The antechamber is the night sky. The adjoining room is the innermost darkness of the night, where the transformation of the body takes place. It has been called the womb of night. The physical reality of the body is the subject of the text in this room: the body is its aggregates. Then follow the treatment and preparation of the corpse, the physical offerings made to the dead, the internal mysteries that will emerge from the body and survive: the eye and the twin. The final wall is the west gable above the body. As on the final wall in the antechamber, the west gable presents a sequence of riddles that refine the meaning of the serpent as the eye, the manifestation of the serpent rising in the body and emerging from it as the flesh turning to gold. The serpent is in the tree of the body; the garden is the earth itself; the dead, having attained the secret knowledge encoded in the words, becomes starlight, rising away, leaving the garden of earth.
The passage into this inner room presents the flight of the eye and the descent of the twin, establishing the two principles of the eternal nature of the mind, and the eternal nature of the body. The eye is the mind released as free-flowing omniscience that flows through the universe; it is the star it sees. The twin emerges as an electrical shadow of light that, absorbed into the universe, becomes it. Thus the ultimate nature of the body and the mind is the resolution of the iconographic riddle of Osiris: the jewel in the lotus is the eye on its throne.
To say that the energy that electrifies your body in life emerges from you as horns of light, that bones are soft, that moonlight is cream—you can feel in these words poetry as a physical force that stirs an inner, tactile awareness of a living transformative reality. To define it kills it, but poetry captures it alive.
The text in the sarcophagus chamber reads from south to east to north to west, continuing in a counterclockwise direction. The language itself now has a silvery quality that gives the sense of unobstructed, free-flowing motion as the disembodied eye flows through the universe. There are extended passages of pure repetition, the verses come around first to a long liturgy that examines the aggregates of the body. The liturgy takes the form of a syllogism, again pointing to an established dialectic, the exercise of logic in a debate tradition among the Egyptian priesthood. The elements that comprise a human being are named, considered, and acknowledged to be eternal. If they do not die, what is death? The dense, repetitive liturgy opens into a detached division and analysis of these elements: air, earth, water; as they live on, you, too, live on. The liturgy progresses through the body and into the mouth. The hieroglyphic phrase n-r-n-k can be translated as either in your name (rn-k) or in your mouth (r-n-k). There is no way of knowing which is intended, but the phrases that determine the meaning are in your mouth are the cavities in the head, in your mouth is the whiteness of teeth, with a hieroglyphic picture of teeth, in your mouth is the taste, and so on. The liturgy goes through the mouth into the body itself, into the lakes, or empty spaces, in the head and in the body, to the rustling scorpion in the throat that once enabled breath. The entire progression of the analysis of the components of a human being is familiar as the Tantric analytical meditation on finding the nonexistent self. In what part of the body does the individual life reside? If the self is not findable, transformation is possible. The limbs of the corpse become generalized as the limbs of Osiris, and emerge from the corpse as arms and legs of light, horns of light. Dynamic, alive, they become the limbs, the motion, of the universe. The ritual preservation of the dry shell of the body ensues with the measured placement of particles of Natron, salt, netcher—as it appears in English—is the holy substance that removes the putrifying liquid of the detested wild dog, death: nature.
Although it has been acknowledged throughout the text that the body is a mere shell, death is characterized as the decay that makes it fall apart.
The composition of the ephemeral body and the eternal elements within it on the south and east walls leads back to its essence, the eternal eye, reflected in the rising moon on the east gable.
The four gables within the monument signify different versions of the eye, represented in things that rise: the lotus, the thunderbolt, the star, the moon, and at last, on the west gable in the sarcophagus chamber, the serpent rising through the tree of the body. The lotus signifies the beauty of still water that mirrors the violent thunderstorm in the antechamber. In the sarcophagus chamber the dangerous serpent awakened as the inner eye mirrors the external eye as the calm of the beautiful shining moon.
The north wall presents a list of offerings appealing to the senses: delicious foods, perfumes, soft clothes. The name of each offered object is a pun on the verb that offers it, creating a sense of the illusory nature of the object. The offering then becomes the eye itself: the seeing, naming mind, take it, it is yours. This “falcon” eye, the eye as the falcon that flies up into the sky, is then apparently painted on the face of the dead, with the repetitive instruction take it, it is yours. The rapid, violent chanting story of the eye devoured by the wild dog follows, as the moon is eaten away by relentless nature, until there is nothing left. The cycle of time is complete. But then it comes back. The final words on this wall make your hair stand up:
Consider this, for the light is going down, the light is going down, it is your light.
The text in the sarcophagus chamber is infinitely more dense, more difficult, but more fluid than on the previous walls. The flight of the eye, the descent of the twin, the flight through the universe, the twin as the universe, the deathless aggregates of the body resolved back into the universe, the verbal examination of the body as an exercise in logic opening into the description of the actual preservation of the body with Natron, salt. The south and east walls of the sarcophagus chamber are the most difficult parts of the text because key elements can be translated in different ways, and there really is no way of knowing which is meant. The overall structure and the essential meaning are clear. Others may work out the details as they understand them.
The first confusing element, as noted above, is the repeated hieroglyphic phrase n-r-n-k. It can be read as either n-rn-k (in your name), or n-r-n-k (in your mouth). There are enough specific references to the mouth, indeed progressive references—teeth, esophagus, taste, the cavities of the skull—to indicate that the mouth itself is meant. Furthermore the phrase is introduced by the command open your mouth to release the falcon. The mouth is the opening into the vast empty interior of the body. Open your mouth... in your mouth... The second confusing element is again the hieroglyph nywt. In this long repetitive liturgy it occurs over and over, and is gradually elaborated upon and then flipped (it is specific as the interior of the body, then general, as empty space) in order to be given a larger meaning, as the text does something quite interesting. Having examined the elements of the body on the south wall, and then going into the mouth and examining by naming the actual physical features within the mouth, the final verse on the south wall states In your mouth is Orion: time itself. In other words, in your mouth is the thing within you that emerges and goes into the sky, hence, in your mouth is the sky. Thus in the following phrase that begins the text on the east wall—In your mouth is the taste of the nywt—the nywt hieroglyph is obviously not used to indicate a city in some other part of Egypt (as it has been translated previously, as Busiris). The hieroglyph would seem to indicate, as before, the general concept of the delineated circle, and as such, a sanctified space with a center like a mandala, here meaning the interior of the body. The east wall follows this concept, taking up the gradual elaboration of the meaning of the nywt hieroglyph in the body, using it to open the sacred space within the body to the sacred space of the sky that contains Sirius and the stars that define the limits of the south and the north. In other words it is the macranthropos, man as the cosmos, arrived at through a detailed verbal examination of the physical body itself as something that has been sanctified for the ritual purpose in the verses of linking the body and the sky. The link is the open mouth.
In the West death is cessation. The principle at work here is its opposite. Death is motion. What they’re getting at is a sense of constant motion that touches something deep in the heart of the mystery of things. Motion depends on an embedded pattern, in the sky and on earth. It is the pattern itself that is eternity. The whole motif of the sky and the Nile is continuation through the reliable repetition of a pattern. The doctrine of remembrance that appears in Plato’s Meno, as in these verses, is the pattern embedded in the mind. Death is a reawakening in which you must remember the deep structure of who you are and where you are, and whom you are with. The use of repetition throughout the text highlights the sense that this is a pattern and words are an essential part of it.
The verses that comprise this body of mystical poetry are a compendium of ritual formulas into which any name can be inserted. This is the importance of the ever-sought “treasure text,” the “golden tablets” of which this text is the source, the origin of all the derivative religious texts that were hidden away or buried with the dead, such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts, the Orphic tablets of gold, and the golden tablets Joseph Smith unearthed in Canandaigua that were the foundation of Mormonism. The buried writing is the most precious thing on earth, for it is a vehicle for the transformation of the soul, any soul. Hence the name is interchangeable and really is the least important element in the text. The theme throughout history of the buried body of writing that contains the lost essential secret is the sword in the stone, the secret weapon that brings the dead thing back to life.
This is the one part of the monument where the text continues from one wall to another, from the south wall onto the east wall of the sarcophagus chamber, as part of the same theme and structure. The south wall examined the body as the dead person identified with Osiris, going into the body itself through the mouth. Inside the mouth what is found is the emptiness within the body; in the final verse on the south wall this empty space becomes the sky. The east wall picks up this theme: inside the mouth is the nywt. It seems that the idea in this hieroglyph of the circular surround of the sky is joined with the physical idea of the mouth by the word taste. In your mouth is the taste of the nywt. In the five verses that follow, the circular space designated by this hieroglyph is defined: it is the temple of the bull (the life force); there is a southern star or limit to it, and a northern star or limit. In the fifth verse the point is made that within the sacred space inside the body that has been correlated to the sky is the eye that encircles your body. Within it, you are released, as your son the falcon you live. You enter the eye in the body and are released into space as the “falcon.” As in the circular sanctified space of a mandala, you are safe within it, but outside of it you would cease to exist (as what you are in the ceremony). The verses on the south and east walls are not simply declamatory but are describing an actual process in keeping with Tantric ceremony. In the second verse the doors of the horizon are now open, and (as in verse 1 on the north wall and verse 5 on the south wall of the antechamber) the soul goes dancing joyfully up into the beauty of the night sky.
The passages open into the description in verse 2 of the rising of the female serpent of great spiritual power, she rises, she rises, readily recognizable as kundalini, “the coiled one,” the sleeping female serpent that is coiled up at the base of the spine in every human being. It is the potential of the awakening of the concentrated nerve energy in the spine that shoots up like a live current of electricity when awakened. The goal of the religious practice is to harness and direct this potent blossoming current of electricity in the spine. This serpent is fierce and dangerous but the initiate controls the process, calms the serpent, with the focus created by beautiful words, the ritual words of the ceremony, and so sees the fruit of the practice: as the serpent of sparking nerve energy rises up the spine, youthful vigor is reborn. The serpent is awakened by means of the love that causes the spirit to rise, the arousal and reversal of sexual energy up the central channel or spine described on page 239. Thus the Tantric spell in verse 1 on the east wall of the entranceway and verse 8 on the west wall of the antechamber, dam the dam of the reassembled, reassembled joined to the light, is explained. This is what the beautiful words are meant to achieve: the control of the canal where the energy in the channel of the body is to be concentrated and then released. As in Tantra, the rising is described as a ground of transformation: Rise upon it, this ground of transformation. The great one blossoms as an arrow in you the blossoming image of a serpent gives birth to you in the image of a falcon. The chant then becomes it is he who goes with you, the falcon, the bull, Sirius, and so forth. The essence of the Egyptian religious system is presented here. This is how it actually happens, the blossoming image of a serpent gives birth to you in the image of a falcon. The channeling of the energy in the Tantric practice is what enables it to cross the sky.
Surrounded by the protection of his eye (the serpent), Osiris is the “father,” the avatar that is this vehicle, shorthand for the practice itself.
May you O ruler: Wordplay on hk (ruler) and hk (spell) in the line below.
Be granted the nine lest he be destroyed: Has the possible meaning Let the Pleiades rise so that Sirius will not be destroyed (will fail to rise in the lineup of stars). The verse proceeds to describe the path of Sirius through the sky. The glittering arc of the falcon is the path of Sirius across the sky; follow it as far as it goes. Spin here has the sense of keep on turning, going around, do not stop. The language of the poem mimics the motion of the turning sky.
As in a Tantric ritual in the Vajrayana, the negative forces must first be invoked and pacified. The text follows into an invocation of Set, with a description of what Set actually is: bad weather, the wild-dog seasonal storms of the south with their howling winds that tear up September, the harvest month. The presence is invoked and asked not to destroy the infant falcon as it rises, whose work it is to become strong. The verses continue with the sense of fluidity present on these two walls, the flow of the universe, you rise you descend you rise you descend, with the quality of pure motion, pure fluidity to the ultimate conclusion. Rejoice: the star is in the sky. Sirius rises.
The progression presented on the east wall of the sarcophagus chamber is as follows:
1. The empty space in the body approached through the opening of the mouth is sanctified and correlated with the sky.
2. Found within the empty space in the body is the vehicle, the eye that surrounds you within. The soul as initiate enters/makes use of this vehicle to be released as the falcon.
3. The great female serpent within is invoked and described as both terrifying and prompted upward by love. Harnessed and controlled by the words of the ceremony she rises she rises, bringing with her the red crown, the king of Egypt.
4. It is he who goes with you: Begins as the king enabled to rise by the rising of the female serpent, the great female of spiritual power, and then becomes the king’s progressive manifestations as the falcon, the bull, Sirius, and so on.
5. Rising as a star, the king dances with joy high in the night sky.
6. May he be granted three things: First, the nine lest he be destroyed, described in the sarcophagus chamber as the nine bright shining lights; are these the Pleiades that presage the rising of Sirius in the night sky, described in this room as the temple of foreknowledge? Second, the spiritual power of the words. And third, to be placed in the north sky with the stars that do not set.
7. The dangerous negative forces are addressed and pacified as Set, the bad weather of autumn in the south. It is requested that this entity not harm the infant soul rising as a newborn star, whose work it is to become strong.
8. Poetic passages capture the beauty and free-flowing movement of the sky: You flow with your father the universe, with your lion’s head of youth you rise, you open your way with bones of the wind, surrounded by the arms of your mother the night, you are pure in the lakes of air.
9. The sense captured in these images of the lovely rising of a bright star gives way to the beautiful chant you rise you descend you rise you descend, with progressive variation: you rise with the light of the universe, with time embracing the earth, with the temple that contains all things—the dark, you flow as the lightning, a soul washed white in the arms of your father the universe. By repetition, by reification, the soul as a star is made real.
10. The universe is then told to look at Unis and thus accept him as a son. There is then rejoicing as at the birth of an actual son.
11. The first food offerings are made (perhaps foreshadowed by the first phrase on the wall: in your mouth is taste). The soul, given its food, comes out as Osiris, miller of the holy nine, in the temple of foreknowledge. The soul is told to rise in the Milky Way. May you be given the falcon eye. May the door be opened to you. Say the words that Unis be able to move.
12. The purpose of the entire ceremony is then stated in the final verse on the east wall: Say the words that cause the green sprouting mounds, may you be with Orion among the living words. The soul as a rising star has become the principle of time itself, the thing that brings food and all sustenance to the earth.
As dawn draws near the eastern lakes of the sky
Welcome Child Lord, Protector of all that is on earth
In your mouth is taste: In your mouth is the eye that encircles the body, within it you are released. It is the falcon that releases you from the body, as the falcon becomes the emergent eye.
That the horizon has doors. That one dances with joy in the beauty of the sky. The red crown is the king of Egypt. The serpent is terrifying and conjured with erotic energy that causes the spirit to rise.
She is the great female principle of spiritual power that rises to the crown, so that he know his falcon, is able to make the transformation, throw out the light body. The ceremonial presence of the knife in the calling forth of the serpent, as awareness and the light body thrown out at once, again suggests the use in the ritual of the beautifully carved flint knives included in desert burials, and that this is a prehistoric system coming from elsewhere, involving the knowledge of the night sky, the conjuring of the internal serpent, a system to which the animal rows on the predynastic combs and knives, as star groups marking time, belong. The presence of both the knife and the loud cry of terror suggest that the conjuring of the serpent must mimic an encounter with a deadly poisonous snake.
The great one blossoms as an arrow in you: The blossoming image of a serpent gives birth to you, it is rising powerfully forth and out, like an arrow, the eye is now a fierce protector as a serpent that can go out and do things like harm enemies.
May you be granted the nine (lest you be destroyed): As for the storm, the bad weather of the south, of September, go away, do not blot out the young falcon, wild-dog thunderstorm with your clouds and rain.
In the hand/the protector/the great mill: A wordplay on dn/nd.
Provided with his bread (its food), your soul comes out: The first appearance of the wattled crane hieroglyph as the soul in this text.
The east wall presents the beginning of the offering ritual that is the dominant subject of the next, or north wall. Offerings are made to coax out the serpent. The sky is accurately called the temple of foreknowledge, the reading of seasonal time. The poem is about the invention of time, and it mimics throughout the turning of the sky, and the elements in the sky: birds, the howling winds, the thunder. The east wall ends with the point of the formula, say the words. You move as you say the words. The words are not describing something but, by imagining it, making it happen. The words are alive. Thus the snake and the walking stick are equated with each other: the words are life, as the snake is life. The words are what enable the soul to move.
The east gable of the sarcophagus chamber begins in a very fine hand and has a distinct quality throughout of fineness and beauty. There are two short words in the first two columns that read from right to left. After looking at them for a long time I realized that the first word in the first column is the word for “moon,” spelled backward or upside down as though deliberately hidden. The word is iahw, the hieroglyphic name for “moon,” a word that the Old Testament scholar Theodor Gaster identified as yahweh, a variation on the word iahw, the divine principle that is the bright shining light that shines through all things. The second column spells out the word for “moon” in Egypt today, qmr (qamar) and may well have been a word for “moon” in hieroglyphs as well. The hieroglyphic phrase in the second column reads ya qamar a nw, O moon of the flood. It is also possible to ignore the word qmr and read the plow hieroglyph mr as the word for “love,” as in O love of water. Egyptologists have translated this phrase as the hoers are aroused, evidently reading the plow hieroglyph as a hoe and as the verb “to love” at the same time. That the moon is indicated in the verse is confirmed by the use of already established tropes to describe the moon in the parallel phrases that follow: it is a milky breast, it is the falcon eye washed white. A verse that follows invokes the full moon, trembling as it rises from the desert hills across the Nile.
It is quite a beautiful verse. The moon is both burning (the onomatopoetic word ss) and cool. Its milky light, the food of the infant soul, is water from the lake of time. The verse explains this with the strange take on Osiris, who as the desert of death knows no hunger or thirst. Its essence sustains not the body but the heart. What it fills what it fills is the heart reads like a classic line from contemporary Egyptian poetry.
The second verse invokes the sky as a beautiful bird, O dappled one above, and pursues the idea of food that was introduced in the first verse on the east gable and continues as the primary subject through the north wall. The food of a star is space and light. This gives way to the idea of actual food. The light in the face of the bull of time would seem to be Aldebaran in Taurus, the rising of which prompts the rising of grain, which becomes bread and beer, the two staples of Egypt. How is this bread and beer attained? By means of an ox to plow the land. This opens into what at first seems to be a lecture on the production of food but turns out to be a riddle, the meaning of which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, involves the interpretation of numbers. As regards the production of food, there are two lights belonging to the sky and three lights belonging to the earth: the greater and lesser light of ancient times. The subject of the verse would seem to be the sky as a clock and its relationship to the production of food. The final verse presents the image of the soul merging with the sky, his sister, who is both empty space and the water hidden within it. The soul merges with the beautiful one he fears, the stormy sky, for it is she, even today, who makes all that is good in the world. The passage is reminiscent of the beginning of De rerum natura, “for without you is nothing beautiful made nor comes into being within the shores of light,” and Job 38, “out of whose womb came the ice and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?”
The question of the mathematical nature of this riddle—there are three lights in the sky, and two relevant to the earth—is open to discussion. The answer might be the sun and the moon, and the three phases, or shapes, of the moon. In the strange arresting poetic riddle mentioned above, Unis merges with the water, the source of water, the sky. It is the ultimate hierogamos. The sky is the great paradox: the mother, the sister, emptiness, space. Her nature is fire, for she is on fire with the stars. And her nature is water, the water that falls from the sky. The hieroglyphic word spelled out on the left, nk (wave/basket), is the word for sexual intercourse here, and a word for sexual intercourse in Egyptian Arabic today (in English it appears as nooky). The determinative for the word as it is used uniquely here is, remarkably, the downward-facing triangle, the Tantric icon of the feminine. The beautiful one he fears is the sky as the womb of all things, the womb of storms.
The strange and powerful, and beautiful verses on this gable present the concept that the moon, the Silver Eye, is food itself, for time brings the earth to fruition. The moon is then, on the north wall, itself eaten away, by time, by nature, by the wild dog.
Verse 2
The hieroglyphic determinative for “food,” aka/l, is the cormorant, Shakespeare’s greedy cormorant. The hieroglyphic phrase hwt aka is the contemporary Egyptian phrase hagat akl (things to eat).
Verse 3
Food resides in the eye of light, the holy eye.
Verse 5
Only in the desert can one understand the poignance of this verse: do not take its greenness away, the greening power of the rain wind, do not leave us with only the parching desert wind.
Verse 6
The moon is now itself described as the opener of the paths. The wild dog signals its rising on the path of the ecliptic. It is Thoth, who sleeps in the desert hills, trembling, as it rises over the Nile, a vivid description of the wavering moon rising over the water and the desert hills beyond. Thoth, the moon, as the luminous disembodied head, as St. John, who said, “Make my paths straight.”
The embalmer’s room for Unis is like a bird trap in the reeds, a lovely poetic conception.
Asheret, here the word for “trees,” is ashgar, shagara, the Arabic word for “trees.”
Here, also, is the reappearance of bwt, the detested (putrefying) liquid of the great wild-dog death, the natural process of death and decay.
Verse 7
The eye as Set is a composite hieroglyph: lightning merged with the rainbow and the feather. In keeping with the sense of the verse, the eye is the moon, the eye is the storm with its rainbow.
Verse 8
Pi stands alone at the end of the east gable, making it clear that pi is a magical or mantric sound.
The east gable introduces the moon and its relationship to water and to the eye. The full moon both swells and beautifies the flood, a sense that carries over onto the north wall. The moon and its relationship to water hence food morphs into the offerings of food and hinges on the question of naming them. Ritual offerings are made in the ceremony. The eye is the organ that recognizes and names things. Every object is presented by a verbal pun on its name, as though the nature of the thing resides in its name, and the name resides in the eye. Ultimately the eye itself is offered. The eye is Osiris. The dead person is Osiris. The eye is then eaten. This is the presentation of the central mystery. The eye is eaten bite by bite by the wild dog death, nature, until it is gone, and then... it comes back, opening like an eye waking after the dark night of sleep.
Thus the text on the north wall addresses the question of what the eye actually is, and involves the ritual creation of the eye. Unis, the dead person, is given and becomes the eye. The eye is then eaten and restored, as the moon is eaten and restored. It is the eye that destroys your face, your individuality. To bring you the falcon eye, to cool your heart with it, to bring you your milk of darkness, pouring out around you as you rise, that your heart never weary. As you rise there is a pervading voice, remain, remain. This wall maps out the actual ceremony of the preparation of the body, its preservation with salt, Natron, the religious instruction that goes with this, the offerings, each of which is a pun on a poetic line that is recited as it is offered. This is, one might say, the early version of communion. The falcon rises from the dead body and becomes the eye, the dynamic energy of light that is embodied by the stars, and particularly, here, by the moon. This “eye” is eaten as food itself, created by time and the seasonal coming of water; the eye is a metaphor for the physical manifestation of light as life on earth. The mystery again resides in the reversal of an essential taboo: the eye is eaten. The moon is both the eye of the sky itself and the breast of the sky that nourishes—with both its visible milky light and its association with water in terms of both the seasons and tides (the Nile has tides). The moon is eaten by nature, hence the ceremony of eating the eye is a metaphor for time, and life as the light energy that manifests in life on earth through the medium of time. The moon shrinking is seen as the water drying up, as the water in the growing desert of the Neolithic dried up, as moisture now goes out of the body in death, conjuring the sense that what you see is what you are. The moon reconstituted is the return of water, the return of life after death. In essence it is the cyclical nature of time.
You take the falcon eye. Its sweetness pervades you.
The idea of sweetness, that the eye is sweet, occurs again in the final verse on the west gable above the body; it is the idea that sense experience has a taste.
Here white and black eyes are mentioned, and would seem to indicate the light and dark phases of the moon. Elsewhere the green eye, the azure eye, and the red eye are all different aspects of the sky as time, greening, peaceful, stormy.
Some of the remarkable lines on this wall:
Grow green grow green cries the night
Aqaq = aeshaesh, a pun on the word for “bread,” the offering here, which is also the word for “life”
As gold it falls in you
It falls through the gates
As the end draws near the alchemical gold arises. It is the serpent that possesses the gold.
You are set according to your nature
Sit, be silent
Emerald-green Sirius you see
And the milky light of the moon
It is Your light
Your light
Consecrate with Natron the eighteen holy elements: Suggests that the holy eighteen in verse 1 on the north wall of the antechamber are in the body. The putrefying liquid of death is different from the liquid of life, water, conjured above. Natron, salt, netcher, because it prevents decay (and makes permanent, places the body beyond time), here used in sanctifying the mouth, hence the interior of the body, and identifying it with the holy principles.
His mouth is the milky mouth of a newborn calf: Presages the birth of the baby bull, mentioned on the east gable of the antechamber and the west gable of the sarcophagus chamber. The mouth is purified for the emergence of the eye, the falcon. The alabaster vessel is the body, the person no longer exists. Similarly in Tantra the body is described as a vase. The unknown country is death. The liquid going out of the moon parallels the liquid going out of the body. The mouth is dry. The serpent sleeps within in verse 16 is also the meaning of verse 7. The liquid of the spine is understood to be the same as saliva and semen, and goes out of the mouth as the light body.
The falcon eye destroys your face: You become a star, you become the moon, you are no longer a person, you shine rather than see. This wall explains the ankh sign—it is the open face of the falcon, the open top of the spinal column approached through the mouth. The falcon eye was imprisoned because it was hidden as the sleeping serpent inside you. The falcon is coming out of the mouth; wrath is part of it.
Foster children: Throughout the text the question is considered: What in fact is a child? What is birth? The soul as the child of Osiris is not born from the living body but from the head in death. You are released into Osiris; you become him.
Thoth provides the words: The words are “poured” like a libation. The offering of bolts of white linen represents flowing milk.
Receive the eyes the great one paints: In other words the female serpent is the great one. She “paints,” enables, the holy vision. Let her light the two lands.
This is the writing on the gable directly above the body in the coffin. The wall below the gable is covered with vivid geometrical designs, the color of which has lasted to this day. The columns on the gable read from right to left. The garden is in the first column, as a divided rectangle. The picture of a baby bull appears in the second column. The surrounding serpent is in the third and fourth.
The section of short riddles on the east wall of the antechamber mirrors this progression of riddles defining the inner serpent on the west gable of the sarcophagus chamber, as the walls themselves parallel each other in the monument. Here the riddles have a deeper layer of meaning. They conjure the sense of trying to catch or draw out the elusive snake, which is briefly visible and which you know is there. The gable begins with a tongue twister that hearkens back to the protection cord in verse 10 at the end of the north wall in the antechamber. Here the protection cord is the serpent that surrounds the universe, life.
Verse 1
Shenn’winn’wshen shenwenushen
Surrounded by the serpent by the serpent surrounded
The baby bull, the nature of starlight (hbs/sh),
Rises from the garden of earth
The serpent is a sibilant sound, and the sound of the word itself surrounds the word: The meaning of the phrase is “surround surround,” hence the serpent is conjured, its meaning is expressed in the sound. The serpent is not actually seen in the ceremony.
Cut from the head the life force: Again suggests the presence of the ritual knife, mentioned three or more times in the text previously, and clarifies the ritual passage on the east gable antechamber (so seizing the hairs on the top of his head...).
Verse 2
The life force has a twin, the ebony (i.e., invisible) serpent.
The verses are a progression, approaching the serpent in its different aspects, and gradually elaborating what it is, and what is happening at death.
Verse 3
The dappled green one watching absorbs him: Sees the face rising within his majesty. The phrase echoes the falcon the falcon is the green snake.
Verse 4
The clawed one which has no face: A riddle: neheb kaw (the one who yokes the energy centers) is the spinal cord within the spine with its claws, the sharp-edged vertebrae.
Verse 5
This verse is a riddle that explains what the serpent actually is: the serpent, the energy in you as it manifests as the nervous system in the body, is the energy that surrounds and turns the universe. A series of complex metaphors is presented. The snake as the nervous system is understood as electricity or fire, based on empirical experiential knowledge of the range of states of consciousness rooted in the body, with their states of expanded, heightened perception. Here there is a close relationship between word and thing—a beautiful example of the exploration and exploding of a metaphor. In the verse is the gradual development of punning on the word psh (to bite). The verse explains the ankh sign, the hieroglyph for “life”; it is the open face of the falcon, the top of the spine, appoached through the mouth of Osiris, the corpse.
It is not a serpent of earth that bites... the two lights seen: This is the manifestation of the twin. The hieroglyph in this verse is the anatomical picture of an open vertebra.
Verse 6
The bones are the columns of the body. They collapse.
The essence of the lion will remain as the falcon is produced.
The lion, the sweetness, the eye, the collapse of the columns: Suggests again the riddle of Samson.
Verse 7
Meti meti meti: In the Tantric system the reversal of semen upward through the body, or more specifically the erotic energy that generates semen, is the source of the creation of the light body. The semen is reversed up into the central channel to emerge from the head as the light body, instead of out of the body in the procreative act. That is the meaning of this verse, elaborated in verse 9. It generates the falcon of light, the energy rising up and out through the body.
Verse 8
The snake is pure light: The words here are the words from the beginning of the text; there they are used of the rising of stars, here of the rising of internal energy, hr, sbn (come out, rise).
Verse 9
The entire process is being explained in an unfolding sequence of riddles, mirroring the sequence on the east wall of the antechamber.
Verse 10
The vulgar and ignorant will gather around the temple, on the outside, like vultures, and will misunderstand what is happening inside. They will not be able to enter, because they have not solved the riddle: that this reversal of sexual energy within is an inner purification.
Verse 11
Kbbhititibiti: The sound alone is relevant here. This is the sound of a snake. The snake is addressed. The alabaster vessel is destroyed, the body is destroyed. The snake is not what killed it but is eternal life. The system described here makes sense out of the story of the death of Cleopatra, who was voluntarily “bitten by an asp.” As Egyptian royalty she would have undergone the death ceremonial of the serpent cult. And also the cryptic words of Jesus Christ, “Those who follow me will raise up serpents.” It also makes sense of the story of the blind seer Tiresias, who saw two serpents twined together and struck them, and then became female for seven years and saw that the female is where the power lies: the power resides in the female serpent rising within.
Verses 12–13
These read as though an observation is being made in the ceremony that the mouth is dry—it is just the mouth of the corpse, the supposed serpent within is asleep, is nowhere to be seen, and the process is not working. This human-sounding, casual observation is then countered by the liturgical language of the following verses, which state that the liquid has been successfully raised up through the spine, then coaxed with offerings of food as though the metaphorical serpent were an actual animal. Then stating what it is: it is the alchemical gold, it is your flesh becoming gold, the light rising within. This is what is meant by the alchemical (meaning Egyptian) transformation into gold.
Does this mean the ritual has or has not been accomplished?
Verse 13
Thus the king has been absorbed in the rising serpent.
Verse 14
There is the serpent—don’t you see it? The verses track the process as it unfolds. The contrast of the snake and the falcon is again resolved.
The wondrous serpent creates the flow of falcon flesh
The green reed given on the burnt ground glides away
This verse contains a hieroglyph that looks like a predynastic rock drawing from the Egyptian desert of a herd of cattle. The herd is of souls; it is the herd of stars.
Verses 15–16
The liquid of the spine goes out of the mouth: The liquid continues to rise; the idea is that semen is the fluid in the spine rising up, as in the Tantric physiology, meaning the process of release is working.
Verse 17
As in a point-counterpoint dialectic, again a contrary voice comes in, indicating that this is all a ritual: “This has not worked, it is not real, there is no serpent.” Put out the ceremonial fire. There’s no point. There’s nothing there. The house is the body. There is no hidden serpent of gold. A serpent is an animal that bites.
Verse 18
The ceremony concludes with a cryptic image, a riddle: There are two trees within the body, how sweet are their twigs, the light is the bread within them, the light is the lion within. It is the green reed, the new life that emerges from the body. The word that defines what kind of trees they are (as the specificity of nature is a factor throughout hieroglyphs themselves, and this Egyptian text) is the hieroglyphic tree name khasat. In Arabic it is alkhasat, in English “acacia,” “cassia,” “locust,” the wild pea tree that miraculously grows in the desert, the flowers of which are called nuar (lights). This is the desert tree whose pod is the hieroglyph for sweetness, the food of the Hamadryas, Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, the luminous head, whose meat was locusts and wild honey, whose voice cries out from the wilderness, the desert hills. The cassia is the cinnamon tree, the powdered bark of which was smeared on the skin of the dead in Egypt. There are two trees. The first is the skeletal structure of the living body, around which entwines the second, the serpentine life force, the nervous system, which heightened and released becomes the Tantric all-seeing eye released at death. Thus, as Plato observed, “Sweetness is knowledge, knowledge is sweet.”