Awakening Osiris: The Spiritual Keys to the Egyptian Book of the Dead

PRAISE FOR

Awakening Osiris

"Normandi Ellis is a genius. Her years of study of the ancient Egyptian language, her deep understanding of the spiritual message of the ancient Egyptian texts, and her exceptional gifts as a poet combine to make Awakening Osiris the best and most beautiful interpretation ever offered of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead—which, of course, celebrates not death but life with all its joys and all its mysteries."

—GRAHAM HANCOCK, bestselling author of

Fingerprints of the Gods and Visionary

"I have read Awakening Osiris more than any other book—ever—in my extensive library. Normandi Ellis's interpretation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is an utterly unique combination of scholarship and poetry. It presents this most important work of Western spirituality in a gorgeously accessible way. Awakening Osiris is a perennial, a classic in the combined realm of Egyptology, spirituality, and pure literary achievement."

—KATHLEEN MCGOWAN, New York Times

bestselling author of The Expected One

"Awakening Osiris is not only a translation and a book of Egyptian religion but also a spiritual work that will serve many pagans as a prayer book of sorts, a book of meditations—something not to be read and left on the shelf but to return to repeatedly."

—JUDIKA ILLES, author of Encyclopedia of

Spirits

Anyone reading this work cannot help but be moved by it. It comes as close to an appreciation of the themes of the soul's journey portrayed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead as any modern interpretation has, and with a poetry unmatched anywhere in the literature thus far.

—KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt

"Awakening Osiris has been my companion for the greater part of my life, always returning me to the wholesome, healthy, and holy. It makes sense of living and dying. Normandi Ellis's understanding of the many nuances of the Book of the Dead breathes life into the words, making ancient Egypt live again, while never losing touch with the present."

—TAMRA LUCID, author of Making the Ordinary

Extraordinary

"Not a translation, a reinvention—in itself a great work of poetic art. From devoted study and long immersion in the writing of ancient Egypt arose this celebration of life and illumination of death, filled with beautiful appreciations of the details of love and living. Read Awakening Osiris to someone you love."

—RONNIE PONTIAC, author of American

Metaphysical Religion

AWAKENING

OSIRIS

This edition first published in 2023 by New Page Books, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

65 Parker Street, Suite 7

Newburyport, MA 01950

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright © 1988, 2023 by Normandi Ellis

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published as Awakening Osiris: A New Translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 1988 by Phanes Press. This new edition includes a new introduction and an instructional appendix.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

ISBN: 978-1-63748-010-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ellis, Normandi, translator, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: Awakening Osiris : the spiritual keys to the Egyptian book of the dead / Normandi Ellis.

Other titles: Book of the Dead. Selections. English (Ellis)

Description: Newburyport, MA : New Page, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: The Egyptian Book of the Dead is one of the oldest and greatest classics of Western spirituality. Until now, the available translations have treated these writings as historical curiosities that have little relevance to our contemporary situations. This new version, made from the hieroglyphs, approaches the Book of the Dead as a profound spiritual text capable of speaking to us today. These writings suggest that the divine realm and the human realm are not altogether separate-they remind us that the natural world, and the substance of our lives, is fashioned from the stuff of the gods—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022057694 | ISBN 9781637480106 (paperback) | ISBN 9781633412811 (kindle edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Incantations, Egyptian. | Future life—Ancient Egyptian religion—Early works to 1800. | BISAC: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Afterlife & Reincarnation | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Ancient Mysteries & Controversial Knowledge

Classification: LCC PJ1555.E5 E44 2023 | DDC 299/.31—dc23/eng/20230125

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057694

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Cover art by Javier Cruz Domínguez

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For Randy

who believed so, too.

Contents

Original Introduction

Concordance

New Introduction

1 The Return

2 Greeting Ra

3 Greeting Osiris

4 The Speeches

5 Coming Forth by Day

6 The History of Creation

7 The Duel

8 Triumph over Darkness

9 Seven Houses in the Other World

10 Twenty-One Women

11 Triumph through the Cities

12 The Arrival

13 Giving a Mouth to Osiris

14 Opening the Mouth of Osiris

15 Giving Charms to Osiris

16 Remembering His Name

17 Giving a Heart to Osiris

18 Giving Breath to Osiris

19 Drinking Water

20 Water and Fire

21 Fish Stink

22 Not Letting His Heart Be Carried Off

23 Not Scattering His Bones

24 Not Dying a Second Time

25 Not Letting His Head Be Severed

26 Not Decaying in the Other World

27 Not Allowing a Man to Pass East

28 Not Losing His Mind

29 Coming Forth and Passing Through

30 Bringing Home His Soul

31 His Soul and His Shadow

32 Returning to See His Home

33 Ra Rising

34 Awakening Osiris

35 A Preponderance of Starry Beings

36 Adoration of Ra

37 A Messenger of Ra

38 In the Talons of the Hawk

39 Before Changing

40 Becoming the Swallow

41 Becoming the Falcon of Gold

42 Becoming the Hawk Divine

43 Becoming One of the Ancients

44 Becoming the Craftsman

45 Becoming the Child

46 Becoming the Lotus

47 Becoming the Snake

48 Becoming the Crocodile

49 Becoming the Heron

50 Becoming the Phoenix

51 Becoming a Light in the Darkness

52 The Apes of Dawn

53 The Heart of Carnelian

54 The Cloth of Life

55 The Knot of Isis

56 The Pillow of Hands

57 The Column of Gold

58 The Eye of God

59 Entering the House

60 Entering Truth

61 The Confession

62 The Bath

63 This Body of Light

64 The Family

65 A Field of Flowers

66 Hymn to Ra

67 Hymn to Osiris

68 Hymn to Hathor

Appendix

Bibliography

Original Introduction

AFTER I HAD BEEN AT work some years on this text, a fellow asked me why I bothered with a subject as dreary as the Book of the Dead. I mean, isn't it morbid? All that fascination with the dead and the dying and decay? What can you possibly see in it? His question is fairly common. People unfamiliar with the text maintain a notion that it is somehow ghoulish. It is not. It is one of the most beautiful celebrations of life that I have ever read.

Osiris, the god of the dead, is a green god, an image of the seed waiting in the dark to burst forth into renewal. His death and rebirth illuminated the path from darkness to light, from unconsciousness to enlightenment. In that light, I called this book Awakening Osiris, for I thought of it as a call to consciousness and spiritual awakening. We are all Osirises.

The Book of the Dead is a misnomer applied by historians to a text which the ancient Egyptians referred to as the Book of Coming Forth by Day. I much prefer the Egyptian title as it seems best to represent what the book implies. No definitive version of the Book of the Dead exists. Rather it is a compilation of funerary texts and religious hymns written by priests and copied by scribes during a period spanning approximately 3000 BCE to 300 AD. In it are included versions of several other texts, which are detailed below.

The Pyramid Texts, the most ancient body of literature known, were inscribed on the walls of pyramids and pharaonic tombs during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties of the Old Kingdom (2464–2355 BCE). They were supplications to the gods and goddesses that a man might achieve unity with the deities in heaven. The Coffin Texts appeared in the early Middle Kingdom (2154–1845 BCE) and usually were written in ink directly on the coffins of the noblemen and women who composed the pharaoh's entourage. These spells, as historians have called them (though the Egyptians called them chapters), were intended to assure a human's unity with the gods by preventing the ravages of the body in the neterworld. Other chapters in the Book of the Dead owe their origin to such works as The Book of What Is in Tuat (the neterworld), the Book of Gates, the Book of Transformations, the Litany of the Sun, and various other hymns to the gods and goddesses.

The order of the chapters was diverse. In fact, the literature was in no manner a book as we perceive it with a beginning, middle and end. It was, instead, a compilation of chapters, each chapter unique unto itself and sometimes particular to the requirements of the pharaoh for whom it was written.

The Book of the Dead went through various revisions, additions and deletions in its history according to whatever theological doctrine was current to a particular region at that particular time. The priests of Amun, for example, assumed for their god the characteristics of Ra. By the Saite Recension (300 BCE) Osiris himself had over 150 forms, characteristics of other deities which he had assumed. The evil power of darkness, Set himself, possessed many names and many other entities of darkness and destruction followed in his train.

These subtle changes in theocracy took place at the priests' instigations in an effort to prevent a community from taking issue with a change in worship. Religious history is full of similar incorporations, such as the Hebrew practice of circumcision learned from the ancient Egyptians, or the Christian celebration of Christ's birth as coincidental with the ancient celebration of the winter solstice. Any drastic changes in the theocracy would have created upheaval. For example, when Akhenaton insisted on the divinity of the one god, he overthrew all at once the local gods. His heretical beliefs won him no favors with either his subjects or the priests. After his reign the ancient Egyptians effaced his name from the monuments—a powerful form of ancient curse—and they immediately returned to their worship of the beatific multitudes.

It is evident, then, that after 4,000 years of development and change, the authorship of The Book of the Dead cannot be ascribed to one particular individual. In fact, it cannot be ascribed to any individuals. The scribes for the most part simply copied what the priests instructed them to copy. Who these scribes and priests were is lost to history.

Ownership of the words was theologically impossible anyway, as the texts were divinely inspired. Certain chapters of the work are said to have been written by Thoth himself with his own fingers. To Thoth—lord of divine speech, lord of Maat (truth) and lord of divine books—was attributed the authorship of 42 sacred texts collectively entitled The Books of Thoth. These dealt with sacred laws, astronomy, medicine, the history of the world and the work of priests. Some historians, such as H. Brugsch, believe that the original inscriptions of some of these chapters appear on the walls of the Temple of Horus at Edfu, but the claim is unsubstantiated and probably will remain so. The Greeks identified Thoth with Hermes, and he may have been the Thrice Greatest Hermes of which the mystics speak. The contents of the texts were, so we are told, not tampered with by the scribes, although the priests and pharaohs made revisions and personal supplications.

By and large, the hieroglyphs which we associate with the ancient Egyptians were the holy writings of the priests used during the Old Kingdom. Only priests were literate then, but by the Middle Kingdom, the business community and the scribes began to write in a cursive form of hieroglyphs called hieratics, which in the later dynasties was transmuted into the language of demotics. Near the end of the New Kingdom era, by and large, the use of hieroglyphs disappeared, for even the priests no longer knew the original meaning of the glyphs.

During the switch from hieroglyphics to hieratics, the alphabet lost its graphic or symbolic appeal. It was not necessary, for example, to illustrate the work of The Pyramid Texts as the hieroglyphics themselves were pictorial. It was necessary, however, to illustrate a papyrus written in hieratic as, by that time, the characters had become more or less abstractions implying sounds only; and since the general populace could not read, the people needed a picture to guide them in understanding the implications of each chapter.

By the end of the Middle Kingdom the scribes who worked on the texts were many, and the papyrus scrolls were often mass produced for the common people. One scribe may have worked only on illustrating the text with vignettes before he passed along the text to the next scribe who inscribed the hieroglyphs for a particular chapter. As a result the writing in the texts is often cramped, occasionally illegible or sometimes contains blank areas where too much space was left by the illustrator. In addition, blank spaces were left in the text where the name of a man could be inserted after the papyrus was purchased. This mass production resulted in several mistakes in various texts, but the circumstances of production make these understandable.

What has survived of Egyptian literature is primarily texts of religious rites, hymns, love songs and work songs. (Some notable exceptions include The Tale of Two Brothers and the wonderful Dialogue between a Man Weary of Life and His Soul, which was beautifully translated by Bika Reed as The Rebel in the Soul.) Little poetry or fiction as we tend to think of it has survived. Although rhyme was not a consideration, certain poetic elements appear such as repetition, alliteration, assonance, allusion, imagery and parallel structure. These were enhanced by a strong meter and rhythm in the work. The Egyptians loved puns of all types and even their religious texts are full of humor. Many times they intertwined sacred and profane images. It is interesting to note the many uses of the anagram; that is, how one word expressing a particular idea may have been spelled backward to represent an opposing idea. For example, kha indicates a corpse, while akh indicates a thing radiant or spiritual.

Language was of primary importance; in essence it cast a type of spell. The ancient Egyptians felt that if words could be uttered precisely, in proper sequence and with proper intonation, those words could produce magical effects. The Fourth Gospel begins: In the beginning was the Word. In like manner the Egyptian History of the Creation of the Gods and the World begins with the words of Ptah, sometimes merged with the evening sun god Atum. (Both gods have similar stories of speaking the world into being, by opening their lips and having light spring forth from the darkness; yet each god derives from a different city in the delta.):

I am he who came into being, being what I created—

the creator of the creations . . .

After I created my own becoming,

I created many things

that came forth from my mouth.

(Nuk pu kheper em Kheperå

kheper-nå kheper kheperu

kheper kheperu

neb em-khet kheper-å asht kheperu

em per em re-å)

In addition, re-å for the mouth and Re (or Ra) for the sun god are similar. The implication, then, may be that Atum opened his mouth and light burst forth. The lions of yesterday and today (time) were symbols of Ra and these were called re-re, or the sound of lions roaring. One begins to see how intricately linked are the sound, symbol, myth and meaning. Language, then, resonates on and on in an intricate spiral of meanings, one word or association leading to the next.

What is most unfortunate is that we are uncertain as to exactly how the language was pronounced. The hieroglyphs were an alphabet of consonants, homophones and ideograms. The vowel sounds, or those breathy vocalizations, were sacred and therefore unwritten or secret. As a result the pronunciation of the text (and in Egyptian terms its precise meaning) is lost to us now.

An abundance of gods and goddesses appear in the text. Some are mentioned briefly and others are mentioned over and over again. Often times the minor names represent local deities incorporated into the greater gods and goddesses. Still, there seems to have been a time early in the development of the religion where the gods were one. The text often refers to one god—sometimes Atum, sometimes Ptah, sometimes Ra, depending on the interpretations of the priests that have been passed down to us. This one god was the creator of himself and all things therein. His name is secret and hidden. All the other gods and goddesses issue forth from him. One might think, then, of the other multitudes as aspects of the one god.

The Egyptian word which we have translated as god is neter, as in the neterworld. But the word god, though common to us, seems imprecise when applied to Egyptian religion. Neter refers primarily to a spiritual essence, or principle. Our word nature may derive from it through the Latin. The multitudes of neteru, then, represent the multitudinous natures of supreme being. As John West pointed out in his book, Serpent in the Sky, the various religious centers of Heliopolis, Memphis, Hermopolis and Thebes, for example, were not advocating different gods. They were advocating differing aspects of god.

From the mouth of one supreme god came what is known as the Great Ennead, or the nine gods (neteru) of the one. In Heliopolis these were: Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. In Memphis, Ptah and Hathor play major roles. In Hermopolis, Thoth is elevated. Ra, as a principle of light, eternity, power and rebirth, attained prominence nearly everywhere.

Atum and Ptah are aspects of one neter. Atum may be thought of as the primordial act, the first creation, pure essence and spirit. Ptah is Atum come to earth: the same principle of spirit, but in this instance he is the manifestation of the act of creating matter. The remaining neteru of the great ennead are paired male and female. They are unified dual natures. Shu and Tefnut are the twin children of Ra, the breath of light one might say. He personifies the dry air and she the mist. Geb, the father, is earth; Nut, the mother, is sky.

From the belly of Nut sprang the other gods and goddesses and Horus, the twice-born. Horus was born once of heaven through Nut and once of earth through his mother, Isis. He represents both the divine and mortal aspects of man, and his presence in the Book of the Dead is always as that of the great spiritual warrior. As the avenger of his father's death, he best represents the strength of the individual in his necessary battle against the power of darkness.

Osiris and Isis represent the dawning of the human world. All the descendants of the world are children of their son, Horus. My chapters The History of Creation and The Duel explain these myths in more detail. For a more in-depth look at all the gods and goddesses, I recommend E.A. Wallis Budge's two-volume set, The Gods of the Egyptians. Suffice it to say here that Osiris was murdered twice. First, his brother drowned him and sailed him in a wooden jeweled coffin far from Egypt. Isis retrieved him and brought him home, then he was hacked into fourteen pieces by his envious brother Set. According to Plutarch, Isis, the wife of Osiris, gathered the severed parts of