Confessions of the Soul: Innocence and Immortality in Ancient Egypt
Part of Rubedo, an ongoing project on philosophy, psychology, and symbolism.
The declarations known as the "Negative Confessions" appear in the Papyrus of Ani, one of the funerary texts of Ancient Egypt collected under the name Book of the Dead.¹ The text describes the posthumous judgment of Ani of Thebes, and his effort to prove his innocence before the gods in order to earn immortality. It is thought to have been written around 1250 BCE. The text is called the "Negative Confessions" because the dead person tries to prove innocence by saying, in effect, "I did not do this, I did not do that." But to understand the text's context properly, let us first look at how death and judgment were understood in Ancient Egyptian belief, before turning to the Negative Confessions themselves.
In Ancient Egypt, physical life can be said to have been seen as a preparation for the true life, the life after death. For this reason the Egyptians developed extraordinarily elaborate spells, prayers, and funerary practices, embalming foremost among them, along with an exceptionally rich mythology, all meant to ensure that the soul woke after death, found its way through the realm of the dead, and reached the gods (eternal life) correctly. The central point of this rich mythology, and its true purpose, is that the dead pass through the Judgment of Osiris. The more detailed the instructions prepared for the dead, and the more the objects they might need were placed in the tomb to ease the journey, the easier that journey became to find, which is one of the main reasons the Ancient Egyptians filled their tombs with inscriptions and treasures.
According to Ancient Egyptian belief, once properly buried, the dead person is woken by the god Anubis and brought before the Judgment of Osiris. Osiris, King of the Dead, weighs the heart of the deceased against the white feather of Maat, goddess of justice, in the presence of forty two gods, each representing one of Egypt's forty two regions, known as "nomes," while Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the judgment. The heart is weighed because the Ancient Egyptians believed that qualities such as character, personality, and intelligence resided in the heart: in a sense, the heart represents a person's spiritual essence. On one pan of Osiris's golden scale sits the heart of the dead, on the other the feather of Maat, so that, in a sense, the dead must prove that the heart is lighter than the feather in order to earn eternal life. During this demanding judgment, the dead stand before each of the forty two gods in turn, making a confession and offering up the heart to be weighed, and as each confession is made, the balance of the golden scale is watched.
The soul's forty two confessions vary somewhat depending on the deceased (they can vary by sex, for instance), but the number forty two itself is kept constant. The most commonly known confessions are as follows:²
1. I have not committed sin.
2. I have not robbed with violence.
3. I have not stolen.
4. I have not slain men or women.
5. I have not stolen grain.
6. I have not stolen offerings.
7. I have not stolen the property of a god.
8. I have not told lies.
9. I have not carried off food.
10. I have not cursed.
11. I have not committed adultery.
12. I have not caused anyone to weep.
13. I have not eaten the heart.
14. I have not attacked anyone.
15. I am not a deceiver.
16. I have not stolen cultivated land.
17. I have not eavesdropped.
18. I have not slandered anyone.
19. I have not been angry without cause.
20. I have not debauched the wife of any man.
21. I have not led astray the wife of any man.
22. I have not defiled myself.
23. I have not terrorized anyone.
24. I have not transgressed the law.
25. I have not been angry.
26. I have not stopped my ears against the words of truth.
27. I have not blasphemed.
28. I am not a man of violence.
29. I have not stirred up strife.
30. I have not acted with undue haste.
31. I have not pried into other people's affairs.
32. I have not multiplied words in speaking.
33. I have not wronged anyone, I have not done evil.
34. I have not worked witchcraft against the king.
35. I have not stopped the flow of water from my neighbor's land.
36. I have not raised my voice.
37. I have not cursed god.
38. I have not acted with arrogance.
39. I have not stolen the bread of the gods.
40. I have not stolen khenfu³ from the spirits of the dead.
41. I have not taken bread from the mouth of a child, nor have I insulted the god of my city.
42. I have not slaughtered the cattle belonging to god.
Some of these are demanding confessions, are they not? But it is possible to prefix a number of them with "without just cause," since Osiris, who watches over the scales of justice, does not condemn someone who raises their voice for good reason. The same holds, for instance, for the 25th Confession (I have not been angry [without just cause]). And given the overall logic of the myth, it can also be expected that someone who has acted rightly, with a clear conscience, will not find their heart weighed down. Once these confessions have been made, the soul of the dead whose heart does not outweigh the feather joins with the soul of Osiris (their name is now spoken together with his, as in "Osiris Ani") and earns the right to an eternal, blissful life among the gods, having passed the test of this world. It might even be said that the roots of the later religious belief that the world is a "place of testing" are to be found here.
Well then, what happens to those whose heart outweighs the feather, who fail the test? Ancient Egypt has no "hell," in the sense we understand it, no place of eternal torment. So the souls of those who cannot prove their innocence are devoured by the monster Ammit, and end there. Ammit, the crocodile headed, pig bodied monster, is said by one interpretation⁴ to symbolize the material world, so that the souls of those who fail to earn eternal life, like their bodies, scatter and return to matter.
NOTES
1. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (2008). Trans. E. A. Wallis Budge. New York: Penguin Classics.
2. For the sake of not overloading the text with detail, I chose to drop the opening address at the start of each confession.
3. A bread like food offered to the dead.
4. See Manly P. Hall, The Soul in Egyptian Metaphysics and the Book of the Dead.
Join Rubedo on Patreon for more free essays and special content for members.
