Having completed this stage of its examination the soul now finds itself confronted by an immense pair of scales beneath the arms of which are to be seen representations of Anubis, the jackal-headed guide of souls, and Horus, the falcon-headed son of Osiris. One pan of the scales contains an object, shaped like a small urn, symbolizing the heart of the deceased, “considered to be the seat of intelligence and thus the instigator of man’s actions and conscience.”123 In the other pan is placed the feather of Maat, symbolizing, once again, Truth.
If the soul is to triumph in the judgment, heart and feather must stand poised in equilibrium and the prize of eternal life in the Osirian kingdom of the dead beckons. But if the heart is heavy with wickedness and willful waste of the gift of life, if it does not balance with the feather of Truth, then eternal annihilation awaits. To remind us of this, beyond the scales in every depiction of the judgment scene we see the agency of the soul’s extinction—a monstrous hybrid, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, who is known as Amit, the “Devourer,” the “Eater of the Dead,” in whose slavering jaws the “unjustified” soul is utterly destroyed.124
In the ancient Native North American afterlife journey the judgment scene is nowhere so formalized and elaborate as it is the ancient Egyptian version but there is nonetheless—and unmistakably so—a judgment. In the early 1900s, for example, Francis La Flesche, a member of the Omaha tribe of Nebraska and Western Iowa, cooperated with Alice C. Fletcher of Harvard’s Peabody Museum to record the traditions of his people. The result, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1911, includes the following account of a crucial moment in the afterlife journey:
It was said that at the forks of the path of the dead (the Milky Way) there “sat an old man wrapped in a buffalo robe, and when the spirits of the dead passed along he turned the steps of the good and peaceable people toward the short path which led directly to the abode of their relatives, but allowed the contumacious to take the long path, over which they wearily wandered. …” The simple and ancient belief seems to have been that the Milky Way is the Path of the Dead. It was said also that the spirit of a murderer “never found his way to his relatives but kept on endlessly searching but never finding rest.”125
Likewise the late Joseph Epes Brown, founder of the Native American Studies Program at Indiana University, gives this account of the afterlife journey of the Sioux:
It is held … that the released soul travels southward along the “Spirit Path” (the Milky Way) until it comes to a place where this way divides. Here an old woman, called Maya owichapaha, sits; “She who pushes them over the bank,” who judges the souls; the worthy ones she allows to travel on the path which goes to the right, but the unworthy she “pushes over the bank,” to the left.126
In 1967 Ake Hultkrantz joined Fletcher and Brown in linking such traditions to the fact that:
the path of souls is not always one and undivided. In the northern hemisphere the Milky Way splits into two streaks. Not unexpectedly, the Indians have associated this phenomenon with concepts of different passageways to the other world and of dissimilar fates after death. Tradition has it that one road … leads to the blessed land of the dead and the other brings downfall and annihilation.127
To this George Lankford adds a crucial insight that Hultkrantz missed, namely that there is “a bright star—Deneb—that is placed right at the fork in the path and thus could serve as a marker for the decision point or a figure who does the deciding.”128
Again a long story must be cut short here, but what Lankford goes on to demonstrate is that a ferocious bird, a raptor with a hooked beak, is a very distinctive “opponent” or “adversary” on the afterlife journey, as portrayed in Moundville pottery. In his view this “Moundville Raptor” is the Mississippian equivalent of the old woman who pushes souls over the bank or the old man who condemns the souls of murderers to endless wandering without rest. And to reinforce his argument, he draws our attention to the Alabamas and the Seminoles, “two groups who are major candidates for descendants of the prehistoric inhabitants of Moundville,” who indeed place an eagle in the role of an adversary on the Milky Way path of souls.129
Deneb is of course Alpha Cygni, the first-magnitude master star of the Cygnus constellation, which the Greeks identified as a bird, and specifically as a swan. “It is a satisfying coincidental possibility,” writes Lankford, “that the people of Moundville saw it the same way, but with the identity of an eagle rather than a swan.”130
Since his specialty is Native American religions, there is no reason why Lankford should have studied the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Had he done so, however, he would surely have been struck by Utterance 304, in which the soul on its journey through the Duat is confronted by a bird adversary that apparently has the power to block its path. It’s difficult to give any other interpretation to this encounter since the soul is made to declare:
The star Deneb in the constellation we know as Cygnus, the Swan, is positioned on the bank of the Milky Way exactly at the fork where a second “path,” a dead end, branches off. George Lankford identifies Deneb—and Cygnus as a whole—with the Moundville Raptor figure (inset), an adversary on the journey of the soul.
Hail to you, Ostrich which is on the bank of the Winding Waterway! Open my way that I may pass.131
An ostrich is not a swan and a swan is not an eagle. Nonetheless, it is surely noteworthy that in both the ancient Egyptian and the ancient Mississippian religions we encounter a bird, with the power to block the further progress of the soul, poised on a bank of the Milky Way.
What else but recognition of the same fork in the Milky Way that was regarded as so ominous in Native American myth can be expressed in Utterance 697 of the Pyramid Texts, where we read:
Do not travel on those western waterways, for those who travel thereon do not return, but travel on the eastern waterways.132
ASTRONOMER CHIEFS
IN THE COFFIN TEXTS, IN a passage that addresses the deceased, we read:
May you recognise your soul in the upper sky while your flesh, your corpse, is in On.”133
The latter location, now a suburb of Cairo 12 miles to the northeast of the immense Old Kingdom burial fields and world-famous pyramids of Giza, was the center of the religious cult that served the Giza necropolis in antiquity. It was the Biblical Hebrews who called this cult center On—there are references to it in Genesis, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.134 Its original name in the ancient Egyptian language, however, was Innu—“the pillar”—and the Greeks would later know it as Heliopolis, “the City of the Sun.”135
The Pyramid Texts, from which the Coffin Texts and all the later funerary texts descended, are often referred to as the “Heliopolitan Recension of the Book of the Dead”136 because they are thought to have originated in the archives of the cult center of Heliopolis. The archives have not survived the millennia, but the texts themselves are convincing evidence that something such must have existed since they “contain formulae and paragraphs which, judging from the grammatical forms that occur in them, must have been composed, if not actually written down, in the earliest times of Egyptian civilization.”137
Let’s note in passing that the High Priest of Heliopolis bore the title “Chief of the Astronomers” and is represented in tomb paintings and statuary wearing a mantle adorned with stars.138 It is therefore of interest, when ethnographers recorded the customs and beliefs of the Skidi Pawnee of Oklahoma in the nineteenth century, that they were reported to have shamans, raised to the rank of chiefs, who specialized in astronomy. In the archives of the Smithsonian Institution there is a photograph of one of these individuals, named His Chiefly Sun, and notably he is shown wearing a mantle adorned with stars.139 It was also the custom of the Skidi Pawnee to wrap a newborn baby in a speckled wildcat skin. This, ethnographers were told,
was equivalent to saying, “I wrap the child with the heavens,” for the hide represented the sky and stars.140
LEFT: In ancient Egypt priests wearin
g a leopard-skin mantle, on which the spots represented stars, played a key role in mortuary ceremonies to prepare the deceased for the afterlife journey. IMAGE FROM TUTANKHAMUN’S TOMB. CENTER: The High Priest of Heliopolis, the cult center of the Giza pyramids, was titled the “Chief of the Astronomers” and wore a mantle like this one adorned with stars. PHOTO: FEDERICO TAVERNI AND NICOLA DELL’AQUILA/MUSEO EGIZIO. RIGHT: Skidi, Pawnee Astronomer Chief. PHOTO: THE NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES (NAA), SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION [BAE GN 01285].
In the case of the Heliopolitan “Chief of the Astronomers” we can see clearly from surviving depictions that the mantle he wore, upon which stars were embossed, was in fact a leopard skin. When the leopard skin was left undecorated the spots of the leopard itself were believed to have symbolized stars.141 A specialized class of priests, the Sem Priests, also wearing leopard-skin mantles, played a key role in mortuary ceremonies for the deceased.142
There is no dispute that the great Mississippian religious centers like Cahokia and Moundville were primarily focused on a cult of the dead, and while not every mound in these sites contains a burial, or multiple burials, the vast majority do. This is also the case at many other mound and earthwork sites in North America. Even some of the very earliest, such as Monte Sano, contain evidence of the postmortem processing of bodies.143 The Adena mounds are largely burial mounds.144 And as to the Hopewell earthworks, William Romain writes:
By far the vast majority of known … remains are interred in mounds located within the geometric enclosures. Necessarily, then, the physical relationship between the remains of the dead and the enclosures tells us that the Hopewell did, indeed, associate the geometric enclosures with the passage of the individual from life to death.145
It may even be, Romain adds,
that the Hopewell considered the geometric enclosures to be actual gateways, or doorways, to the otherworld. Certainly the idea of architectural structures being used to create entrances to the otherworld was known throughout North America. The circular hole in the top of the Ojibway shaking tent, for example, was specifically meant to allow for “soul-flight travel to the Hole in the Sky and across the barrier to the spirit realm.”146
Though different in degree in terms of the engineering required, there is no difference in kind between the hole in the Ojibwa tent and the star-shaft in the Great Pyramid—which likewise appears to have been intended to facilitate soul-travel to the sky across the barrier to the spirit realm.
Similarly, although there is again a marked difference of degree, there is no difference in kind between the geometric, astronomically aligned structures of the Giza plateau and the geometric, astronomically aligned structures of the Mississippi Valley. All of them seem bound together by the single purpose of the triumph of the soul over death and by the means deployed to achieve that purpose.
But why were structures required at all? And why these specific kinds of structures?
ASTRONOMY AND GEOMETRY IN THE AFTERLIFE
I’M NOT SUGGESTING THAT THE religion of ancient Egypt was brought from there to ancient North America and I’m not suggesting that the religion of ancient North America was brought to ancient Egypt. I accept the scientific consensus that the Old World and the New World have been isolated from one another, with no significant genetic or cultural contacts, for more than 12,000 years. Also, the similarities between the religious systems practiced in ancient Egypt and ancient North America are not such as could be explained by direct “missionary” or “conversion” activities at any time, whether relatively early or relatively late. There are too many stark and obvious differences, too deeply adapted to local conditions and local cultural circumstances, for this to be the case.
What, then, are we to make of the striking package of shared beliefs and symbols reviewed in the previous chapter? In both cases we have a journey of the soul to a staging ground in the west, a “leap” to a portal in the constellation Orion, transition through that portal to the Milky Way, a journey along the Milky Way during which challenges and ordeals are faced, and a judgment at which the soul’s destiny is decided.
Just as the differences rule out direct influence so, too, in my view, the similarities are too many and too obvious to be dismissed as mere “coincidences.” A better explanation needs to be sought and in this respect it’s helpful to remember that analogous situations arise in genetics. Sometimes, for example, two seemingly completely different groups of people, separated by huge distances and formidable geographic barriers and with zero opportunity to trade DNA, nevertheless turn out to share certain distinct clusters of genes. In these cases the answer very often lies in an earlier population, perhaps with no living members today—a “ghost” population—that was the remote common ancestor of both otherwise unrelated populations in which the surprising genetic resemblances have been found.
In the realm of archaeology, E. A. Wallis Budge faced a comparable problem with similarities he had identified between the Mesopotamian deity Sin, a moon god, and the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth, also associated with the moon. The resemblances, in Budge’s view, are “too close to be accidental. It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.”1
Walter Emery, late Edwards Professor of Egyptology at the University of London, also looked into similarities between ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. He found it impossible to explain them as the result of the direct influence of one culture upon the other and concluded:
The impression we get is of an indirect connection, and perhaps the existence of a third party, whose influence spread to both the Euphrates and the Nile. … Modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area. [However] a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to Egypt and Mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations.2
What I’m suggesting is essentially the same. The hypothesis that best explains the puzzling common features and fundamental differences between the religions of ancient Egypt and ancient North America is that an even more ancient religion, of as yet unidentified provenance, was ancestral to both. The presence of its “DNA” in Egypt and North America also has chronological implications. In view of the evidence that the Old and New Worlds were isolated for more than 12,000 years, from the end of the Ice Age until the time of Columbus, the remote common ancestor of the religions that would later blossom in the Nile and Mississippi River valleys must therefore be more than 12,000 years old. I suggest that this ancestral religion—perhaps system would be a better word—used astronomical and geometrical memes expressed in architectural projects as carriers through which it reproduced itself across cultures and down through the ages, and that it was a characteristic of the system that it could lie dormant for millennia and then mysteriously reappear in full flower.
The ayahuasca-inspired art of the Shipibo, in the Peruvian Amazon, is noted for its complex geometrical imagery. PHOTOS: TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM: LUKE HANCOCK. TOP CENTER: NMAI. SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION [19/5940]. TOP RIGHT: “DADEROT.”
Though it is not my purpose to argue this case here, the possibility that the system still hibernates in some form or another in the twenty-first century cannot be ruled out, nor the possibility that it might at some point be awakened again in a garb suited to its time.
Indeed, might we not already be seeing the first intimations of this with the explosion of interest all around the world in ayahuasca as a teacher plant, and in the parallel growth in public exposure to the initiating geometries of ayahuasca-inspired art?
The notion that human agents were behind the spread of the system is not contradicted by this suggestion. On the contrary, the system may itself have had its origins in visionary experiences, in which case those responsible
for its spread would surely have made use of “plant allies” wherever they could find them.
ANSWERS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES?
BECAUSE OF THE BURNING OF the library of Alexandria and the frenzied despoiling of the temples by fanatical Christian mobs in the fifth and sixth centuries, much of the legacy of wisdom that made ancient Egypt the “light of the world” has been lost. Nevertheless, because they carved so much in stone, and wrote so much down on papyrus and other media, and because they were enormously prolific artists and builders for more than 3,000 years, the ancient Egyptians have left us a vast legacy of knowledge about their spiritual ideas.
The immense destruction, genocide, and near-total obliteration of indigenous cultures unleashed in North America during the European conquest was a matter of an entirely different order—a full-blown, fast-moving cultural cataclysm, as a result of which we’re left often with no record at all or with huge gaps in the record. Thus, although we can be sure the great earthworks and mounds of the Mississippi Valley were connected to beliefs about death and the afterlife, no myths or traditions have survived to explain why it was essential to these beliefs that geoglyphs and mounds should be built or why these structures should incorporate complex geometry and astronomical alignments.
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