Psychology of Ancient Egypt

In issue no. 14 of Le Lotus there is an article by Franz Lambert, translated from The Sphynx, containing the following passage—a transcription from a tablet depicting the arrival of the deceased:

“One sees the deceased plowing the Elysian Fields, sowing and harvesting them. The wheat there is seven cubits high, the ears three, and the straw four. From his harvest he takes an offering for Hapi, the god of abundance, etc.”

I have underlined the errors, and here is why. In the Book of the Dead, chapter CIX, verses 4 and 5, the deceased says:

“I know that field of Aamrou, enclosed with iron, whose wheat is seven cubits high; its ear three cubits, its stalk four,” etc.

Hapi is not the god of abundance. When he appears in a ceremony in which the mummy plays the principal role, he is one of the funerary genii. Hapi personifies terrestrial water—that is, the Nile—in its primordial aspect, just as Noun personifies celestial water. He is one of the “Seven Luminous Ones”¹ who accompany Osiris-Sun.

In chapter XVII of the Book of the Dead it is said:

“The Seven Luminous Ones are Amset, Hapi, Tioumautef, Kebhsennouf, Maa-tef-f, Ker-bek-f, and Har-khent-an-mer-ti. Anubis has placed them as protectors of the sarcophagus of Osiris (the Sun during eclipse and night).”

Hapi, like Amset who precedes him, is a psychopompic genius (Mercury), who receives seven gifts from Osiris-Sun—perhaps because Mercury receives seven times more light from the Sun than does the Earth.

In the celestial hierarchy of the Archangels of the Presence, or “the Seven Eyes of the Lord,” Hapi and Amset correspond to Gabriel, the Messenger, and Michael, the patron of all gulfs and promontories—both of whom personify terrestrial water, as does Hapi.

Some of our pious friends will protest here. They will say: “Gabriel and Michael are not psychopompic gods; the latter is Archistrategus, the General-in-Chief of the Lord’s army, the Vanquisher of the Dragon-Satan, the Victor diaboli; while Gabriel is the Fortitudo Dei, the Strength of God, and His Messenger.” Very well—I will even add that Michael is Quis ut Deus, if that pleases them. That does not prevent them both from being our Egyptian Hapi and Amset, each in turn.

For this Hapi, this “Son of the Sun,” this Flame, is the chief “of the divine chiefs” who, with six others, accompany Osiris-Sun “to burn the souls of his enemies” and who slay the great Enemy, the shadow of Typhon-Set—otherwise called the Dragon. The Catholic Church calls this septenary vigilant guardian, precisely the same name it bears in the Book of the Dead, where the “Seven Luminous Ones” are the guardians of the sarcophagus of Osiris. (See the Marquis de Mirville, who boasts of this in his Mémoire à l’Académie.)

But it is not precisely of Amset or Hapi that we are treating here. We may leave Gabriel and Michael for the moment on their respective planets. The question at hand concerns the interesting notes of Ch. Barlet, who draws the reader’s attention to “the innumerable concordances” presented by the aforementioned article with the doctrines of the Theosophists. He gives a few examples, but overlooks one of the most remarkable. I refer to the cited verses from the Book of the Dead concerning the deceased in the field of Aamrou. This chapter is the most striking corroboration imaginable of the sevenfold principles of man to be found in the esoteric religion of ancient Egypt.

The reader is cautioned not to seek such analogies or correspondences between the esoteric and exoteric systems in the translations of our Orientalists, for those gentlemen have the habit of introducing more fancy than truth into their interpretations. Let us rather turn to the Kabbalah, where the septenary system presents us the following table:

The Seven Worlds or Planes of the Visible Cosmos

1st world	* * *	Ararita	אראריתא	Asser Eheie	אשראהיה	* * *	* * *	The 7 Letters of the Divine Name
2nd world	Zadkiel	Uriel	Samael	Raphael	Haniel	Gabriel	Mikael	The 7 Angels of the Prescence
3rd world	Saturn	Jupiter	Mars	Sun	Venus	Mercury	Moon	The 7 Planets

The remainder is unnecessary; I give only the first three worlds with their Angels and their Planets corresponding to the seven divine letters. The names of the Angels, apart from the first two, are substitutes; they interchange among themselves and with the planets. Only Gabriel has remained faithful to his Mercury—although, for well-known reasons,² the Church today assigns to Gabriel the planet Jupiter. Michael vacillates between the Sun and the Moon. Yet since these two planets were, in Egyptian esotericism, the Eyes of the Lord—the Sun being the eye of Osiris by day, and the Moon his eye by night—they are interchangeable.

Starting from this, the rest becomes clear. The field of Aamrou is the Devachan. The wheat sown and reaped by the deceased, and which is seven cubits high, represents the karma sown and reaped by the seven principles of man during his life. The ear of three cubits symbolizes the upper triad (Atma, Buddhi, and the aroma of Manas) or the superior triangle.³



The four cubits of stalk or straw signify the lower quaternary (kama rupa, the astral body, the vital principle, and the physical man) represented by the square.



Now, man has always been figured in geometric symbols as follows:




In Egypt, it was the symbolic tau, the ansate cross:

This is the representation of man. The circle or loop above the tau is a human head. It is man crucified in the space of Plato, or the Vittoba of the Hindus (see Muir’s Hindu Pantheon). In Hebrew, the word for man is Anosh, and, as Seyffarth says:

“This sign represents the brain—the seat of the soul—and the nerves extending to the spinal cord, the back, etc.”

Indeed, the stone of Tanis always renders it by anthropos—“man”; and this word, alphabetically written in Egyptian, is ank. In Coptic it is likewise ank (vita, or better, anima), corresponding to the Hebrew anosh. אנוש (anosh) means precisely anima. Anki, in Egyptian, translates as my soul.

“Seyffarth numerically translates⁴ Anosh as 365 – 1, which may mean 365 + 1 = 366, or 365 – 1 = 364, the phases of the solar year.” (J. R. Skinner, The Source of Measures).

We thus see that the solar year, or rather the number of its days, corresponds to the septenary man, or twice-sevenfold man; for we have the psychic man with his seven principles or etheric planes, and the physical man whose division is the same, making fourteen, corresponding to the three digits 3, 6, 5 = 14. Let us see whether the nocturnal eye of Osiris—the Moon, or symbol of the Hebrew Jehovah—corresponds likewise. In an unpublished and highly Kabbalistic manuscript it is written:

“The ancients always made a mysterious use of the numbers 3 and 4, which compose the number 7. One of the chief properties of this divided number is that if we multiply 20612⁵ by 4/3, the product gives a basis for determining the mean revolution of the Moon; and if we again multiply this product by 4/3, we have a basis for finding the exact period of the mean solar year.”

Now, examine carefully the esoteric ansate cross of the Egyptians. The cross is the unfolded cube, whose six faces give us the septenary—for there are four in the vertical line and three in the horizontal, making seven, the central cell being common to both lines. The 4 and 3 are the most esoteric numbers, for 7 is the number of Life, the number of Nature itself, as is easy to prove by reference to the vegetal and mineral kingdoms. Three is Spirit; Four is Matter. But in the symbol under discussion—purely phallic, since it represents living and sevenfold Man—it is the Four that corresponds to the masculine line; indeed it is the Tetragrammaton, the Tetractys on the lower plane, the “Heavenly Man” or Adam-Kadmon, the male-female (i.e. Jah-vah or Jehovah); or again Chokmah and Binah (Wisdom and Intelligence, the Divine Hermaphrodite) on our cosmic and terrestrial plane. The horizontal line of the three faces of the cube is the feminine principle—the Jehovah-Eve of the pre-Adamic race, which, like Brahmâ-Vach, divides into two sexes. This Eve, who was the Sophia or Holy Spirit⁶ of the Gnostics, gave birth to Cain-Abel, the male and female on earth in the Adamic race (see in The Secret Doctrine my Notes on Cain and Abel).

Once in the other world, the constituent principles of the deceased separate as follows:

1. The vital principle leaves the body.
2. The body dissolves.
3. The astral spirit evaporates with the last physical atom.

What remains of the lower quaternary is the Kama rupa, that is, the perispirit of the animal man. As for the upper triad, it separates from the lower quaternary; and the Spirit, with its vehicle the divine Soul, accompanied by the spiritual aroma of manas, united in the unity of the immortal Ego, find themselves in the blessed state of Devachan. The perispirit (the animal soul) retains from the lower part of manas (the human soul) only enough instinct to seek mediums and to vampirize them. Its destiny is one day to evaporate; meanwhile, it lives only by the life and intelligence of the living (mediums and believers) who are weak enough to let themselves be possessed: it is therefore a miserable borrowed life.

And that is what is meant by the three cubits of the ear and the four cubits of the stalk of the wheat growing in the Fields of Aamrou.

---