And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. There was no mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it had before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation.
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Mansions for Voices
That the voice and therefore the power of a god-king lived on after his body stopped moving and breathing is certainly suggested by the manner of his burial. Yet burial is the wrong word.
Such divine kings were not morosely entombed, but gaily empal-aced. Once the art of building with stone was mastered shortly after 3000 B.C., what once had been the stepped matsaba tombs leap up into those playhouses of bicameral voices in immortal life we call the pyramids: complexes of festive courts and galleries merry with holy pictures and writing, often surrounded by acres of the graves of the god's servants, and dominated by the god's pyramidal house itself, soaring sunward like a shining ziggurat with an almost too confident exterior austerity, and built with an integrity that did not scruple to use the hardest of stones, polished basalts, granites, and diorites, as well as alabaster and limestone.
The psychology of all this is yet to be uncovered. So seriously has the evidence been torn away by collectors of all ranks of guilt that the whole question may be forever wrapped in unanswer-ableness. For the unmoving mummy of the god-king is often in a curiously plain sarcophagus, while the gaudy effigies made of him are surrounded with a different reverence — perhaps because it was from them that the hallucinations seemed to come.
Like the god-statues of Mesopotamia they were life-sized or larger, sometimes elaborately painted, usually with jewels for eyes long since hacked out of their sockets by conscious nonhallucinating robbers. But unlike their eastern cousins, they did not have to be moved and so were finely chiseled out of limestone, slate, diorite, or other stone, and only in certain eras carved from wood. Usually, they were set permanently in niches, some seated, some standing free, some in multiples of the god-king in standing or seated rows, and some walled up in small chapels called serdabs with two small eyeholes in front of the jewel-eyes so that the god could see out into the room before him, where there were offer-
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ings of food and treasure and we know not what else, so have these tombs been plundered. Occasionally the actual voices hallucinated from the deceased god-king came to be written down as in "The Instructions which the Majesty of King Amenemhet I justified, gave when he spoke in a dream-revelation to his son."
The commoner also was buried in a manner as if he still lived.
The peasant since predynastic times had been buried with pots of food, tools, and offerings for his continued life. Those higher in the social hierachy were given a funeral feast in which the corpse itself somehow took part. Scenes showing the deceased eating at his own funerary table came to be carved on slabs and set into a niche in the wall of the grave-mound or mastaba. Later graves elaborated this into stone-lined chambers with painted reliefs and serdabs with statues and offerings as in the pyramids proper.
Often, "true-of-voice" was an epithet added to the name of a dead person. This is difficult to understand apart from the present theory. "True-of-voice" originally applied to Osiris and Horus with reference to their victories over their opponents.
Letters too were written to the dead as if they still lived.
Probably this occurred only after some time when the person so addressed could no longer be 'heard' in hallucinations. A man writes his dead mother asking her to arbitrate between himself and his dead brother. How is this possible unless the living brother had been hearing his dead brother in hallucination? Or a dead man is begged to awaken his ancestors to help his widow and child. These letters are private documents dealing with everyday matters, and are free of official doctrine or make-believe.
A New Theory of the Ka
If we could say that ancient Egypt had a psychology, we would then have to say that its fundamental notion is the ka, and the problem becomes what the ka is. Scholars struggling with the
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meaning of this particularly disturbing concept, which we find constantly in Egyptian inscriptions, have translated it in a litter of ways, as spirit, ghost, double, vital force, nature, luck, destiny, and what have you. It has been compared to the life-spirit of the Semites and Greeks, as well as to the genius of the Romans. But obviously, these later concepts are the hand-me-downs of the bicameral mind. Nor can this slippery diversity of meanings be explained by positing an Egyptian mentality in which words were used in several ways as approaches to the same mysterious entity, or by assuming "the peculiar quality of Egyptian thought which allows an object to be understood not by a single and consistent definition, but by various and unrelated approaches."15 None of this is satisfactory.
The evidence from hieratic texts is confusing. Each person has his ka and speaks of it as we might of our will power. Yet when one dies, one goes to one's ka. In the famous Pyramid Texts around 2200 B.C., the dead are called "masters of their ka's." The symbol in hieroglyphics for the ka is one of admonishing: two arms uplifted with flat outspread hands, the whole placed upon a stand which in hieroglyphics is only used to support the symbols of divinities.
It is obvious from the preceding chapters that the ka requires a reinterpretation as a bicameral voice. It is, I believe, what the ili or personal god was in Mesopotamia. A man's ka was his articulate directing voice which he heard inwardly, perhaps in parental or authoritative accents, but which when heard by his friends or relatives even after his own death, was, of course, hallucinated as his own voice.
If we can here relax our insistence upon the unconsciousness of these people, and, for a moment, imagine that they were something like ourselves, we could imagine a worker out in the fields suddenly hearing the ka or hallucinated voice of the vizier over him admonishing him in some way. If, after he returned to 15 Ibid., p. 61.
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his city, he told the vizier that he had heard the vizier's ka (which in actuality there would be no reason for his doing), the vizier, were he conscious as are we, would assume that it was the same voice that he himself heard and which directed his life.
Whereas in actuality, to the worker in the fields, the vizier's ka sounded like the vizier's own voice. While to the vizier himself, his ka would speak in the voices of authorities over him, or some amalgamation of them. And, of course, the discrepancy could never be discovered.
Consistent with this interpretation are several other aspects of the ka. The Egyptians' attitude toward the ka is entirely passive.
Just as in the case of the Greek gods, hearing it is tantamount to obeying it. It empowers what it commands. Courtiers in some of their inscriptions referring to the king say, "I did what his ka loved" or "I did that which his ka approved,"16 which may be interpreted as the courtier hearing the hallucinated voice of his king approving his work.