Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [428]
The lack of agreement about what carried the identity of the ancient Egyptian into the afterlife points out local differences. That they were never synthesized suggests that Egyptian religion did not need to develop an overriding notion of the self, if the ancestor showed up at all the different required ritual occasions. When the body of the Pharaoh, who was Horus on earth, was preserved by the priesthood of Osiris, his person was reunited with his divine father Osiris. The medium of preservation was the body itself, which could be preserved through the dry desert climate aided by the desiccant Natron. When the body was elaboratedly prepared and wrapped for its future life, the ancestor received all the proper spells and prayers for a successful journey to the afterlife. But that symbol came more and more to equal the other forms of postmortem life-the ba, the ka, and the akh, with the heart carrying the conscience and rationality.
Such a great advantage could not be available only to Pharaoh for long. More and more people were eventually included in his fortunate afterlife, but new, moral, entrance requirements were added. Only those who were deserving of the rewards of transformed existence by personal acts of piety to the gods and service to the state qualified. Unlike the Pharaoh, who answered for the government in this life, the newly privileged transformed souls had to answer for their behavior in an elaborate judgment of the dead, where the soul was judged against the feather of Ma’at, good order and justice.
The process of including more and more people in the afterlife was a gradual one. But, given a long enough duration (and Egypt had time to spare), changes are apparent in the notion of the afterlife. Ancient Egypt had stable government for over three thousand years. Because of archaeology and ancient historians, the history of ancient Egyptian is available at a glance, making correlations between religion and politics and sociology easier than it has been.
The relatively complete record of Egypt’s history allows us to see that even their heaven was manipulated by their priests, kings, and writers. This is symptomatic of afterlife beliefs throughout the world. Over a generation or two, they appear stable and unchanging. But through the eyes of an ancient historian, the vast changes in their notion of the afterlife becomes entirely clear. This necessarily relativizes all views of the afterlife and points out how easily they are affected by social circumstances. Any intelligent understanding of the afterlife must eventually account for parallel development between the concept of the afterlife and the people’s social world.
MESOPOTAMIA
In Mesopotamia the afterlife was less optimistic; it was a poor consolation compared to the Egyptian notion of immortality of the gods. If humans are lucky, we can achieve divine wisdom, but we never become immortal. Everyone must die. The fate of the dead is hardly pleasant in this culture, condemned to shadowy existence in the underworld. Gilgamesh tried for immortality but lost it. Utnapishtim, the only mortal who had escaped death, explains that no one else will ever be given this divine reward. Gilgamesh both realizes that immortality is impossible for humans and also becomes the king of the dead.
Even the formidable goddess Inanna who, as the planet Venus, regularly descended beneath the horizon, could not herself escape the clutches of her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld; her deliverance by means of Geshtinanna and Dumuzi had permanent climatological effects on the world but scarcely effected the fate of the departed. The situation is scarcely better in Canaanite culture. Access