The Egyptian Way of Death

Abstract

In modern scientific times, we have no real philosophy of death, and what few rituals of death we do follow in no way approach the intensity of the concern that ancient Egyptians displayed for their dead. No other culture has ever cared so much about the question of what happens to the dead. Egyptians started describing in pictographs and images what they imagined the Netherworld to be like and what might happen to the dead in their passage to the Netherworld and beyond to a life after death. In The Sun-god’s Journey Through the Netherworld: Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat, the Zürich theologian and psychoanalyst Andreas Schweizer takes us on the journey first described in the oldest of the Egyptian funerary texts, the Amduat, the Book of the Netherworld. He shows the parallels between the journey of the Sungod through the darkness and the kinds of night-sea journeys experienced by his own analysands, in describing the twelve stages imagined by the Egyptians on the journey through the darkness and on to the light of sunrise, those stages corresponding to the twelve hours of darkness. Some stages are more critical than others; that is, they symbolize turning points where either regression or renewal can occur. He succeeds admirably in demonstrating how extraordinarily relevant this ancient Egyptian text and the twelve-hour journey of the Sungod is to our own lives today, seekers one and all on the same kind of journey through darkness to light as we continuously face that same challenge of regression or renewal in our work, and that same possibility of approaching the numinous.