Verse 1
The flight of the eye, the twin of Unis descends: The passage begins with the eye. It is the passage of the eye, the flight of the eye into the dark. The point of this entire body of mystical poetry is the emergence of the naked eye freed to range throughout the universe. Hence the passage begins with the eye. Then the wall is broken. The inner room is the innermost darkness where the transubstantiation of the dead takes place. Matter becomes light and flows with the flow of the universe. Hence the body, not the sky, is the subject of this inner room: the body as the sum of its aggregates is the eternal nature of the aggregates themselves; the treatment and preparation of the corpse; the internal mysteries that will emerge from the body and survive: the rising serpent as the golden flow of falcon flesh, the emergent eye, mirrored in the moon that vanishes like an eye closing in sleep. The subject of the final wall, the west gable above the body itself, is the manifestation of the serpent, rising in the tree of the body and emerging from it. The garden (a rectangular hieroglyph consisting of measured square garden plots) is the earth itself, from which the soul, becoming starlight, rises away, leaving the garden of earth behind.
Verse 2
Broken, exhausted, weary you go into the night: The body is a broken jar, the contents of which flow out, as in Ecclesiastes 12:6, “Remember him, before the pitcher is broken at the spring.” The soul becomes a baby hawk with soft, fragile bones made of light, rising to see the face of Osiris; the seat of the eye is no longer the corpse but the sky.
Verse 3
This verse foreshadows the line on the west gable above the body itself, where the soul becomes the baby bull, the nature of starlight that leaves the garden of earth. The stars gently ask in astonishment, in voices like the drifting sound of the wind, “Who who what son what child, what white soul is nursed?... What attributes are his as he races by?” They are flapping. They are wings. Here lies the idea of angels as the humanized ghosts of birds, flapping in the fields of stars, the Elysian fields, the lake of space. The cormorant leaping up is the hieroglyphic picture of a cormorant, and a reference back to the north wall of the antechamber where the waterbirds are rushing up into the sky. Then the soul is the bull as the thunder, marked with the hieroglyphic thunderstone, the belemnite.
Thus the primary ideas are listed, first the eye, then the soul of white light that rises as a bird, then the bull of heaven, as thunder, are received by the holy nine.
The eye of light sees: The hieroglyphic word is nw, identified as nous, the Greek word for “mind.” It is first used in the text here as the verb for “seeing.” As a noun this is the word for “hunter, tracker.”
That Osiris count you: The English word reckon is the Arabic reqim (number). “Count” here has the sense of the English word reckoning, that you be judged to be included. But here there is another dimension to the concept: there is a mathematical underlay to the Egyptian idea of eternity as an astronomical reading of cyclical time; the souls are “counted” as stars in the readable grid of the sky.
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The whiteness of moonlight as cream: The falcon eye is the moon, the cream is moonlight. This wall presents the conflation of the falcon with the eye, and the falcon as the eye with the moon. The soul receives and becomes the falcon eye.
As you rise a voice or sound comes to you: This is a reference back to verse 7 on the north wall of the antechamber. The ma’a herw, the voice arises, and now the soul, purified, can hear and understand it.
The sound carries over to the importance of the words themselves. The words effect the transformation: bring him the words. The ritual words are now meant to be said, four times, or seven times, and must be spoken in precisely the right way for effect.
The next stage is protection for the prompting of the descent of the twin. The actual descent is then described: the leg, the arm, as Unis is conflated with, merges with, becomes one with Osiris and is given the falcon eye; he is now the eye alone, having no longer a face, a personality, he is faceless, the self is gone. He literally becomes the eye, pure disembodied awareness. The eyes of light looking out are faceless.
Verse 2
Here is the recognition of this new merged being: Greetings divine one, you who are three. The falcon eye raised high is the moon.
The remarkable thing throughout is how contemporary the language is: the dangerous flight through the dark; broken, exhausted, weary you go into the night. The body is a broken water jar out of which the contents flow. The soul is a baby falcon with soft, fragile bones flapping into the dark. The soul flies up, flapping, to the eye on its throne. This icon is briefly humanized as a judge on a throne: whom he desires to live will live, whom he desires to die will die. Then it is simply the eye again, and the question resides in semantics: Is it the harsh, judging, watching eye, or is it the absorbing, shining eye that is light itself? Though one easily sees in this the familiar conception of the all-seeing, punishing God, the soul is not judged by this entity but becomes it.
The hieroglyphs on this wall are written in reverse, in order to mirror the writing on the opposite wall of the passageway, indicating, as in the entranceway, that “reversal” is primarily an aesthetic consideration.
Verse 1
You will not die, because you are Osiris. As he lives, you live. You know the words, hence you are absorbed into the universe itself. Elements involving numbers: the nine bright lights, the four greens. Your face is the dog star. The path of the turning sky is pshr, the hieroglyphic verb for “going around.” It is the picture of the winding path of the labyrinth.
The horns come out upon you: The alchemical unicorn. The hieroglyphic horns are the verb “to open.” The head opens to release the serpent that forms on the brow as a single hornlike growth before emerging from the body. To examine the span of the word and the predictable hardening of the h into c, q, k, and g, in what might be called the progression of hs: horn = corn = cornu (Latin, horn) = qarin (Arabic for both “horn” and “spiritual twin”)= grow = green.
The horn is the thing that rises up: Out of the upper part of your head. As the dead soul becomes the eye, like a baby bull it grows horns. The eye is a star, and the horns are rays of starlight. The eye is thunder and the horns are lightning. Hence the horn as the serpent is the uni-corn, or single horn. The horn goes into the lap of the seated virgin. You trap a unicorn with a seated virgin because the unicorn puts its horn in her lap. The seated virgin is the seat, Isis the sky. Thus the unicorn, as in Auden, gives way to the dove of light. As is explained in the verses that follow on the east wall, the rising serpent is both generated and pacified by love.
Horns and bones are both invoked as the hard, tactile substance of things: the bones of falcons, of holy serpents in the sky; you rise to the sky in your vehicle of light, your form moves, your feathers rush.
The boat in this verse has light streaming from the back. This is a further elaboration of the feather and the falcon: the falcon is the sky, the feather is its nature, emptiness, air, the wind.
Verse 3
Your sight of the universe: A world of light. It is only possible to see it with the eyes of the stars, for it is known only to them. The sky is holy, both as the harmonizing movement, the wheeling of the falcon, and the wildness of the wolf. The harmonizing patterned movement of the falcon brings coolness even to the desert, as the cool silver light of the shining moon dispels the darkness of the wild sky.
You will not forget, you will not forget: existence is remembering. You are born not from love or sexual intercourse but transubstantiation, a process that belongs, hence you in all your constituents, both physical and intangible as energy, belong and have their origin in the physical world. This is the mystery, the actual translation of flesh into light. Both are aspects of nature, hence the mystery of the translation of the body into the universe is real. Your eyes, your ears, your nose, your senses are all absorbed and not destroyed, you become the movement, the beauty, the harmonious turning. Yet you must remember where you come from.
Verse 4
The whole sky turns with you: The boats as vehicles have hieroglyphs progressively added to them. The ultimate truth goes with you, as you have attained the ultimate reality. The one who goes with you is the starry sky, she of a thousand souls. You become the one Orion takes around, the one Sirius takes around and brings to the pure realm of the stars, washed white with the starlight. The hand of the father is the hand of the universe. What is intended is that the universe itself is the parent of all that lives, is a realm of pure light, all of which is knowable without faith, and true.
Verse 5
The sacred shrine of the stormy sky: The four greens are the sprouting mounds of both the falcon and the wolf. The seat of the four greens is Egypt.
Verse 6
Unis is now merged with Osiris, shining white and strong. The nine bright shining lights are here defined as nine stars. Thunder, greenness, this is not your season of silence, for you are the eye of the wolf = nshni, the open eye of the storm. With Thoth, the moon, you go round and round the sky. Although one has been told not to mourn, the stars are seen as weeping, suggesting meteor showers. The image echoes the first verse on the north wall of the antechamber.
Nine bright lights, a constellation traveling the sky nearing each horizon, the Pleiades appearing as nine bright lights, the Pleiades circling the sky. The lines in this verse track the circular progress of the Pleiades about the sky, as though turning the wheel of the sky.
Verse 7
The text now goes into the mystery of Osiris. By identifying with Osiris you have eternal life. Hence the chant can be translated you are the child of air, as it [air] lives, you live, or as he [Osiris] lives, you live. But the overall meaning is the same, as Osiris is the eternal life within the corpse and in the universe. This very holy and significant liturgy examines the elements and the composition of the body and how they do not cease to exist. The point is that holiness resides, and the eternal life resides in the body itself.
The Aggregates: The verse proceeds as an exercise of logic. If what your body contains is eternal, then you are eternal. As in Tantric ceremony, repetition of verbal formulae is part of the process of sanctification.
You don’t cease to exist, but you do cease to exist as a particular person, that is obvious. The air as breath is unchanging, eternal, hence your breath does not die or cease to exist. The following elements of the composition of the body are examined as in a logical argument that cannot be defeated: the moisture in the composition of your body does not cease to exist; earth, matter is next; then darkness; then the empty space; then wild nature with its two thunderbolts (the vajra is here explained as the double-headed axe). Hence Unis is rendered back into the elements. Thoth as perception is signified by the moon. Having conflated the dead with the nine holy things—air, moisture, space, nature, dark, earth, decay, birth, perception—what follows is the opening of the mouth. As though the text were saying “These are the things within you, let us find them, let us open the mouth,” we look in the mouth and what we find is empty space.
In the nywt hieroglyph the sides of the pyramid point to the center; here the central column is the spine. In your mouth is the column of the nywt, the spinal column. In your mouth is the lake within the head. In your mouth is the scorpion that enables breath, the disembodied windpipe that resembles a scorpion. In your mouth is the holy shrine within you, the emptiness of the body itself. In your mouth is the whiteness of teeth, illustrated by a perfect hieroglyph of teeth; their whiteness itself is eternal. This is the third shift: first it is the holy nine elements, then it is the aspects of the body within the mouth, the cavity, the throat, the teeth, now it is the universe itself, all of this is within you: the mouth contains all that is in the body. Then a switch, as sliding to the empty space of the universe is itself contained within the body, as the text moves on to the next wall.