Tags: the weighing of the heart in the Book of the Dead; psychostasy; life review; Édouard Naville (The old Egyptian faith, 1909); Papyrus of Ani; ancient Egyptian religion

The weighing of the heart in the Book of the Dead, according to Édouard Naville (1905)




As explained in an earlier entry, on Saturday, I had been thinking of returning a book to Lausanne’s university library. However, before doing so, I thought that I would quickly go through the excerpts of the articles collected in this anthology of French texts having to do with ancient Egypt and published originally for their most part in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On going through the book starting from the end to the middle sections, I came across the following passage taken from a series of lectures given by the Swiss scholar of religions and archaeologist Édouard Naville (1844-1926) in 1905 at the Collège de France and translated into English in 1909 by a Scottish clergyman, Colin Campbell. As the subject of psychostasy (weighing of the soul in Greek) is of great interest to me and also because of a previous entry I wrote on a related subject (‘Herodotus on the Egyptian belief of transmigration’), even though I am no expert on this topic (thereby conveniently allowing me not to have to provide footnotes on the various place names and deities mentioned in Mr Naville’s text), I decided to publish the English translation of Édouard Naville’s description of how the ancient Egyptians believed a soul would be judged by the gods, as described in various versions of the Book of the Dead.

For a very short list of links about psychostasy and the works of my fellow Genevese compatriot Édouard Naville, please take a look at the bottom of this page. In addition, a photograph of a pictorial representation of the weighing of the heart from an ancient Egyptian papyrus is available here, as a frontispiece to the English translation of Naville’s work, under the caption of ‘The Forty-two Gods, who avenge the Forty-two Trespasses, adored by the Deceased [...]’. The photograph was taken by Colin Campbell himself. Another pictorial representation of the weighing of the heart from an Egyptian papyrus of the Theban Book of the Dead (the famous Papyrus of Ani) kept at the British Museum and reproduced in full colour is available here. (Should this page have moved by the time you were to read the following, then go here.)

[Here begins the translation provided by Colin Campbell on pages 184 to 193 of The old Egyptian faith; as usual, words, fragments of sentences or full sentences in green indicate emphasis purely of my responsibility.]
 
[…] Yet undoubtedly it is Heliopolis that is the reputed scene of what I consider to be the heart of the Book of the Dead, the Judgment. This part is also the most interesting of all, because it is almost the only one in which a moral element appears. Up to this point, as we have seen, the gods are deities more or less cosmic; they are divinities whose nature-character is strongly marked, and whose relations with man are precisely the same as those which he holds with natural phenomena. Consequently, the conception of good and evil, and everything connected with conscience, are entirely absent. How comes it, then, that, side by side with such strongly accented pantheistic tendencies, we have a moral code as well, which for loftiness may well be placed beside others which claim our admiration? We are here in presence of a contradiction which is not peculiar to Egypt— a something inherent in the nature of man— namely, conscience, which always appears again and again, and always will assert itself as the standard of right and wrong. As Osiris stood for the primeval man, he could not be a stranger to those feelings which govern man in relation to his conduct: it is man himself who must be his own judge.

     The scene of the Judgment occupies chapter cxxv. of the book. One of the longest, it is also one of the commonest. Indeed, it of all others had the greatest value for the deceased, and summed up the whole book for him. Frequently it follows chapter i., but it is found more often near the end of the book. It consists of three parts, with an introduction bearing different titles, one of which is: “Words said when one approaches the Hall of the Two Truths, or the Two Justices, to the end that one may be delivered from his sins and see the faces of the gods.” It is curious that Truth, or, as Renouf renders it, Justice, should be represented by two goddesses, absolutely alike; and one of the texts informs us that one of them is at the East and the other at the West. They keep guard, therefore, over the two extremities of the Hall or Seat of Osiris. We have here a singular mingling of cosmic or nature ideas relative to the course of the Sun, with a scene which is altogether human in its character, and implies, above all, an order of ideas entirely apart from nature. The dead man draws near with his wife; the two have their hands raised in adoration; before entering, he makes his addresses to Osiris, who is in his hall or pavilion, and he says: “Hail to thee, mighty God, Lord of Justice. I come to thee, my Lord, to behold thy beauties; I know thee, I know the name of the two-and-forty gods who are with thee, who devour those who meditate evil, who drink their blood the day when a man gives account of himself before Unnofer. Truly thy name is: He whose two eyes are those of Justice. Behold me, I have come to thee, I bring the truth to thee, and I will put aside all lying.” Then he begins a confession which he repeats later when he enters the Hall: “I have not done evil to any man; I am not one of those who put to death his kindred; I am not one who telleth lies in place of truth. ... I am not a doer of that which the gods abhor; I have not done wrong to a servant in the eyes of his master; I have not caused famine; I have not caused weeping; I am not a murderer; I have not given commands for murder; I have not caused men to suffer; I have not diminished the temple offerings; I have not lessened the bread given to the gods; I have not robbed the dead of their funeral offerings; I am not an adulterer; I have not diminished the grain measure; I have not shortened the palm’s length .... I have not pressed down the arm of the balance; I have not falsified the tongue [of the balance]; I have not snatched away the milk from the mouth of children; and I have not driven off the cattle from their pastures.” Then follow some delinquencies which have a purely Egyptian smack: “I have not stopped the water at its appointed time; I have not diverted a runnel of water in its course.” Obviously, water, being in Egypt the producer of life, is regarded with a veneration and respect that it could not have in a country not wholly dependent on a large river and on inundation. There are also trespasses with reference to the gods. We have seen above that the dead man denies that he had diminished or stolen the offerings; other transgressions refer to the ceremonies, like the following, the last in the list: “I have not put myself in the way of the god when he cometh forth,” that is, when the god is led forth in procession in the temple at his festival. And at the very end the dead man exclaims: “I am pure, I am pure .... let no harm come to me in this land, in the Hall of Justice, because I know the name of all the gods who make their appearance in it.”

    The foregoing is only a preliminary confession made at the gate; it is not enough to justify the deceased. Anubis comes and takes him by the hand, and leads him into the Hall of Justice. At the end of it Osiris, the supreme judge, is enthroned in a pavilion; and sometimes with him are four judges as assessors, the gods of the cardinal points. In front of the judge is a balance, the tongue of which Thoth (in the frontispiece it is Horus) verifies, while round about him are forty-two deities to whom the deceased has referred as being ready to devour the guilty and drink his blood. These gods seem quite fit to inspire him with terror. Sometimes also there is the Enemy par excellence, “he who eats the dead,”—a monster with a composite body of three animals, a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus. But what completes the chilling terror of the deceased is that he feels his heart is no longer in himself; he sees it before him in one of the scales of the balance, and the goddess of Justice in the other. His first cry is to it: “O Heart of my mother, Heart of my birth, Heart that was mine on earth, rise not up as a witness against me, be not my adversary before the Divine Powers, let not the scale weigh against me in presence of the guardian of the Balance; do not say, ‘See there what he has done, in truth he has done it’; do not suffer wrongs to arise against me in presence of the great god of the Ament.” Then he begs his heart to come back to him, and to be joined to him anew. The heart listens to his request, and it is found to be neither too heavy nor too light. Yet, all the same, the deceased must make his defence; and for this purpose he challenges by name each of the forty-two deities who assist in the judgment—the same that are ready to devour him if he is found guilty—and he calls each of them to witness that he has not committed any of the forty-two sins which would entail his condemnation: “O thou who stridest with long steps, and who makest thine appearance in Heliopolis, I am not a doer of wrong. O thou who holdest the fire, and who makest thine appearance in Kheraha, I have not been a robber. O thou god (Thoth) with the long beak (beak of the ibis), and who appearest in Eshmoun, I am not evil-minded,” and so on through the forty-two. He thus repeats in greater detail the confession made at the entrance. When we analyse this confession we are struck with its lofty character and the development of the moral sense that it reveals. If we compare it with the Decalogue, in those commandments, for instance, which govern the relations between man and man, we find that murder, adultery, and theft are forbidden in both codes; false witness-bearing is forbidden also in the Egyptian law under the calumny of “doing wrong to a servant in the eyes of his master”; and if covetousness is not specially named, the Egyptian law, on the other hand, accentuates very forcibly the forbidding of lying and deceit, a prohibition which Egyptians of the present day appear often to forget. Blasphemy is banned, as well as words spoken against the king.

     Certain obligations imposed are interesting, like the following: “I have not been deaf to the words of justice (righteousness).” I was saying that covetousness is not specially cited, at least not so clearly as in the Hebrew law, but perhaps it is meant by the sentence which Renouf translates thus: “I have no strong desire but for my own property.”

     During the confession Thoth is weighing the heart, and afterwards he reports to the judge as to the state of the balance. I translate from a papyrus written for a princess: “The princess is triumphant; she has been weighed in the balance before the guardian Anubis, under the command of the god of Hermopolis himself, in presence of the powers of the Hall of Justice. No fault has been found in her; her heart is according to truth, her members are pure, her whole body is free from evil, the tongue of the balance shows true; there is no doubt; all her members are perfect.” Then comes the decree of Osiris, the eternal god: “Let her go forth victorious, to enter into every place she pleases, and be with the spirits and the gods. She will not be repulsed by the guardians of the gates of the West; grant her food, offerings, drinks .... and clothes of fine linen”: whereupon her heart is restored to her.

     Here, then, we have the Egyptian conception of conscience. Thus the most terrible accuser of man—he who can most effectually bring down on his head the punishment he has earned,—he whose assertions no one has skill to gainsay, is man himself, his own heart, that knows too well that he has broken a hundred times that moral law which he knows perfectly.
When the dead man emerges triumphantly from the Hall of Justice, he goes wherever he wills. Sometimes he enters a hall called “The Great”; he declares that he is the man to whom those who see him say, “Come in peace.” Every part of the hall asks him if he knows its name, the door, the floor, etc., and everywhere he is allowed to pass. Later, he goes to see the fourteen abodes, or, as M. Maspero translates the words, “the fourteen islands of the West.” In one of these are the two green sycamores between which the sun passes as he [sic] rises in the firmament; in another we see the Nile issuing from the caverns of Elephantiné and running as far as Heliopolis, where it was supposed to find a fresh source, for in the Egyptian mythology there are two Niles. It is at this point the Book of the Dead of the Theban period usually ends, with the words, “It is finished.” We now leave the dead man in this ill-defined existence of his, in which he is at one time the double of his earthly personality, at another a god, Osiris or Ra himself, at another still, a bird or a lotus—an existence in which he can assume any form he pleases, or contend with malignant spirits, or devote himself to working in the fields of the gardens of Aalou, where he has numberless courses open to him, without following any definite line or complying with any obligation. All this body of ideas, we repeat, represents the conceptions the Egyptian had of the future life, but there is no possibility of discovering in it a systematic or settled doctrine.

Some links:

- (not limited to ancient Egypt) ‘Psychostasis or the Weighing of the Souls’, Laura Rodríguez Peinad, https://webs.ucm.es/centros/cont/descargas/documento21343.pdf

- (a good introduction to the life of Édouard Naville, including the huge contribution his wife made to his work; unfortunately, the text is in French) http://blog.mahgeneve.ch/histoire-des-collections-lapport-dedouard-et-de-marguerite-naville

- (the works of Édouard Naville available at the Internet Archive) https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Naville%2C%20%C3%89douard

- (an even more comprehensive list of the works Édouard Naville authored) https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ANaville%2C+E%CC%81douard+Henri%2C.


This entry was published on the twenty-fourth day of May 2021.