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.