Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [33]
Death is before me today
like the fragrance of lotus
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
The repetition emphasizes that death can be a release from the troubles of life. This is not the standard notion of life in Egypt, where death is avoided and life is loved, but an exploration of doubt, anomie, and depression; and that accounts for its remarkable power. All the Egyptian love lyrics and exuberant scenes of life in Egyptian wall painting show how strange this dialogue was. It was an eloquent paean to the end of an unhappy life. The promise was for greater felicity in the next life.
Jan Assman finishes his discussion of this articulate and sad poem by saying that it is extraordinary and perhaps characteristic of a particular moment in Egyptian history:
The basic problem is what an individual does with his or her own solitariness in the context of a culture that constructs the person in terms of plurality. How can a person built on communication and constellation persist when communication fails and constellations break? It is the same question that underlies Whitehead’s famous definition: “Religion is what an individual does with his own solitariness.”47
The answer that the Dialogue of the Man with his Ba provides is the answer of religion.48
Akh: Felicity on the Other Side and Its Attainment
ASSMANN SUGGESTS further, in another work, that the notion of a consistent “self” was reached in parallel fashion with the development of the notion of a transcendent akh, the glorified body of the afterlife.49 It was, he professes, the development of the notion of ma’at, justice, right order, that allowed this consistency to develop.50 If ma’at could be achieved in this life, could it not be achieved in parallel fashion in the next life? The same notions of justice and equity, which followed good behavior in this life, ought also to obtain in the life to come. For this to develop, one needed to bring the notion of a courtroom from this life to the next. One had to develop a more sophisticated notion of the principle of identity between the person in this life and the next, a notion of “person” who could be punished and rewarded for behavior in this life. I would suggest that it is the glorified self, the akh, which is in some ways the completed form of the Ba, the “transcendent self” after death that provides the key, as it were, for knitting together a unified notion of the self in Egyptian culture, making the imaginative exercise of an afterlife indispensable for coming to full terms with ourselves as persons.
The condition of an Egyptian in the afterlife was first of all dependent upon correct behavior in this life but also apparently dependent upon amassing enough possessions to use in the next world, and more importantly on completing the correct funeral rituals, at least in the eyes of the priests, who wrote the texts. When the dead achieved akh status, usually translated “glorified being,” he had evidently completed all necessary steps for reaching the afterlife. This, no doubt, implied the attainment of priestly ritual purification, mummification, and burial. To achieve this status was to achieve the balanced and enduring order of justice, or ma’at, as it was known in Egyptian. This implied right order in the cosmos and right order on earth, brought by the power and authority of the pharaoh but maintained by the Osiris priests, who had the primary responsibilities for mummification.
By the Middle Kingdom, the tombs also depict star charts and figures quite clearly, presumably to help the dead navigate their trip, thus adding the starry heaven to the vocabulary of images of immortality available to the Egyptians for decorating tombs. In particular, the north star was invoked as “the star that cannot perish” a proof from nature that the pharaoh was immortal, since this star is at the top of the heavens, just where the pharaohs should go.
Burial was the beginning of this upward-bound process. The continued survival and well-being of the royal and aristocratic dead also depended