Life and Death in Ancient Egypt
Time loops, father-births, and wandering eyes: amazing things you never knew about ancient Egyptian myth and culture
The Cauldron is a reader-supported publication featuring curious occult history and mythology. Visit pick-your-potions.com to learn more about witchy author, teacher, and mixologist Lindsay Merbaum.
Fall is upon us, the candy-coated season of death! When the leaves wither, and the veil between worlds grows thin.
What better moment to talk about the kings and queens of Afterlife, the ancient Egyptians?
We all know death played a big role in ancient Egyptian life. Hello, pyramids. However, the fixation on the afterlife was also about rebirth—for those good and wise enough to achieve it.
But first, let’s begin at the beginning. Which might also be the end.
In Ancient Egypt, time is… complicated.
Time is relative, an hour for the dead is a lifetime to the living. Time loops also exist; the same events repeat. Temporal paradoxes arise—some kings were said to be their own fathers. Further complicating matters, the mythic age of the gods is 11,000 years long.
Welcome to the wondrous world of ancient Egypt, where mythology does more than explain how things are and came to be: these are metaphors for the eternal cycles that order the universe.
Creation is about balancing opposing forces, like good and evil, or chaotic energy vs chaotic destruction.
Creation occurs in seven stages:
Chaos (pre-creation)
The emergence of the creator
The creation of the world and the things that live upon it
The reign of the sun god
The reign of other deities, like Osiris
The reign of semi-divine kings, like all the mummies you know
The return to chaos, aka the end of the world
Before life, there is a watery abyss called the nu or nun, personified as the cow goddess Mehet-Weret, who gives birth to the creator. Alternately, the creator’s mother is Neith, the Mother and Father of All Things, aka “the terrifying one,” who forms the world by pronouncing seven magical words.
In other versions, the creator is born from the blue primeval lotus, Nefertem, or hatches from an egg made by the eight: the first primeval deities.
All alone in the nun, the creator sends their eye swimming through the chaos. This eye is the daughter of Ra, also called the Eye of Ra, and the Eye of Atum (more on Atum below). Relationship status: complicated. The Eye is a goddess who operates independently, manifesting as various deities, including Hathor, Sekhmet (Hathor’s destructive aspect), Bastet (more on her next month when I talk about cats!), and Mut. Her pupil is said to be the womb from which gods are born. But The Eye is also an integral part of the sun god.
Here’s another Eye story: When the first land emerges—aptly named the Primeval Mound—Atum impregnates himself with the gods Shu and Tefnut.
The flesh of the gods is made of gold, their bones, silver.
When Shu and Tefnut get lost in the primordial murk, Atum sends out his Eye again. This is the catalyst for the most important moment: the very first sunrise, when the sun emerges as a golden child, or a shining bird, an event so wondrous, no single depiction can do it justice. As the curtain of darkness draws back, Atum and Ra merge into Ra-Atum. Both gods are both primordial, solar aspects of an androgynous creator.
Meanwhile, the Eye returns from the search-and-rescue, only to find Atum has forgotten all about her. Sometimes she’s enraged, at other moments, heartbroken. In one coffin text (yup, that’s what it sounds like), humans derive from the tears of the Sole Eye. This is why humanity is imperfect, and perpetually suffering—because we’re made from emotions.
Shu and Tefnut go on to become the parents of Geb and Nut, the earth and sky. The two are in a permanent state of sexual union, and so none of their children can escape Nut’s womb. When Shu forcibly separates them, five gods spill out: Osiris, who marries his sister Isis; Horus the Elder; Seth, a destructive force; and Nephthys, the sky goddess, who’s forced to marry Seth.
Geb and Nut both possess unseemly habits: Geb swallows the dead, and Nut, embodying the form of a sow, sometimes eats her children. Nut is included among a handful of goddesses who, at various times, give birth to the creator god.
In some Egyptian creation myths, the first being is a bird, and the heavens are a cosmic hawk, who lands on a mat of vegetation floating in the primordial sea.
There’s another creator god, Amun, whose name means Hidden One.
In some versions, Amun calls the eight primeval gods into being, thereby creating his own parents. He is bearded, with a headdress and a double plume. In the New Kingdom (roughly 1550-1077 BCE), Amun also merges with Ra and becomes Amun-Ra, the King of the Gods.
In the Middle Kingdom (around 2030-1650 BCE), Amun turns super sexy and potent. By the end of the New Kingdom, Amun has a new look: a ram with curved horns, or a ram-headed sphinx. He is the “one who made himself into millions.”
In ancient Thebes, the temple priestess of Amun-Ra was called the god’s “wife” or “hand.” Her job was to manually arouse the god to keep creation going ad infinitum.
To produce an heir, Amun also engaged in sacred sexual union with the queen of Egypt. This is how Alexander the Great got away with boasting of divine parentage.
Ptah is also a creator deity, who fashions the world from his heart and tongue.
By the Middle Kingdom (roughly 2030-1650 BCE), Ptah can even make a new body for the dead. One text, possibly from the New Kingdom (around 155-1077 BCE), depicts Ptah as self-generated. Through thought (heart) and speech (tongue), he manifests everything that exists.
By now, you might’ve noticed something missing: yourselves. The origin myths of ancient Egypt aren’t about how we got here. Nevertheless, humans are imbued with divine essence, a puff of the breath of life. So we are also, in some way, manifestations of the creator.
There are a few hymns that name the goddess Mut Creator and Queen of the Gods. The Nile floods with the sweat of her body. Paradoxically, she is also the Eye of Ra. In cat form, she roams the desert.
When Mut combines with Sekhmet and Bastet, she sports wings, three heads—human, lion, and vulture—and a penis. If you’re frightened and facing judgment in the underworld, you can call upon her, if you dare.
Every morning, Nut gives birth to the sun.
The horizon, known as Akhet, is a liminal space, guarded by a double sphinx and two lions. The sun god dies daily on one side, and he’s reborn on the other. Typically, the horizon is represented by a sun disk between two mountain peaks, each with a shining tree.
The sun’s daily path marks each stage of the human life cycle: at dawn, he’s a child, manifesting as Khepri, “the shining one.” At noon, he’s Ra, Ra-Horus, or Ra-Horakhty—a strong, sharp-eyed falcon. By evening, he’s old Atum, or Ra-Atum. At sunset, he dies. In the Pyramid Texts, he’s swallowed by Nut. (Remember, she’s the sow-goddess who eats her babies?)
Then the sun passes through the underworld, spreading divine light over the dead. In an hour, they enjoy a lifetime of glorious sunshine.
The dead die again as the sun god is reborn at dawn.
Other sources describe a different eternal journey via a Day Boat for Khepri, and a Night Boat for Atum.
The vessels traverse water and sand. Creatures emerge from the dark: every night, at the seventh and twelfth hours, the chaos monster Apophis attacks the sun god’s boat. Most commonly depicted as a giant serpent, Apophis is known as the “Evil One,” a threat to divine order. His mother is the creator goddess Neith—Apophis forms from her spit.
As a defense, battle-ready deities travel aboard the Night Boat. Their success depends primarily on Seth, the strongest god, a chaotic force wielding an enormous mace only he can lift. Every night, he spears and binds the beast. But Apophis is the world’s recurring nightmare: he regenerates and returns.
The earliest Egyptian kings are deities.
The creator rules Egypt for a long time. Eventually, the creator retires to the sky. (First, he does try to annihilate humanity, but changes his mind halfway through. Nevertheless, Atum will flip flop again one day and return the world to the chaos from which it came.) He is succeeded by Osiris.
Eventually, all pharaohs were viewed as manifestations of Osiris, post mortem.
After Osiris comes his son, Horus (there are multiple aspects of Horus, including Khenty-en-irty, the vengeful Horus who tortures the evil dead). Horus is born after his father’s death by fratricide.
Egyptian kings were associated with Horus the child. Various texts depict monarchs as naked children, suckling, or cheekily pressing a finger to their lips.
The details of the murder of Osiris are vague, because the story is so taboo.
To depict something this terrible runs the risk of manifesting evil. So the death of Osiris isn’t even mentioned until the end of the first millennium BCE, and it comes from a foreigner’s account at that.
The motive for the crime also depends on the source: some say Osiris started it, others that it’s a jealousy thing. In any case, Osiris is murdered by his brother, Seth, called Typhon by the Greeks, the same god who defends order against the monster Apophis. The murder method varies: trampling plus drowning, and assault by assorted ferocious wild animals—all manifestations of Seth. This horror story positions Osiris as a god of the underworld—the Duat, “land of silence.”
Seasonal reaping and sowing were associated with Osiris, the scything of the grain symbolic of his death and dismemberment. At annual festivals, corn mummy Osiris dolls sporting erect penises were stuffed with mud and seeds, then planted in sacred spots to bring new life to the dead.
By the end of the second millennium BCE, the story of Osiris’s demise has further evolved. Now Typhon (Seth) tricks Osiris into fitting himself inside a chest—his own coffin—which is then sealed and tossed into the Nile. Isis locates the chest but Typhon finds her out and chops up the body. So Isis and Nephthys (Seth’s sister-wife, now a funereal deity) hunt down all the pieces—there’s one for each district in Egypt. Except, in some versions, the penis gets eaten by a fish.
In the city of Edfu, priests of Horus ritually castrated Seth for what he’d done to Osiris and his son. In an ecstatic state, they sacrificed and dismembered a wild ass, one of Seth’s animal manifestations.
Isis is a healing goddess. She restores each part of her husband before burial. She’s also a cunning strategist. Determined to bear the next king (Horus), whom she’ll raise to avenge his father, she revives Osiris: as a bird, she beats her wings to fill the body with the breath of life. She takes within herself the seed of a dead god and, ten months later, her son is born.
The annual flooding of the Nile was first an expression of the tears of Isis. Then, from the beginning of the New Kingdom, if not sooner, the flood was seen as the “waters” leaching from the corpse of Osiris.
Horus has a rough time growing up.
He’s attacked and poisoned on multiple occasions. His mother’s scream are so loud, they stop the sun in its tracks. Uncle (or sometimes brother) Seth is probably to blame for young Horus’s suffering. When the god reaches maturity, Seth comes on to Horus—Seth is known for inappropriate, NSFW behavior. Isis advises her son to trade his body for some of Seth’s magical strength. But she cautions him to collect Seth’s semen in his hand and nowhere else. Horus does as instructed, then Isis cuts off the defiled hand, and gives him a new one.
The cult of Isis gained a lot of traction in the first millennium CE. Isis became a sea goddess and was credited with inventing agriculture, plus a number of other useful things. The Greeks identified her with Demeter. Then, all other goddesses started turning into differently-named Isises. Her cult was Christianity’s biggest potential rival at that point.
Isis also milks some of her son’s semen, which sounds like what it is. She smears the seed on some lettuce in Seth’s garden. Seth eats the greens and falls pregnant with a radiant disk, which emerges through the top of his head. Thoth (a lunar deity of wisdom and sacred knowledge) sets the disk on Horus’s brow as a sign of his status as the one true heir.
There are different, equally macabre stories about the eyes of Horus.
In some myths, the eyes are torn out as punishment. The crime varies: Horus rapes or abuses his mother, or cuts her head off (the gods give her a new one, a cow head). It’s Seth who metes out punishment. He buries the plucked eyeballs, which turn into lotuses. Or grape vines. When Horus is in falcon form, his eyes are the sun and moon.
After the loss of his sight, Hathor, Horus’s foster mother, steps in. Hathor is a VIP: the patroness of lovers, and the hand of Atum. She is a guide both through birth and rebirth, with a fierce lioness aspect (Sekhmet) that can only be appeased through raucous festivals in her honor.
Hathor restores Horus’s sight with gazelle milk, thus granting him the power to rule. Then Horus presents the power of his Eye to his father, who leaves his mummy behind to become the ruler of the dead. In some Coffin Texts, the creator god, Ptah, assists with this part.
Earlier texts name wise Thoth as the deity who finds and heals Horus’s eye(s). The loss and restoration of the eye(s) follow a lunar cycle, which aligns with the dismemberment and reunion of Osiris’s body.
Lunar eclipses were associated with Seth who, in the form of a black boar, swallows the eye of Horus, only to vomit it back up. The myth of the Distant Goddess—who wanders off and must be persuaded to return—may represent a solar eclipse.
Meanwhile, Horus gets into a lot of dick-measuring contests with Seth, like racing stone boats, or turning into hippopotami to see who can hold their breath longer underwater.
Eventually, Seth has to answer for killing Osiris, and the rivalry between Seth and Horus must end. Both are accomplished through trials held before a Divine Tribunal. Horus and Seth take their shares of Egypt, though some texts show further disputes over the settlement, where Horus wins all.
Now Horus becomes the model for all future kings. He’s succeeded by other gods, including Thoth and Maat. And then, ages later, men (and some women) take over.
It falls to the pharaohs to make sure divine order (maat—yes, same as the goddess) is maintained. Communication with the gods is nuanced, and invisible: Kings receive divine messages through dreams. Some priests are said to travel between worlds, but most mortals don’t expect to meet the gods face-to-face until they reach the Duat, royalty included.
In the end, the pharaohs are mythologized into the historical record, with retroactive prophecies and divine parentage, where convenient.
The realm of the dead is a terrifying place.
After death, the ba (as of the New Kingdom, the ba looks like a human with the head of a bird) embarks on a fateful journey through the Duat, where Osiris is the king and judge of the dead.
There are rivers, deserts, and lakes of fire in the Duat. This land is also home to demons and monsters, like the Crocodiles of the Four Directions, and the god Anubis, who has the head of a jackal or a wild dog—the animals that roam around, digging up shallow graves. Being eaten by a scavenger is a horrifying defilement. To balance this evil, the people worship Anubis as “the dog who swallows millions,” the Master of Secrets, and the Keeper of the Keys of the Underworld. (Worship of the scorpion goddess Serqet likewise protects against poisonous stings.) Anubis is also folded into the myth of Osiris as the god who invents mummification.
For the ba to make it to eternal life, they must possess knowledge of not only protective spells, but the true, secret names of beings of the underworld. Naming is creation; naming is power.
The soul’s final challenge is the weighing of the heart, the seat of creative genesis, balanced against a feather of the goddess Maat. The point here is to justify the soul’s existence. A worthy spirit takes its place among the stars, but remains a spoke on the wheel of birth and rebirth, destruction and renewal. The unworthy are swallowed by the Eater of Souls, Ammut, a hippo goddess, the devourer of hearts and evil dead. Or by Khonsu, “who eats the hearts of the dead.” It’s a second and final death.
If a soul is lucky enough to spend some time in the idyllic Field of Reeds, they better make the most of it. Every night the sun dies and darkness returns. Likewise the star-spirits are obliterated at dawn, then reborn at night.
The end.
In spell 175 of The Book of the Dead, Atum complains to Thoth about the vengeful, war-mongering children of the sky goddess Nut. We are those children. Atum vows to one day destroy everything he’s made.
To begin, Ra will merge with the corpse of Osiris to become “the United One.” Then the dead will reawaken and the world will be remade. The land will return to “the Deep,” meaning the primordial sea, with no distinction between life and death.