Ancient Egyptian Texts for the Afterlife?

To get a better sense of the function of the funerary texts, we thus need to think of them alongside other ritual texts, with which they turn out to have a lot in common. A characteristic feature of Egyptian ritual texts (and those of many other cultures) is the application of mythological patterns analogous to the situation that the ritual seeks to influence. This is easiest to illustrate when the situation is concrete and well defined, as in rituals of healing. For example, a ritual for a patient stung by a scorpion might draw on the mythological situation of the young god Horus who was brought up in the marshes of the Nile Delta under his mother Isis’s protection from dangerous animals. By identifying the patient with Horus (and perhaps secondarily or by implication the healer with Isis), a pattern is established to which the ritual, if successful, makes the real-life situation conform. In simple terms, the patient becomes protected and healed just like Horus was protected and healed.

This basic mechanism is found across Egyptian ritual practices whether private, cultic, or funerary. Rather than taking such mythological descriptions literally because they happen to be written in a tomb, we should in all cases see them as deliberate uses of conceptual patterns from mythology to affect real-life situations. This also helps us understand why funerary texts so often appear to be contradictory, which would be a real problem if they provided literal descriptions of the afterlife, but is perfectly acceptable in a ritual as long as the underlying conceptual patterns are compatible.

But what can the funerary texts then tell us about ancient Egyptian thought about life and death, if we cannot simply read them literally as statements of afterlife beliefs? To address this question, we need to look at the texts at a more general level of what mythological patterns they deploy and include considerations of where the texts may have originated – before being written on a tomb wall or funerary papyrus.

Not surprisingly, much of the mythology is modeled on the fate of the murdered god Osiris who provided a precedent for every person who died. Central in the mythology is the theme of kingship being passed on to Osiris’s legitimate heir, who was not merely a manifestation of the dead father’s life force, but also took over his social role. This concept is thus less about the kind of personal salvation scholars steeped in popular Christianity expected to find, and more about the balance of the interrelationship between the living and the ancestors in social life.

But the mythology and concepts in the funerary texts are much richer than just the Osiris mythology. Other frequent roles taken up by the deceased are that of the creator god Atum and other primeval beings. This can be understood within the conceptual framework of Egyptian creation myths where the myriad things of the created world are continuously brought into being from a unitary source. The movement of the deceased is essentially the opposite, as he or she regresses from a distinct individual back towards the primeval unity. This ontological regression or “reset button” is closely connected with the status of being an ancestor, but is also drawn upon by the priesthood in the temple cult, or healers in private rituals.

In this manner, the funerary texts can indeed tell us much about Egyptian thoughts about death and life, but only if we abandon the 19th-century intuition that they provide literal descriptions of the tribulations leading to personal salvation and eternal life.