Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [31]
When the pharaoh died, he returned to his father Osiris, tracing the way to the afterlife. Ascent could be effected in any number of ways-by bird or beetle, for instance-but a favorite image was of a passenger on the boat of the sun, which appeared close to earth at dawn and dusk and mounted high in the sky the next day. The person, or his ka, survived death in the sky but his image remained on earth to receive the rites and rituals which were due the departed.
This image made of the departed was as close a likeness as possible, considered to be a physical embodiment of the individual, so that the ka could take up residence and receive offerings. The common word for statue, shesep, probably originally means “a receiver,” and when used in the phrase shesep-r-ankh (a receiver in order to live, a receiver of life), it denotes the capacity of the image to serve as a “receptacle” for the vital image of the deceased.36 The Sphynx, the famous human-headed lion at Giza, was originally one such shesep-r-ankh on a grand scale and originally supported a mortuary temple for a cult to the ka of the king at its base. Attention to the image as the receptacle of life-giving spirit may explain the meticulous attention given to producing a lifelike mummy. Like a hieroglyph, a lifelike mummy conveyed the essence, or identity, of the dead person. This conception of the image possibly also lies behind the entire hieroglyphic writing system of ancient Egypt and is mirrored in the commemorative cult, where the priestly establishment dramatized the process of immortalization in ritual. In a way, the pharaoh’s mummy becomes his hieroglyphic spell generating his immortality.
The grave was also visited by the ba, another and in some ways more important Egyptian soul concept, which was often represented as a human-headed bird.37 Like the ka, the ba was a complex and diverse phenomenon, whose use changed through time and depended on the referent as well.38 Proving that even the iconography was not stable, the ba was also designated as a ram or a ram’s-headed divinity, as the nocturnal sun god was sometimes understood to be a ram, probably because the syllable ba also could mean “ram.” His barque traveled on a watercourse that was the otherworldly mirror image of the earthly Nile, returning him to the place where he was to rise each morning in the East. At first, only the pharaoh was described as having a ba, so it may function as the pharaoh’s divinity in this context. Gradually, however, first the court and then, by the New Kingdom, the nobility and royal bureaucracy were described as having a ba, which seems to parallel their participation in the afterlife.39 Especially from the New Kingdom onwards, the focus of Egyptian interest in the afterlife appears to have concentrated more and more on the realm of Osiris underground.
No one knows precisely how the ka, ba, and akh interact, were synthesized, or how all of these related to “spirits,” “ghosts,” or “demons.” It sometimes seems as if the transformed dead successfully reunite the three aspects of life.40 Probably, these words, like the complicated pantheon itself, reflect local differences brought into a national system. Very likely there were different explanations for the three major types of soul even in antiquity.41 The word “shadow,” shut or showt, could also have the force of what we call “soul” in a general sense.42 But all these different words occurred in different rituals performed at the tomb, in the presence of the departed, and yet the departed was also enjoying the afterlife in the Duat, the Egyptian name for the afterlife land. The fact that these several aspects of the person could remain separate after death, to be reunited at night with special ceremonies-and indeed did not congeal into a single notion of soul until the Hellenistic