Was that ancient civilization well aware of the understanding processes? Yes, it was. Egyptians also had a finely grained intuition about human agency.
By Primavera Fisogni
At the core of the transformations occurring in the afterlife, collected in the Book of the Dead, the repetition of the very ‘first time’ took place. The terms sp tpy indicates the process which the never ending creation consists of, that’s to say a perennial reply of the original act of being. It allows the possibility that every single thing, as well as human individuals who passed the weight of the heart, could became once again, in a new way. Hence, each change is interested by that crucial re-enactment of creation.
This complex post-existential phase entails an extraordinary interest for contemporary philosophical investigation because it offers a lens through which Egyptian anthropology can be either approached and understood just moving from afterlife transformations. Furthermore this cultural frame is about to reveal an extraordinary systemic thinking approach to life, as I want to argue in the following paragraphs.
A Texture of Processes
This article is aimed at going further the traditional view, still persistent among scholars of Egyptological issues, who traditionally look at the individual as a cluster of parts, either biological-organic and spiritual, whose connection can be primarily thought of in terms of connectivity according to a bodily recipient (the mummy/the coffin) that recalls the biological organism1. In this dyadic perspective, when any biological activity ends, the body is nothing but a sort of envelop that can be surgically manipulated for becoming functional to the recovery of connectivity.2
On the contrary, more than a matter on connections, the human condition in the Egyptian afterlife would be better understood as texture of processes belonging to eachof its single components or subsystems. It is properly this kind of relation which enables the person to overcome the limits imposed by death, in order to flourish as a righteous of voice (mȝˁ-ḫrw), the essential condition for living a new, prosperous existence in the Dwat. My argument moves from two main traits that emerge from the literary and religious sources: 1) the various parts that characterized the very idea of the human being in the afterlife are not simply limbs, biological organs but complex personal systems; 2) secondarily, what connects these ‘parts’ together as a whole is energetic activity, a principle of efficiency that comes forth from the body’s dissipation, as will be discussed.
Indeed Egyptians had many terms for making references to anatomical description; the decision to overcome the anatomical lexicon in order to use systems of interrelation, may be interpreted furthermore a clear sign of the intentional systemic description of the human individual in the afterlife. Although Egyptian have never theorized the concept of ‘system’, which is firstly sketched by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, indeed they were familiar with the idea of a complex of interacting elements, interconnected and capable of self and mutual organization.
One can object that is an organ, namely the mouth – r3 – that activates the entire process of rebirthing/re-creation. This is certainly true, but we have to remember that mouth is a anthropological activator in virtue of the voice (ḫrw), which is endowed of the creative power. In the Memphite cosmogony, creation belongs to mouth of god Ptah, who pronounced the name of everythinhg (r m ȝt rn n iẖt nbt)3.
It seems and it may be argued, as I intend to do, that Egyptians were well conscious of the unitary connection between the various parts/systems; they always referred to the afterlife’s existence as a dynamic interaction of the whole constellation of systems or, it would better to say, of personal subsystems. This perspective is particularly fruitful, especially because it overcomes the necessity to postulate two different kinds of connections for the biological condition (the society, the state, the veins within the body and the mt conducts)4 and the afterlife existence (the mummy), as scholars generally assume; the systemic view throws light on the analogy existing between the two domains, either dynamic, which the Kemet civilization tried to explain according an extraordinary sophisticated frame. It is interesting to note that Egyptians, in their anthropological view of afterlife and especially in highlighting on the ‘activity’ of the various human subsystems,seem to provide an answer to Aristotle main ontological question: what does give reason of the unity of different parts of the whole? All these considerations will be better understood at the light of the systemic thinking.
From Life to Afterlife, a Systemic Perspective
When the last breath of the existence has come to the end, the multiple components of the human subject revealed how their peculiar dynamics are knotted together. Everything, we could say, begins from the end, when the dead body (ẖȝt) is mummified (wi ), assuming Osiris’ image and his noble shape (mummy is also given by the term sˁḥ, in hieroglyph or followed by the the determinative ), thus becoming the barycenter of the individual’s multiple parts, as the Lord of life (nb ˁnḫ)10.
For Ancient Egyptians this is the beginning of a new existence and properly the pre-condition of the persistence of the ka, the subtle component that stands in the proximity of the mummy as a sort of caretaker, in virtue of its intimate link with the Self of the deceased. On a systemic view, this passage is crucial in order to give rise to emergent properties or to a new balance: dissipation, in fact, functions as a sort of earthquake when death terminates the unitary functioning of the biological body. It worth noting that the mummified body (wi/sˁḥ), in a systemic perspective, represents the very center of the individual’s constellation of subsystems: the corpse (ẖȝt), the ka (kȝ), the ba (bˁ), the shadow (šwyt), the glorified individual (ȝḫ). An analogical relation between the living body and the mummy, as the playground of the entire set of biological dynamics was finely perceived by Egyptians; differently from Homer’s anthropological frame, where no term was definitely related to the «“idea” of the body that coincides with the modern meaning in the sense of “organism”»11, the Kemet civilization found in the mummy the point of departure of any operation providing the individual the possibility to recollect and reconnect the various constituents, either material, spiritual, spiritual and material as well. Within the afterlife, in other words, Egyptians seemingly grasped the very idea of the human being as an interacting system. Furthermore they took in something crucial in the very essence of a perturbation: its being a change enabler, an activator of emergence, whose consequences appear highly relevant for a new becoming of the deceased. Moving from the idea that any image is always a living image (twt ˁnḫ) – and also the stela and the tomb belong to the individual’s constellations of parts12 –, they also realized that, so far as the body overcomes the destiny of decomposition, maintaining its proper shape, the conditions of the rebirth would be given.
The mummified body, systemically speaking, operates as well as a magnet attracting the multiple parts of the individual and give rise to the new integrity of the whole, according to the proper name (rn). It is important to outline that the name resumes in itself the story and the destiny of the person, the existential journey made in space and time.
Singing the Name to Let the Ka Alive
It is in virtue of the name processes of rebirthing and transformation are activated within Egyptian afterlife. Called to existence, through the proper name, the deceased is allowed to use the voice for restoring the cosmic balance or maat, according to the ritual of wp r3, the opening of the mouth. It is properly the voice, through the words pronounced by the priests of other individuals on behalf of the dead that functions as an activator of the processes taking place after the death. A crucial phase for achieving the spiritualized condition of the akh, it has to be taken carefully in consideration for having a better understanding of how the afterlife dynamics works. Let us investigate briefly how the name keeps the ka alive before moving to the akh, the glorified person.
In the Memphite cosmogonic tradition, one of the three on which Egyptian religion is grounded, it was the god Ptah to give birth to the universe though his shout, his words. Hence, the deceased was expected to have the control over his existence as long as he could use the voice, according to chapters 21 and 22 of the Book of the Dead. Singing emphasizes the voice’s pragmatic strength, fueling its capacity to interacts with the ka, the subtle component that mainly refers to the individual’s Self. Despite the act of ritual singing, which in the temple was mainly directed to appease the resident god, in the very private region of the tomb the songs that evoke the deceased, reinforce his/her identity. A valuable example is provided by the song of Tenja for his master Nebank, in which is clearly reaffirmed the role of the name as the personal barycenter among the other anthropological subsystems, for its attitude to activate the spirit of the deceased. This song brings to light how voice, modulated by singing, had the power to intersect subtle and material components, as well as the principle of individuation (principium individuationis).
ḥsw tni-ˁȝdd.f mn(t).wytw m st.k nt nḥḥ m mˁḥˁt.k nt dt
iw.s mḥ.tiẖr ḥtpt dfȝw ˁrf.n.s bw nb nfr kȝ.k ḥnˁ.k
n tš.f ir.k ḫtmw-bitiimi-rȝ pr wr nb-ˁnḫ
iw n.k tȝw ndm n mḥyt in ḥsw.f sˁnḫ rn.f
imȝḫy ḥsw tni-ˁȝ mr.n.f ḥs n kȝ.f rˁ nb13
«Tenja, the singer, says: “How stable you are in your eternal pease, in your perennial tomb! / It is fulfilled of offerings and provisions, it has any sort of goods. Your spirit is with you/ and it will never abandon. O great administrator Nebank, responsible of the royal seal / to you (is given) the sweet breath of the North wind”. So says his singer, who keeps his ka alive, who sings for his (Nebank’s) spirit every day» (ḥs n kȝ.f rˁ nb).
The stela clearly indicates a relation between the sound of voice and two subsystems of the individual: the ka and the name. Subtle components, they are a close-knit couple in the Egyptian anthropology for referring to the human Self. Although this ancient civilization had never developed any notion of ‘person’, through the term rn they made a synthesis of the material/immaterial operation of the human being. Hence, the Egyptian concept of name entails some aspects traditionally assigned to the very notion of personal being since the classical doctrine of Boetius and the Aquinas to the modern approach of Max Scheler: the principle of individuation of the rational being (individual substantia in natura rationali), whose main trait is integrity (persona significat id quod perfectissimum est in tota natura, Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a 3) and refers to an active center of understanding, will and emotion.
The song of Tenjia is an alchemy: in fact it allows the name of Nebank to vibrate through the memory of the gestures and the sounds of the words that recall them to life. It makes the name and Nebank as well, living again, giving him back, in virtue of the well-modulated rhythm, the breath of existence. Tenjia’s tongue is righteous, by saying the truth about his master Nebank, quoting carefully who he was. This passage cannot be underestimated. According to the Memphite theology the creative power of words – Morenz notes – comes about in virtue of «what the heart thought (kȝi) and the tongue commanded (wd)» in the very beginning.14 Falsehood, or the wrong use of the words, provides the opposite effect, as we can grasp from a passage of The Tale of Eloquent Peasant:
1) ˁqȝ ns.k im.k
2) tnmw tȝmw
3) pw n s ˁt im.f
4) m dd grg
I translate following Parkinson: «1) Be your tongue righteous, 2) so that you will not stray; 3) the limb of a man is his bane. 4) Don’t speak falsehood!».15 Mouth is not simply an organ, it is a biological system that interacts with the moral system, and the result is either a creative and a righteous act, as we can realize reading a further passage of the Peasant.
tḫ pw ns.k dbn
pw ib.k rmnw.f pw spt.ki
«Your tongue is the pointer (of the balance), your heart is the weight, and your lips are its arms».16
«the tongue of people is their ‘stand’-balance», and it is the ‘hand’-balance that detects deficiency».17
The different attitudes of spiritual/corporeal subsystems are nevertheless deeply revealing of their peculiar activities: while the ka never abandons the mummified body, the ba who is directly implied with the body, to whom is analogically related, flies away like a bird and come back at night; by acting this way, it shows, at the highest grade, the drive to mobility that belongs to the humans. The systemic view of the Egyptian afterlife can solve the problem about the relation between the ba and the biological life of the person. As we noticed in a previous paragraph, there are at least two references in the Egyptian literature – the Tale of Sinuhe and the Dialogue of a desperate with his ba – that describe the existence of the ba before the dead. This component, generally translated with the term “soul”, empowers the living attitude, providing strength and capacity to deal with the troubles. Both Sinuhe and the desperate man feel depressed when they evoke the absence of the ba in the inner ground of the living experience (Sinuhe) or have a taste of the death itself, by facing the ba and the possibility that it might flight away (Desperate)18. Only in virtue of the biological final step of the existence the ba can activate and assure the persistence of shadow, the organic remain of the body.
Hence, each human component, in the afterlife fully explicates its function, not separately but within a systemic logic. Even the mummified body, despite its static posture, is indeed an hospitable ground that operates like a harbor for the different personal entities. The metaphysical divide between isfet-m3’t is highly shows itself in the continuous facing up of the perturbation (the death) and new balance (the start of a new ‘first time’, sp tpy), to be resolved in the maat condition. Indeed the righteous of voice is not exactly experiencing the same condition of the living individual; although the subject lacks any biological life – although the ka and the ba can seldom feed themselves – he/she can count on processes not available within the previous existence or could be evoked through the use of magic. The dead person, when spiritualized, is allowed to assume different shapes. There is nothing surprising, if we consider that the analogical link between biological life and afterlife: Egyptians finely intuited that transformations – or ḫprw – are part of the human becoming.
They grasped also the idea, which grounds the systemic thinking, that the «variation of a state is in act if the structural dynamic of the support is activated or when an interaction with another support is in act».19
The Glorified Person (the Akh), a Second-level Systemic Property
As seen before, any interrelation among dynamic, open systems gives rise to II type systemic qualities that do not depend upon any single system. In the Egyptian afterlife the energy that re-collects and re-connects the different parts of the individual person is probably the most peculiar emergence: the akh, or the glorified body, seems to deal directly to that kind of properties. What circumstance let energy grow? What does originate the process? At the light of the systemic thinking one of the change factor, within a constellation of dynamics, is related to a perturbation that shutters the subsystems.
Dissipation, Chaos and Balance
The afterlife’s personal condition, in the Egyptian civilization, recalls the dynamic of a dissipative structure, a concept that systemic thinking gained from thermodynamics and quantum physics. What denotes a dissipative structure is the cohexistence of change and stability. The latter condition, stability, depends upon the «ability to transform a large amount of entropy» to the environment20. In this perspective death, the more crucial perturbation fo a human individual/system, in which dissipation is given at the higher grade, entails a chaotic event that can either “degenerate” or reach a “higher structural organizational level”21. Egyptians highlighted the second possibility by assuming that energy is an incessant flow. Hence, the biological body, while dying, could be at the origin of a dissipative, highly energetic process: a new beginning, then, not the end of everything. This insight was definitely grasped by Egyptians, since the very beginning of their civilization.
On a systemic ground, a dissipation is an event that allows the surge of emergences, or properties that cannot be reduced to any singular component of the constellation. The glorified individual or akh recalls directly to what GST describes as a second-level or systemic property. Differently from the ka, the ba and the shoadow, which are subtle and autonomous component of the individual, whose originated from the biological condition, the akh is a completely new creature. This anthropological frame may also clarify why transformations are part of the afterlife, not simply in virtue of the analogy to the biological condition. For being established, the processes of emergences – in the systemic view – deal with a huge variety of ‘modalities’, and especially with incompleteness, a «quasi-systems related to their continuous structural meta-stables changes»22. Energy needs to be constantly fueled. This explains why Egyptian were so concerned with thw nourishment of the deceased. Not simply symbolic rituals, the courtesy for the dead was essential to supply the akh with energy for allowing the person to dissipate matter again.
Conclusion
The afterlife, within the systemic frame, can be considered an emergence. Self-organization after death is, for Egyptians, a stable process of acquisition of new activities. It is interesting to note that in this dynamic is respected a basic principle of GST, that’s to say, the homogeneity of agents. As Minati notes: «the peculiarities of emergence include (…) robust coherence given, for instance, by the occurrence of long range correlations among components».23 As it has been noticed before, the mummified body guarantees the coherence of a further sequence of dynamical coherence, embodied by the interactions between the voice and the name of the person, the name and the ka of the deceased, the ba and the shadow, the whole subtle subsystems and the mummy. Worth of note, the systemic perspective is furthermore attested, in the Egyptian view of the afterlife, by the role performed by the observer in the process. Either the painted or carved images, the stelas and the mysterious reserve head as well, take a part in this peculiar dynamic.
© Rekh Magazine
1 Among the more recent investigation in the field L. Fraschini, Individuo e mondo nel pensiero dell’Antico Egitto: percorsi antropologici ed epistemologici in una tradizione culturale “pre-greca”, PhD dissertation, Università di Ginevra, 2013 (Doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige: 31286), published in Italy with the title Individuo e mondo nel pensiero dell’Antico Egitto. Percorsi antropologici ed epistemologici in una tradizione culturale “pre-greca”, Sesto San Giovanni, Mimesis, 2015. Fraschini makes a distinction between the ‘corpo articolare’ (the biological body) and the ‘corpo inviluppo’ which correspond to the corpse’s recipient, the coffin.
2 Fraschini (2013), p. 191.
3 S. Morenz (1960), Egyptian Religion, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p. 164.
4 Fraschini, L. (2013), p. 195.
5Agazzi, E. (2019), Systemic Thinking: An Introduction. In L. Urbani Ulivi (Ed.), The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. A Rock in The Pond. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, p. x.
6 Urbani Ulivi, L. (2019). Preface. In L. Urbani Ulivi (Ed.), The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. A Rock in The Pond. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, p. VI.
7 Matelli, E. (2019). The Living Body as a Model of Systemic Organization in Ancient Thinking. In L. Urbani Ulivi (Ed.), The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. A Rock in The Pond. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, p. 149.
8 Minati, G. (2019). Phenomenological Structural Dynamics of Emergence. An Overview of How Emergence Emerges. In L. Urbani Ulivi (Ed.), The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. A Rock in The Pond. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, p. 23.
9 Minati, G. (2019) b, On Some Open Issues in Systemics. In G. Minati et al. (Eds), Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems, Cham: Swizerland: Springer, p. 349.
10 A term used for coffin.
11 Matelli, E. (2019), p. 151.
12 The inscription found in the tomb n. 82, belonged of Amenemhat refers to offerings for the ka, the ba, the akh, the corpse, the shadow and the stela and the tomb as well. As Fraschini notes, it is the sole reference of this type known to scholars. Its importance depends upon the fact that «the stela and the tomb are counted among the component of the human identity» (Translation is mine). Fraschini, L. (2013), p. 99.
13 The text is from Two Harper’s Songs, egypt-grammar.rutgers.edu. Translation is mine.
14 Morenz, S. (1960), p. 164.
15 The hieroglypic text is from Eloquent Peasant, mnj.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk by Mark-Jan Nederhof. He translates as such: «May your tongue be truthful, so that you won’t go astray! That organ in a man is his canker-worm. Don’t speak falsehood!». See also: Parkinson, R. (1997). The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16 Peasant, lines 197-197
17 Peasant, lines 92-94.
18 Im šm(w) bȝ.i (Dial., 7). My ba do not go away (?) vedi Parkinson
19 L. Urbani Ulivi, op. cit., pag. 239; see also A. Giordani, “L’ontologia della sostanza alla luce della teoria dei sistemi”, in Strutture di mondo, vol. I, op. cit., pag. 210 e sgg.
20 Minati, p. 23.
21 Minati, p. 24.
22 Minati b, p. 349.
23 Minati, p. 5