H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3

Evidence of Papyri -
(Page 243) Chabas is one of these, for he indulges, in his translation of the “Harris” papyrus, in the following reflections:

Without having recourse to the imposing ceremonies of the wand of Hermes, or to the obscure formulae of an unfathomable mysticism, a mesmeriser in our own day will, by means of a few passes, disturb the organic faculties of a subject, inculcate the knowledge of a foreign language, transport him to a far-distant country, or into secret places, make him guess the thoughts of those absent, read in closed letters, etc. . . . The antre of the modern sybil is a modest-looking room, the tripod has made room for a small round table, a hat, a plate, a piece of furniture of the most vulgar kind; only the latter is even superior to the oracle of antiquity [how does M. Chabas know?], inasmuch as the latter only spoke, [ And what of the “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” the words that “the fingers of a man’s hand,” whose body and arm remained invisible, wrote on the walls of Belshazzar’s palace? (Daniel. v.) What of the writings of Simon the Magician, and the magic characters on the walls and in the air of the crypts of Initiation, without mentioning the tables of stone on which the finger of God wrote the commandments? Between the writing of one God and other Gods the difference, if any, lies only in their respective natures; and if the tree is to be known by its fruits, then preference would have to be given always to the Pagan Gods. It is the immortal “To be or not to be.” Either all of them are - or at any rate, may be - true, or all are surely pious frauds and the result of credulity.] while the oracle of our day writes its answers. At the command of the medium the spirits of the dead descend to make the furniture creak, and the authors of bygone centuries deliver to us works written by them beyond the grave. Human credulity has no narrower limits today than it had at the dawn of historical times . . . . As teratology is an essential part of general physiology now, so the pretended Occult Sciences occupy in the annals of humanity a place which is not without its importance, and deserve for more than one reason the attention of the philosopher and the historian. [ Papyrus Magique. p.186.]

Selecting the two Champollions, Lenormand, Bunsen, Victomte de Rougé, and several other Egyptologists to serve as our witnesses, let us see what they say of Egyptian Magic and Sorcery. They may get out of the difficulty by accounting for each “superstitious belief” and practice by attributing them to a chronic psychological and physiological derangement, and to collective hysteria, if they like; still facts are there, staring us in the face, from the hundreds of these mysterious papyri, exhumed after a rest of four, five, and more thousands of years, with their magical containments and evidence of antediluvian Magic.
A small library, found in Thebes, has furnished fragments of every kind of ancient literature, many of which are dated, and several of which have thus been assigned to the accepted age of Moses. Books or manuscripts on ethics, history, religion and medicine, calendars and (Page 244) registers, poems and novels—everything—may be had in that precious collection; and old legends - traditions of long forgotten ages (please to remark this: legends recorded during the Mosaic period)—are already referred to therein as belonging to an immense antiquity, to the period of the dynasties of Gods and Giants. Their chief contents, however, are formulae of exorcisms against black Magic, and funeral rituals: true breviaries, or the vade mecum of every pilgrim-traveller in eternity. These funeral texts are generally written in hieratic characters. At the head of the papyrus is invariably placed a series of scenes, showing the defunct appearing before a host of Deities successively, who have to examine him. Then comes the judgement of the Soul, while the third act begins with the launching of that Soul into the divine light. Such papyri are often forty feet long. [ See Maspero’s Guide to the Bulah Museum, among others.]
The following is extracted from general descriptions. It will show how the moderns understand and interpret Egyptian (and other) Symbology.
The papyrus of the priest Nevo-loo (or Nevolen), at the Louvre, may be selected for one case. First of all there is the bark carrying the coffin, a black chest containing the defunct’s mummy. His mother, Ammenbem-Heb, and his sister, Hooissanoob, are near; at the head and feet of the corpse stand Nephtys and Isis clothed in red, and near them a priest of Osiris clad in his panther’s skin, his censer in his right hand, and four assistants carrying the mummy’s intestines. The coffin is received by the God Anubis (of the jackal’s head), from the hands of female weepers. Then the Soul rises from its mummy and the Khou (astral body) of the defunct. The former begins its worship of the four genii of the East, of the sacred birds, and of Ammon as a ram. Brought into the “Palace of Truth,” the defunct is before his judges. While the Soul, a scarabaeus, stands in the presence of Osiris, his astral Khou is at the door. Much laughter is provoked in the West by the invocations to various Deities, presiding over each of the limbs of the mummy, and of the living human body. Only judge: in the papyrus of the mummy Petamenoph “the anatomy becomes theographical,” “astrology is applied to physiology,” or rather “to the anatomy of the human body, the heart and the soul.” The defunct’s “hair belongs to the Nile, his eyes to Venus (Isis), his ears to Macedo, the guardian of the tropics; his nose to Anubis, his left temple to the Spirit dwelling in the sun . . . .What a series of intolerable absurdities and ignoble prayers . . . . to Osiris, imploring him to give the defunct in the other world, geese, eggs, pork, etc.” [ De Mirville (from whom much of the preceding is taken). v 8I, 85 ]
Symbols and Their Reading - (Page 245) It might have been prudent, perhaps, to have waited to ascertain whether all these terms of “geese, eggs, and pork” had not some other Occult meaning. The Indian Yogi who, in an exoteric work, is invited to drink a certain intoxicating liquor till he loses his senses, was also regarded as a drunkard representing his sect and class, until it was found that the Esoteric sense of that “spirit” was quite different; that it meant divine light, and stood for the ambrosia of Secret Wisdom.
The symbols of the dove and the lamb which abound now in Eastern and Western Christian Churches may also be exhumed long ages hence, and speculated upon as objects of present-day worship. And then some “Occidentalist,” in the forthcoming ages of high Asiatic civilization and learning, may write karmically upon the same as follows: “The ignorant and superstitious Gnostics and Agnostics of the sects of ‘Pope’ and ‘Calvin’ (the two monster Gods of the Dynamite-Christian period) adored a pigeon and a sheep!” There will be portable hand-fetishes in all and every age for the satisfaction and reverence of the rabble, and the Gods of one race will always be degraded into devils by the next one. The cycles revolve within the depths of Lethe, and Karma shall reach Europe as it has Asia and her religions.

 

Nevertheless,

This grand and dignified language [in the Book of the Dead], these pictures full of majesty, this orthodoxy of the whole evidently proving a very precise doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul and its personal survival,

as shown by De Rougé and Abbe Van Drival, have charmed some Orientalists. The psychostasy (or judgment of the Soul) is certainly a whole poem to him who can read it correctly and interpret the images therein. In that picture we see Osiris, the horned, with his sceptre hooked at the end —the original of the pastoral bishop’s crook or crosier—the Soul hovering above, encouraged by Tmei, daughter of the Sun of Righteousness and Goddess of Mercy and Justice; Horus and Anubis, weighing the deeds of the soul. One of these papyri shows the Soul found guilty of gluttony sentenced to be re-born on earth as a hog; forthwith comes the learned conclusion of an Orientalist, (Page 246) “This is an indisputable proof of belief in metempsychosis, of transmigration into animals,” etc.

Perchance the Occult law of Karma might explain the sentence otherwise. It may, for all our Orientalists know, refer to the physiological vice in store for the Soul when re-incarnated—a vice that will lead that personality into a thousand and one scrapes and mis-adventures.

Tortures to begin with, then metempsychosis during 3,000 years as a hawk, an angel a lotus-flower, a heron, a stork, a swallow, a serpent, and a crocodile: one sees that the consolation of such a progress was far from being satisfactory.

argues De Mirville, in his work on the Satanic character of the Gods of Egypt. [See De Mirville. v. 84, 85.] Again, a simple suggestion may throw on this a great light. Are the Orientalists quite sure they have read correctly the “metempsychosis during 3,000 years”? The Occult Doctrine teaches that Karma waits at the threshold of Devachan (the Amenti of the Egyptians) for 3,000 years; that then the eternal Ego is reincarnated de novo, to be punished in its new temporary personality for sins committed in the preceding birth, and the suffering for which in one shape or another, will atone for past misdeeds. And the hawk, the lotus-flower, the heron, serpent, or bird —every object in Nature, in short—had its symbolical and manifold meaning in ancient religious emblems. The man who all his life acted hypocritically and passed for a good man, but had been in sober reality watching like a bird of prey his chance to pounce upon his fellow creatures, and had deprived them of their property, will be sentenced by Karma to bear the punishment for hypocrisy and covetousness in a future life. What will it be? Since every human unit has ultimately to progress in its evolution, and since that “man” will be reborn at some future time as a good, sincere, well-meaning man, his sentence to be re-incarnated as a hawk may simply mean that he will be regarded metaphorically as such. That, notwithstanding his real, good, intrinsic qualities, he will, perhaps during a long life, be unjustly and falsely charged with and suspected of greed and hypocrisy and of secret exactions, all of which will make him suffer more than he can bear. The law of retribution can never err, and yet how many such innocent victims of false appearance and human malice do we not meet in this world of incessant illusion, of mistakes and deliberate wickedness. We see them every day, and they may be found within the personal experience of each of us.
Rebirth and Transmigration - (Page 247) What Orientalist can say with any degree of assurance that he has understood the religions of old? The metaphorical language of the priests has never been more than superficially revealed, and the hieroglyphics have been very poorly mastered to this day. [ One sees this difficulty arise even with a perfectly known language like Sanskrit, the meaning of which is far easier to comprehend than the hieratic writings of Egypt. Everyone knows how hopelessly the Sanskritists are often puzzled over the real meaning and how they fail in rendering the meaning correctly in their respective translations, in which one Orientalist contradicts the other.
What says Isis Unveiled on this question of Egyptian rebirth and transmigration, and does it clash with anything that we say now?

It will be observed that this philosophy of cycles, which was allegorized by the Egyptian Hierophants in the “cycle of necessity,” explains at the same time the allegory of the “Fall of Man,” According to the Arabian descriptions, each of the seven chambers of the pyramids—those grandest of all cosmic symbols—was known by the name of a planet. The peculiar architecture of the pyramids shows in itself the drift of the metaphysical thought of their builders. The apex is lost in the clear blue sky of the land of the Pharaohs, and typifies the primordial point lost in the unseen Universe from whence started the first race of the spiritual prototypes of man. Each mummy from the moment that it was embalmed lost its physical individuality in one sense: it symbolised the human race. Placed in such a way as was best calculated to aid the exit of the “Soul,” the latter had to pass through the seven planetary chambers before it made its exit through the symbolical apex. Each chamber typified, at the same time, one of the seven spheres [ of our Chain] and one of the seven higher types of physico-spiritual humanity alleged to be above our own. Every 3000 years the soul, representative of its race, had to return to its primal point of departure before it underwent another evolution into a more perfected spiritual and physical transformation. We must go deep indeed into the abstruse metaphysics of Oriental mysticism before we can realise fully the infinitude of the subjects that were embraced at one sweep by the majestic thought of its exponents. [Op. cit.,i. 297.]

This is all Magic when once the details are given; and it relates at the same time to the evolution of our seven Root-Races, each with the characteristics of its special guardian or “God,” and his Planet. The astral body of each Initiate, after death, had to reenact in its funeral mystery the drama of the birth and death of each Race—the past and the future—and pass through the seven “planetary chambers,” which as said above, typified also the seven spheres of our Chain.
The mystic doctrine of Eastern Occultism teaches that
“The Spiritual Ego [not the astral Khou] has to revisit, before it incarnates into a new body, the scenes it left at its last disincarnation. It (Page 248) has to see for itself and take cognizance of all the effects produced by the causes [the Nidânas] generated by its actions in a previous life; that, seeing, it should recognize the justice of the decree, and help the law of Retribution [Karma] instead of impeding it. [ Book II., Commentary.]
The translations by Vicomte de Rougé of several Egyptian papyri, imperfect as they may be, give us one advantage: they show undeniably the presence in them of white, divine Magic, as well as of Sorcery, and the practice of both throughout all the dynasties. The Book of the Dead, far older than Genesis [ Bunsen and Champollion so declare, and Dr. Carpenter says that the Book of the Dead, sculptured on the oldest monuments, with “the very phrases we find in the New Testament in connection with the Day of Judgment . . . was engraved probably 2,000 years before the time of Christ.” (See Isis Unveiled, i. 518.) ] or any other book of the Old Testament, shows it in every line. It is full of incessant prayers and exorcisms against the Black Art. Therein Osiris is the conquerer of the “aerial demons.” The worshipper implores his help against Matat, “from whose eye proceeds the invisible arrow.” This “invisible arrow” that proceeds from the eye of the Sorcerer (whether living or dead) and that “circulates throughout the world,” is the evil eye—cosmic in its origin, terrestrial in its effects on the microcosmical plane. It is not the Latin Christians whom it behoves to view this as a superstition. Their Church indulges in the same belief, and had even a prayer against the “arrow circulating in darkness.”
The most interesting of all those documents, however, is the “Harris” papyrus, called in France “le papyrus magique de Chabas,” as it was first translated by the latter. It is a manuscript written in hieratic characters, translated, commented upon, and published in 1860 by M. Chabas, but purchased at Thebes in 1855 by Mr. Harris. Its age is given at between twenty-eight and thirty centuries. We quote a few extracts from these translations:

Calendar of lucky and unlucky days . . . He who makes a bull work on the 20^th of the month of Pharmuths will surely die; he who on the 24^th day of the same month pronounces the name of Seth aloud will see trouble reigning in his house from that day; . . . . he who on the 5^th day of Patchous leaves his house falls sick and dies.

Exclaims the translator, whose cultured instincts are revolted:

If one had not these words under our eyes, one could never believe in such servitude at the epoch of the Ramessides. [ De Mirville, v.88. Just such a calendar and horoscope interdictions exist in India in our day, as well as in China and all the Buddhist countries.]

The Egyptian Khous - (Page 249) We belong to the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and are therefore at the height of civilization, and under the benign sway and enlightening influence of the Christian Church, instead of being subject to Pagan Gods of old. Nevertheless we personally know dozens, and have heard of hundreds, of educated, highly-intellectual persons who would as soon think of committing suicide as of starting on any business on a Friday, of dining at a table where thirteen sit down, or of beginning a long journey on a Monday. Napoleon the Great became pale when he saw three candles lit on a table. Moreover, we may gladly concur with De Mirville in this, at any rate, that such “superstitions” are “the outcome of observation and experience.” If the former had never agreed with facts, the authority of the Calendar, he thinks, would not have lasted for a week. But to resume:

Genethliacal influences: The child born on the 5^th day of Paophi will be killed by a bull; on the 27^th by a serpent. Born on the 4^th of the month of Athyr, he will succumb to blows.

This is a question of horoscopic predictions; judiciary astrology is firmly believed in in our own age, and has been proven to be scientifically possible by Kepler.

Of the Khous two kinds were distinguished: first, the justified Khous, i.e., those who had been absolved from sin by Osiris when they were brought before his tribunal; these lived a second life. Secondly, here were the guilty Khous, “the Khous dead a second time;” these were the damned. Second death did not annihilate them, but they were doomed to wander about and to torture people. Their existence had phases analogous to those of the living man, a bond so intimate between the dead and the living that one sees how the observation of religious funeral rites and exorcisms and prayers (or rather magic incantations) should have become necessary. [ See De Mirville. iii.65]. Says one prayer:

Do not permit that the venom should master his limbs [of the defunct ], . . .that he should be penetrated by any male dead, or any female dead; or that the shadow of any spirit should haunt him (or her).”

M. Chabas adds:

These Khous were beings of that kind to which human beings belong after their death; they were exorcised in the name of the god Chons . . . .The Manes then could enter the bodies of the living, haunt and obsess the formulae and talismans, and especially statues or divine figures were used against such formidable invasions. [ Ibid. p.168]. They were combatted by the help of the divine power, the god (Page 250) Chons being famed for such deliverances. The Khou, in obeying the order of the god, none the less preserved the precious faculty inherent in him of accommodating himself in any other body at will.

The most frequent formula of exorcism is as follows. It is very suggestive;

Men, gods, elect, dead spirits, amous, negroes, menti-u, do not look at this soul to show cruelty toward it.

This is addressed to all who were acquainted with Magic.
“Amulets and mystic names.” This chapter is called “very mysterious,” and contains invocations to Penhakahakaherher and Uranaokarsankrobite, and other such easy names. Says Chabas:

We have proofs that mystic names similar to these were in common use during the stay of the Israelites in Egypt.

And we may add that, whether got from the Egyptians or the Hebrews, these are sorcery names. The student can consult the works of Éliphas Lévi, such as his Grimoire des Sorciers. In these exorcisms Osiris is called Mamuram-Kahab, and is implored to prevent the twice-dead Khou from attacking the justified Khou and his next of kin, since the accursed (astral spook)

Can take any form he likes and penetrate at will into any locality or body.

In studying Egyptian papyri, one begins to find that the subjects of the Pharaohs were not very much inclined to the Spiritism or Spiritualism of their day. They dreaded the “blessed spirit” of the dead more than a Roman Catholic dreads the devil!
But how uncalled-for and unjust is the charge against the Gods of Egypt that they are these “devils,” and against the priests of exercising their magic powers with the help of “the fallen angels,” may be seen in more than one papyrus. For one often finds in them records of Sorcerers sentenced to the death penalty, as though they had been living under the protection of the holy Christian Inquisition. Here is one case during the reign of Ramses III, quoted by De Mirville from Chabas.

The first page begins with these words: “From the place where I am to the people of my country.” There is reason to suppose, as one will see, that the person who wrote this, in the first personal pronoun, is a magistrate making a report, and attesting it before men, after an accustomed formula, for here is the main part of this accusation: “This Hai, a bad man, was an overseer [or perhaps keeper] of sheep: he said: “Can I have a book that will give me great power?’ . . . . And a book was given him with the formulae of Ramses-Meri-Amen, the great God, his royal master; and he succeeded in getting a divine power enabling him to fascinate men.

Obsession in Egypt -

(Page 251) He also succeeded in building a place and in finding a very deep place, and produced men of Menh [ magical homunculi?] and . . . love-writings . . stealing them from the Khen [ the occult library of the palace] by the hand of the stonemason Atirma, . . . by forcing one of the supervisors to go aside, and acting magically on the others. Then he sought to read futurity by them and succeeded. All the horrors and abominations he had conceived in his heart, he did them really, he practised them all, and other great crimes as well, such as the horror [?] of all the Gods and Goddesses. Likewise let the prescriptions great [severe?] unto death be done unto him, such as the divine words order to be done to him.” The accusation does not stop there, it specifies the crimes. The first line speaks of a hand paralysed by means of the men of Menh, to whom it is simply said, “Let such an effect be produced,” and it is produced. Then come the great abominations, such as deserve death. . . . The judges who had examined him (the culprit) reported saying, “Let him die according to the order of Pharaoh, and according to what is written in the lines of the divine language.”

M. Chabas remarks:

Documents of this kind abound, but the task of analysing them all cannot be attempted with the limited means we possess. [ Maimonides in his Treatise on Idolatry says, speaking of Jewish teraphim: “They talked with men.” To this day Christian Sorcerers in Italy, and negro Voodoos at New Orleans fabricate small wax figures in the likeness of their victims, and transpierce them with needles, the wound, as on the teraphim or Menh, being repercussed on the living, often killing them. Mysterious deaths are still many, and not all are traced to the guilty hand.

Then there is an inscription taken in the temple of Khous, the God who had power over the elementaries, at Thebes. It was presented by M. Prisse d’Avenue to the Imperial—now National —Library of Paris, and was translated first by Mr. S. Birch. There is in it a whole romance of Magic. It dates from the day of Ramses XII. [The Ramses of Lepsius, who reigned some 1300 years before our era.] of the twentieth dynasty; it is from the rendering of Mr. de Rougé as quoted by De Mirville, that we now translate it.

This monument tells us that one of the Ramses of the twentieth dynasty, while collecting at Naharain the tributes paid to Egypt by the Asiatic nations, fell in love with a daughter of the chief of Bakhten, one of his tributaries, married her and, bringing her to Egypt with him, raised her to the dignity of Queen, under the royal name of Ranefrou. Soon afterwards the chief of Bakhten dispatched a messenger to Ramses, praying the assistance of Egyptian science for Bent-Rosh, a young sister of the queen, attacked with illness in all her limbs.

The messenger asked expressly that a “wise-man” (an Initiate - Reh-Het) should be sent. The king gave orders that all the hierogrammatists of the palace and the guardians of the secret books of the Khen should be sent for, and choosing from among them the royal scribe Thoth-em-Hebi, an intelligent man, well versed in writing, charged him to examine the sickness. (Page 252) Arrived at Bakhten, Thoth-em-Hebi found that Bent-Rosh was possessed by a Khou (Em-seh-‘eru ker h’ou), but declared himself too weak to engage in a struggle with him. [ One may judge how trustworthy are the translations of such Egyptian documents when the sentence is rendered in three different ways by three Egyptologists. Rougé says: “He found her in a state to fall under the power of spirits,” or, “with her limbs quite stiff.” (?) another version: and Chabas translates: “And the Scribe found the Khou too wicked.” Between her being in possession of an evil Khou and “with her limbs quite stiff.” there is a difference.]

Eleven years elapsed, and the young girl’s state did not improve. The chief of Bakhten again sent his messenger, and on his formal demand Khons-peiri-Seklerem-Zam, one of the divine forms of Chons - God the Son of the Theban Trinity - was dispatched to Bakhten. . . .

The God [incarnate] having saluted (besa) the patient, she felt immediately relieved, and the Khou who was in her manifested forthwith with his intention of obeying the orders of the God. “O great God, who forces: the phantom to vanish,” said the Khou, “I am thy slave and I will return whence I came!” [ De Mirville, v.247, 248 ].

Evidently Khons-peiri-Seklerem-Zam was a real Hierophant of the class named the “Sons of God,” since he is said to be one of the forms of the God Khons; which means either that he was considered as an incarnation of that God—an Avatâra—or that he was a full Initiate. The same text shows that the temple to which he belonged was one of those to which a School of Magic was attached. There was a Khen in it, or that portion of the temple which was inaccessible to all but the highest priest, the library or depository of sacred works, to the study and care of which special priests were appointed (those whom all the Pharaohs consulted in cases of great importance), and wherein they communicated with the Gods and obtained advice from them. Does not Lucian tell his readers in his description of the temple of Hierapolis, of “Gods who manifest their presence independently?” [ Some translators would have Lucian speak of the inhabitants of the city, but they fail to show that this view is maintainable.] And further on that he once travelled with a priest from Memphis, who told him he had passed twenty-three years in the subterranean crypts of his temple, receiving instructions on Magic from the Goddess Isis herself. Again we read that it was by Mercury himself that the great Sesostris (Ramses II.) was instructed in the Sacred Sciences. On which Jablonsky remarks that we have here the reason why Amun (Ammon)—whence he thinks our “Amen” is derived—was the real evocation to the light. [ De Mirville, v. 256,,257.]
In the Papyrus Anastasi, which teems with various formulae for the evocation of Gods, and with exorcisms against Khous and the elementary demons, the seventh paragraph shows plainly the difference made between the real Gods, the Planetary Angels, and those shells of mortals which are left behind in Kama-loka, as though to tempt mankind and to puzzle it the more hopelessly in its vain search after the truth, outside the Occult Sciences and the veil of Initiation.