What happens to us after death? Science does not address the issue, but for the ancient Egyptians, it was a carefully mapped region, called the Duat—very close to the word death. In Sumer, this realm was called Nibiru, “Crossing”; in Greece it was symbolised by Charon, the ferryman who would transfer the soul to the other side of the River Styx. In Egypt, the symbol for this mode of transport was that of the Henu Bark, the boat that transported the soul to the Land of the Dead—the equivalent of the Magur boat of the Sumerians.
The Apkallu, or Anunnaki, were the Sumerian equivalent of the spirit aides that helped the soul in its negotiations of the Duat, or Nibiru—the neteru, the gods, of the ancient Egyptians. Equally, the Pyramid Texts were said to be written on the “Henu Bark,” and as they were written on the walls of the burial chamber inside the pyramids, it is clear that the chambers were envisioned as the Celestial Bark—thus explaining the presence of boats next to the pyramids, such as the Great Pyramid. Equally, the Coffin texts were the same text written on the coffin of the deceased, the wooden coffin being another—smaller—version of a bark.
The Pyramid Texts state how “I am a soul… a star of gold.” In Egyptian symbolism, the soul was placed on a boat, led by a navigator: the boat would be the instrument for the soul’s exploration of the Duat. The Papyrus of Nu, from the Eighteenth Dynasty, says that the original text was indeed present in the Shrine of the Sacred Boat. The Book of the Dead was literally a map for travel in the Duat.
But what was the Duat? Eastern religions speak of a state following death that is literally a “state of nothingness.” They have called this the “bardo,” which is identical to the Christian concept of Purgatory—or the Egyptian concept of the Duat?
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a book for the living as well; it aims to concentrate the mind of the living on their continual preparation for the afterlife, with liberation from the cycle of life and death as the ultimate goal. However, reincarnation is deemed to be the most likely outcome for the majority of human beings who have not attained sufficient spiritual advancement during their life, and preceding past lives.
Some authors, in particular Andrew Collins, have argued that the Duat, the Egyptian Underworld, must have been physically represented beneath the Giza complex. This idea has led to various theories, specifically referring to Edgar Cayce, who claimed a chamber existed underneath the Sphinx, which would hold evidence of the lost civilization of Atlantis. In more recent years, the discovery of a small door leading from an “air shaft,” the so-called Gantenbrink door, has fuelled speculation that there are as yet undiscovered chambers inside the Great Pyramid.
Though this is certainly a possibility, most, if not all, of us have missed the point. If we were to ask the question whether anyone doubts the fact that we have identified the core chambers and corridors of the Great Pyramid, the answer would be “no”: it is clear that the current known passages are the main arteries inside the highest building in the world, until the Eiffel tower was finished in the nineteenth century.
The next question to ask is what these passages mean, if anything. For many Egyptologists, they are merely the visible evidence of a Pharaoh who repeatedly changed his mind, from being buried in the subterranean chamber, to a new room, which is now known as the “Queen’s Chamber,” and eventually the King’s Chamber. Anyone familiar with project management will know that project owners often change their mind, and either request changes, or even alter the scope of the project. But if you were project manager of the biggest building project the world had ever seen, and would ever see for the next 5000 years, would you agree with these changes? The answer would be “no”— especially since it is known that Khufu, or Cheops as the Greeks called him, was not a tyrant as Herodotus would have it, but instead an apparently nice man. His father Snofru was easily swayed in his opinions and ideas, but nevertheless successfully managed the construction of three pyramids. Equally, because the granite was a key ingredient for the construction of the King’s Chamber, it is clear that the time required to prepare those blocks means that the King’s Chamber must have been an integral part of the pyramid’s original design.
If the design was always intended to incorporate three chambers, what would that mean? What was Khufu trying to do? As leading Egyptologist Mark Lehner has pointed out, the Egyptian word for pyramid, mer, is possibly derived from m, meaning “instrument” or “place”, and ar meaning “ascension.” Therefore, the pyramid is either the place of ascension or the instrument of ascension, or both. I.E.S. Edwards also identified mer or mr as “instrument/place of ascension,” but added that the interpretation was “open to justifiable doubt.” What the word meant, nobody knows for sure, as the m-er conjunction is unusual in Egyptian grammar. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the mer is written as a pyramid, which is definitely capturing the essence.
Again, “ascension” has been interpreted as taking off in a rocketship. But the “ascent to Heaven” should perhaps be looked upon in a metaphysical context. After all, though Egyptologists might not have been perfectly able to explain the meaning of the pyramid, it is a matter of fact that the Pyramid Texts speak of a metaphysical journey, of the soul on his way through the Duat to reach the Afterlife.
Charles Muses (1919-2000), a man who walked the fine line between New Age and solid research, realized that in the museum of Torino, in Italy, there was a coffin from the Egyptian village of “Two Hills” (Gebelein) which depicted the plan of the Duat, as written down in the Coffin Texts, spell 650.
It visualizes the three paths of the soul at death, at the Duat, the Crossing: floating about, return or voyage. It is depicted as a fork in which the central path leads to regeneration (the voyage) and the other two diverge from it, postponing the regeneration.
The Egyptians visualized this in the concept of the Henu Boat, where his navigator guided the soul: once it set off, where did the soul want to go to? Float about, return to shore, or go to an undiscovered country?
Muses identified each path with the types of couch, or bier—or coffin—on which the deceased, and Osiris, the god who had died and had had to face the same trial, laid. The central path (resurrection) was identified with the lion couch, the hippopotamus couch with return to the shore (reincarnation), and the cow couch with the floating about in the Duat.
There are various depictions of the “lion couch,” as this was the path obviously favoured by all those who were buried—and definitely for the Pharaoh. After all, if the Pharaoh did not go on the voyage, who would? Examples of a hippopotamus and a cow bier were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and his tomb shows that each couch was furnished. To a large extent, what would happen after death could only be confirmed once the deceased Pharaoh was dead—it was then that the choice had to be made. As Tutankhamun died at a very young age, it is clear that it was not at all clear that his “mission in life” had been fulfilled and that he would have gotten enough brownie points to enter the Afterlife—the realm of the gods, the “First Time,” a point beyond Creation, beyond Time.
The state of the bardo is therefore identical to the encoffined Osiris: though dead, he is not “dead dead”: there is still potential, not for an earthly life, but for a life “elsewhere.” The soul is in a “land of nothingness,” a gateway, a crossroads, where the soul is also in need of a guide.
Let us go through each option one by one. At death, the easiest path was the path of reincarnation: one body was exchanged for another and the cycle of life continued. In nature, this cycle was visible in the snake shedding its skin, the sun rising and setting, the seasons, the deer renewing its antlers—symbols and “physical evidence” that has been found at many sacred sites. It was the path chosen by most souls, it seems, for a variety of reasons: the sahu, the Egyptian term for soul, might have had too much fear to go on a voyage or even dwell in the Duat for too long; the life review might have been specifically negative: life was not led properly, and hence a successive incarnation is required for the soul to grow before it might be ready to return to the Source.
The path of the Cow was to sail about in the Sacred Boat in the Duat. It is believed that this was literally “biding time”: the soul was undecided as to what to do. It is this state that in popular parlance is known as a ghost: the soul is literally in a state of “nowhere;” it has not gone on. It could also be the state in which certain séances, particularly popular in Victorian England, contacted the “dead” and received information from “the beyond.” But at some point, the soul could either reincarnate, or the boat could set course towards the “Lion’s Path Gateway.”
Central to the imagery of the Duat is a central path, a tunnel, from the world of the living into the darkness of the Duat. In that tunnel, the soul is given three paths, each leading to a specific destiny, and identified, at least at the time of Tuthankhamun, with three different couches: a cow, a hippopotamus, and a lion.
This imagery translates straightforwardly to the Great Pyramid: the entrance leads down into a dark, low tunnel. By default, the path descends to the Lower Chamber. However, there is an entrance towards another tunnel, leading to the “Queen’s Chamber” or the “King’s Chamber.” A lot of ink has been spent on how the stone blocking this tunnel was put in place and whether or not it could pivot. That is less important than the observation that there was a “guarded” entrance in this fork in the road. Once in the ascending passage—an apt description for those trying to attain heaven—a further fork occurred, one leading to the Queen’s Chamber, another that continued to climb, towards the King’s Chamber.
Did each of the tombs symbolize a path? The path of reincarnation, of the Hippopotamus, would be the Underground Chamber: easiest to reach, but very “basic,” earth to earth. The path of the Cow would be the Queen’s Chamber: in between both, specifically there for a soul stalling to make the final ascent to the King’s Chamber. The Lion’s path would be the continued ascent towards the King’s Chamber, where the “tomb of God,” the coffin, was the symbol of resurrection—initiation in the Divine Abode.
This interpretation of the Great Pyramid as the three-dimensional visualization of the Duat would explain many anomalies, too many to list here. But one intriguing anomaly is the “Well shaft,” a roughly hewn path connecting the Lower Chamber with the fork in the tunnel towards respectively the Queen’s and King’s Chambers. This path was the “loop” from the second path, that of the Cow, either to reincarnation or regeneration. It would, by default, have to bypass the original “choice” (the original fork in the road), but it would have to lead to both other chambers. For the architect, this presented a problem, but I believe the shaft and its execution display exactly the nature of the path: rough, “unhewn.” To some extent, the architect had made the passage from the Queen’s Chamber to the Lower Chamber more difficult than the passage towards the King’s Chamber. It was a reminder that the seeker “had come so far, why not go all the way”?
The Well Shaft is not open to the public and few people officially enter it, though it seems that the guards on the Plateau must occasionally practice climbing it, as they normally act as descent guides for those who do enter it, such as Mark Lehner. Its purpose is unknown and whatever scenario has been proposed for its function, it has always failed. I believe that the theory that the Great Pyramid was the three-dimensional representations of the Duat and the paths within, not only makes sense of the number of chambers, but specifically of the reason behind the presence of the “Well Shaft.” It would also firmly set into place the presence of the Sphinx, the guardian of the Duat – and above all, why the Sphinx was in the form of a lion with a human head. Was it because those who entered were humans on the Lion’s Path, towards the Abode of Osiris?
Mark Lehner states that the Duat, the Netherworld, was written as a star in a circle. He states that “in the Pyramid Texts the Duat is connected to the Earth or to a darker region lying primarily beneath. Aker, the earth god in the form of a double Sphinx, was the entrance—already the Sphinx is a guardian of gateways.” In this case, it is quite clear how the Duat is entered: via the Sphinx. Or rather, the Sphinx is the guardian of the entrance, of the gateway, which from the depiction of the Duat as a star in a circle, is quite literally a “star gate,” although not in the concept of an entrance to Heaven, but to the Underworld. It is, furthermore, not an opening to an Underground Chamber which would hold evidence of Atlantis, but it is an entrance into the Duat. The Great Pyramid was a three-dimensional representation of the soul’s journey in the Duat. Visible and clear… built to last, finally understood…
Excerpted and adapted from The Canopus Revelation by Philip Coppens.
