Hieroglyphs as Nature
The Pyramid of Unis
The outer shell of the pyramid complex on the Saqqara Plateau is dun-colored mud and stone abraded in the desert wind. But hidden within is a vividly illustrated study of the living world: the early attempts to domesticate wild animals, the catching and corralling of migrating cranes, and the solitary scimitar-horned oryx of the desert hills; marshlands where kingfishers hover in the reeds above the fish below, while concealed between them waits a watching otter. Buried within an outwardly collapsed pyramid, a nondescript heap of stone and sand, is a radical new vehicle for the preservation of life: a book. The detailed manuscript is inscribed from beginning to end on the hidden stone walls, from the entranceway to the innermost chamber. Where or how old the original composition is is not known, but this is the earliest version of the work that has yet been found, in the Old Kingdom Pyramid of Unis.
This is a riddle that has not been solved, although the words are simple. The wall is the page of a book. The columns are lines on a page. It is worthwhile looking hard at this wall, looking at every word, for this is the earliest surviving body of written poetry and religious philosophy in the world. It is important to say that what is written here presents a series of open questions. No one has figured out the meaning or the purpose of the Pyramid Texts. The questions presented are questions in the religious sense: the answers are not necessarily knowable; the object of contemplation is the question itself.
The columns read from left to right. The first line is missing where the wall was broken by forced entry into the tomb. The jagged wall of broken stone shows how fragile the lines of carved words are, words made of meticulously recorded objects, of animals and plants. The light of the mind sweeps over the stone to find the living thing. And there it stands, as it stands today: the peregrine falcon.
Entranceway, West Wall
But first draw back and look at the wall. You might find at once a patch of mental ground from which to probe this unfamiliar form of writing. The columns show the same structure that appeared in the poem on page 14: repetition. The first two surviving columns of hieroglyphic signs are nearly identical, and the third column takes signs from the prior two. The hieroglyphic words are repeated with subtle progressive variation in each line. The writing in the columns is unmistakably in the form of a poem, in the traditional sense. It is four lines long, and the first line is missing. Repetition draws the mind into an evolution of meaning, as though turning the object in the light.
Three primary elements are introduced in the first surviving column, then repeated in the second column and the third:
Fire
The first is fire, the word that appears at the top of the first and second columns. The word is spelled outbkhkhw (b/foot, kh/lined disc, kh/lined disc, w/chick), then marked with a picture, defining what it is. The picture shows a fire drill, a cord attached to a stick placed upright in a flat piece of wood with a hole in it—the cord wound around the stick will, as it rapidly unwinds, spin the stick to throw off sparks to start a fire. This hieroglyphic determinative is the standard designation for words having to do with fire. The fire is in a definite place, for it occurs between two prepositions, the face, hr, on or above, and the footstool, shr, beneath.
Netcher
The second primary element in the first column is the word ntr, netcher. It is a prayer flag. This word has been translated “god,” as though this were a mythology, a story with characters engaged in actions such as scooping water on a fire. But really it is what a prayer flag is. It is a marker, a designation for something that is holy. There are three prayer flags, meaning three or more holy things are above the fire.
This is a riddle. It describes something real.
The Falcon
The third primary element that appears in the first column, and is repeated in the third, is the focus of the verse: the falcon, distinguished by the vivid black feathers that surround its eye like a marker. Hieroglyphs are dense composite metaphors. An animal is what it does. The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on earth, clocked in flight at nearly three hundred miles per hour. The falcon’s distinguishing pattern of flight is embedded in its name. In hieroglyphs the name is qher, in Arabic saqher (sagr), in Greek kirke (Circe). The related word in English is gyre, circle.
The falcon has long been translated as the god Horus, the Egyptian word qhr as spelled two thousand years later by the Greeks. But what is here on the pyramid wall is simply the picture of a falcon. The picture stands alone but conveys compounded meanings: Horus, meaning the falcon, is the child of Osiris. Osiris is the corpse. The falcon is its child, rising away in peregrine circles from all that dies: the universal shamanic image of the spirit rising from the body in the form of a bird. The soul rises in a gyre. DNA rises in a helix. How closely related the meaning of the hieroglyphic text is to some absolutely fundamental design of life: turning is transformation.
The sense of turning is implicit, in the falcon as in the fire drill—the prehistoric device that miraculously spins fire, heat, and light into being, out of thin air.
O Sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic on the wall
Come from your holy fire
Perne in a gyre
Yeats turns perne, a Greek word for “falcon,” into the verb “to turn.” He uses the image of a living thing to signify its characteristic motion, applying the sense of the animal’s motion to another thing. This is the ingenious method the Egyptians devised in the development of writing. It is a trick of mirrors, capturing an image and reflecting it onto something else. And it highlights a question that arises on this wall: What is a noun? And what is a verb? And what is the difference between them? Like the vowels that activate the words, the verbs that thread through them are the movement that activates the line. In the Pyramid Texts, as in Yeats above, the verb is often the motion that rises from the thing itself, the noun, by repeating the name of the thing with a prefix or a suffix for a tag. Or it repeats the name in a verb that sounds the same, indicating the close relationship between the verb and the noun in a pun.
The language is deliberately repetitive; the same words are used as concepts are introduced and elaborated upon. The words are the basic hieroglyphic vocabulary, simple and clear, as clarity is critical for the valid representation of an actual thing. Clutter merely obscures it. As in Plato’s Greek, or Auden’s English, the sophistication of the language lies in the skillful arrangement of familiar words. The complexity lies not in the words themselves but in the meaning. Here the failure to recognize the verb as a simple familiar word is the key to the mistranslation.
The verb, appearing in the first column and repeated in the second, is iknt (i/reed, k/basket, n/wave, t/bread), instantly recognizable as a verb form, precisely as in Arabic today, by the addition of an initial i and a final t. Because iknt has not been recognized as a common word it has not been successfully defined. Allen, assuming that the prayer flags are gods in a myth, and that they must be doing something that has to do with fire, sees it as a spelling variant of the word cup (qnt) and translates the word scoop (with the idea of water implied). Piankoff also made the assumption that the prayer flags are gods and guessed that the word might mean “assemble”? (Piankoff politely puts in a question mark).
Yet the verb is not a mystery, and the translation of the word is not arbitrary or difficult. Kn is a common root in hieroglyphs. It is the word for “dark” (as in knh, dark, darken; knhw, darkness; kni, be sullen; knmt, darkness). This verbal form of kn, ikn, appears again within the monument on the east wall of the antechamber in verse twenty, with the unmistakable meaning grow dark. (ikn hay, grow dark O serpent).
The holy things grow dark is the literal translation of this, the earliest known poetic line:
Over the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
As the falcon flies, as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into this fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
The verb that defines the falcon’s action is sbn (s/knotted cord, b/foot, n/wave). This word appears throughout the Pyramid Texts with things that rise up away from the earth, away from death. It appears here before the falcon and is immediately repeated before the name of the dead person, who thus takes on the action and identity of the falcon. The name is within a knotted protection cord (for that is what the “cartouche” is). Like a blank in a legal document, the cord could contain any name.
The Path
The netchers, the prayer flags, the things marked holy, make a path. The hieroglyph for “path” is a stretch of road between three trees or bushes. This is the first written use of the word for “path” in the religious sense. The netchers make a path for the spirit to rise through the fire. At the top of the third column a causative s is added to the word for “path” (wat), turning it into a verb (s-wa), as Unis takes the path.
The Eye
What makes the path is the eye. The eye here serves grammatically as a verb. But one cannot say, in the reading of this multilevel religious text, that it is just a verb, that nothing else is meant. As a verb the eye means to create, to make out of thin air, but there is an element of seeing involved in creation. The eye creates the concept in the mind.
Over the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
As a falcon flies, as a falcon flies,
May Unis rise into this fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
They make a path for Unis
Unis takes the path
The last words of the verse are Unis is, or becomes, qhr spd, “the sharp falcon”; spd means both “sharp” and what is sharp, the triangle. The picture of a triangle is what defines the word. Here it forms part of an odd composite hieroglyph, a hapax legomenon, a compound word that does not appear again but is created just for this place in the text. This composite, beneath the name of Unis, is the hieroglyphic letter p (the square, a reed mat) and, affixed to the p on the right, the letter i (the flowering head of the marsh reed phragmites). Affixed to the p on the left is a triangle. Beneath this unusual conflated notation, pi + triangle, stands the falcon. The notation alters the falcon itself, for the triangle in hieroglyphs is the sign of a star, Sirius.
The meaning of the missing first line was inferred from the tomb of Senwosret-Ankh hundreds of years later, where there is a similar but not identical version of these beginning verses. There the first words are djed medw, the formula for the beginning of a verse, the cobra and the walking stick: say the words.
The Thread
The word that follows is a standard geometrical notation: sta (setcha). The determinative is the picture of string being unspooled. This word is commonly used to describe the measuring out of a grid, as in the yearly remeasuring after the flood of the boundaries of small square plots of land for fields, using string pulled tight around posts hammered into the ground, much as one would measure out a garden plot today. As a verb it means “to pull,” “to unspool a thread.” The word that follows is qhnn. It is the common word in hieroglyphs for “penis.”
This image is defined by the word that follows it, in the genitive by virtue of its position. The word is ba. It is the word for “soul.” The ba is a long-legged waterbird. In the Pyramid of Unis this bird is the white stork. On their seasonal migration north and south the white storks are seen in the Nile Valley in huge numbers funneling up into the sky, an indelible sight, no doubt what is meant by the white bird as the image of the disembodied soul drawn up into the sky.
The hieroglyph comes to be drawn with a mark on its throat, a conflation with the wattled crane, a similar migratory waterbird. In the Pyramid of Unis the hieroglyph appears as both birds, though predominantly without the mark as an unmistakable miniature of the white stork. Three storks or cranes together form the hieroglyph that represents the power or force of a living person.
The wattle becomes a hieroglyphic flag emphasizing the throat of the crane, which is known for its beautiful sound. The sky filled with the sound of cranes, like the sound of wild geese, is a marker for the turning of the seasons.
The emphasis, the mark, flags what is relevant in the animal. The raised tail of the dangerous wild dog is lightning. A halo of silvery fur is the mind.
In Arabic the action of a verb or the quality of a noun becomes emphatic, is intensified, by doubling the sound:wuswus/whisper, rufruf/flutter, loglog/babble. Hubbub is a doubling of the Arabic word for “love.” Ruckus is the Arabic word for “dance.” In the English version of the word the sound of the central consonant is intensified to intensify the action conveyed in the word. Alfalfa is Arabic for “a thousand thousand,” the best fodder crop; “pepper” is the English pronunciation of felfel. This kind of linguistic doubling is a common device in Egypt, and it is a common device in hieroglyphs.
Here the word ba (soul) is doubled for emphasis in much the same way: Babay. The tail feathers of the standing stork, and the two reeds together that comprise the final letter y, are all that can clearly be made out on the broken wall in the Pyramid of Unis.
The spool can either be a transitive verb, pulls (the thread), or a notation for measuring out a grid. The beginning of the reconstructed missing line has two possible readings:
Say the words,
The penis of the great soul
Pulls (the thread) open(ing) the doors of the sky
or
Say the words,
(On the grid:)
The penis of the great soul
Opens the doors to the sky
The sky is the picture of the bar of the sky, pt. The door of the sky is the picture of two facing swinging doors. But the gate to the path is a rebus. The word for “gate,” liw, is the picture of a lion, for gate and lion are the same word. They are homonyms. It is a pun. And yet, the lion is the gate. The gate is dangerous. It is guarded. It is sacred. It is sealed. The word for “seal,” htm, the picture of a seal on a cord, is the word for “seal” in Arabic today.
The penis of the great soul
Opens the doors to the sky
The doors seal again
The gate to the path over the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
As the falcon flies, as the falcon flies,
May Unis rise into this fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
They make a path for Unis
Unis takes the path
Unis becomes the falcon star, Sirius
There is a sense of astonishment as the iconographic riddle clarifies before one’s eyes. The solution to the riddle comes with a clarity that sweeps away all of the dust and fog that has surrounded hieroglyphs for centuries. This is a densely compounded but highly precise reading of astronomy. It is a star map:
The fire is the dawn
The holy ones, stars
The path, the thread of stars rising
In the door of the sky: the eastern horizon
Babay is the great soul, the great man of light, Orion,
The qhnn Babay is Orion’s sword.
The Orion nebula is in the door of the sky. It is rising. The Orion nebula directly precedes Sirius on the path of rising stars. The soul rising like a bird becomes the star.
This is a moment in time, not a historical moment but the dawn of a day in mid-July when the dawn rising of Sirius signals the rising of the Nile.
VERSE 1
Say the words:
The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close again the gate to the path
Over the fire, beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
As a falcon flies as a falcon flies, may Unis rise into this fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis, Unis takes the path,
Unis becomes the falcon star, Sirius.
Taurus
That the Pyramid Texts are astronomical in nature is confirmed immediately by the second verse, which begins beneath the line across the fourth column that marks the end of the first verse. The subject of the second verse is visible at once. It is the picture of a bull with very long horns. It is the bull of the distinctive African longhorn cattle. Its name is spelled out with the wave (n) and the clay oven (g), neg. The verb following the bull is the word “to break”; it is spelled in exactly the same way, with the wave and the oven, ending with the Egyptian vulture (a semivowel guttural a/r sound), nega. The verb is a pun on the animal’s name, as though the action, the sound of the verb, arises from the name of the animal itself, as though the animal is inseparable from its action.
VERSE 2
Say the words:
Would that the Bull break the fingers of the horizon of earth with its horns.
Come out. Rise.
On the most basic level the sense of the line is easily made out just by looking at the words. It is a clear and simple poetic line, with wordplays in puns. The literal elements are visible at a glance: the fingers holding back the bull below the horizon are the pictures of the three fingers. The hieroglyphic pair of horns is a noun, wpt, marked by the picture of the horns of the bull. But a pun is implicit in the horns: as a verb this hieroglyph means “to open.” The horizon of the earth is the word Akher, often though not here (as ending pictures vary considerably) marked with the Sphinx as a sign determinative. R. O. Faulkner’s Dictionary of Middle Egyptiandraws the word with two lion heads to define it; the lion heads look both ways.
Akher is the Arabic word for “the end,” “the edge of the earth.” In Greek the word is Acheron, “the gate of hell.” Is the Sphinx itself the riddle, the lion that is the gate? The treasure within is the meaning, hidden in poetic code: Hell is the fire from under the edge of the earth. It is the light of dawn.
Ikher is the imperative form of the verb “to fall” or “to come out of something,” kher, which occurs throughout the Pyramid Texts paired with the verb sbn, “to rise.” Come out. Rise. It is used here as a pun on Akher.
The verse unmistakably describes the rising of the constellation Taurus: the head of a bull with very long horns. Taurus is told to rise, sbn, the verb used of Sirius rising in the previous verse. Taurus is told to get out of the way, to break the fingers of the horizon with its long horns. To open the door. For Taurus directly precedes Orion and Sirius on the diagonal of rising stars. This is an extremely valuable verse, because it is the earliest written reference to the constellation Taurus.
The Moon
The third verse begins at the bottom of the fifth column. Following the opening formula, Unis pi, “Unis becomes,” is the word i’n, the Hamadryas baboon. In the first verse Unis becomes the rising falcon as the star Sirius. The rising soul of the dead next appears as the baboon, not the animal itself, for if the falcon is Sirius, what is the baboon? What does the baboon mean in Egypt? This animal is not a coarse or comic figure but rare, revered, remembered from long ago and far away. It is the Hamadryas baboon of the desert grasslands, with long, slender humanlike hands and a face of strange, watching intelligence. With its distinctive halo of diaphanous long silver fur about its head, the Hamadryas is the avatar for the mind. This iconographic conception carried over from an earlier time, for the Hamadryas is not an animal of the Nile Valley but of the old days, when the inhabitants of the Nile Valley lived in the vast grasslands of what became the Sahara in the rapid desertification of the Neolithic, when people fled the growing desert in search of water and came down to the Nile. Like the hermit ibis, the hieroglyph for the light body, another animal with a haloed head, the Hamadryas belongs to the remembered landscape of semiarid scrub. It is a shy animal that lives on the pods and flowers of the acacia tree, the smell of which is almost intoxicating in its dry, faint sweetness. It is the smell of the Egyptian desert. The pod of the acacia is the hieroglyph for “sweet,” ndjm. Its flowers are callednuar, “lights.” Where this tree grows in the desert there is water. It is the tree of the sweetness of knowledge. Out of its wood the arc of the covenant was made. The name for the tree in both hieroglyphs and Egyptian Arabic today is the sant tree.
Thoth is the name Plato used in the Timaeus for this avatar, a Greek rendering of its hieroglyphic name,Djehuty. The early representations of Thoth are of a Hamadryas baboon with a moon on its head. This is because Thoth is the moon—not the moon as a god but what the moon represents. Like the word Buddha, from the Sanskrit word buddhir, “to know,” Thoth is the subtle but real radiance of the electric awakening of intelligence. The awakened mind understood the patterns in nature and saw, then created, a system of signs to mark and predict them: mathematics and written language. The phases of the moon taught time and, inseparable from it, the intricacy of measurement, the fractions added and subtracted to the luminous body of the moon each day. The moon is both understanding and what is understood, the silver eye that sees and illuminates what it sees at the same time. Unis is absorbed into this composite metaphor for nonduality, the dawning moon of the mind, the radiant eternal eye.
The words that follow the baboon are htt ptt, spelled out here without pictorial determinatives. Piankoff sees the words as the names of different kinds of baboons: Unis is an ian baboon, a hetet baboon, a patet baboon. Allen sees them as participles: Unis is a screeching, howling baboon. The evident meaning on the wall is simpler than either interpretation. In the later, parallel text in Senwosret-Ankh (shown on the right, contrasting the spelling of the word in the Pyramid of Unis on the left), the word htt is marked with a pictorial determinative: the desert landscape discussed in the poem cited at the beginning of this book, making clear that this is simply a spelling variant of the common word hst, the desert hills, the home of the Hamadryas. Spelling variants are common in the Pyramid Texts where the hieroglyphs are fluid and not standardized, and reversals and regional variation in spelling and pronunciation are common in Egyptian even today. The likely answer is that, as in Greek lyric poetry, words have both prose forms and poetic forms, and here htt and ptt (of old; spelled with the pintail duck taking flight, the letter pa) are made to agree with each other both for the aesthetics of the visual construction and for the sound and rhythm of the passage.
Unis becomes the baboon of the desert hills of old
The following word, ‘rt, is a participle from ‘r (‘/arm, r/mouth), the verb “to rise.” It is the common description of and name for the cobra, and appears as such in the bottom of the first column on the opposite wall. The wordcobra is a description of an animal. It is the feminine of the Arabic word kabir (large). The cobra is the largest venomous snake in the world, kabra. The word ‘rt similarly is a description of a different aspect of the same animal: it is the snake that rises up. In this third verse something else is rising up. The hieroglyphic determinative tells you what it is. It is the circle, commonly used to indicate a source of light: The rising circle of light is Unis.
The word at the bottom of the column is sa (s/thread, a/vulture) marked with the looped bowstring as a determinative. This is the word for wisdom in hieroglyphs, where it is written both with and without a final r. This word appears in Arabic for knowledge, and for poetry (shaar: v., to know; n., poetry). Here it is used as an adjective, following the noun it modifies, the picture of a face: The wise face is Unis.
How can this simple image, with a kind of stately loveliness expressed by the simplicity of the hieroglyphs themselves, be misconstrued to mean the anus of a screeching baboon? The verse has an incantatory quality that is built around a visual image and the use of repetition to state different aspects, different views, of what the image is: the luminous disc of light in the sky is like a watching face, like a detached head, like a radiant eye.
The word that follows wise in the progression of stated qualities is a key word in Egyptian religious thought. Like the word omphalos in Greek, it is a word that means the center of a thing as both its essence and its eye. It is the mysterious word imakh. As an adjective this word means holy, radiant, shining. What it is is shown in the hieroglyph: it is the spinal cord, visible hanging down from the spine and a section of ribs. The disembodied spinal cord is shining, shockingly white, and in this tradition it has a very potent meaning: it is the cord of life itself. The spinal cord pulled out of the spine looks like a glowing white headless snake.
The hieroglyphs in the progression could not be clearer and more straightforward; the face is the face itself, followed by the head itself, the eye itself:
VERSE 3
Say the words:
Unis becomes the baboon
Of the desert hills of old
The rising disc of light is Unis
The wise face is Unis
The shining one is Unis
The face, the head is Unis,
The eye is Unis
What is described is the rising of the luminous haloed moon: it is “the Man in the Moon.” The following word is one of the most common expressions in Egypt today, haneean, “rejoice.” As neg (bull) is a pun on nega(break), haneean is a sonal pun on the word for “baboon,” i’n (eean); the action is encoded in the animal’s name.
* * *
I would like at this point to pause and state the purpose of going over the hieroglyphs themselves in depth, as I am doing in the verses presented on this first wall. I am asking the reader to consider the hieroglyphic text itself, to really look at it, in order to see its simplicity, its clarity, and its intelligence, and with me to probe what it means. For the meaning has not yet been understood. It is important to understand right at the start that the familiar interpretation of Egyptian religion, an interpretation that has long made Egypt seem archaic, strange, and, more important, irrelevant, is based on the institutionalized mistranslation of Egyptian religious literature demonstrated in the excerpt on pages 10–11, a convention of mistranslation that does not hold up if you look at the hieroglyphs themselves.
But the relevant question is much larger than that. It is an enormous question. What is Egyptian religious thought? What did the Egyptians know? And how has their perception, a perception that dates to and is embedded in the formation of written language itself, affected the development of culture and philosophy as we know it, the very way we see the world?
Taurus, Orion, and Sirius rising in the light of dawn, the moon becoming full, are among the most beautiful sights on earth today, as they were five thousand years ago. This first wall presents them as the progression of celestial phenomena key to the mechanism that underlies life itself. That mechanism is time. The Egyptians invented time as we know it. And they did so by means of the empirical observation of the night sky.
The hieroglyphic name for The Egyptian Book of the Dead is the Am Duwat, literally, “Among the Stars at Dawn.” Yet the obvious fact that the primary work of literature and religious philosophy in Egypt is astronomical has been completely missed. Part of the reason for this is simply the mistaking of poetry for prose. Poetry predates prose. It is telegraphic and fragmentary by nature. Poetry is dynamic: the meaning is signaled as a glimpse of the active hidden layers of reality. Prose is static: the meaning is historical, hence inert. The view that this text is a prose narrative means that it is merely a historical document in which Unis, the historical figure, is understood to be the subject. Unis is and does this and that. In the poetic form Unis as a subject is unimportant. The subject is the writing itself. Unis is merely a name, placed as an afterthought in a finished work. The verbs and actions do not cluster around him. He is placed within an imagined reality and takes on its atmosphere.
The problem of mistaking what are essentially poetic conceits as prose has given rise to the idea of myth, the Greek word for “word.” The institutionalized misassumption is that earlier religious systems are based on ignorance and play out in childish stories characterized by an anthropomorphized understanding of the world. But the simplistic view that sees existence only in human terms arises in an alienation from nature that belongs not to an ancient but to a modern society. Egyptian systems of thought and technology, one of which is written language, do not draw on the mere ephemeral dramas of human life. What they are after is what lasts: the essence of physical reality, not only to understand it but to work with it, to make things that work.
For more than a century different thinkers have tried to correct the misimpression that earlier religious systems are based on myth. Frazer’s primary insight in The Golden Bough is that Christ is Osiris, and that Osiris is death. Harrison’s Themis is an explanation of nature as the underlay of all of Greek religion. Graves’s The White Goddess is a study of poetry as code for the interpretation of the natural world. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Calasso dissipated the concept of myth by placing what were obviously different versions of the same motif together in such a way that the reader saw that they were not merely stories but different presentations of the same communication of a historical event or religious idea. Though stories derive from the formulation of ideas, and continue on simply as stories, the insight lies in the original formulation.
In the Pyramid Texts one does not have to peel back layers of derivative story to find the original idea. There is no story. Isis and Osiris are not characters. They are not personalities. They are words. As such they are what words are, they are concepts. Isis is the throne, the numinous ground of space itself. Osiris is the active principle within this radiant surround, this pervasive inevitability of disintegration and resurrection. The active principle is the eye, the disembodied ordering intelligence of the universe, the paradox that is the mind of space, the mind of being as dissolution and manifestation, omniscient in the inevitability of its profound order, an order that spins everything predictably out to the last detail.
Much as hieroglyphs themselves represent both concrete things and their metaphorical dimensions, a religious text can be read on different levels. It can be read on the surface as the composition itself, or one can look for the deeper meaning within. The meaning of the Egyptian religious tradition is a familiar yet undiscovered country. We are in the territory. Now to define the map: the sequence of poetic tropes that track the journey into and out of form, from mortality to immortality, the trail of the falcon, the serpent, the eye, and the star.
This trail can only be followed poetically. It is not straightforward but circular, and dense with layers of meaning. Mistakes in interpretation are inevitable. Some words and phrases can be translated in different ways. Some things cannot be known. But the highly refined poetic stucture and the astronomical nature of the text are unmistakable. In this earliest version of the Pyramid Texts inscribed in columns on the twelve inside walls of the two corridors and two rooms within the Pyramid of Unis, each wall is a distinct chapter, leading the reader through a logical argument expressed in an unfolding series of poetic riddles. The primary concept of Egyptian religion is introduced in the first verse, embodied in the sense impression made by the motion of a bird of the prehistoric desert world. The bird is not a myth but a suggestion that conveys a numinous, multilevel metaphor. It is at once the vivid, newly freed motion of the infant child of the dead body: the wild energy that rises from the shell of the corpse back into the sky; and it is the continuous motion of rising itself, the dappled wings of rising and setting stars that are the variegated wheel of time as eternity. The resolution of the antechamber, the room beyond the entranceway, is the paradox that defines what rises from the body: it is a bird, and yet it is a snake, the snake that casts off the skin of death. In the sarcophagus chamber the description is refined as the snake emerging from the body becomes the disembodied eye.
This loose range of metaphors describes something real: the eye in the body is the snake of the central nervous system in the channel of the rising spine. As it leaves the body at death this serpentine current of energy is “thrown out”; rising like a bird, it becomes pure rising light. The subject of the text is the ultimate nature of the human body and mind. At death this essence, the light that is in fact the ultimate reality of a human life, is reabsorbed into the universe with its fluctuations of infinite light, the stars, the moon, their paths, their harmonious eternal movement in the sky. Hence the work is an investigation of the truth of the physical world, a truth that can only be apprehended through the associative imagery of poetry, which triggers a deep recognition on the physical level. What, after all, is the eye, defined as “an outpocketing of the central nervous system”? What is seeing, the essence of which is pure awareness? This awareness illuminates its object. It sees and shines as light. Is the mind, the nature of which is like a live electric current, the light energy that leaves the body at death? Is it indeed one with the light of the universe? In the antechamber doubts begin to be expressed: the person is dead, find his mind. Whatever leaves the body at death, the person ceases to exist.
Every wall has a different quality of language and presents a different aspect of the argument as it unfolds. The most significant passages are on the gables, the triangular sections within the monument that point upward. On the east gable of the antechamber is the “Cannibal Hymn,” a name given to this section because of an Egyptologist’s translation of the phrase ankh m a century ago. The owl as the letter m is the common abbreviation for hieroglyphic words that begin with m, among them the words for “with,” “from,” “in,” and “as.” In the “Cannibal Hymn” Egyptologists have agreed that instead of the obvious translation, lives [ankh] with [m]or as his ancestors, the phrase here means lives on them, an English colloquialism that one would hardly expect to find in hieroglyphs, meaning, incredibly, eats them: a classic example of how this critically important body of writing has been misunderstood, misrepresented, and marginalized.
For far from being obscure and strange, the verses in the Pyramid of Unis resonate with the familiar motifs of later religions. The virgin birth appears in the pyramid not as a religious mystery but as a riddle, the one who gave birth but didn’t know it. It is the mother of all things, the sky itself, empty space. Mary is a hieroglyphic word for this all-embracing reality, a word that means “beloved.” The soul leaves the garden: the earth itself, where the tree with the sweetness of knowledge is the human body, and within it the serpent, the name of which is hayy, “life.” The infant soul rises away from the garden to heaven through the field of rushes, the eastern stars at dawn; moses, the word for “infant” in hieroglyphs, is itself the bright star in the east, the soul becoming Sirius as it rises in the dawn. The three wise men that presage its appearance are the three stars in the belt of Orion. The verses on the pyramid walls elaborate the concepts of esoteric Buddhism: the two truths (maaty), emptiness (shu), omniscience (the eye), the emanation body (the ka). The serpent rising within the human body is the third eye, the fire-breathing dragon of heat and light.
Others have long speculated that this is the original, universal religious text. Yet far from being primitive, or even archaic, it is clearly the work of accomplished writers (for stylistically there seems to be more than one), writers who are playing with words, raising the radical question: Is it possible that what is conventionally thought of as religion is not a record of historical events but is based on poetic formulations of the actual world? Auden wrote that poetry makes nothing happen. But in this religious system, that is where the power lies. The soul as an initiate in the process of immortality is the one who knows the words, the poet who wanders off into the dark to be torn apart by the glittering stream of stars. The cult of the poet, the cult of Orpheus, which pervades the writings attributed to Pythagoras, the poetic lines of Heraclitus, Pindar, and others, would seem to be the Egyptian cult of life in death, the golden flow of falcon flesh that is the rising snake of fire within, theophis. The Orpheus symbology introduced into Greece in the sixth century B.C. is present throughout the Pyramid Texts: death as snakebite, the journey into and out of the land of the dead, death as reawakening, the questioning of the newborn soul, the lake of memory, the holy transforming fire. The Orphic formulas of Classical Greece appear in the pyramid as hieroglyphic palindromes, as the soul is introduced to the entities of the sky with the singsong you know him, he knows you, for the soul must remember itself and where it comes from. “Who are you?” the soul is asked. The answer, “I am a child of the starry dawn.”
VERSE 4
The North Star as the Axis Mundi
O Star that sits shining,
Does Unis not give you his life force,
That he remain ever after as a holy thing,
That in the axis of the wheel
Unis may float to the sky
Astronomers in the past have noted the geometrical correspondences with the stars in Egyptian religious architecture: that the great pyramid at Giza, for example, is perfectly aligned with the North Star. They have speculated that Egyptian temples were created for astronomical purposes—and have assumed that Egyptian religion was essentially astronomy. Egyptologists have refuted these informed conclusions on the basis of philology, meaning the authority of their translations, and have insisted that the subject of the Pyramid Texts is a sun cult in Heliopolis, “sun city,” some distance away from the pyramids themselves. The argument for this interpretation resides in the translation of a hieroglyphic phrase that occurs in verse 4 on the west wall of the entranceway. The reader can evaluate the validity of the claims on both sides by examining the hieroglyphs in this verse. The subject of the verse is a star, a hieroglyph that appears at the top of the second column. It is introduced by the first word in the verse, the flowering marsh reed, the hieroglyphic letter i/y. This is one of the most familiar expressions in Arabic, ya; like oh in English, it is the formal address:
ya qhmy sqhd
O Star that sits (qhmy) shining (sqhd)
The opening line signals the identity of what is conjured in the poetic lines of the verse, for it is a pun on the name of the North Star: ihm (the one who does not know) sk (destruction). As the moon and Sirius are similarly conjured though not named in the previous verses, the North Star as a prominent feature of the night sky is introduced in a trick verbal formula.
The key phrase that determines the validity of the refutation that Egyptian religion is not a reading of astronomy occurs at the end of this verse. It consists of three common hieroglyphic signs: the picture of a column, iwn, a jar, the letter nw, and a circle that contains four triangles, one apparently defining each direction. This marked circle is the hieroglyph nywt, a sign that becomes the designation for place in the general sense, as though the picture is of an X marking a spot, or a crossroads. This hieroglyphic phrase has been read as the city Heliopolis. The way to test out the validity of the translation of this phrase as the name of a specific city is to examine its use in a parallel verse, verse 7 in the antechamber, where the meaning of the phrase is teased out in the conventions of Egyptian poetry: repeated over and over with subtle progressive adjustments in the words that surround it. To test out the meaning of the phrase as Heliopolis, consider Allen’s translation of the verse:
Recitation: There is a Heliopolitan in Unis, god: your Heliopolitan is in Unis, god; There is a Heliopolitan in Unis, Sun: your Heliopolitan is in Unis, Sun. The mother of Unis is a Heliopolitan, the father of Unis is a Heliopolitan, and Unis himself is a Heliopolitan, born in Heliopolis …
Then read the hieroglyphs as what they represent, a column in a circle, an axis in a wheel:
The axis is in Unis, the holy falcon is the axis in Unis, light of the axis, you are in Unis,
the light is the mother of Unis, the axis is the father of Unis, Unis himself is the axis,
the axis creates and the axis destroys, the light of the stars, and the light of men.
The literal reading of the verse is an elegant description of the fixed point around which the sky turns, the North Star. The soul of the king becomes the center of the universe, the still point of the turning world. The holy falcon with its glittering wings is the sky as revolving time, the arising and dissolution of all living things. The repetition in the verse mimics the physical reality of the turning sky. The noun remains constant, as the words around it change, embodying the concept of the turning wheel.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
—T. S. Eliot
Is the text meant to convey a meaningless myth or a profound insight? The answer lies in the hieroglyphic star in the pun that begins verse 4 on the west wall of the entranceway, ya hmy sqhd, signaling that the reality embedded in the lines is ihm sk, the North Star.
This introductory phrase is followed by a picture of shrugging arms, the negative, which modifies the verb to give, the pyramid, or specifically a pyramid-shaped bread, sometimes placed in an open hand as the designation of this pervasive verb to give: di (Greek: di/domi; Latin: do; Sanskrit: do; Arabic: di). What is requested to be given is the first representation in the text of the ka, the upraised arms, preceded by a twisted thread (h/q, a suffix for the causative). This word has been translated as magic, as though this were the work of primitive people who believed in magic, but the idea really is that of the energy in the body that survives the body at death, the chi.
The final image uses the implicit suggestion of the sky as a wheel to introduce the subject of the next verse. It is the water skin, shd, an object that brings to mind the connection between the wheel and water. A water skin filled with air rises through the water, suggesting the rising of the water itself. As a verb it means “to bob up.” May the soul bob up on the turning wheel of the sky, as a water skin bobs forcefully up through the water. As a noun the water skin is the standard epithet for the animal that does precisely this, the crocodile. Seshed, the doubling noun from the causative form of this verb, is the lightning bolt, the defining picture for which in hieroglyphs is the crocodile, a dangerous animal that moves with lightning speed. This animal metaphor is the vehicle of the sense conveyed in the following verse.
VERSE 5
The Nile
Say the words:
Unis comes today before the rising, swirling flood
Unis becomes the crocodile, green, floating up, face watching, chest raised,
He rushes out, rising as a leg and great tail within the shining light,
He goes to his banks of silt in the great swirling flood,
To the still place in the reeds on the rim of the sky.
He greens the green reeds on the banks of the sky.
He brings his precious green to the great eye in the heart of the reeds.
He takes his place on the luminous rim of the sky.
Unis rises as the crocodile, son of the water, Unis eats with its mouth,
Urinates, copulates with its penis. Unis becomes (the life-giving water of) semen itself,
Seizing women in their husbands’ arms, wherever love arises, according to its nature.
A glance at the wall shows the subject of the fifth and final verse: water. Hidden in the waves is the danger of the rising water, personified by the danger rising in the water, the crocodile. The verse is a dynamic description of both the element and the animal. The swirling throb of rising water is conveyed by the word kbb, a word likeebb. The economy of the previous verses gives way to a kind of wild fluidity that conjures both the sight and the sound of the rushing flood that brings the miraculous greening of life. The crocodile is the rising of greenness itself. The intensity of the motion as the meaning of the animal is embodied in a visual pun on its name that contains the typical sweetness of Egyptian humor. The name of the crocodile is sbk (s/thread, b/leg, k/basket).Unis pi sbk. Unis becomes the crocodile. Beside the word sbk on the wall is the word for “leg,” sbkh, with the same letters but a different, aspirated k. Both words are spelled with a leg, which is the letter b. The second word ends with the leg, not as a letter but as a defining picture drawn slightly differently. Immediately below this picture is the word khbs (kh/lined disc, b/leg, s/knotted cord), the word for “tail,” spelled out and followed by the picture of a tail. The word for “tail” is the word for both “leg” and “crocodile” spelled phonically backward. It is a hieroglyphic joke. Yet, by means of the words, the animal is dissolved into and hidden within its parts. There is a sense of the sliding meaning of things, of the drifting quality of the recognition of things, of the drifting quality of language forming words like the flow of mud forming banks in the river.
The first wall begins with fire and ends with water, the essential formula of alchemy applied to the dramatic reality of the flood rising with the star in the fire of the dawn. This final verse stands apart from the others, as ingeniously constructed on three different levels at once: the meaning, the sound, and the words as images on the wall. The primary hieroglyphs are pictures of water and green reeds. The three reeds standing together form the word sekut: the hieroglyph for “marsh” is the Arabic word for “silence,” an incidental pun that conjures the whispering sound of the marsh reeds in the wind. Everything is in motion, the motion of the water forming the precious banks of rich black mud, the name of which, chem (chemistry), is the hieroglyphic word for Egypt. Does the feather hieroglyph mean feather-green (like the green bee eater with its brilliant green feathers)? Or is the color green floating up like a feather (the meaning of the hieroglyphic feather as a verb). The feather grammatically applies to the crocodile, rushing, rising, floating up through the water as the green serpent that is the life in all things, water and seed at once, pure semen (semen is the Latin word for seed). The verse is filled with echoic devices: mrr (loving) echoes r mr (to [r] the shore [mr]). The leg and great tail are within theiahw, the shining light—the light that manifests as life itself, suggested by the phrase the great eye in the heart of the reeds, the hidden intelligence that makes things grow. The cryptic phrase is echoed directly across the entranceway on the east wall, reversed in a mirroring sequence of the words: there iahw, the shining light, is inthe heart of the eye, ib ir, rather than in the eye of the heart.
In hieroglyphs the word for “green,” wadj, is spelled with things that are green in different ways: the cobra and papyrus. The papyrus is a picture of the vivid embodiment of the color, the floating fields of papyrus that fill the Nile. The cobra, the letter dj, is the essence of greenness, of newness, because it sheds its skin. The wall typically ends with an image that introduces the verse that begins on the following wall, and refines and examines the meaning of the image, a hinge between the first wall and the second. The first wall presents a description of the elements of the sky as markers in time that relate to the rising of the Nile flood: the dawn rising of Taurus, Orion, and Sirius, the full moon, their rising keyed to the sky turning around the North Star. As though going back in time, the soul goes back into the night to be born as a star in the dawn. The subject of the final verse on the first wall is essentially rebirth, the unstoppable rising of the inherently green, inherently serpentine life force.
The verses establish the eternal principles of geometry: the circling of the sky, and within it the triangle as Sirius rising and descending, pulls with it the life force on earth. With the stars that set beneath the edge of the earth, the greening of life will go down beneath the ground.
Breaking the Code
Babay = Orion; the fire = the dawn; the holy ones = stars; the falcon = Sirius; the bull = Taurus; the Hamadryas baboon = the full moon; the column at the center = the North Star; the crocodile = the greening life force in the flood, the semen that engenders life on earth.
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Brind Morrow
