Nothing New After 3000 Years

I spent much of the long New Year's Weekend reading "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books," by Darnell and Darnell.  I've gotten through "The Book of Adoring Re in the West," and "The Book of the Hidden Chamber."  I'm about to start "The Book of Gates."  

So far this is a scholarly read.  It's not a book for a discussion of hieroglyphics because -- aside from the black and white line drawings of registers -- the various books are presented in their already-translated form, with occasional references written in linguist's pronunciation marks (so no ankhs here, just something like ꜣnḫ).  There's interesting parts in the translations of spells, hymns, and litanies... and I wish I had copies of the author's previous works, and the works of Eric Hornung and Theodor Abt because the footnotes keep referencing discussions between the texts of these authors in passing, and it's apparent that that's where the work of translation is being shown.  (It's like reading an X-men comic, and every other panel has an editor's note from Stan Lee saying, "see New Mutants #43" or "As in Secret Wars #4", which gives one a sense that there's much more context that one is missing from the provided dialog.)

Technically, the tri-part book of translations that I'd hoped for in my previous posting would be difficult to do:  finding complete versions on tomb walls or on the insides of sarcophagi is rare, and, in addition, there are different versions of the same texts.  (Pause to imagine a lost copy of the books going up in flames at Alexandria, except, even then the books would have been a thousand years old...)  So one would have to cobble together an "original version" from multiple sites and sources.  

One insight I have is that there are lots of passages about bound enemies, foreigners, and other conspirators with Apep, the serpent trying to oppose the solar regeneration.  There's tons of decapitations, and disintegrations, and flinging into lakes of fire, and general smiting and punishment; it's enough to make one wonder how sadistic and xenophobic the ancient Egyptians were.  On the other hand, it's part of Western ceremonial magic to consciously call up and neutralize the negative and chaotic aspects in one's spells in order to insure the efficacy of the operation -- these are usually visualized as gods, angels, or some other spirits, though, and not groups of people (pause to reflect on some of the more phobic writings of Dion Fortune...).  

As I was reading later, I came across a statement in one of the litanies:  "there is no part of my body that is not inhabited by a god!"  (This was after shocking the family by reading aloud how such-and-such a goddess was within the phallus of the spell-reciter.)  Later, in an introduction, the authors spoke about how the reciter and the god Re were consubstantial, which had a parallel existence of "Flesh," the mummified earthly body of a god, and the celestial Re going through the stations of the netherworld.   The first reminded me of all those Wiccan books from the eighties and nineties saying, "for a vision of the Goddess, turn to the woman next to you." The second reminded me of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  

When I shared with Mark that since 1450 BCE there's been nothing new in magico-religious thought, he just smiled and nodded.