The Egyptians described the soul as having a number of constituent parts, some close to the physical persona and other more abstract. The Ka and the Ba were the parts of the soul which continued to have contact with the living. The khu, the Sah, and the Sekhem were transcendental. The Khat, the Ren, and the Khaibit all tended to decay if not tended to by the living. This same idea survives in our Seven Planes of Existence and Higher and Lower Selves: The Higher Self being transcendent and eternal while the lower Self decays after death, its experiences continuing on within the Higher Self of which it was a manifestation.
In addition to the soul’s existence as an Ancestor the Egyptians also believed in an Otherworld paradise to which the soul was admitted if it passed the Psychostasia or Divine Judgment of Osiris. In the Psychostasia the soul (in the form of the Heart, which the Egyptians considered the spiritual center of the body) was weighed against a feather, symbol of truth. If the person had lived a good life their soul would be light as a feather, and they would advance to Osiris’ paradise. If they had lived a bad life, their heart would be heavy and they would be consumed by Ammemit, a hideous (and somewhat silly looking) demon. To put this in our own terms, the soul could be held back by regret or guilt about the life just ended, and thus unable to advance –devoured by its own self judgment.
To reach the realm of Osiris the soul required many magic spells to overcome a variety of tests which it encountered on the way. These were provided to the deceased through the Peret Em Heru, or “Coming Forth In Light”, the book commonly known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Peret Em Heru is a loose collection of spells and incantations found in several versions and highly variable in content. Parts of the Peret Em Heru dated from the earliest periods and refer to very ancient beliefs whose real meaning is lost to antiquity. Some chapters of the Peret Em Heru known as the Pyramid Texts were already in use as early as the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (and presumably have their origin well before that), others are of much later provenance. At first the book seems to have been reserved to royalty, but by the New Kingdom it was in common use.
Egyptian civilization stretches over a period of at least four thousand years, beginning in the pre-dynastic period and extending till the rise of Christianity. During the last several hundred years of this period Egypt fell on hard times, being conquered by a series of foreign rulers. This caused Egyptian religion to turn inward and decay, becoming rigid and classicizing –looking only to preserve the past, and ceasing to grow or innovate. Even during this twilight period Egypt remained fertile religious ground, producing two major movements which still influence us today.
The Thirtieth Dynasty –the Greek Ptolemies who acquired Egypt in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persians- saw Egyptian ideas exported into the Mediterranean as never before. The Ptolemies actively sought a syncretism of Egyptian and Greek religious ideas, and patronized Egyptian Deities Who took on Greek aspects: chief among these were the Goddess Isis and God Serapis (Osiris-Apis). The worship of Isis in this period became a distillation of earlier Egyptian thought, embodying Egyptian ideas of the Afterlife and the Egyptian sense of syncretism which caused the followers of Isis to see Her as the inner nature of all Deities everywhere: Isis of Ten Thousand Names. Thus the Isiac Priesthood said “All Goddesses are One Goddess, All Gods are One God,” and preached a universality of Deity. Isis came to be worshipped throughout the Greek world, and then throughout the Roman world, as far north as Britain, and in time would prove to be the principle rival to Christianity as the Roman empire drew to its sad close.
The second movement was centered in the use of magic. Egypt had always been known for its magic, but under the Ptolemies Egyptian and Greek magical ideas merged to create a vibrant magical revival centered in the Ptolemaic capital at Alexandria. Huge amounts of magical papyri have been preserved from this period and show the origins of the Hermetic and Alchemical traditions which would flourish in the DARK AGES to come and leave such an impact on the magical community of today.