Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [32]
Indeed, there is good evidence that ancient Egyptians did not normally understand themselves as a single “self” at all but rather as a kind of harmony among forces. For example, the chagrin of love can be described in terms of dissociation of heart and self:
My heart quickly scurries away
when I think of your love (= my love of you).
It lets me not act sensibly,
It leaps up from its place.
It lets me not put on a dress,
nor wrap my scarf around me;
I put no paint upon my eyes,
I’m even not anointed. (Chester Beaty Papyrus: C 2.9; C 3.1)44
Great fear is likewise understood as a dissociation. Here is quoted Sinuhe, the main character of a famous Egyptian story, before pharaoh:
Stretched out on my belly I did not know myself before him
while this god greeted me pleasantly.
I was like a man seized by darkness.
My Ba was gone, my limbs trembled,
My heart was not in my body,
I did not know life from death. (Sinuhe B 252-56)45
Thus, the coherence of “the self” in ancient Egypt is problematic. One of the most famous wisdom pieces in Egyptian literature is the Dialogue of a Man and his Ba (sometimes called The Dialogue of the Self and the Soul). The “self” addresses the ba and is answered by it. Since this dissociation did not happen in ordinary circumstances, it was an important and extraordinary condition, symbolizing great emotional distress. The subject of this important internal dialogue was whether to “go away” (ŝmj) or not, a conventional way to express “to die.” In this context, we see a man contemplating suicide, asking Hamlet’s famous question: “To be or not to be?”
It is unclear whether the self says that there is no afterlife or there is no earthly remembrance of those who have gone on. The moral of the story is that what is worse than death is never to have been born.46 It is life that provides us with enjoyment. But just as important to notice is that Egyptian anthropology had not quite unified “the self” into a single, cognizant being. We also notice this contemplation in early Greek thought, but there we can trace a gradual rise of a single concept of a thinking, transcendent self. Here all three conceptions continue in use. In both cultures-early Greek and early Egyptian-the separation of the self into several different parts is correlated with the various social situations in which a person was expected to participate in the afterlife: present at the tomb as ka with the mummified body, in the heavens with the divine ba or akh residing in the house of Osiris, while enjoying the Duat in the “field of rushes,” receiving gifts at the “field of offerings,” riding the “barque of millions,” and many more. There was no need to posit a single experiencing self as long as the person appeared in all the contexts that society determined. A great many of the aspects of the self specifically have to do with the ways in which the dead were expected to participate in the institutions of social life in Egypt, either within religious rituals or in the journey to the afterlife, in which such scenes as judgment recapitulated the values of Egyptian culture. So, in important ways, the notion of a consistent self was a product of human speculation about the nature of the afterlife. We shall see this point repeated again and again in various ancient cultures.
Returning to the plight of the supplicant in the Dialogue of a Man with his Ba, we see that the condition of the soul got worse before it got better. The third stanza contains the widely quoted ode on the comforts of death:
Death is before me today
Like a sick man’s recovery,
Like going outdoors after confinement.
Death is before me today
Like the fragrance of myrrh,
Like sitting