Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [35]
I am truly an official of great heart, a sweet lovable plant.
I am no drunkard, I was not forgetful;
I was not sluggish at my task.
It was my heart that furthered my rank,
It was my character that kept me in front.56
In the earliest Egyptian period, the pharaoh himself was described as attaining his immortal state upon the successful completion of the funerary rites, presumably because the pharaoh himself served as judge in this world. As more and more people were able to attain to akh state, however, a judgment scene developed in Egyptian literature. Prior to the Instruction for King Merikare (found in wisdom texts dated around 2100 BCE) the idea appeared that a person’s destiny depends upon the absence of complaints made against him or his ability to refute them in the heavenly court. In this particular wisdom text, the emphasis of the judgment shifts to the person’s own moral achievement. The person’s deeds were pictured as heaps of good and ill to be laid in front of the court. Furthermore, the striking image of the balance of the god Re, in which he weighed ma’at, became a major theme of the judgment scene.
A major new theme, found in the Coffin Texts, was the depiction of the dangers of the journey through the earth. The earth should not have kept the dead king imprisoned in its depths when he must always strive for the sky. The Coffin Texts fairly swarm with chthonic demons and other obstructing forces. Perhaps this dates from the growing practice of burying the court officials of the king around his pyramid in masteba tombs, most of which have not survived the ravages of the ages.
In the Amduat, the pharaoh traveled to his final reward through the hours of the night. He undergoes several adventures. Initially, he begins in his boat but must also navigate through the desert where the boat transforms into a snake. He encounters trials at almost every hour of the night. He finally was reborn in the East in the morning. Egyptian descriptions of beings of the underworld, the enemies of Osiris are represented in either human form or by hieroglyphs denoting “shadows” or “souls.” They were drawn in pits of fire. The damned were condemned to a “second death,” which was evidently equivalent to consignment to a “hell” in the afterlife. Brandon suggests that Egyptian mortuary cults were essentially magical techniques for the acquisition of immortality.57 So, there were other aspects of Egyptian religion as well, aspects in which moral behavior was not emphasized and monitored, especially when the epic adventures of the pharaoh in the afterlife were narrated. Pharaoh’s subjects, on the other hand, needed to demonstrate moral behavior to gain a glorified afterlife.
Akhenaten and The Egyptian Book of the Dead
THE REIGN OF Amenhotep IV, the famous Akhenaten, provided a brief respite in the process. A member of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and possibly the father of King Tutankhamon (born Tutankhnaten), Akhenaten briefly changed the religious culture of New Kingdom Egypt. As his name change suggests, he stopped patronizing the traditional gods of Egypt in favor of the single cult of Aten, the sun disk itself, with the result being that the traditional cults fell into disfavor. He even changed the capital to a newly constructed city, Akhetaten, where he and his wife Nefertiti were free to develop the new cult.58 Erik Hornung suggests that his religious reform, worshiping the religion of light, totally stopped the mortuary practices of the Osiris priesthood.59 As Hornung says:
The wakening of the dead to new life was no longer accomplished nocturnally in the netherworld, but in the morning, in the light of the rising sun and at the same time as those still alive. All was now oriented toward the east, and indeed, even the tombs lay in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten-in the text of the earlier boundary stelae Akhenaten gave directions to prepare his tomb there, “where the sun rises”; the “West,” previously the mortuary