A thing without a name did not exist for the Egyptians. The perpetuation of a person's name in inscriptions perpetuated his life. Therefore, harmful witchcraft primarily sought to betray the name to desecration, curse and even destruction of the name inscription.
The pictures of the transmigration of the souls of the deceased into the other world, which the Book of the Dead draws, fascinate with their clarity and detail. Where did the Egyptians get this knowledge of otherness?
Materialistic science, with no hesitation, designated the complex complex of Egyptian knowledge about otherness as "the primitive idea of the afterlife as a direct continuation of earthly life." The obsessive desire in the entire Egyptian ritual to see only a "perverse" reflection in the consciousness of people of earthly life leads to a pedantic study of the particular changes that Egyptian ideas about the afterlife underwent in time, and not to the study of the timeless essence of these ideas.
The most common view of the secret Egyptian teaching about the Kingdom of the Dead looks something like this. A person continues to live after death, provided that his body is preserved in the integrity and that his vital needs for food and drink are taken care of by living relatives. The cult of the dead is reduced to "the struggle against death for eternal life."
The one-sided limitation of such ideas becomes apparent when one gets acquainted with the Egyptian funeral literature (Sahu).
First of all, it should be remembered that popular beliefs are very far from priestly ideas; and the difference here lies in the very methods of acquiring knowledge about otherness.
The common people at all times were inclined to simplified, often thoughtless performance of generally accepted rituals related to the funeral cult. For reflection and understanding of the essence of the phenomenon of death, the uninitiated have never had any abilities, no desire, no time.
The Book of the Dead was undoubtedly created by the great initiates of Egypt, who had a completely different, “mystical” experience. It was the initiates who received the sacraments of the temple or received initiation not from people who not only meditated on the phenomenon of death, but also acquired supernatural knowledge about it. They conveyed their knowledge verbally and even in writing, but almost always allegorically God-fearing.
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The Book of the Dead is a large collection of similar allegories, pious revelations of the “mystical experience” of several generations of initiates. All of them came from among the priests who participated in and led the mysteries.
The initiates of the sacraments were divided into three groups according to the degree of initiation.
Initiates of the first degree (most of the junior temple staff had it), due to poor health or strong emotional turmoil, experienced at least once in their lives an “unintentional” exit, journey and return of the soul-manifestation of Ba. Their souls wandered in another being and remembered everything they saw there.
Initiates of the second degree, by nature and as a result of special exercises, had the ability, at will, to send their souls on a journey through another being. They explored all the path available to their souls many times, memorizing the smallest details and details.
Initiates of the third degree, otherwise called miracle workers, were endowed by the gods with the ability not only to independently send their souls to another world, but also to help the souls of other people to make such wanderings in order to cognize otherness.
A significant part of the mystical experience acquired by the Egyptians remained unspeakable, a smaller part of it was expressed and recorded allegorically, and only a small fraction was fully made public.
By itself, the "mystical" way of obtaining knowledge about otherness does not at all contradict the more accessible "empirical" way, as it is commonly thought, but rather is in the relation of complementarity to it. However, it is rather “empirical” experience that complements “mystical” than vice versa; transferring the features of the empirical method to the mystical method of cognition is certainly wrong.
And although the mystical method of obtaining any knowledge has a lesser social basis: there are few initiated people in any society, and there are only a few great initiates, the knowledge gained by this method deserves no less attention and study than the knowledge gained as a result of wide social practice.
The funeral literature of all times of Egyptian history, even completely "grassroots", says that the soul-twin of the deceased does not consume the funeral offerings themselves, but is saturated with their twin souls. Ka of the deceased eats not bread, but Ka of bread, drinks not beer, but Ka of beer. The soul-manifestation of Ba and the soul-heart of Eb are generally satisfied not with memorial offerings and gifts of relatives, relatives and friends, but with their pious and unhypocritical memory, care for the deceased, their ritual purity and lack of malicious intent.
The favorite motive of Egyptology about how magic fiction (all kinds of oral and written memorial incantations, prayers and praises) saved the Egyptians from the unbearable material costs for the cult of the dead, is nothing more than a fake melody of little faith.
The Egyptians, both uninitiated and initiated, until the death of their civilization retained a strong belief in the creative magical power of the word and straightforwardly supplemented material memorial offerings and gifts with their magical verbal substitutes, often without any selfish intention.
Due to their amazing knowledge about otherness and about the spiritual structure of the human being, the Egyptians, as a rule, turn out to be, in general, right in relation to the particulars of modern scientific knowledge about man and death. Many years will pass, and it will turn out that everything obtained by sophisticated empirical science serves only as a confirmation or even an illustration of the long-spoken absolute truths of the Egyptian doctrine of otherness.
