Last night an old friend came to me in a dream. He has been a genuine soul-mate, both before and after his earthly passing. Our affair of the heart was stormy, but in matters of spirit he always drew me to my best self. I blocked him out for many years, but for a while now have been aware of his benevolent and supportive presence. And he is not the only one. On the periphery of my awareness there is a veritable cloud of witnesses, as one sacred text refers to those who have crossed over. I don’t seek them out so often as I simply know them to be with me and part of me.
Not unlike contemporary Pagans, ancient Egyptians had a complex set of ideas about the afterlife which often look like contradictions without study and reflection. After the weighing of the heart in the Hall of Maat one might ascend to the sky as an “imperishable star” along with other ancestors. Or one might face defeat by the monster Ammit should the heart be out of balance. Most Egyptians simply hoped to live in comfort and happiness in a new world beyond. Those of a more religious ilk imagined detailed journeys through the Duat, including encounters with all manner of beings and neteru (gods). They understood this trip to be an alchemical sort of transformative process, describing the path of spiritual development.
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Ka, double, khaibit, ba, sahu - what a confusing complexity of terms for what moderns simply call “soul.” Everything we know about the ancient Egyptian concepts of non-physical being come from writings like the Pyramid Texts, the Book of Going Forth, Coffin Texts, etc. These do not define terms that must have been an accepted part of the culture, but we can derive a sense of their meaning from the context of what they do, where they live, and to what they are attached. Reams and reams have been written about Egyptian ideas of the soul, but I will only give as very brief summary here, as best I understand.
Egyptians also located different qualities of the soul in various parts of the body, for example:
