Black Spirituality Religion : The Descent of the Soul into Amenta- Part 1

Part 2

The incarnation for the soul, was its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that could be poetically dramatized as "death." The inability to comprehend any but a phyisical sense of the word "burial" has left us victims to poetic fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation of the crucifixion,, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to held by any religious group. Not even woodland nations have wretchedly missed the true sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased the human mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.

The incarnation of the Gods were forewarned that their venture into flesh would be successful on condition that they achieved it "without merging with the darkness of body." They were to make a magnetic connection with the animal body by means of a linkage of their currents of higher life with the forces playing through the nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be in a position to pour down streams of vital power into the body, but were not to sink their total quantum of divine intellection into the sense life of the "beast". They were to hover over the physical life of the body, touch it with divine flame, but not be drawn down into it. To fall into this dereliction would be to sin, to lose a measure of their vivific life and eventually to die. For there are always two deaths spoken of in the books of the past. It was death, in the first place, for them to come under the heavy depression of fleshly existence. This was the first death. But to sink farther down and be lost in the murks of animal sensualism to a degree that made a return to their heavenly state next to impossible, was to suffer the "second death" of which the sould ever stood in fear and terror in the old texts. The first death was the incarnation; the second was failure to rise and 'return to Neter."

The soul, then approached the "confines of death" and upon it's approach. and at the moment of it's divulsion from it's seat on high, there ensued an intermediate or preparatory stage, a partial loss of conciousness. Each step downward is preceeded by a swooning into unconciousness, and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower levels in mental element or compound of mental elements, seperated during the swooning from higher and more spiritual enlightened elements.

This swooning on the downward path to earthly death is likened to a falling asleep. Jesus' assertion that lazarus was not deat but only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened, is a picturing of the same condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of the earth-bound Ausar in Kemet. "That is Ausar, who is not dead but sleeping in Annu, the place of his repose, awaiting the call that bids him to come forth by day."

"Ausar in Annu, like Lazarus is Bethany, was not dead but sleeping. In the text of Her-Hetep (Rit, Ch 99), the speaker who personates Heru, is he who comes to awaken Ausar out of his sleep. Also in one of the earliest funeral texts it is said of the sleeping Ausar, "The Great One waketh, the Great One riseth. The "decease" of Amenta were not looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless of body, motionless of heart. Hence Heru comes to awaken the sleepers in their Qeres (coffins).
 
Part 3

If incarnate life is the burden of this death, then release from it must presuppose a liberation from the thralling "dead weight." Reputed savants in the field give no evidence of having the remotest apprehension which would have taken them into the temple of truth, the threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew that the ancients styled this life "death," but they were unable, apparently, to apply the connotation to the bible and theology. The obsessions of current thought were too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their own premises.

It is sometimes true that archaic usage of the word "death" makes it cover the period following the occurrence of death in its common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation was regarded as a continuing experience, the periodical rythym of of release from the body no more breaking the sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep break the continuity of the experience of the days. But as our waking days are the important parts of our earthly activity, the nights being but interludes of repose and renewals of strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our larger lives are primarily signficant phases of our mundane history. The ancient seers both knew more about the subjective experiences of the soul when out of the body and were less concerned with them than we are today. They regarded the phenomenon of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less automatic reaction of the soul to the sum of its impressions in its last incarnation, a kind of reflex, threshing over the events of the life just closed. They would have regarded it as preposterous to use the vaporings of the spirits for the tenets of a religion. They were but products of a mental automatism set up by the engrossments of the last life. The post-mortem existence of the soul was only the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as comparatively inconsequential to the larger process of conscious living. Theologically, "death" was the bodily life on earth, but comprising its two aspects of sleeping and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive unity. Activity in the body during the waking phase of the "death" was alone determinative of destiny. By unforunate diversion of the original cryptic sense, the unimportant portion of the experience, the interlude between lives, became the locale to which practically all religious values were shunted when esoteric knowledge was lost. The meaning of all religion has in consequence fled from earth, where it properly belongs and where alone its true value is realized, to heaven, where present focusing of meaning has little utility for man.





It must be prefaced that the Kemetic writings use more than one character to personate the incarnating god. We may find Ausar, or Ra himself, or Atum, or even Heru taking the role. Then there are the two characters which we meet most often "Speaker" and the Manes in the ritual. There appear to be distinctly the soul. Sometimes again it is represented as the 'deceased,' and again as the "Ausarified deceased." Besides, the names of four or more kings are used to stand for diety: Unas, Ani, Pepi and Teta, frequently with "the" prefixed.

It is definately corroborative of the thesis here defended that the central god figure in Kemetic theology, Ausar, the Father, in distinction from Heru, the Son, is consistently assigned the functions, prerogatives and sovereignty of the "king of the dead." He is hailed in a hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld, or as Lord of Amenta, or Hades. The correct locating of which region in theology is one of the major aims of this work. That this dismal limbo of theology is actually refers to the earth, is a fact which has never once dawned upon the intellectual horizon of any modern savant, however high his name. Ausar, the "Speaker," the "Manes," the incarnating deity, is indeed the king of the realm of the dead. For we are those dead,, and the god within us cam to rule this kingdom according to the arcane meaning of every religion. For our ancestors in Kemet called the coffin "the chest of the living."
 
Part lV

Death, in the ancient usage did not imply extinction, the Manes in the Ritual says: "After being buried on earth, I am not dead in Amenta." Heru knows that though he enters the realm of the dead, he does not suffer annihilation, he is "buried in the deep, deep grave," he will not be destroyed there. He will rise out of the grave of the (living) body in his final resurrection.

Such a passage as the following carries in its natural sense the allocation of the term "dead" to living inhabitants on earth, not the spirits of the deceased: "The peoples that have long been dead come forth with cries of joy to see thy beauties every day." It pertainst to the resurrection. Another text says: Tanenet is the burial place of Ausar." Tanenet, along with Aukert, Shekhem, Abtu (Abydos), Tattu, Amenta and half a dozen others, is a designation for the earth as the place of burial for the soul living in death.

Cognate with the idea of death is the presumption of burial in a tomb. grave, coffin or sepulcher. Evidence of the prominence of these terms in relation to the descent into earth life is not wanting in the old texts. The matter is not left in any state of doubt or confusion. In Kemet we have Ausar as the god who "descended into Amenta, and was dead and buried there," Gerald Massey's succinct statement covering the point is: "The buried Ausar represented the god in matter," not in a hillside grave. The hillside grave, however ws a typograph used to designate the non-historical burial in the body. What could be more pointed and conclusive than Massey's other declaration: "In the astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin of Ausar, the Coffin of Amenta, which Set, the power of darkness, closed upon his brother when he betrayed him to his death" "The coffin of Ausar is the earth of Amenta," he says again. It is worthy of note that the shrine in the Kemetic Temples, representing the vessel of salvation, was in the form of a funeral chest, the front side of which was removed so that the god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the ritual contains a plea for the welfare of the incarnated soul: "Let not the Ausar-Ani, triumphant, lie down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the land wherein souls are joined to their bodies." So that is quite apparent that the land in which souls lie down in "death" is the old earth of ours. For nowhere else are souls joined unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in the range of cosmic activity where this transaction is possible, and this fact is sufficient warrant for focusing upon it all that mass of vague meaning for whic theologians have been forced to seek a locale in various subterranean worlds whose place is found at last only in their own imaginations.

Heru says in one text: "I directed the ways of the god to his tomb, and I caused gladness to be in the dwellers in Amentet when they saw the beauty as it landed at Abtu." Abti was claimed to be the place of entry to the lower world where the "dead" lived, but in this use it was another of those transfers of uranographic locality to a town on the map in some way appropiately symbolizing the spiritual idea involved. There was no actual entrance to an actual underworld at Abtu ( or anywhere else), but to complete the astral typology a temple, tomb and deep well (of great symbolic value) had been constructed there to the god Ausar. It was mythically and poetically the door of entry to the lower world, or realm of death, Amenta. Budge does not realize that he is writing only of the historical adaptation of a spiritual allegory when he says:

"But about Ausar's burial place there is no doubt, for all tradition, both Kemetic and Greek, states that his grave was at Abtu in upper Kemet."

He argues that Ausar must have been a living king, who was later deified. This is not likely as there is little to indicate that the Kemetic gods were other than abstract personifications of the powers of nature and intelligence. The legend that his body was cut into fourteen pieces, scattered over the land and then reassembled for the resurrection could have no rational application to the life of an actual king.

Another text carries straighforward information of decided value: "In the text of Teta the dead king is thus addressed: 'Hail! hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta!... thou art not a dead thing," What can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction of terms, telling a dead king he is not dead, unless the new interpretation of "death" as herein advanced and supported be applicable? The souls as deities entered the realm of death, our world, but were not dead; philosophy dramatized them as such, however.

In a different symbolism the Eye of Heru, and emblem typifying his life and said to contain his soul, was stolen and carried off by Set, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that "during the period when Heru's eyes was in the hands of Set, he was a dead god." His regaining possession of his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity and his restoration to his original godhood. Heru elsewhere (Rit. Ch. 85) says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though my dead body be buried." If such a declaration is not to be taken for a species of after-death spiritism, it can have no logical meaning only in reference to the contention that the buried god is the sould in the fleshly body.

It is imperative to look next at the conceptions of the sphere of death that were expressed through the use of the term "underworld." This region of partial death in which the outcast angels were imprisoned was styled the dark "underworld." A varian name was "the nether earth." It is often actully pictured as a subterranean cavern. It may be asked it if has ever occurred to any scholar of our time that "the underworld" was but another figurative applelation for the condition of life in the human body.
 

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