The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld

Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat

Andreas Schweizer, David Lorton, David Lorton

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801458040
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

"The ancient Egyptian sources come alive, speaking to us without seeming alien to our modern ways of thinking. Andreas Schweizer invites us to join the nocturnal voyage of the solar barque and to immerse ourselves, with the 'Great Soul' of the sun, into the darkness surrounding us. Here in the illustrations and texts of the Amduat, threats hidden in the depths of our soul become visible as concrete images, an analysis of which remains ever worthwhile: even in the guise of the evil, ominous, or dark side of godhead with which Schweizer concerns himself. The netherworld into which we descend underlies our own world. Creative energies of dreadful intensity are active there, and only death, to which all must surrender, makes us truly alive by offering us regeneration from the depths."—Erik Hornung, from the Foreword

The Amduat (literally "that which is in the netherworld") tells the story of the nocturnal journey of Re, the Egyptian Sungod, through the netherworld from the time when the sun dies, after setting in the west, to its rebirth at sunrise in the east. In the middle of the night, in the profoundest depths of the netherworld, this resurrection is made possible by a mystical union of the sun with the mummified body of Osiris, god of the dead. This great mystery of the union between the freely moving soul of the Sungod, longing for the bright and boundless sky, with Osiris's corpse, which is irrevocably bound to the subterranean realm of the dead, evokes the renewal of all life and the restoration of totality.

In the Egyptian belief system, the pharaohs and in later times all blessed dead embarked on this same "night-sea journey" after death, ultimately becoming one with Re and living forever. The vision of the afterlife elaborated in the Amduat, dating from around 1500 B.C.E., has been influential for millennia, providing the model for an entire genre of Egyptian literature, the Books of the Afterlife, which in turn endured into the Greco-Roman era. Its themes and images persisted into gnostic and alchemical texts and made their way into early Christian portrayals of the beyond.

In The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld, Andreas Schweizer guides the reader through the Amduat, offering a psychological interpretation of its principal textual and iconographic elements. He is concerned with themes that run deep and wide in human experience, drawing on Jungian archetypes to find similar expression in many cultures worldwide: sleep as death; resurrection as reawakening or rebirth; and salvation or redemption, whether from original sin (as for Christians) or from the total annihilation of death (as for the ancient Egyptians).

fourth hour

The Snake-Land of Sokar

The Dark Night of the Soul

In the fourth hour of the night, we enter an entirely new region of the netherworld, one that is especially dark and dry. Its name is Rosetau, whose literal meaning in the ancient Egyptian language is “act of towing.” The sun barque has run aground in the shallows and can no longer be rowed along the flowing water. With arduous labor, the assisting deities must tow the barque through the sandy region of this nocturnal hour. Gone are the life-giving fertility of Wernes and the gentle light of the fields of Osiris, though the god is intimately present in this hour as well. In this Land of Silence, as it is also called, the darkness is so intense that even the Sungod himself can no longer see those who dwell on the banks. He can only hear their voices.

The barren desert teems with snakes whose fiery breath illuminates the impenetrable darkness with a pale and ghostly light. This is the sandy Land of Sokar, and the fifth hour of the night will be called the “Cavern of Sokar.” Sokar, originally the falcon-headed god of death in the Memphite area, is a god of the earth, and in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, he is already identified with Osiris.1 In his realm, the stream of life runs dry, and there is not enough water to carry the sun barque over the shallows. Without the supportive presence of the four deities who tow it, and without their rope, the continuity of creation would be seriously challenged. Here the Sungod is most definitely in need of the help of his entourage. His barque has been transformed into a double-headed serpent, for only the serpent can successfully traverse this dangerous region of the snake-demons. Several times, the Sungod’s journey is blocked by doors that bar the way, and the line of the stream of the netherworld, which was previously clear, is broken up into a confusing, zigzag path.

In this imagery we see a psychological truth. There are times when obstacles bar the way to the further development of an individual, or even a whole nation, times when the dominant consciousness is in dire need of renewal, for it is morbid, no longer serves the flow of life, and is inadequate to the present situation and its requirements. In such times, the individual might easily fall into a severe depression. Nothing seems to move anymore. One can but wait for that moment when the “supportive deities towing the sun barque”—that is, psychologically, some auxiliary inner figures within the unconscious—become active and manage to overcome the present stagnation on a conscious level. At a national level, moreover, this would mean that the ruling political or religious-dogmatic order becomes undermined to the point where it finally collapses. In such chaos, renewal will be successful only when it is nourished by the underlying archetypal stream of life, that is, by the vivid and enlivening spirit.

In the introduction to the fourth hour, we read that those who dwell in this mysterious region are well provided for. Despite the darkness that prevails, the blessed dead are not in want, for the necessities of life are available. Psychologically, this means that even when we suffer darkness—as, for example, in a state of depression—the energy needed for life can nevertheless be present, though the ego-consciousness may have only limited access to it. In such periods, the major part of our energy lies secluded in the collective unconscious, where a process of renewal is at work. In the area of religion, many myths contain the motif of pregnancy through death, and this motif will be discussed later. At the individual level, these periods leave us feeling somehow paralyzed, sad, depressed, and powerless. And yet, contrary to the peculiar stagnation we consciously experience, the psychic world of the unconscious is even more alive than usual, and this can cause a dangerous imbalance between the inner and the outer world.

In the I Ching, hexagram number 36 shows how to deal with such a fatal situation.2 The basic theme of the hexagram is the darkening of light. The sun has sunk under the earth, and the earth has darkened. The name of the hexagram means literally “wounding of the bright.” This is precisely the situation in the land of Sokar, where the fire (i.e., the sun) has sunk under the earth and is now the sun of night. In such times, says the I Ching, one must “maintain his inner light; while remaining outwardly yielding and tractable,” for “perseverance must dwell in inmost consciousness and should not be discernible from without.” “In social intercourse one should not try to be all-knowing,” but rather, “let many things pass, without being duped.” Metaphorically speaking, these words beautifully describe the behavior adequate to the land of Sokar, that is, to a state in which psychic energy is hidden in the depths of the earth, or in the unconscious. Again, the very beginning of the introduction to the fourth hour states the matter clearly and simply:

Pausing in being towed by the person of this great god

in the mysterious cavern of the West “with protected forms.”

Taking care of those who are in it with his voice,

without his seeing them.

A transformation of consciousness rising from the depths to the surface from which it will emerge needs, more than anything else, stillness and persistence. It is much more a matter of being towed and carried along, like the Sungod here, than an active forward movement. Here, in the Amduat, even the great god Re has to dedicate himself entirely to a process of transformation, whose innermost structure stems from a fate to which not even his divine will has access.

An individual involved in such a transpersonal event needs most to live in his or her innermost consciousness and awareness, as indicated by the I Ching; only then can he or she gain the correct mental attitude, so as to be open to just that kind of transformation whose origin lies in the innermost part of the psyche, that is, in the collective unconscious. In this sort of life situation, any attempt to use all kinds of tricks and means to change the outer, perhaps painful, situation is in vain, for the transformation will begin on its own, and it will begin deep inside the individual and there alone.

Let us take, by way of example, a hitherto harmonious and uncomplicated relationship between a man and a woman. One day, this relationship is thwarted by the love affair of one of them. Almost overnight, all sorts of seemingly insuperable obstacles arise between the two. At the beginning, they might discuss the problems, trying to provide a clarification, but soon they will realize, to their bitter disappointment, that nothing of that sort will help. The time to solve the problem might not yet have come. Still, they must bear the uncertainty regarding their future, for neither can really know how, or even if, their relationship will continue. This painful situation must be endured, though not in a fatalistic way but rather with alertness on the part of that “innermost consciousness” that recognizes and follows the slightest psychic activities of the unconscious. In psychotherapeutic practice, we often see people who are too weak and agitated to persevere, patiently and successfully, through such a severe conflict in the matter of love. Instead, they desire to create facts and take destiny into their own hands. In most cases I have followed, such efforts change nothing, for merely altering the outer situation is usually of no use. In such cases, what really matters is a shift rooted in deep psychic layers, that is, a transformation process that originates in the collective unconscious, for only this can fundamentally change someone or something, or, as the Amduat puts it, can “pierce the (mysterious) way” of the future development.

In the fourth nocturnal hour, for the first time, the sun barque gets a name: “Piercing-the-way.” The Egyptian word for “piercing” has the determinative (a hieroglyph indicating the category of meaning of a word) of a knife, a cutting instrument used with words indicating the way a weapon or a serpent’s bite pierces. Though the Sungod is pausing while being towed, this does not exclude partial activity on his part. Psychologically, the image of the cutting knife points to an alertness that is the aforementioned innermost consciousness.

Just as the sun barque pierces its way through the darkness like a serpent, so in the midst of the dark clouds of a depression, the individual can find assistance in an alertness that renounces grandiose plans or ideas about his or her own future. The person who has come to a dead stop in his or her life will need to follow the “very long path,” for, as the Rosarium philosophorum tells us, “nature completes her work only gradually,”3 According to the alchemist Morienus, darkening of the mind and suffering belong necessarily to the initial stage of the opus. Its origin lies in an invasion by still totally foreign content of the unconscious into consciousness, content that the consciousness is unable to integrate at first. Such an initial stage is hard to bear because the unleashed opposites of the interior still need to be accepted as a part of one’s self. Redemption from such a conflict, be it ever so painful, must be left to the healing powers of the unconscious. Our task is merely to be as aware as possible of this process and to retain an open, sharp, and conscious mind that is, paradoxically, possible only with the aid of a sane instinctive disposition (the image of the piercing serpent). Such an accepting and conscious awareness of psychic images, along with the active acceptance of their emotional and affective quality (depressive feelings), can strongly stimulate the healing powers of the unconscious, thus improving the transformation process. It is not up to us to determine the length of this journey through the dark regions of a depression, that is, the duration of this transitional stage: the unconscious obeys only the laws of its own making.

By depicting the sun barque of the fourth hour in the form of a double-headed serpent, the author of the Amduat has made it clear that in this wasteland, healing can come only from instinctive and archetypal forces (that is, from the snake demons and deities) that lie deep within us. What is required is not ego-consciousness and intellect, not the gleaming light of the daytime sun, but the mysterious spirit of the serpent and the earth. This spirit is the dim consciousness that remains instinctively connected to and focused on the enlivening images of the unconscious and the netherworld.

Timor Dei initium sapientiae—“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). This famous biblical saying is the most apt motto for all who have embarked on the dangerous journey of the fourth and following nocturnal hours, or for all who are about to proceed into the realm of the collective unconscious, which normally does not happen by one’s own will but by fate. This transition cannot be accomplished on one’s own and certainly not with a heroic attitude. It rather requires the psychic forces of the inner self. From time immemorial, religious traditions have demanded that the initiand be accompanied and supported by one or more assistants. In the fourth hour, these assistants are personified by the gods towing the barque, who are connected with the Sungod in a particularly intimate manner by their towrope.

In our dreams, such supportive figures can appear, quite surprisingly, in the form of an unexpected visitor or visitors. Notwithstanding his or her often plain and modest appearance, such a figure can have a profound and lasting effect on the dreamer. He or she perceives that the visitor, sometimes immediately and sometimes after a while, has a mysterious knowledge, for the visitor comes...

Table of contents

• Foreword to the German Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Note
• Immersion into Darkness
• The Amduat—The Book of the Hidden Chamber
• The Title of the Amduat
• First Hour: The Jubilation of the Baboons Getting in Touch with the Animal Soul
• Second Hour: The Fertile Region of Wernes First Encounter with the Psychic Totality: Creation and Destruction
• Third Hour: Rowing on the Water of Osiris The Experience of Love through the World of Psychic Images
• Fourth Hour: The Snake-Land of Sokar The Dark Night of the Soul
• Fifth Hour: The Mystery of the Cavern of Sokar The Regenerative Force of Depression
• Sixth Hour: The Corpse of the Sungod and the Rebirth of Light Re-Union of the Opposites
• Seventh Hour: Apopis, Enemy of the Sun The Unstable Balance of the New
• Eighth Hour: Provision with Clothes Religious Renewal
• Ninth Hour: The Sungod’s Crew Manifestation of the New
• Tenth Hour: The Bodyguard of the Sungod Ready to Fight for the New
• Eleventh Hour: The Renewal of Time The Religious Dimension of Time and the New Consciousness
• Twelfth Hour: The End of the Primeval Darkness The Long-Awaited Birth
• Closure: The Five Stages of Renewal
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits