falcon.
Verse 19
This sequence of riddles elaborates the nature of the inner light: What is the snake that flies, the hidden eye, as opposed to the two alabaster jars, the visible eyes? The verses proceed to prompt it forth, a ceremony is taking place to prompt it forth, and the verses are a progression involved in the prompting. The shining white bird of the soul is now rising within.
Verse 20
Ikn hayy: Here is the word ikn that appeared in the first verse as grow dark; the serpent is told to grow dark, to go away, to disappear as it arises, as though those who are calling it up are suddenly afraid and wish to turn it back, thus the serpent is characterized as a real serpent, deadly and terrifying. The following verse explains the meaning: Would that you be hidden...
Verse 21
As in the previous verse, that one does and does not want to see the rising snake seems to be part of getting it to rise. In verses 20 and 21 the serpent is formally negated. The shining white bird, now a pelican, escapes the serpent, sheds its skin, flies away on the winding paths of the stars, but it is not Unis himself. The soul rises with the “pelican,” the Pleiades, prompting the Nile flood, with the life force rising with the rising stars.
Verse 22
The acacia tree is the body: This is the verse that makes it clear that the serpent in the tree is an iconographic image from the Tantric system: the tree is the body, the serpent is the spinal cord, and what it contains, the root and branching of the nervous system. The serpent guides him to leave the tree, to rise up as a white bird, purified energy, leaving the tree of the body behind.
At first light: The direct realization of emptiness is called the actual clear light. The actual clear light of the fourth stage is also spoken of as “external manifest enlightenment” because it is always initially manifested at dawn (just as Shakyamuni Buddha became enlightened at dawn). (See Daniel Cozort, Highest Yoga Tantra, p. 109.)
Consider also Christ on Mt. Tabor—while his companions still slept, his garment suddenly became as white as lightning—and the surat al fajr, the dawn sura: Mohammed’s realization comes at dawn.
Verse 23
The serpent manifests, according to what has been harnessed: The ceremony is conducted correctly and the serpent manifests. When the serpent leaves the body, what is left of the person? Does the person continue to exist and does it matter?
Verse 24
The riddles end by posing questions that are addressed in the subsequent riddle. The answer to the previous verse is the serpent takes you yet you do not go. The energy is freed, but the dead becomes earth, the corpse resolves to earth. This sentiment is elaborated upon in the following verse. If there is no death, where is the mind? The serpent is now defined as two serpents, one male and one female, the twin energy channels that flank the spine. The readers now signify that they are merely following the words of a ritual. The snake is never visible. It is a metaphor.
Verse 25
In answer to the question what remains of Unis as a person: he is gone, the man is dead, find his mind, it is gone. This is what actually endures after death, your bad deeds, your name, your children, and your writing.
Verse 26
The verse suggests the reason that beautifully carved unused flint knives are found in predynastic burials in Egypt. They are there to cut off the head of the rising snake. It seems to say that the presence of the knife itself prompts the snake’s appearance as it leaves the body through the head. What is desired in the ceremony is the ritual appearance of the rising snake, which is in actuality the light body, the serpent sleeping within those who are in the cult of Osiris. Awakened, the serpent rises and enables the transcendence of death. In your shoes is the hieroglyph of a pair of shoes, an element of the plain and earthly in this discussion of otherworldly things. The inclusion of a point-counterpoint negative and positive; it’s real, it’s not; and so on seems to indicate the presence of a formal dialectic or debate tradition of refining, pinning down with words what is real.
Verse 27
The snake encircles you in your tree: The serpent rises through the tree of the body.
Verse 28
The far desolate expanse of the mirror world: The awareness throughout of actual death, that death is real, the person is gone. The hawk from the burning land, the land of stars.
Washed white as the moringa tree: Refers to the startling whiteness of the trunks of the moringa tree, which grows only on the lower slopes of high mountains in the desert. J. J. Hobbs in Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness (40) remarks that the trunks of the moringa are so white that they are visible from a great distance in the desert. The letter k in the hieroglyphic word moringa may designate both the letter k, which is a mountainside, and the mountain slope where this tree grows. Here in the hieroglyphic phrase is the picture of the moringa tree, and the letter k, which is the picture of a mountain slope. This final verse resolves the progression of animal transformations on the west wall of the entranceway, which begins with the falcon circling and ends with the rising up of the crocodile, here explained as the great green snake. The passage also brings to resolution the first startling image in the monument, which is not only an astronomical reference but has a compounded meaning that the semen drawn upward as the serpentine energy rising through the tree of the body enables the release of the eye as pure light.
These short verses in particular seem as though they were composed by different people, almost in a competition, with each verse rendering a different aspect of the religious mystery. The final verse on the east wall of the antechamber presents the resolution of the insight of the life of the soul and the life of the universe presented in the monument.
The holy stars in their atmosphere... secret of the universe: Dark energy is most of what exists. May you remain in the realm of light, in the light of the stars. Air and moisture, the two gates/lions of existence. The sense follows, may you become the falcon rising in the east: the star in the east that is the green eye, and all that is in it, water, growth, joy, writing, memory, singing, speaking, all the good that it makes possible, take it, its names and qualities: alabaster (the actual eyes); willow (the tree); your great joy for the serpent rises through love of you. This is clearly a description of the rising of the internal serpent that has been called kundalini, “the coiled one,” by means of the reversal of sexual energy. The rising internal stream of energy, conflated with the reversed sexual energy, becomes pure bliss and leaves the body flowing freely as the omniscient eye.
The great wide snake is a detailed hieroglyph of a puff adder, which is indeed a great wide snake. As in the sequence of white birds, one reptile becomes another. The crown is the snake having risen to the head, the eye that sees the malachite land, the pure land, where all is precious, jewellike, and green, the diamond realm as green as emerald, the falcon lord of the green lake. The falcon is the green snake.
As the snake in the grass and the snake in the garden are commonly encountered by anyone who lives in the country, the image of the bird and the snake coming together as a single entity comes directly from a simple familiarity with nature: the bird flies up carrying the snake in its beak; the snake lies in the top of the tree to catch the bird that comes to land. As the snake rises from the tree to catch the bird, for a moment in the air the snake and the bird are one. This is the meaning of the final verse. The east wall of the antechamber presents a progression of naturalistic representations of different birds that shine white in the sky, contrasting the dark hidden things that lie below. The two primary contrasts are resolved as the final insight in the antechamber, as the riddle teased out in the previous verses is given a definite answer: the rising white-winged being, the nature of light, and the dark hidden thing from below are different vehicles for the energy of life and morph into each other. St. George and the dragon, Apollo and Python, the winged angel and the serpent are the same thing.