The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld: Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat

First Hour The Jubilation of the Baboons

first hour The Jubilation of the Baboons Getting in Touch with the Animal Soul First Hour 32 The magnificence of sunset now ended, the Sungod and his entourage descend in the night barque to an intermediate realm separating this world from the actual netherworld. This interstitial space embodies an interval of time after which the god will enter Osiris’s realm of the dead through the gate at the end of the first nocturnal hour. Once again, there is a clear distinction between this world and the next, between the world of the day and that of the night, between above and below. Here we observe the Egyptians’ dread of the netherworld, this Land of Silence and Place of Truth where no enemy of the Sungod, or even the unauthorized, may set foot. No wonder, then, that the god we see depicted at the end of the lower middle register is named “He-who-seals-the-earth.”And the gate at the end of the first hour is called “He-who-devours-all,” again stressing the importance of preventing the Sungod’s enemies from entering the fields of the beyond. (The Amduat, unlike the Book of Gates, depicts neither the gate itself nor its guardian.) This natural fear of entering the netherworld—that is, of setting foot in the realm of archetypal images reflecting the collective unconscious— is entirely understandable. It is a well-known fact that if we try too eagerly to penetrate into the realm of the collective unconscious, or if we approach the healing images of the soul, let us say, with some sort of ulterior , ego-centered motive, striving for power or profit, it can be as though we are trying (as indicated by the imagery of the Amduat) to enter this “other world” in the company of the “enemies,” or, to put it in psychological terms, contaminated by the “shadow.” The shadow incorporates all those dark and inferior aspects of our personality that, despite the fact that they are repressed into the unconscious, prove to be real in the form of uncontrolled affects, moods, and emotions emerging from the depths of our psyche (in Jungian psychology the shadow is also a technical term for the parts in us that we don’t recognize). If we approach the archetypal world without awe and humility, the unconscious will most likely be hostile toward us. C. G. Jung refers to this danger in a major work entitled Mysterium coniunctionis.1 In the chapter “Allegoria Alchymica”—a pearl of Jung’s 1 Mysterium coniunctionis, vol. 14 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. G.Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), §§ 189–213. Jubilation of the Baboons 33 writings—he offers an interpretation of a text called “Philaletha” (“lover of truth,” the alchemist’s name), in which the alchemical opus is threatened by the intrusion of a thief. “Worthless is this thief,” the text runs, “armed with the malignity of arsenic, from whom the winged youth (that is, the spirit of inner truth) flees, shuddering.” Jung interprets this intruder as “a kind of self-robbery...not easily shaken off, as it comes from a habit of thinking supported by tradition and milieu alike: anything that cannot be exploited in some way is uninteresting—hence the devaluation of the psyche.”2 The Bhagavadgita (chapter 3, verse 12) also knows this greedy thief: “The Gods, nourished by the sacrifice, will give you the desired objects. Indeed he who enjoys the gifts given by them without offering to them is verily a thief.”3 Comparing the structure of the Amduat to the psychology of common human experience, we may say that this unequivocal separation of the hereafter from the transitory world of the living symbolizes protection: on the psychological level, it is protection of the realm of the unconscious from infringements and abuses by the ego, which can lead to misuse of the objective psyche and its numinous images for a mere ego-purpose. If Egyptians hoped to be accepted among the blessed dead and even to be identified with the Great God after death, they were expected to devote their lives totally to the service of this god, who was also called the Great Ba-soul. In the Amduat, all the deities and blessed dead who dwell on the banks of the subterranean stream live through this god and for him...