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Two Otherworldly Books: Polar Opposites?
The two most famous mystical manuals for guidance through the Otherworld are, in staggering ways, diametric opposites. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was preserved by the living, its chapters kept intact over millennia by monks in monasteries. Contrariwise, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was preserved by mummies, its chapters scattered piecemeal (even as Osiris was dismembered?) and sealed for millennia in coffins and tombs. The Tibetan was meant to be recited to a corpse by a living undertaker. The Egyptian was meant to be read only by the deceased individual, in the afterlife. In the Tibetan, the soul navigating the afterlife liminality is a human who encounters deities and torments, judgments, and pitfalls, the book serving as a guide map to another incarnation. In the Egyptian, the soul in the netherworld is itself a divinity (indistinguishable from all deities), the book constituting "identity papers" that exempt one from any torments, judgments, or pitfalls on the way not to another incarnation but rather eternal providence. The Tibetan is read in whole and then retained by the living. The Egyptian is unread in fragments (as chapter 64 notes, "This composition is a secret; not to be seen or looked at ... by any man, for it is forbidden to know it. Let it be hidden") and retained by the dead. The Tibetan would have the soul disattach from memories of illusory experiences. The Egyptian soul, as a deity having been disguised as a mortal, is prompted to say, "That which I went in order to ascertain I am come to tell. Come let me enter and report my mission" (chapter 86). The Tibetan calls the soul toward realms indescribable by known language, while the Egyptian promises a perpetuity of familiar worldly food, bodily pleasures, landscapes, climates, planting and reaping, labor and recreation.Clerical (pun intended) errors by Egyptian scribes corrupted the book to the extent that varied copies of the same chapter are wildly discordant. It would seem that over the millennia the copyists did not understand the original texts, the original meanings having been lost at a very early date. The Tibetan, while similarly reproduced, is significantly less adulterated. Because the Egyptian copies were never meant for living eyes, the scribes' attention to detail naturally faltered (in other words, the accuracy of their work went unchecked). It was the opposite situation for the Tibetan scribes. As the Egyptian is significantly bastardized, translators are so often left to conjecture, to either fill or not fill the empty pools of textual lacunae, to baffle over the legitimacy of enigmatic hapax legomena. Yet there's a strange poetry to that — a book of metaphysical mysteries, not meant for living eyes, gathering further unfathomableness over time. (Somewhat ironically, Egyptologists seek "accuracy" of non-literal, possibly deliberately nonsensical esoterica and paronomasia. As translator Peter Le Page Renouf notes, the various chapters of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and other texts prove that "with reference to the details, free scope was allowed to the imagination of the scribes or artists." Though Renouf fastidiously checked his own guesswork, he perhaps needn't have been overly cautious. The Egyptian Book of Dead would seem to be unstuck in time and even unstuck in phraseology, like a text in an hallucinatory dream that morphs as the visionary tries to read it.)In short, the Tibetan (guarded at extraordinarily high elevations) is addressed to human beings, while the Egyptian (preserved at very low elevations) is addressed to gods.P.S. Interestingly, the judgment scenes in both books are so alike in essentials as to suggest a common prehistoric origin. The Tibetan's King of the Dead as judge corresponds to the Egyptian Osiris. Both books have a symbolical weighing. On the scales before the King of the Dead, black pebbles are weighed against white (symbolizing evil and good deeds). Before Osiris, the heart and a feather are weighed (conduct/conscience against righteousness/truth). In both books, a simian-headed figure oversees the weighing (the ape-headed Thoth in the Egyptian, the monkey-headed Shinje in the Tibetan). In both books, a jury of deities looks on, some animal- and some human-headed. The record-board that Thot holds corresponds to the Mirror of Karma held by the King of the Dead. The deceased in both books pleads innocence.
See Books of the Dead, a distillation of twenty-four books of the dead from around the world and across the centuries. Each book’s most intriguing, poetic, and useful revelations are painstakingly gathered.
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