Qualified for What?

3 Qualified for What?

“But surely,” we hear again and again, “such great scholars should be able to decide on this particular case without any trouble.” Should they? Being a great scholar, while it gives people the impression that one is an authority on many things, is possible only because one is an authority on a few things. It is precisely the great authority, C. S. Lewis reminds us, that we should mistrust: “It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives,” he writes of the leading New Testament scholars, “but that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them . . . is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them.” 1 Lewis then proceeds to cite examples in the field of

This chapter consists of the remainder of parts 3 and 4 of “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” that were not reprinted in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14. “Part 3: Empaneling the Panel” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 71 (July 1968): 48–55; most of part 3 appeared in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14: 127–44. “Part 4: Second String” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 71 (August 1968): 53–64; the first section of part 4 appeared in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14: 144–56. 1. C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Chris- tian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967) , 154. 95 96 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM biblical scholarship, but the best examples of all must surely be furnished by the Egyptologists. Every Egyptologist is by necessity a specialist, if only because Egyptian is written in three totally different scripts, and as the outpouring of specialized studies has steadily increased in volume, especially since World War II, the specialists have become even more specialized. Jean Leclant noted in 1966 that the last of the real “all-round” Egyptolo- gists are fast dying off.2 Shortly before his death, Sir Alan Gardiner, who was certainly one of those great ones, com- plained that it was “impossible for any student to keep abreast of all that is written save at the cost of abandoning all hope of personal contributions.” 3 And those contributions become ever more personal, according to Jean Capart, things having reached the point where “the authors sometimes confine themselves to reading nothing but their own works while systematically turning their backs on those of their colleagues.” 4 Many years ago Capart cited Heinrich Schäfer’s complaint that the study of Egyptian religion had made little or no progress through the years because the experts, like the blind wise men examining the elephant, were each content to study and report on one limited department only; all their lives, Capart notes, Gaston Mas- pero and Alfred Wiedemann had protested against that sort of thing—but in vain.5 In 1947 an attempt to organize an international society of Egyptologists (a thing that any sensible person would think to be totally inevitable in such an ancient and peculiar brotherhood) fell through completely—for specialists are a

2. Jean Leclant, “Pierre Lacau,” AfO 21 (1966): 272. 3. Alan H. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) , 16. 4. Jean Capart, “Le Cheval et le dieu Seth,” in Mélanges Maspero 1 (Cairo: IFAO, 1935) , 227. 5. Jean Capart, Bulletin critique des religions de l’Égypte, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1904 (Brussels: Misch et Thron, 1905) , 6–7. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 97 jealous lot.6 Adriaan de Buck even charged Egyptologists with discouraging others from studying Egyptian; 7 and Günther Roeder reports that his translations of religious texts had to buck the “current of opinion and the sovereign personalities in the field,” who opposed his ideas “with much head-shaking and rude condemnation” before they finally began to give way.8 The very nature of Egyptian studies, in which the unknown so completely overshad- ows the known, has always encouraged specialization, for as FranÇois-Joseph Chabas noted a hundred years ago, it is possible for each student to find in Egypt “whatever sus- tains his particular views.” 9 Today even the specialist, according to Siegfried Morenz, “is in constant danger of losing his grasp even of a special area, such as Egyptian religion.” 10 How specialized Egyptian studies have always been may be inferred from the report of Georges Goyon in 1963 that the problems of the Great Pyra- mid, which have had enormous popular appeal for more than a century, remain unsolved because “the scholars who have really studied it on the scene can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”11

6. [The attempt apparently was eventually successful as the Inter- national Association of Egyptologists dates its founding to 1947. Nib- ley may not have known about this because the American Egyptolo- gists have generally had very little participation with the international association—eds.] 7. Adriaan de Buck, “Défense et illustration de la langue égypti- enne,” CdE 23 (1947): 23. 8. Günther Roeder, Volksglaube im Pharaonenreich (Stuttgart: Spe- mann, 1952) , 7. 9. François-Joseph Chabas, “Sur l’étude de la langue égyptienne,” Verslagen en Mededeelingen (1865): 195; reprinted in Oeuvres diverses, BE 11 (Paris: Leroux, 1903) , 47. 10. Siegfried Morenz, review of Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religions- geschichte, by Hans Bonnet, Orientalische Literaturzeitung 48 (1953): 342. 11. Georges Goyon, “Le méchanisme de fermeture a la pyramide de Chéops,” Revue archéologique 2 (1963): 1. 98 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM The Book of the Dead12 The largest part of the Joseph Smith Papyri in the posses- sion of the Church consists of fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the fragments having been translated and discussed by no less a scholar than Professor John A. Wilson of the Oriental Institute.13 “Scholars had barely begun the study of the Book of the Dead,” Edouard Naville recalled, “when they saw that the text swarms with difficulties. . . . The prevailing mysticism, the abundance of images, the oddity of the pictures, the impossibility of knowing how the Egyptians expressed even the simplest abstract ideas—all offer formidable obstacles with which the translator is con- tinually colliding.” 14 These points can be illustrated by the most easily recognized section of the Joseph Smith Papyri, namely the frag- ment with the picture of a swallow (fig. 8) , chapter 86 of the Book of the Dead. It is, according to the rubric (the title in red ink) , “A Spell for Becoming a Swallow.” But what do we find? To this day Egyptologists cannot agree on just what is meant by “spell” —is it a recitation? an ordinance? an act of medita- tion? an incantation? merely a chapter? Neither does anyone know for sure in what sense the “transformation” is to be understood—whether it is a change of form, a transmigration, a passage from one world to another, a mystic identification, a ritual dramatization, or whatnot. And what about this business of becoming a swallow? In the same breath the speaker announces that he is a scorpion, and after the title there is nothing in the text that even remotely suggests anything having to do with a swallow—literal, typological, allegorical, or mystical. Certainly what the subject does is most unswallow- like and unscorpion-like as he advances on his two legs and

12. Part 4 of “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” began here. 13. John A. Wilson, “The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: Translations and Interpretations: A Summary Report,” Dialogue 3/2 (1968): 67–85. 14. Edouard H. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie (Berlin: Asher, 1886) , 2. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 99

Figure 8. The swallow vignette of JSP VI shows that this is Book of the Dead 86. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. stretches forth his two arms in the accepted human fashion.15 Strangely, the titles are often easier to understand than the sections that go with them, as if, T. George Allen points out, the two were of different origin and history.16 Such confusion may in part be explained by the alarm- ing fact that the ancient scribes who produced these documents were often unable to read what they were writing. By the Twenty-first Dynasty, Naville noted, the “ignorance of the scribes” reached the point (toward which it had long been steadily tending) of complete miscomprehension of their own texts, betrayed by the “common habit of copying entire sections backwards.” 17 “Even in their original state,” however,

15. Wilson, “Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri,” 79–80. 16. T. George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) , 3. 17. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 41; cf. E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyp- tian Ideas of the Future Life: Egyptian Religion (New York: University Books, 1959) , 45. 100 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM Professor Allen assures us, “the sanctity of the spells proper was furthered by intentional obscurities,” 18 so that no matter how far back we go we will always be in trouble. At all times, Wilhelm Czermak observes, “the concrete wording of the Book of the Dead” is illogical and “fantastic,” but its religious sense, he insists, is not; if we confine our researches, therefore, to the examination of the text, as almost all students do, we are bound to get nowhere.19 This is not a paradox: the divine words don’t need to make sense in order to be taken seriously. For some years this writer taught classes of Moslem students who gloried in the thrilling sound of the Koran while resenting, some of them fiercely, any suggestion that a mortal listening to those words might possibly understand their meaning—their incomprehensi- bility was a stamp of divinity. The Book of the Dead is a huge Chinese puzzle. In the first place, no two copies are just alike, and most of them differ widely, so widely, in fact, that if we were to gather together all the materials in all the various copies and reconstruct from them a single standard text, “the whole would make an ensemble that would be hard to reproduce and even harder to use.” 20 The pictures often have nothing to do with the texts they accompany and sometimes illus- trate things not found in the book at all.21 Texts and pictures (they are usually called vignettes) were sometimes done by different persons, and, “generally speaking, the beauty of the vignettes runs counter to the goodness of the text.” 22 By

18. Allen, Egyptian Book of the Dead, 3. 19. Wilhelm Czermak, “Zur Gliederung des 1. Kapitels des ägyp- tischen ‘Totenbuches,’ ” ZÄS 76 (1940): 9–10. 20. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 10. The various texts and interpretations were introduced with no idea of trying to “add to a composite design.” Rudolf Anthes, review of The Shrines of Tut-ankh-Amun, by Alex- andre Piankoff, Artibus Asiae 20 (1957): 93. 21. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 39. 22. Theodore M. Davis, The Funeral Papyrus of Iouiya (London: Con- stable, 1908) , 1. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 101 the same token some of the most beautifully written texts are among the worst in grammar and spelling, for everything seems to go by mere appearances, so that the relation between the effectiveness of a certain spell and the actual contents of the spell is “often incomprehensible.” 23 Texts were valued long after their real meaning was lost from sight because “the magical use of these old religious texts is based on their eternal aspects; it is magic, not religion that loves learned obscurity, actually taking pleasure in what is incomprehensible because of its mysterious allure.” 24 This means that the documents defy classification, each being an agglomeration of texts related in content but coming from different epochs and backgrounds.25 Anything goes! Since the Egyptians were, as is well known, the most conservative of people, and since funerary rites, as is equally well known, belong to the most tradition-bound and conservative department of human activity, it is quite baffling to find just in this particular branch of this particular cul- ture what seems to be a total lack of official or social control. Everything is up to the individual choice: some vignettes drawn to order for a particular buyer might in the end be bought by somebody else ordering completely different texts to go with them; 26 sometimes a text chosen by one person would catch the fancy of others who would order the

23. Hans Schack-Schackenburg, Das Buch von den Zwei Wegen des seligen Toten (Zweiwegebuch): Texte aus der Pyramidenzeit nach einem im Ber- liner Museum bewahrten Sargboden des Mittleren Reiches (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903) , 9. Thus the magnificent Turin Papyrus “swarms with every kind of mistake.” Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 3. 24. Schack-Schackenburg, Buch von den Zwei Wegen des seligen Toten, 10. 25. “An arrangement of the manuscripts in classes and lines of descent is not possible, so that we must fall back on an eclectic method.” Hermann Grapow, Das 17. Kapitel des ägyptischen Totenbuches und seine religionsgeschichtliche Bedeutung (Berlin: Paul, 1912) , 51. 26. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 39. 102 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM same for themselves; 27 individuals would for their private funeral texts borrow, “apparently without a qualm, many of the Pyramid Texts, including their implications of royalty,” while at the same time blithely composing new chapters on the spot to suit their fancy.28 If a person did not understand an old text, that made little difference—he would simply latch on to something in the manuscript that caught his fancy, even it if was only a single word or symbol, and put it down for its magical use.29 “Sometimes, also, space was kept blank for a vignette which was to record some special feature of the deceased.” 30 As to the order in which the texts occurred, there was no fixed order, and different general arrangements were popular at different periods.31 It will be useful to keep all this in mind when we consider the facsimiles, which have been brushed aside as “typi cal” Egyptian funerary documents, though uniqueness is a con- spicuous characteristic of such documents, and the facsimiles are among the strangest. Completely counter to what one would expect in an ancient and venerable tradition of ritual documentation, each individual was free to impose his private taste and his personal history into the record whenever he saw fit. “Each copy,” according to Allen, “comprised a col- lection of spells both selected and arranged on a more or less individualistic basis.” 32 And this goes for the oldest funerary monuments as well as the latest crude papyri. “Not one of the Mortuary Temples hitherto excavated has proved to be an exact

27. Ibid., 40. 28. T. George Allen, “Additions to the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” JNES 11/3 (1952): 177. 29. Hermann Kees, Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägyp- ter: Grundlagen und Entwicklung bis zum Ende des mittleren Reiches (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926) , 254. 30. Davis, Funeral Papyrus of Iouiya, 2. 31. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 25. 32. Allen, “Additions to the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” 177. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 103 replica of any other known example.” 33 Typical is the repre- sentation of the rite of the Opening of the Mouth, depicted in some 80 tombs over a period of more than 1500 years. All but seven of the tombs offer only “an extremely curtailed repre- sentation,” no single tomb shows the entire rite, and what one tomb shows another does not; also, during the long centuries of transmission no “systematic variation” appears.34 It was at first assumed that the Book of the Dead was a ritual text, and Champollion gave it the name of the Egyp- tian Funeral Ritual; but that interpretation was given up when it was recognized that no ritual is described. There is not a single mention in the Book of the Dead of anything that the dead person or any priest or any member of the family is required to do.35 Taken as a whole or a part, “one gathers the impression that the compilers of the Book of the Dead have included any religious text suitable for recitation as a spell regardless of its contents.” 36 As an illustration of this puzzling unconventionality, we may take the best-known picture from the Book of the Dead, the well-known judgment scene of “psychostasy,” a fine example of which is found among the Joseph Smith Papyri (fig. 9). This judgment of the dead is the sort of thing that any amateur expert could explain at first glance, but

33. I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (Harmondsworth, Middle- sex: Penguin, 1952) , 114. 34. Svein Bjerke, “Remarks on the Egyptian Ritual of ‘Opening the Mouth’ and Its Interpretation,” Numen 12 (1965): 202–3. 35. Richard Lepsius, Älteste Texte des Todtenbuchs nach Sarkophagen des altägyptischen Reichs im Berliner Museum (Berlin: Hertz, 1867) , 6; Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 19. [Nibley rejected this idea later; see Hugh Nibley, Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, CWHN 16 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 2005) , 12–15; see also the quotations from the Book of the Dead discussing its use by the living collected in John Gee, “The Use of the Daily Temple Liturgy in the Book of the Dead,” in Totenbuch-Forschungen, ed. Burkhard Backes, Irmtraut Munro, and Si- mone Stöhr (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006) , 75–80.—eds.] 36. Alan Shorter, The Egyptian Gods (London: Paul, 1937) , 64–65. 104 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM

Figure 9. JSP III is an example of the well-known psychostasy, or judgment scene, from the Book of the Dead. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. those with experience tell us that “we do not even know what significance it may have had for the dead.”37 Though the scene occurs in many copies of the Book of the Dead, it is by no means found in all of them, and it would seem that “not all the dead are required to stand judgment.” 38 What is more, there is no indication anywhere that standing trial successfully will lead to any kind of blessedness, nor any certainty whatever about what is supposed to happen to the wicked in the hereafter. Except for its occasional representa- tion in the Book of the Dead, the idea of judgment is nowhere so much as hinted at in all of the Egyptian documents. The dead person is tried for 42 sins; Naville notes that the 42 sins are not the same in all the texts.39

37. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 22. 38. Ibid., and Alfred Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Im- mortality of the Soul (New York: Putnam’s, 1895) , 55–57. 39. See Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 161–62. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 105 We often read of transformations, the capacity of the dead to assume whatever form he will, “but not all the dead take advantage of this privilege and nothing obliges them to do so.” 40 Transmigration may be indicated, but there is “no doctrine of compulsory transmigration.” 41 In fact, in all this vast literature of the beyond, “there is neither a system nor any definite ideas about the fate of the dead beyond the grave. . . . In the Book of the Dead the goal is as uncertain as is the way to get there. . . . There is no compulsion and no necessity.” 42 Down through the centuries of tradition there is not the slightest indication “of any authoritative transmission of theological interpretations.” 43 And yet, in spite of this lack of controls, we cannot learn from these sources what the Egyptians really thought of death, for all thoughts on the subject such as occur in their secular writings have been rigidly excluded.44 The one safe, or at least what Gardiner calls the “most valuable,” guideline to the understanding of Egyptian texts—that is, “the logic of the situation” —is denied us here in this timeless, spaceless story without a development and without a plot.45 The Book of the Dead stands in line of descent of a very ancient corpus of writings beginning with the Pyramid Texts. The so-called Coffin Texts, standing midway between the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead, “contain in

40. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 22. 41. Wiedemann, Immortality of the Soul, 66. 42. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 21–22; cf. Wiedemann, Immor- tality of the Soul, 49–50: “The Egyptians never attained to any clear idea of the Osirian underworld; the same confusion and obscurity reigned over it as over the whole conception of the unseen world and of deity. . . . Each was at liberty to form for himself a more or less modified conception of the characters of the underworld.” 43. Anthes, review of Shrines of Tut-ankh-Amun, 95. 44. Émile Suys, “Le dialogue du désespéré avec son Âme,” Orientalia 1 (1932): 65, notes that the average Egyptian seems to have been rather skeptical about the whole business. 45. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, 24. 106 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM about equal number” chapters found on the one hand in the Pyramid Texts and on the other in the Book of the Dead, while there are many passages in the Coffin Texts that are found in neither of the other two, 46 some of these being nonetheless just as old as the Pyramid Texts themselves.47 “The Coffin Texts,” says Pierre Lacau, “overwhelm us with unanswered questions,” 48 mostly the same questions that confront us in the Book of the Dead.49 It seemed to James Breasted that “the priests to whom we owe these Coffin Text compilations allow their fancy to roam at will,” so that “it is difficult to gain any coherent conception of the hereafter which the men of this age thus hoped to attain.” 50 Thus, we see that the problems of the Book of the Dead are not merely the result of decadent and sloppy thinking; in fact, the same problems meet us in the very beginning, where the priests of Heliopolis in compiling the Pyramid Texts selected those “sayings” which they considered most desirable for particular individual kings.51 The Pyramid Texts were used in ritual, but already “the Coffin texts have deserted the firm ground of ritual,” presenting a “kaleidoscope of ideas that do not reflect the cult but are very free.” 52 Though the Coffin Texts differ widely from coffin to coffin and follow no plan of organization, they

46. Pierre Lacau, “Textes religieux,” RT 26 (1904): 59. 47. Kees, Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägypter, 13–15, noting that the content of the Coffin Texts in general suggests freely selected pieces from a corpus of Pyramid Texts. 48. Lacau, “Textes religieux,” 61. 49. Quoting Lacau in Jean Capart, Bulletin critique des religions de l’Égypte, 1904–1909 (Leiden: Brill, 1939) , 31. 50. James H. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1912) , 278. 51. Kees, Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägypter, 15. According to Kees, not only the Book of the Dead, but the Coffin Texts and Pyramid Texts as well, are all “entirely disorganized collections of unrelated sayings.” Ibid., 14. 52. Rudolf Anthes, “Atum, Nefertem und die Kosmogonien von He- liopolis: Ein Versuch,” ZÄS 82 (1957): 7–8. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 107 do all have certain ideas in common, according to Louis Speleers—namely, (1) the idea of a physical resurrection and a spiritual existence in eternity, and (2) the reception of the dead by Osiris.53 The doctrine of Osiris lies at the heart of the business, yet in all of the Egyptian literature “no systematic exposition of this myth is known,” 54 and we would know nothing whatever about it were it not for the remarks of some poorly informed Greeks.55 As in the Book of the Dead, the Coffin Text owner is always going some- where, “but where he is going on his long road is not to be clearly discerned from the spells.” 56 “Yet there is method in it” The scholars who condemned the facsimiles in 1912 by labeling them scenes from the Book of the Dead never bothered to answer the urgent question of Janne M. Sjo- dahl, “What is then the Book of the Dead? ” 57 The question is still in order. Since the beginning, “the idea has prevailed that the Book of the Dead is nothing but a conglomera- tion of fantastic ideas,” but that, as leading Egyptologists are pointing out today, was just the easy way of escaping a humiliating confession of ignorance and a crushing com- mitment to years of hard work.58 As a result, “the ‘illogic’ of the Egyptians has almost become an article of faith in our

53. Louis Speleers, Textes des cercueils du Moyen Empire égyptien (Brus- sels: n.p., 1946) , xxxii–xxxiii. 54. Jaroslav Æerný, Ancient Egyptian Religion (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1952) , 35. 55. For an estimate of the limitations of Greek knowledge on the subject, see Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, 1–10. 56. Schack-Schackenburg, Buch von den Zwei Wegen des seligen Toten, 15, noting also that the real meaning of the “Two Ways” was entirely lost by the Middle Kingdom. Ibid., 14. 57. Janne M. Sjodahl, “The Book of Abraham,” IE 16 (1913): 331. 58. Czermak, “Zur Gliederung des 1. Kapitels des ägyptischen ‘Toten- buches,’ ” 9. 108 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM science—much to its loss.” 59 We have been told ad nauseam that things that supposedly intelligent Egyptians took seriously were “unmitigated rubbish,” 60 that Egyptian religion is “inarticulate, fuzzy, and incoherent from the logical point of view,” 61 that the mentality of the East will forever escape us logical Westerners,62 that the Egyptians “like all primi- tives emerging from the night of prehistoric times had yet to discover and explore the real world,” 63 that “ancient Egyp- tian religion . . . [was a] motley mixture of childishly crude fetichism and deep philosophic thought,” 64 “a hotchpotch of warring ideas, without real unity of any kind.” 65 Perhaps the most enlightening discourse on this theme is that of Professor Speleers, who in his work on the Coffin Texts takes the Egyptians to task with great feeling for hold- ing religious beliefs that clash at every point with the teach- ing of Roman Catholic scholastic philosophy. He is shocked to find among the Egyptians “the total absence of the idea of an Absolute Being,” but in its place the concept of a God who is “but man on a higher scale.” 66 Their unpardonable sin is to prefer concrete to abstract terms: they “ignore the Absolute Good” to describe eternal bliss “in terms of earthly objectives.” 67 In their thinking, “everything is as material and concrete as the Christian metaphysic is abstract and

59. Wilhelm Czermak, “Vom großen Gedanken Ägyptens,” Archiv für ägyptische Archäologie 1 (1938): 205. 60. Speaking of certain hymns, Alan Gardiner, “Hymns to Sobk in a Ramesseum Papyrus,” RdE 11 (1957): 55. 61. Raymond Weill, “L’invasion de la réalité dans la pensée religieuse de l’Égypte ancienne,” Egyptian Religion 3 (1935): 121. 62. Werner Kaiser, review of Die Geisteshaltung der Ägypter in der Frühzeit, by Hermann Junker, Orientalische Literaturzeitung 58 (1963): 341, citing Hermann Junker. 63. Weill, “L’invasion de la réalité,” 119. 64. Wiedemann, Immortality of the Soul, 1. 65. H. R. Hall, review of The Religion of Ancient Egypt, by A. H. Sayce, JEA 1 (1914): 77. 66. Speleers, Textes des cercueils, lxii, lxx. 67. Ibid., lxx; cf. xxxi, xix, xviii. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 109 spiritual.” 68 Even worse, if possible, they fail to place rigorous logic before all other considerations: “These ancients always proceed by simple affirmation and negation. . . . They don’t think, they only ‘feel’ . . . no critical sense, no method.” 69 Thus, they “expect to live forever with their neighbors and the delights of material things while at the same time shar- ing the life of gods and spirits.” 70 “It is as if the principle of contradiction . . . did not exist for them.” 71 The ancients are disgustingly egocentric, too, with the individual clinging to his personal identity throughout the eternities,72 which is highly unscientific to the bargain, what with the “trans- position of earthly things to a divine existence and of a dead person to another world” and otherwise “accepting the most improbable miracles, denying the laws of nature as we understand them.” 73 It all bespeaks “a disorder of the brain . . . which provokes in us a horror of everything that offends our more or less innate sense of logic.” 74 “As to their cosmology . . . there is nothing in common between certain of their cerebral conceptions and our own intellectual operations”; where Christian thinking “applies the most rigorous logic,” the Egyptian “accepts the most shocking contradictions” of the most “rudimentary and childish thinking.” 75 Significantly enough, Dr. Speleers admits that the early Christians were guilty of the Egyptian type of thinking, regarding heaven and hell, for example, as definite places, “and it was only in the course of the Middle Ages [that is, thanks to the efforts of scholastic philosophy] that they were

68. Ibid., xxxii. 69. Ibid., lxviii; cf. “no concern for ontology or causality,” lxix. 70. Ibid., xviii. 71. Ibid., lviii. 72. Ibid., lxx. 73. Ibid., lxii–lxiii, lxix. 74. Ibid., lxxiii. 75. Ibid., lxiv, xxxi: In short, “their cosmology is simplistic; they do not state clearly what they mean by life and nature,” but simply accept such things as given quantities (ibid., lxix). 110 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM recognized as a ‘psychic state’ of human existence.” 76 And even as the Egyptians could not think of existence without some physical base, “one must recognize that the Christians themselves could not free themselves from this idea until a certain period of time had passed, and even then only to a certain degree.” 77 To bring out their glaring contrast, Spel- eers places certain of his own beliefs side by side with their Egyptian opposites. Given the choice between the two, there can be little question but that the Latter-day Saint would choose the Egyptian version every time. Indeed, Catholics are becoming rather cool to the appeal of scholastic philosophy, and many Egyptologists are beginning to ask whether the Egyptians were such fools after all. As examples of some of his own impeccable logic, Speleers tells us how “God through the mediation of his creatures becomes aware of that which He is not,” 78 and how the human soul “requires to be resurrected in a body, but . . . purged of all necessity of organs.” 79 And he calls the Egyptians confused! From the first there were eminent Egyptologists who suspected that people as clever as the Egyptians could not possibly have been as illogical as they seem to be from their writings. What we have in the texts, they argued, must rep- resent the breakdown of a religion which in the beginning was entirely logical.80 The most widely accepted explanation for all the confusion was the well-known determina- tion of the Egyptians to throw nothing away: ideas, images, and stories originating in remote times and places were all welcomed by the Egyptian community and retained side by

76. Ibid., xvii. 77. They accept “the most improbable miracles,” Speleers, Textes des Cercueils, lxix, and “persistently confound the body and soul,” lxx. These are stock charges of the ancient pagan philosophers against the early Christians. 78. Ibid., xxx. 79. Ibid., ix. 80. Gaston Maspero, “A propos de deux ouvrages de M. Pierret,” in Études de mythologie et d’archéologie, BE 1 (Paris: Leroux, 1893) , 124. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 111 side, with ingenious efforts to explain their clashing coex- istence and, when these failed, a good-natured and perma- nent hospitality, that “liberal” or “additive” attitude that allowed room for everybody in the temple.81 Along with this, we have today an increasing tendency to seek the explanation of many paradoxes not in Egyptian intransigence but in our own ignorance of what was really going on. “We cannot subscribe,” wrote Henri Frankfort, “to the prevalent view that . . . the Egyptians held a number of incompatible ideas in a hazy or muddleheaded confusion,” this false idea being “founded on a discrepancy between our own outlook and the views and intentions of the ancients.” 82 Alan Shorter seconds this: “We are apt to stigmatize as ‘contradictory’ the apparently confused ideas which run through . . . many Egyptian texts, when perhaps it is ourselves who are interpreting them too literally.” 83 François Daumas lays down some rules to be observed in the reading of Egyptian religious texts: (1) Assume a minimum of errors in a text, always giving the Egyptians instead of ourselves the benefit of the doubt. (2) “Believe that if we do not understand it is because we are badly informed, rather than imputing a shortage of intelligence to the Egyptians. . . . Let us not be hasty to condemn what on first sight looks chaotic and confused.”84 It was for fail- ing to observe these principles, it will be recalled, that Pro- fessor Samuel A. B. Mercer was taken severely to task by his reviewers.85 “Our attitude toward the Egyptians,” wrote Daumas, “has been that of children who find their parents

81. Kaiser, review of Die Geisteshaltung der Ägypter, by Junker, 342, discussing Junker’s theories. 82. Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948) , 91, 125. 83. Shorter, Egyptian Gods, 86. 84. François Daumas, “Le sens de la royauté égyptienne à propos d’un livre récent,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 160 (1961): 147–48. 85. See Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 2nd ed., CWHN 14 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 2000) , 94–109. 112 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM to be outmoded and old-fashioned and conclude from that that they must be absolute nincompoops.” To fall back on Egyptian unreason to explain what we cannot understand is not a sound practice: “It is a vessel that leaks on all sides, and it leads quickly . . . to the conviction that the Egyptians were utterly stupid.” 86 In the same vein the eminent Egyp- tologist Adriaan de Buck chided those who find fault with the Egyptian language as primitive and defective: the real fault with the language of the Egyptians, de Buck points out, is, after all, simply that it is not our language.87 “I have never met a specialist,” writes Professor Rudolf Anthes, “who did not have the highest respect for the Egyptian craftsmanship, and all agree in classifying the best Egyptian work as perfect in form and timeless in appeal.” Moreover, Anthes continues, we judge Egyptian military and political history by the same measures we use for modern history, never claiming Egyptian leaders to be naive or primitive in their thinking. In everything militar- ily they come up to the highest standards and often sur- pass the best the later world can produce. Yet we give these same people no credit for brains whatever when it comes to the subject that interested them most, religion! 88 A century ago Eugène Revillout called attention to this strange bias.89 What is behind it? Anthes and Frankfort suggest not a different level of intelligence but a different method of solving problems. We get neat final solutions to our problems by isolat- ing them in artificially closed systems. Thus we find a tidy

86. Daumas, “Le sens de la royauté égyptienne,” 139–40. 87. De Buck, “Défense et illustration de la langue égyptienne,” 26, 28, 34. 88. Rudolf Anthes, “Mythologie und der gesunde Menschenverstand in Ägypten,” Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 96 (1966): 5–6; cf. Rudolf Anthes, “Remarks on the Pyramid Texts and the Early Egyp- tian Dogma,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 74/1 (1954): 36. 89. Eugène Revillout, L’ancienne Égypte d’après les papyrus et les monuments, 4 vols. in 2 (Paris: Leroux, 1907) , 1: 103, noting also that Egyptian piety in no way differs from orthodox Christian piety in nature. Ibid., 31–65. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 113 correlation between the consumption of cholesterol and heart disease and immediately announce that all cholesterol is deadly. We get quick answers by drastic oversim- plification. The Egyptian, on the other hand, “did justice to the complexity of a problem by allowing a variety of partial solutions.” 90 After a statement in a funerary text, for example, it is common to find the phrase, “Some say this means so-and-so,” followed by another, “Others say it means so-and-so,” and so on, the reader being given his choice among a number of “official” explanations.91 What we have here is “liberality in dogmatics rather than inability for clear thinking.” 92 Why settle for a final answer before we know all the facts? If two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle did not fit together, the Egyptians did not, as we so often do, pronounce one of them to be a fraud and throw it away, but they allowed for the possibility that there might be missing pieces that in the end would link up the two apparent contradictions. This attitude some have called the “multiplicity of approaches” : “Ancient thought . . . admitted side by side certain limited insights, which were held to be simultane- ously valid.” 93 Hence, “quasi-conflicting images . . . should not be dismissed in the usual derogatory manner” 94 since they are expressions of the “habit of using several sepa- rate avenues of approach to subjects of a problematical nature.” 95 The modern single-line approach is neater and

90. Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, 92. 91. According to Anthes, review of Shrines of Tut-ankh-Amun, 93, this for- mula is “no allusion to any authoritative transmission of theological interpretation,” but rather acknowledges the validity of individual judgment. 92. Anthes, “Remarks on the Pyramid Texts,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 74/1 (1954): 39: “It was dogma, and not the transmission of earlier myths.” 93. Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, 4. 94. Ibid., 19. 95. Ibid., 91–92. The idea is discussed by Rudolf Anthes, “Zum Ur- sprung des Nefertem,” ZÄS 80 (1955): 85; and Helen Wall-Gordon, 114 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM easier to understand, but the history of Christian dogma has shown only too clearly how brittle and bigoted its solutions are.

review of Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägypter, 2nd ed., by Hermann Kees, RdE 13 (1961): 145.