(December 17, 2011 at 7:50 am)dtango Wrote: The judgment takes place just before death, but only for the unlucky ones who failed to pass the test and were executed. The rest go to live happily in the “Gods’ place.”
Are you arguing my point?
Quote:.
You like bizarre things, situations and beliefs. No?
Here is one for you:
In spell 464 of the Coffin Texts occurs a passage which is famous and well known because it is present in all kinds of the funerary texts.
The man who was found pure at his judgment was ferried over to where the gods live and he was given a field of his own. So he says:
I acquire this field of yours, O Hetep, which you love, the Mistress of the Winds, I eat and carouse in it, I drink in it, I plough in it, I reap in it, I am not destroyed in it , I copulate in it.*
“I copulate” in the hieroglyphic script is written nk (copulate) =j (I)
“I do not copulate” is written n (not) nk (copulate) =j (I)
The spells of the coffin texts come in many copies and the translators are commenting the differences between them. In this case the gloss of the translator R. O. Faulkner reads:
So B9C (the id number of the spell in which the above passage occurs); the negation before “nk” is certainly in error, having been derived from an arrangement such as that in B6C, where again the negation surely cannot apply to “nk”, while B5C has it both ays, wjhich makes no sense: B1C, B3C and B1L are correctly in the affirmative.
Please note that the negation applies only to “nk” copulate not to eating and drinking and ploughing the field. The ancient scribes who added the negation knew that love making was prohibited by the gods and, most probably, thought that the texts they were copying from were in error and they simply were correcting the error.
What they did not know was that love making was prohibited only before judgment –something that the translator obviously knows- and that those found pure were allowed to procreate after their judgment.
What is of value in mythology is not what we believe of the myths but what the ancients believed. We have to find why they believed whatever it was they believed into and not just speculate basing our assumptions on our modern mentality.
The belief that the gods were prohibiting sex is no mythology any longer, is a fact of life that can be investigated.
Remember that in the Egyptian tradition it was not the soul that was judged (the concept of the soul did not exist in the ancient Egyptian tradition) it was the body. When the priesthood transformed the judgment of the living into a judgment of the dead they could not say that now the soul is to be judged because it was impossible to eradicate or falsify the ancient texts. They had to go on judging the body and they resorted to the madness of the mummification.
People today believe in the judgment of the soul because Egyptologists managed to label the texts “magical incantation,” to translate them in a way to confirm their assertion and thus render them useless even to the scientists who were willing to study them.
The above is absolutely irrelevant to my questions. You asserted that no other cultures have similar burial practices to the Egyptians. The implication being that there is no way to tie the after life beliefs of the Egyptians to their burial practices by way of comparison to other cultures. Is this what you were saying and what you believe? Simple answer, please. Your walls of text have not been enlightening in terms of the subject matter thusfar and I really just want to stay on track of the conversation.
