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

Part V

The mystery rituals did dramatize the life of an underworld but the gods, and kings of this nether realm, were not subterranean deities. The gnomes and other nature spirits were the only "deities" that were believed to subsist beneath the surface of the physical earth. The gods of the underworld were always the gods of the dead. And as the souls of deceased mortals were in all religions asserted to ascent to heaven and never to remain in the burial ground with the corpse, it was again impossible to place the underworld down with the gnomes. But it seems next to incredible that the academic diligence should have missed the plain correlation which would have made the descent of spirit from heaven equate the descent of all divine heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld of earth.

From the great Kemetic ritual, which so cryptically allegorized this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Kemetic name for the Sphinx was Aker. This was also the name for the tunnel through the underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Aker. As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor of stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its implication. The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this earth. The terms of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that the mystery pertains to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our existence in some unlocalized underworld of theological fiction.

The entrance to Amenta, with its twelved dungeons, consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor mortal knew the secret of and none but the god could open. Hence the need of a deity who should come to unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and be "the door" and "the way." The god came not only to unlock the door of divinity to human nature, but to be himself that door. The giving of the keys to bolt and unbolt the doors of the underworld was but the allegory of this evolutionary reinforcement of the human by the divine nature.


Descriptions of this dark realm of our present state are given in the texts. "It is a land without an exit, through which no passage has been made, from whose visitants, the dead, the light was shut out." "The light they beheld not; in darkness they dwell."

The first chapter of the Per Em Hra (Book of the Dead) was repeated in the mystery festivals on the day when Ausar was buried. His entrance into the underworld as a Manes corresponds to that of Ausar the corpse in Amenta, who represents the god rendered lifeless by his suffocation in the body of matter. The dead Ausar is said to enter the place of his burial called the Kasu. In this low domain of the dead there was nought but darkness; the upper light had been to shut out. But Heru, Ptah, Anpu, Ra and others of the savior gods would come in due time to awaken the sleepers "in their sepulchres," open the gates and guide the souls out into the light of the upper regions once more. One of the sayings of the soul contemplating its plight in the underworld is: "I do not rot. I do not putrefy. I do not turn to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall not be destroyed; it shall not perish in the earth forever." Inasmuch as the flesh of the physical body most certainly will perish, rot, putrefy, and turn to food for worms in the only grave that Christian theology has been able to tell us of the term "flesh" in the excerpt can not be taken as that of the human body. And that is not to be so taken is obvious from other passages. It refers to the substance of another body which does not rot away.

The same sense may distinctly be caught in the term "body" as used in the prayer uttered by the soul in the body when it says: "May my body neither perish nor suffer corruption forever." Such a prayer directed to the physical body would be obviously irrelevant, expecting the impossible. Heru, on his way to earth to ransom the captives, says: "I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of the deceased ones of Ausar."

The wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Heru, Shu, Apuat...as servants of Ra, the Supreme one god, to wake them in their coffins and lead them forth from the land of darkness to the land of day.
 
To continue

The lavish use of animals as symbols, filled the underworld with a menagerie of mythical monsters. Animals such as dragons, serpents, crocodiles, dogs, lions etc, lay in wait in the underworld for the lucklells soul. What is the significance of this? Patently it figures the menace to the soul of its subjection to the constant beat upon it of the animal propensities, since it had taken residence in the very bodies of the lower creatures. In a measure detached, it was not immune to being drawn down into ever deeper alliance with carnal nature. Ever to be remembered in Daniel's statement that "his mind was like the mind of an animal."

Etymology supplies a sensational suggestion of the soundness of the present thesis in the similarity of the two words "tomb" and "womb" which Gerald Massy avers rise from the same root. At all events it is rigorously in accord with the theory that the body , as the tomb of the sould, is at the same time the womb of its new birth. In Kemetic ritual the soul is addressed as he "who cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death."

In the Christian bible the textual evidence is multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled. First is St. Paul's clarion cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries: "Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon thee." Job, combining his death with its correlative resurrection, exclaims: "I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked, for the Lord sustaineth me." Paul cries in anguish of the fleshly duress, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And it is an open question whether the final phrase might not as well have been rendered "this death in the body." And Jonah, correlative name with Jesus, cries from the allegorical whale's belly: "Out of the belly of death have I cried unto thee, O God." Paul again pronounces us "dead" in our trespasses and sins, adding that "the wages of sin is death" and "to be carnally minded is death>" It is sin that brings us back again and again into this "death" until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that we are dead and that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as yet undeveloped, buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being. The Psalm says that we "like sheep are laid in the grave," though "God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave." The death spoken of is not at one place defined as "even the death of the cross," when spirit is bound to the cross of matter and the flesh. Isaiah declares that "we live in darkness like the dead," And Jesus broadcasts the promise that whosoever believeth on him, "though he were dead, yet shall he live." Assurance is given (Peter 4:6) that the Gospel is preached "to them that are dead." Would not such addresses to the dead, as noted in several of these passages, be absurd if not referable to the living on earth?

Then there is the ringing declaration of the Father God in the Prodical Son allegory rebuking the jealousy of the obedient elder brother at the rejoicing over the wastrel's return: "This my son was dead and is alive again." The thing described here as death was just the sojourn in that "far country", Earth.

A most direct and unequivocal declaration, however, is found in the first chapter of Revelation: "Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead." And this is at once followed by the adjuration to "Wake up; rally what is still left to you, though it is on the very point of death." This is again a strong hint of the danger that the soul might be so far submerged under the sense as to fail to rise again, and sink down into the dreaded "second death."

St. Paul's discussion of the problem of sin and death in the seventh chapter of Romans. The statements can be rendered intelligible and enlightening only by reading the term "death" in the sense here analyzed. He says first that "the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace." And then he says: "For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death."

In this chapter Paul concatenates the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things: the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the law equivalent to sin? And he replies that sin developed in us "under the law." What is this mysterious Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not possessed the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it is the power of carnal nature in man. It is that, in part; which had been discarded. This Law, St. Paul's bete noir- is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-revolving Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the seven coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.

Now, by the Law came sin, and by sin came death. Here is the iron chain that binds man to the cross. The Law brings the soul to the place where it sins and sin condemns it to death. Death here must mean something other than the natural demise of the body, for that comes to all men be they pure or be they sinful. Reserving a more recondite elaboration of the doctrine of sin for a later place, it may be asserted here that the great theological bugaboo, sin, will be found to take it place close along the side of "death" as the natural involvement of the incarnation itself. Sin is just the soul's condition of immersion or entanglement in the nature of the flesh. And happily such of its gruesome and morbid taint by the theological mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant pietism.

to be cont'd

HeTePu
 

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