Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [34]
The Social Sources of Egyptian Afterlife
TO WHOSE benefit was this religious system? The social implications of this system are obvious. Immortality was the prerogative, first of the pharaoh, and only afterwards of his most trusted and intimate retinue.51 It was essentially provided by the Osiris priests who knew how to embalm the body of the pharaoh and hence how to benefit from royal patronage. Since they dispensed salvation, in sacred spheres they were more powerful than the pharaoh himself. The priests and the pharaoh thus cooperated in the earthly power whose purpose was to provide the land with stability and peace, the pharaoh with eternal life, symbolized by ensuring the state of continuity between Osiris and Horus. At first, the attainment of immortality was closely associated with the state cults, controlled by powerful priesthoods. Even as the attainment of life after death became more and more democratic, more and more individual entrepreneurs of the afterlife sprang up, led by more and more needed priesthoods, embalmers, and funeral directors.
Essentially, the state cults and their entrepreneurial imitators were supported by those who could pay to have embalming done. They, in turn, benefited from the stability of political power which the pharaoh enforced, further implying that service to the gods brought natural stability as well as political stability and completed the circle by promising an eternal afterlife for anyone who respected ma’at.52
A number of histories of Egypt trace the continuing “democratization” or popularization of the immortalitization process through the succeeding dynasties.53 The Coffin Texts, collections of inscriptions taken from funerary stelae of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2160-1580 BCE), and The Egyptian Book of the Dead, succeeding Egyptian religious documents compiled in the New Kingdom (c. 1539-1075 BCE), both attest to the expanding clientele of persons who applied for and attained the akh state. Whether this represents a real democratization or merely an expansion of the literary record to nonroyal persons cannot be clearly distinguished. But the Coffin Texts allowed a wider circle of people the immortalitization of the pharaoh by a union with the gods.
Along with this seeming expansion of divine membership came an increasing “Osirification” of the mortuary ritual. The dead person was seen as an avatar of Osiris, with the ritual surrounding the Osiris myth coming to predominate in funerary practices. Finally, this seems to parallel the weakening of kingship during The First Intermediate Period, followed by the strengthening of kingship again under the Theban rule of the early Middle Kingdom.
A number of scholars see this progressive identification of the dead with Osiris as a backwards step in religious evolution because it seemed to make the success of the process more and more dependent upon correct Osirian ritual practices alone. This is a bold, modern, Western, value judgment. As S. G. F. Brandon noted, it is particularly interesting that concomitant with the wider clientele of persons eligible for eternal life came the scene of the judgment of the soul in the underworld.54 The judgment of the “soul” was what allowed nonroyal persons into the afterlife.
An Egyptian word for the self-conscious self is the “heart,” as it is in Israel. In contrast to the Old Kingdom, where the heart played no role at all, the heart became a central topic in the tomb inscriptions starting in the Intermediate Period and the Early Middle Kingdom. With the coming