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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Egypt and the Life After

I've just finished the chapter on Egypt in Alan Segal's Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion.

I'm very interested in the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma’at which is truth and the "rational working of the world" and often embodied as a single ostrich feather or a young goddess with multi-colored wings wearing the feather in her hair. Ma’at prefigures the Logos concept, and I don't believe it would be stretching to say that Ma’at is also "the word" especially as hieroglyphs were seemingly as important to that system of religion as what they signified. Through a little further reading on ma’at, I've begun to understand that concept as neccessary to the reading of the remains of early Egyptian culture as the concept of the tri-partite soul is to, say, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan consciousness (I could have said Dante...). That the seed of the tri-partite soul was present in Egypt's divisions of the soul which included Ba (personality) and Ib (heart or consciousness). Personality, in the context of a society that valued rational order and therfore a lot of adherence to the governing principles and principality, wasn't so important. However, as the rites of the cult of Osiris became more available to more people (i.e. not just Pharoah and his closest), the religion had to develop. The judgement scene developed wherein individuality became a deciding factor in a person's attainment of immortality. The self, therefore, also became more important to the living.
So, in my last post, I mentioned how I value thinking and consciousness. What if the scale of Anubis in comparing the heart and the feather weighs how much the person valued their own consciousness, therefore his self, compared to how much "weight" they gave to reason and order (i.e. the good of the state) in their life? Just a thought.

This is how I pursue poetry.

Unrelated except for the word "poetry":
to a co-worker I said that my love and I drink tea and read poetry to each other, and he said, "Just like Alan Rickman and his wife, huh?"