Fixation on the Afterlife

At the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa there is an exhibit of ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and artifacts. I remember that it was in Tulsa, long before I lived here, that I saw my first ancient Egyptian items. I had grown up in a California town where even the historical museums had nothing from before 1800 (CE, that is) and was amazed to see something that was actually from the time of the Old Testament stories. I was in awe. But this time, as I looked at item after item, some of them over 5000 years old, I felt burdened. Here is why.

The Egyptian fixation upon death and the afterlife was total and stifling. Egypt is famous as an archaeological treasure trove, because of its long civilization and the dry conditions that allowed exquisite preservation even of things that had not been mummified. It should be a tremendous source of information about the everyday lives of ancient people. But in reality, besides the records of kingly conquests, most of the hieroglyphics are incantations that will guide the departed person through the afterlife. So, for instance, you have a sarcophagus covered with hundreds of hieroglyphics. They tell you that it is so-and-so-and-so son of so-and-so-and-so, that he was a scribe or the keeper of the granaries, and the rest of it is please-Osiris-don’t-hurt-me-please-Ra-don’t-feed-me-to-the-alligators-please-Horus-I-wrote-down-the-right-words-so-I-deserve-to-live-in-the-underworld-forever-along-with-my-mummified-cat-no-longer-Fluffy. No biography, just religious hocus-pocus.

The extravagances expended upon preparation for the afterlife of Egyptian kings and nobles are infamous. But so imbued was Egyptian culture with this fixation that middle-class people were expected to make these preparations also. I saw the sarcophagi and other items of artisans. Preparation for death could cost the artisan a year’s wages. They had various cost-cutting measures. The middle-class sarcophagi had red and yellow paint to imitate the gold sheet they could not afford, and painted patterns to make limestone look like granite. Even the lowest professionals had to have something, so they made mummy-covers out of terra cotta (pretty amateur work, resulting in faces that looked almost Neanderthal). If they found a tomb that had been abandoned, they recycled the contents by erasing the names of the previous owner-inhabitant. Some of these items could have been a chance to preserve a record of, for example, how the pyramids were built—did the artisans (who were not slaves, but contractors) push the blocks up inclined planes? Or did outer space creatures use anti-gravity devices, as Erich Von Däniken claimed? Just how were the contractors chosen and how much were they paid? There is a little information, but not much. The Egyptians wrote a lot, but mostly incantations for the afterlife.

So powerful was the cult of the afterlife that conquerors got sucked into it. One of the sarcophagi was of a Greek ruler just before the Common Era. Everything looked just like it was Egyptian, even with hieroglyphics (which were used only for religion; commerce used a primitive alphabet)—but the face plate was a Pompeii-style painting.

The Egyptians were not the only ones to focus all their attention on religion and leave little record of their ordinary lives. In another part of the museum there are medieval paintings. They are all of religious themes. Occasionally a little bit of ordinary life and landscape would slip in as background. Only later did ordinary life and lives make it into paintings. At the end of one hallway is a permanent exhibit at the Philbrook: Bouguereau’s painting of the little sherpherdess, more lifelike than life, and whose eyes, everyone agrees, seem to follow you wherever you are.

Some of my own writings have suffered from religious limitations in the past. I have kept a daily journal (today’s entry was number 7548) for 21 years. The recent entries contain many things that I have learned from my experiences, observations, and from the news. Whoever reads them someday, should they happen to survive, will learn much about our times and how at least one thoughtful person reacted to them. But when I started the journal, it was a devotional book, in which I wrote only about the Bible, and wrote prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (the ACTS system). A little bit about me, hardly anything about the world. My journal, at its inception, was very much like an Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with writing that would tell a person of the future very, very little, and which did not even help me very much. I felt an obligation to be pious rather than wrestling with difficult spiritual issues honestly. I am thankful that enough life remains to me that I can finally begin examining it.