Rites for resurrection

Greetings to you Osiris,
Lord of Eternity,
King of the many Names,
Of the sacred transformation
Of the secret forms in the temples.

Death as an end doesn’t exist in the thinking of ancient Egypt and, as so, is refused because it’s intended only as a modification of vital harmony. Actually the Egyptians never accepted it as the disappearance of the Being neither as a second life relegated in another world, far from life on earth. The funeral rituals are actually rituals of awakening to the heavenly life and not moments of desperation: the soul continues to live in the mortal body, rests in it, it eats the offers brought from the living, because the divine body of the dead person continues to live in constant communication between this world and the other one:

….you don’t die, you don’t annul yourself,
your Name lasts among the people,
your Name lasts among the Gods…..

Each man has as a mission, to know the secret Name given to him at his birth and to overcome victoriously the test of death means to render this Name lasting as Osiride’s one.
Man exits from Maat’s body and returns to it after his stay on earth.
The elements that form the Being don’t live together any more; the event called death is so the most dangerous of “ the moments of the passing” because man’s twelve male genes risk, beyond the mirror, to remain not united and the harmonic passage of the Being is allowed only by the correct execution of the funeral rituals that mark the way toward the Light to live again, “on the other side”, complete, avoiding the “second death”. The funeral magic has the aim to refund life, a life that needs the correct function of the Heart and of the vital organs, of the thin energies in the food and drinks served in the banquets in afterlife; for this reason the mortal remains is brought to the house of death where it stays for seventy days.
In it, in the purifying tent, the dead person is received and washed with salted water, symbol of the NUN, the regenerating primigenio ocean, and the dead person is purified as the Sun when in the morning it comes out of the sea after its passage through the darkness of the west; at his feet two Ankh are put, the crosses symbol of life and resurrection. The rituals of resurrection promise to the new being that he will possess again the use of his body, similar but not exactly the same as the one he had on earth and to allow this his insides were put in the canopy vases. So not only the material organs are kept but also the thin principles they hold, because the mummification is the magic act through which the magician lets the “dead person” pass from his human body to his divine one. In the Sardab, a small and scanty room in the heart of the Mastaba, there is the dead person’s living statues and his creating dynamism, the Ka, is around it. Beside the mummy, a papyrus is put that rejects every evil force and allows a safe journey to the “Lands in the West”; others are put on his hands and legs and with those directions and itineraries the dead person doesn’t get lost in the darkness. The amulets of Heliopolis are put on him: in the tomb there is a djed pilaster, so this unchangeable plank that connects earth to the sky enlightens his conscience; a little ouadj column, which represents the constant growth of the Being, banishes for him the border between the “low” and the “high” world; on the heart a scarabs symbolizes the continuos changes of conscience. Around the sarcophagus a symbolic camp of energy made real by the Eye, levels it, squares it, the borning son and the mummy are so rendered incorruptible by the magical power that comes from them, so the mortal remains become an Immortal Body so the soul with such a support enters the reign in the West living for eternity. The thin bandages wrapped around the body have been given by Neith, the weaving goddess, whose task is to preserve the body from putrefaction, giving the mummified being the quality of reality in eternity. Brought back to the purifying tent, to him yet unanimated, the magician with a small iron ax 2opens the mouth” to give him back the Verb and with this act the mummy is living and the dead person can pass from his human body to his divine body. Anubis expresses his power on the vital breath, on energy, on the material; he puts the ipocefalo under his head, which as a divine flame transforms the corpse to a living being and so to the purified corpse to a living being and so to the purified corps he substitutes the smell of decomposed meat with the one of incense and myrhh. Ra puts on the dead person’s face a gold mask, a symbol of regenerated life, symbol of imperituro which express the splendor of divine life and Isis makes sure that the dead person renews his life through the inner gold every man has. The statue is so put in the sarcophagus and his spirit can go in and out of it because it’s not a sepulchral, a constrictive place; “he who possesses the life”- that’s his name- is the boat that brings the dead person to the sky allowing the free passage of the spirit from this world to the other one.
An offer by the King,
An offer by Anubis:
One thousand bread, one thousand jugs at zytum,
One thousand ox, one thousand goose
For your vital power.

It’s the classic formula angraved on the funeral steles and in the tomb the folders of the offers are put, the lists of the food for survival in the dark world; with their reading, from the hyerogliphics the deep assence of the food radiates because it’s the power of the Verb that actually feeds the people’s souls in afterlife, around the sarcophagus the golen are put, substituting corpses on which any possible aggressive force is dumped to defend the dead person.

He is surrounded by other personages: the Ushebtl, who answer to the dead’s call for help; they are little statues of personages with their body covered by magic texts, and a sack on their back and grasping two hoes.
They are the support of the building forces and their function is of magic substitutes in the land of the west, taking the dead person’s place in the hardest works, so the right one could completely enjoy his second life, the ritual offers, the food, the hunting, the love, living a calm death in the paradise of the “cane reed fields”.
The Egyptian paradise is not immagined as a place of continuous worship at a divinity nor as an incomplete projection of earthly life; they symbolically represent the heavenly society in which the blassed one takes his rightful place passing an independent life in harmony with the gods.
The dead person has to face many rsk on the roads of the other world and the way is long; its inhabited by terrible genes who await the traveller, along the two ways, one on water, one on earth and separated by a river of fire.
To pass the four borders of the sky the traveller has to convince the guards to let him pass because he is worthy, he has knowledge; thanks to the funeral rituals he has magic powers with which he can defeat these strange creatures that guard the dark and deep places, on the roads that lost themselves in the darkness, on crossroads that lead to nothing. Another personage is against the vagrant: he’s the passing one who keeps the boat, thanks to which the acquatic deserts that surround the heavenly paradise, can be pased, a memory of the dead Osiride’s journey over the waters. To get on the boat the dead has to demonstrate his knowledge, his powers; he comes from the enflamed island where he has engaged a cruent battle with the enemies of light, he knows the secret names of things and doesn’t hesitate to say them; he has discovered the gods’ place where the royal boat is split, as Osiride on earth. The passing one is won by such a knowledge and puts his boat at his disposal – “pass – he says – because you have the knowledge° and prepares to await for another vagrant to test. To ho ahead, the dead person must pass the test at the door that separates the two worlds and must demonstrate to the guardian that he knows his names well: the threshold is “the teacher of rectitude whose on his legs”; the architrave is “The teacher of force that introduces the livestock”; “Precious balance” is the pediment. He so can enter the “chamber of the two truth”, the human one and the divine one, and contemplate the meeting of his brother who had preceded him, because only the community can form the complete Eye who can watch the Divinity: he recognizes the forty-two gods that question him and Osiride who sits under the royal baldachin with his merciful savers, Isis and Neftis. For the people Osiride is the “god of sentiment”, the “good” god who keeps in himself the potential of affection and of hope which he gives to men to confort them; he allows to overcome the borders of the unknown assuring an afterlife destiny according to each man’s moral behavior and merits, but with a veil of benevolent complicity. For the wise one he is the “divine Osiride”: Lord of Eternity and of Kings; he’s the power of the manifestation of the hight that projects toward the world of men the Divine reality where everything is a continuous transformation.
He is the inflexible judge and before him the interior man has to reveal himself completely to put in relation his own personal action with the universal one. Osiride is mostly cosmic energy in which each one can discover the laws of Wisdom in a proportional way to the intensity of his own Eye. At the opposite end of the room sits Anubis with the head of a jackal, who introduces the dead person. Everybody listens to the vagrant’s confession, who assures them of not having committed the seventy horrible sins, to hide one’s responibilities would be as to deceive oneself and so be condemned to a worse punishment:

I come before you, great tribunal
That is in the sky, on earth and in the necropoli…
Greatings to you who preside over the Westerners
… I come before you and my heart brings the truth.
There is no fault in my body..

On a plate of the great balance there is the vagrant heart; on the other there is Maat’s pen; Anubis controls the weigh and in this moment the man has to give an account of his own behavior and demonstrate he has let grow a particle of the hight put inside him. Absolved he goes toward Osiride guided by Ra and he himself is transformed in Osiride in Eternity and for the blessed dead person the heavenly doors open, he gets on the boat of the sun because he’s both God of Darkness and of the sky; navigating on the heavenly boat, he sits beside the king; he takes his place with the divinities; he enters the sun and with it, day and night, he goes over the roads of the Cosmo giving creative energy, real living God; he can “go out in the day”

“The doors of the sky are open,
the bolts have been removed from the doors of the temple.
The house is open for its master!
May he go out when he wants to,
May he go in when he wants to…”

If on the contrary in this world he has been satisfied to survive with no conscience of the Divine Armony, he is devoured by the “eater of the west”, condemned to the second death from which there is no return.
Osiride’s messenger arouses fear.
Here the affections are alive and burning in the chest; over there the fear at the unknown of solitude impress a thin melancholy that the hope of a second life can’t dissipate.
The water of the NUN doesn’t reach the Duat and the regret for “The water of life” is great:

“the west is a country of sleep, of deep darkness, the place of those who are there, who sleep in their coffins…
The water of life
Of which all mouths feed is for me thirst it comes to who is on earth, for me it’s thirst.
Turn my face toward the northern wind,
To the banks of the water
Het my heast in its distress have a refreshment
Concerning the death,
Its name is “COME”….
Nobody can divert his nod on his own…”

On the sarcophagus of the priestess in Tebe the god Thot is is represented with the head of an ibis and god Horus with the head of a hawk, who are pouring water over the woman’s body, represented still alive and on her knees on a mat.
The re-generation power is indicated by the ank and by the uas.