Do you know what the Ancient Egyptian’s believed would happen to the soul if a body was left to decompose? I’ve been looking for the answer to this for months now, and many different sites say that the soul experiences a “second death,” with the meaning ranging from becoming a wandering ghost to the soul ceasing to exist altogether… Thank you!

thatlittleegyptologist:

Ahh see the thing is you’re imagining that bodies in Ancient Egypt were left to decompose without care. There’s really no such thing. There’s also no concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt either.

Let’s start at the beginning. 

Most people believe that every Egyptian was mummified after death. This is simply not true. 99% of all Egyptians were never mummified, either because the practice was not yet invented (seriously, it took them a while to get it right), or because they simply could not afford it. It’s the age old adage of the 1% getting all the bells and whistles and the 99% getting nothing. Most of our surviving record is the burials of the elite, with little known about the regular citizens. It’s a bummer for Egyptologists.

What did happen was that when someone died they were placed in a dug out hole, given grave goods, and then re-covered. However, the body would not decompose but instead dry out, thus forming a natural mummy, leaving most organs intact. This was an acceptable form of burial for the Egyptians and they would still get into the afterlife even though they’ve been left to ‘decompose’.

Here’s an example:

(The Gebelein Man – Source: The British Museum) (Learn more about the Gebelein PreDynastic mummies here)

Both manually mummified and naturally mummified individuals would be able to enter into the afterlife as they still had the one organ that mattered in all of this: the heart. 

You’ve probably heard of the ‘weighing of the heart’ whereby the heart was believed to be the seat of emotion and intelligence (as they hadn’t figured out what the brain did yet), and it was weighed against Ma’at (the feather of truth). Before this point the deceased had to go before 42 ‘judge’ gods and speak Negative Confessions to state they have not broken the laws of Ma’at. The heart is then weighed to make sure they’re telling the truth. Read more about the Judgement process here.

(Weighing of the Heart scene from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)

If you balanced with Ma’at you could progress into the Field of Reeds; the Egyptian afterlife that is essentially just Egypt all over again, but this time with no manual labour. If you failed, and your heart was heavy with lies, then your heart was eaten by Ammit. Here she is looking as beautiful and as terrifying as all women wish to be when they enter a room. Get it girl:

(Thoth and Ammit from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)

If Ammit ate the heart you fall into Nun (pronounced Noon) or ‘Chaos’, thus achieving ‘Second Death’ and ceasing to exist entirely. (Though this was preventable with the use of a Heart Scarab, which you can read more on here)

I’m gonna go on a slight detour before I explain Second Death, so I can address the concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. 

There isn’t such a thing as a ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. Modern influence on the Ancient record has led us to impose the concept on the Egyptians as a way of explaining the religious implications of the Egyptian concept of self to the general public. Basically there are 5 parts to the Egyptian concept of self:

ib – (eeb) the heart – seat of knowledge and emotions

rn – (ren) the name – important for being remembered and accepted into the afterlife. No name, you don’t exist. This is why they scrubbed names off monuments of people like Akhenaten. Read more about Damnatio Memoriae. Oddly for the Egyptians, being on display in a museum wouldn’t be the worst thing as their name would continually be being said by visitors, thus causing them to live on forever. They even had inscriptions on their tomb walls asking visitors or passers by to say their name and say an offering of bread and beer to help them continue existing. Odd how that works out. Read more about the Egyptians and their interactions with the dead.

Swt – (sheut) the shadow – since it was always present the Egyptians believed is was an intrinsic part of the self.

bA – (bah) the personality – 

comes into existence after death and is corporeal, eats, drinks and copulates. It can fly between the living world and the afterlife communicating with the gods and the living. It is thought that the Ba is not a part of the person but the person in their entirety, so very much unlike the Abrahamic religions concept of a soul. 

kA – (kah) the vital spark – this is what distinguishes between a living and dead person. When a person died the Ka left the body and remained in the afterlife. It needed to be sustained by offerings of food and drink from the living otherwise it would die and go into ‘Second Death’. This could be worked around by having carvings or paintings of tables piled high with food on your tomb walls (because images were magic and came to life in perpetuity), or burying yourself with food. 

So basically what you refer to in your ask is the Ka of the deceased dying if the body is left to decompose. As I’ve already stated, decomposition isn’t really a thing in Egypt if the body was buried, so the Ka of the deceased would live on as long as it was tended to. I’ll get on to what happens when it isn’t in just a bit. 

The only way you could get a ‘decomposed’ body is through something catastrophic happening meaning that your family would be unable to retrieve it for burial. No body. No burial. No Afterlife. This is relatively rare, but would usually occur through things like drowning in the Nile and being swept away, being eaten by an animal (usually a Crocodile), or dying outside of Egypt. There’s a reason a lot of the curses you find in Ancient Egypt have to do with drowning or being eaten by Crocodiles, mainly because it was an excellent way of wiping the existence of a person from the face of the Earth. Read more about curses in this PhD thesis.

And finally back to Second Death…

So now we know that to achieve Second Death in Ancient Egypt was to either have no body or an abandoned Ka. What exactly was ‘Second Death’? It’s a bit of a tricky concept to get across, but essentially with second death the person dies again and falls into Nun. Nun (noon) is the deification of the primordial waters of chaos that the Egyptian’s believe the world originated from. So essentially, if a person is unfortunate enough to be subjected to ‘second death’ then their Ka falls into the waters of Nun and ceases to exist entirely. There is no comeback from this. When a person falls into Nun due to second death they can never comeback to the Afterlife and they are forgotten. That’s it. Gone. Kaput. It’s not Hell or Purgatory (there’s no such thing in Ancient Egypt), it’s just complete non existence. You either achieve the afterlife, and have used all within your power to maintain your Ka (family provides offerings/tomb wall carvings/heart scarab), or you get Second Death and cease to exist. 

That, my friend, is what happens to an Egyptian when their body is lost and their Ka is not sustained.