British Museum mummyStanding beside mummies, it’s easy to understand what attracts people to the ‘first mystery’, death, to the gods and the magical afterlife of Egypt. There are few subjects on earth, or beneath it, quite so compelling.
The ancient Egyptians probably invented heaven, the first to set out their beliefs clearly in texts and illustrations, while others, such as the Israelites, still believed that at death a person entered a dark realm of nothingness called Sheol.
Was the Egyptian afterworld a place, or just a different reality, a sort of virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained by its religion?Or were the Egyptians wrong and did they go to their graves resting on a broken reed, believing in a non-existent eternity?
I sometimes wonder if they achieved some sort of ghostly existence within the withered husks of their remains, suspended, like their bodies, in stasis, where the relative motions of space and time no longer operate.
