This article by Egyptologist Kara Cooney argues that ancient Egyptians (as a result of certain incorrect ideas they had about the roles of men and women in procreation) believed that women had to temporarily become male in order to be "reborn" into the afterlife. During the Ramesside period of the New Kingdom, this manifested itself in women being depicted as men (i.e. with "male" skin coloration) and addressed with male pronouns in the text on mummy coffins. However, they were expected to become female again at the end of this process.
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
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Good find and a very interesting parallel to * Rotenremet depicted like Nehesu * Aamw depicted as Temehhw * Temehhw like Aamw also in a Ramesside era afterdeath portrayal.
That one, however, was a one off but the topic case was consistent.
posted
This is very interesting. I'll have to read the paper first, but I think this belief may have to do with the Osirian cult which was associated with the male deity Osiris. Most resurrection deities in the ancient world including those in West Asia were male. There were exceptions like Inanna/Ishtar in Mesopotamia and Persephone/Proserpina in Greece and Rome.
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I think the Greeks had a notion that men created the fetus and simply transferred it into women for incubation too. Maybe they got it from the Egyptians, or maybe that was a belief widespread in the eastern Mediterranean basin at the time?
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^ You're referring to the Classical Greek notion of woman as empty vessel, whereas men's semen were the germs of life. The problem with that convention of thought comes from the simple fact that children inherit traits from their mothers as well.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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This article by Egyptologist Kara Cooney argues that ancient Egyptians (as a result of certain incorrect ideas they had about the roles of men and women in procreation) believed that women had to temporarily become male in order to be "reborn" into the afterlife. During the Ramesside period of the New Kingdom, this manifested itself in women being depicted as men (i.e. with "male" skin coloration) and addressed with male pronouns in the text on mummy coffins. However, they were expected to become female again at the end of this process.
Any thoughts on this?
I read Cooney's paper above weeks ago and meant to respond then. My point is that her views seem to echo that of Ann Macy Roth whose very ideas of conception and rebirth as it pertains to the male sex only was cited here years ago in another thread which I have been unable to find but I have Roth's original article here: Father Earth, Mother Sky: Ancient Egyptian Beliefs About Conception and Fertility
The problem with Roth, which was even noted by her peers in the Egyptological community, is that she merely repeats old outdated theories of Victorian Era Egyptology not only regards to 'race' but in this case gender. The very notion that conception and fertility pertained to males only is absurd especially considering that not only did the more male dominated cultures in the Near East and Europe still hold women more accountable for fertility in belief and ritual practice but that we also have accumulating evidence that Egyptians themselves may very well had matrilineal kinship! Though technically, the Egyptians had bilateral descent that is tracing kinship from both parents, traditionally it was always presumed a priori in scholarship that the Egyptians were patrilineal not only due to Western cultural bias but to the simple fact that sons and the male line was important in regards to the funerary cult. In Egyptian culture, sons were held responsible for funerary rites of deceased parents both mother and father and were tasked with not just funeral preparations but also rituals of ancestor placation. Unsurprisingly most of what we know about ancient Egypt comes from tombs and funerary material so of course the bias will come from the male side of that culture ritually and religiously speaking.
However, if one takes a more thorough approach to the examination of Egyptian culture keeping in mind the complimentary and balanced gender roles in that society, one would realize that just as sons were invested with funerary rites, daughters were invested with fertility rites that is perpetuating and maintaining the family in its existence in the mortal plane just as sons perpetuated and maintained the spirits of deceased ancestors. These two spheres of ritual activity by the way not being entirely separate but very much connected-- birth and life here and death/rebirth and life in the here-after. Egyptologists have only recently begun to realize that the so-called domestic or household cults pertaining to women of households were just as significant as the funerary cults of men.
In fact, one of the biggest misconceptions of Egyptian religion that Roth and Cooney are operating from is the idea that creator gods were only male. I've come across this belief far too often. A lot of it stems from the over-popularized Heliopolitan cosmogony which Cooney unsurprisingly cites in her paper. But the Egyptians did not have a single cosmogony, rather their cosmogonic beliefs varied by locality. There were indeed female creator deities, the most well known ones being the Neith of Lower Egypt and Mut of Upper Egypt. Even the cosmogonies of male creators that have come down to us today through Egyptology are but surviving variants of older stories where female deities once had more active roles. For example, many people know about the sun god Re who is known as a creator but not many know about the celestial goddess Mehet-Weret who was his mother who bore in the beginning of time. And yes even in the Heliopolitan myth of Atum creating the world through his bodily fluids, not many know about the goddess Iusaaset who has his wife-sister or even mother. She was a goddess of conception itself and of the mysterious darkness within where conception took place and identified with the darkness inside a shrine that housed a deity as well as the šwt (shadow) of living beings.
Again, these primordial mothers seem to go largely ignored by some Egyptologists. What's also funny is that many goddesses in general often have the hieroglyph determinative for swht meaning 'egg' attached to their names.
swht
Many Egyptologists have noted this same determinative being attached to the names of women who are mothers and deduce its associations with progeny and some have even noted its equivalence to the glyph for mtwt meaning 'semen' as it pertains to male reproductive power, which interestingly enough is also grammatically feminine.
And then we have this bizarrely ridiculous passage from Cooney as it regards the role of Isis:
quote: Another creator-god, Osiris, was thought to have the same potentiality for resurrection. After his murder and dismemberment by his brother Seth, his consort and sister Isis reassembled him. Osiris was then able to re-create himself through a sexual act with himself, the same act of masturbation used by Atum at the first moment of creation. Isis provided sexual excitement, but it was Osiris who essentially raised himself from the dead (fig. 4). Isis created the enclosure for Osiris’s rebirth—his mummy wrappings—and she acted as the vessel for the conception of their son, Horus. But Isis was not thought to bring Osiris back to life; instead, she manifested a situation in which he could bring himself back to life...
I have no idea how Cooney came up with this interpretation, since all the surviving texts are clear that Isis used her own magical power to not only reattach his body parts and even refashion his missing penis but resurrect him with help from her sister Nebthet! Even in later texts where her magic powers are mitigated by having Djehuti (Thoth) show up to give aid it's clear that Osiris did not come back on his own but through the magic of his wife. In fact the whole episode is part of a shamanic theme found in many cultures around the world where a typically female shaman has the power restore life to a dismembered deceased. This is succinctly shown by Max Dashu in her article Raising the Dead: Medicine Women Who Revive and Retrieve Souls I One of the 10,000 names of Auset (Isis) is Weret Hekau, meaning the Great Enchantress, or “strong of magic.” One way that she heals is by words of power. This is how she restored the scorpion-bitten son of a lady in the Delta marshes. Auset is often depicted shaking the sistrum, the sacred rattle of Kemetic temple women, which itself has strong shamanic associations. (Some modern healers in Kenya, Namibia, and elsewhere in Africa, use gourd rattles in their curing ceremonies.) And Auset also possesses the shamanic power of shapeshifting into a falcon-form. She spreads out her protective wings, and beats them powerfully, to arouse vital spirit. To revive the slain and dismembered Ausar (Osiris), she changed into the form of a kite (a falcon-like bird with a flat, owl-like face) and hovered over his body. She “made a shade with her plumage / Created breath with her wings.” [2] Temple reliefs at Abydos and Denderah show Auset flying and beating her wings all around Ausar. Serpents of regeneration rise in the underworld beneath his bier. The deep-eyed Hekat, frog goddess of generation, birth and resurrection, watches over this transfiguration in the Denderah relief. [3]
Although Auset is indisputably a deity, she is also described as a First Woman, with an array of foundational acts to her credit. She is not only a model of queenship, but a powerful sorceress who is “mighty of tongue.” Her shapeshifting and power to restore the dead to life recur in numerous stories about powerful shamans. A very close parallel exists near the bend of the Niger River in Mali, where the great tungutu Pa Sini Jobu shapeshifts into bird form and uses her wings to impart life to a dead body.
^ Note that Isis isn't just mere "stimulation" she brings her husband back so she can have sex with him while still in her kite form so she can conceive a son. Note also the frog goddess Heket on the right.
Heket is the feminine form of heka which is translated as 'magic'. While heka means magic in the general sense 'heket' refers specifically to the magical power of life itself or vital force that creates and sustains life which is the Egyptian word ankh. Heket is personified as a goddess and in many myths she was the wife of the creator god Khenum who fashioned the bodies of fetuses from clay while Heket animated them giving life.
So to say that Egyptians believed females have no power of life and regeneration and that their only role was as the Greek notion of 'empty vessel' or incubator is really ludicrous. I do believe that what Cooney observes from the sarcophagi of gender-shifts more than likely represents some form of theurgy that is summoning the power of a deity by identifying with that deity in this case Osiris since Osiris is the god who resurrects. I don't at all find it surprising that Egyptian female as well as male would call on that power, but then to deny that the force of life or literally 'heqet' is only possessed by males is something else entirely.
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More to keep in mind when it comes to the Egyptian concept of birth and resurrection.
Birth and Rebirth in Ancient Egypt Birth has always been one the most dangerous periods of human life. In ancient Egypt saving the lives of mother and child during that trial entailed special measures. One was medicine, which was really mostly magic, and the other were religious practices, including prayers to divinities like the Seven Hathors or Isis. But in Egypt, birth was closely paired with death, which was the gateway to rebirth...
But the Egyptian understanding about human generation and growth can only be found in religious sources. Texts from Late Period to the Ptolemaic period (ca. 712-30 BCE) written on the walls of temples at Esna, Philae, and Khargah give us the most information regarding Egyptian thought on human embryonic development. Another valuable text, the Papyrus Jumilhac, from Ptolemaic period, tells that the embryo is formed from masculine semen emanating from the father bones, while the mother contributes flesh and vital fluids (re)created from her milk. During the child creation process, the blood of the pregnant woman played the role of a “binder,” which allowed the transformation of milk into flesh and semen into bones and vice versa..
It was actually believed that semen originated from the base of the backbone or spine (interestingly as stated in the Islamic belief per the Quran). The Egyptians believed mans' semen produced bone while the woman's uterine blood produced the flesh and blood.
The Egyptian considered the animal and human world as oviparous. All beings came from eggs, even if it was an “internal egg.”..
At Karnak, it is a moon god, Khonsu, who presides over embryonic development, “putting in shape the semen-bones into the egg.” The role of blood as binder was not enough: divine intervention had to be requested for growth.
The idea of an egg comes from Pyramid Texts, written on the inner walls of pyramids from the 5th and 6th Old Kingdom dynasties. To reach a new life in Heaven, the dead pharaoh had to be rejuvenated into the womb of various goddesses, in particular, the great mother and sky goddess Nut. The embryo was conceived as an egg and the pharaoh had to “break his egg” to be reborn in the afterlife to take his place among gods. The embryo itself was considered as a little child.
It's likely that Egyptians had some conception of the mammalian ovipary simply by observation of human and live stock fetusus still wrapped in amniotic sacs. Though I have heard of the possibility that the Egyptians may have made use of early magnifying lenses that allowed them to see human ova.
And rebirth
Death was unacceptable to the Egyptian mind. It was the opposite of life and world creation and was related to the primeval chaos, where life and cosmic order, expressed through the notion of Maât or balance, have no place. Thus, by definition, everything had to start again.
Reacting against death, Egyptians found different ways to construct it not as the end, but the beginning of another kind of life in the world of the dead, the afterlife in a world related to gods.
Thoughts about survival after death consumed a large portion of Egyptian daily life and a great deal of energy was directed at rehabilitation of the dead, who were crossing a critical stage in their “existence”.
In Egyptian religious concepts, death could not be separated from the myth of Osiris, who was a prototype of the divinized dead pharaoh...
..According to these beliefs, the deceased experience a dissociation of the elements of his being: his nourishing spirits Ka and Ba are gone; his body needs to be preserved against decay; his name, an important feature of his personality needs to survive; the shadow, a proof of life, is gone and has to come again. His Akh, the luminous spirit of the dead, also needs to be found and reunited wtih him.
With time, other elements of the personality of the dead were added, like fate, the life-time, birth, and the ib or the heart as a concept of memory of the dead. To ensure a new life for the deceased, all these elements had to be magically reunited thanks to the “Opening the Mouth ceremony” performed on the mummy at the entry of the tomb, which was conceived as a new house for the dead. There the deceased found all the possible comforts, including furniture and offerings.
There's an excellent book on the topic of death and the funerary cult in ancient Egypt:
^ According to the author Assman, there is a gendered role in the process of rebirth from death with the female role being the preparer for integration ala Isis with if not the gathering of body parts to the process of incubation similar to the incubation of an embryo in the womb whereas the male role is after his passive inactivity, he then becomes active in being aroused both vitally if not sexually. Too bad there's no material on the gender-shifting of deceased women though.
There's also an interesting chapter on the importance of the heart which could be thought of as the core organ of a person or soul manifested physically. This was the organ weighed against the feather of Maat in judgement and was formed from the mother's germ.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:There's also an interesting chapter on the importance of the heart which could be thought of as the core organ of a person or soul manifested physically. This was the organ weighed against the feather of Maat in judgement and was formed from the mother's germ.
I wonder if this has anything to do with how we use "heart" to refer to a person's emotions today?
quote:There's also an interesting chapter on the importance of the heart which could be thought of as the core organ of a person or soul manifested physically. This was the organ weighed against the feather of Maat in judgement and was formed from the mother's germ.
I wonder if this has anything to do with how we use "heart" to refer to a person's emotions today?
Well if you are talking of Greco-Roman culture and thus "Western" European culture then yes.....
You see it in the works of the Greeks and from there it passes into Western culture.
As for the topic of the thread, these people love cherry picking bits and pieces of the cosmology of the Nile in order to prop up absurd talking points. Anybody familiar with the cosmology of the Nile knows that male and female were an important aspect of duality. This is seen as a repeating pattern throughout an incudes the Ogdoad of Hermopolis (4 pairs of male and female dieties). It is seen in the fact that every major deity had a partner of the opposite gender in their main temple along with a child. Of course the depiction of women in tombs with color the same as men just means they wanted to show them "realistically" versus symbolically. But of course these people will vehemently deny that color of the men as being anything other than symbolic........
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