"Do I believe in survival after death?" the independent Egyptologist asked himself...
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| Anson Hunter wrestles with life, death and Egypt's mysteries - The SMITING TEXTS adventure thriller |
Anson
threw a glance to the columns bearing reliefs of the Vizier Mereruka.
The
striding figure in profile seemed beyond time and decay. The Hittite, Greek,
Persian, Roman and British empires had all come and gone while the Vizier had
continued to move steadfastly through eternity.
It was a
reminder that the Egyptians really believed, he thought. People were wrong to
imagine that cynical priests pretended to believe and merely went through the
motions when they presented offerings and prayers and burnt incense in front of
this door. They believed unshakably in an afterlife. They lived in an age
where humankind and gods, the living and the dead, and the forces of good and
evil, existed side by side in two parts that held the universe together. In
today’s age that denied god and laughed at the devil, people could not see both
sides. But they needed to believe in the light and the shadow and to hold both
in their minds, not least the shadow. The shadow gave things shape and form.
Without it there was just blinding, unrelieved glare like the sunlit desert
outside.
Was
Mereruka’s afterworld a physical place? Or just a different reality, a sort of
virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained
by its religion? Mereruka did not question its existence.
‘Do I
believe in survival after death?’ Anson asked himself. ‘Perhaps not, when I
think about it. But what about when I don’t think about it, but merely feel it,
at a deeper level?’
Everyone
knew that the Egyptians were preoccupied with the afterlife, but they took it
even more seriously than many imagined. Humans, they said, were the only
creatures that must live life with the knowledge that one day they’re going to
die and our culture was the world of distraction we create around ourselves to
shield us from this knowledge. But the Egyptians’ culture did not serve as a
mere distraction to the pitiless cruelty of death. Instead their culture came
to grips with death in an attempt to overcome its tyranny. This doorway and
statue, the glowing underworlds of the tombs, the Books of Coming Forth By Day,
or the Book of the Dead as they called these religious texts - were the results
of government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the
afterlife. The early pyramids were like nationally financed space-shots
designed to launch the god-king pharaoh into the hereafter. The Egyptians even
had maps showing the routes to the underworld painted on the bases of coffins.
The unconscious psyche believes in life after death Carl
Jung asserted.
Anson
recalled that the doctor and founder of analytical psychology had written of a
near-death experience after a heart attack and had reported a spiritual
existence outside of his body.
The images
of the afterlife carved on the tomb walls around him urged Anson to believe.
But the
veil of mystery remained.
Perhaps we
were not meant to know the truth so that we could endure this life.
