This is the second (but not the last, despite the name) post in a planned series in which I will discuss Ancient Egyptian cosmology and my own musings about the nature of reality, good and evil, and other big questions. For the story so far:
Okay, so the myths work for the beginning of time. What about the end?
As you may know, modern physicists (optimists that they are) have come up with a number of ways the universe as we know it could come to an end. And I don’t mean just Earth or even the Solar system. I mean the entire cosmos.
There are Egyptian texts in which the end of the cosmos is described … but not many, because the Egyptians worried if you wrote about something too much it would happen. So two big instances of it were intended only to be frequently read by the dead.
Erik Hornung presents these in Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (p. 163). One is Spell 1130 in the Coffin Texts1; it is spoken by “him whose names are secret, the Lord of All”, the creator2, who says that “I made millions of years into something between me and that weary-hearted one [Osiris]. Then I shall dwell with him in one place. Mounds will become cities, and cities mounds, and estate will destroy estate.” Hornung comments: “After the ‘millions of years’ of differentiated creation the mayhem before creation will return; only the primeval god (Atum3) and Osiris will remain ‘in one place’ – no longer separated in space and time.”
No longer separated in space and time. Either this describes a Big Crunch – in which all the universe returns to a single point – or perhaps the Heat Death, in which the entire universe is so spread out and undifferentiated, everything in a state of maximum entropy4, that it’s meaningless to talk about space and time anymore, because there are no events anymore to distinguish.
Somewhat more ominously, the Book of the Dead in chapter 175 has the dead man asking the creator how long he, the dead man, will continue to enjoy life in the Hereafter. The creator says that the dead man is destined for “millions on millions” of years, but “this earth will return to the primeval water [Nun, from the Ogdoad], to endless (flood) as in its first state. I shall remain with Osiris after I have transformed myself into another snake which men do not know and the gods do not see.”
A snake? We’ll come back to that in a later post. But what’s important is this notion that the Creator and Osiris will exist at the end … and perhaps nothing and no one else will. Even our afterlives may come to an end. Not a fun thought. But there’s some ambiguity. On the one hand, the creator says the dead man will live for millions upon millions of years – which is not forever – but on the other hand, so much of Egyptian funerary practice has the purpose, magically, of imbuing the deceased with all the attributes of Osiris. So if he gets to live forever with the creator, perhaps so do we.
But there you have it: the universe on the whole will return to the primeval, undifferentiated disorder from which it came. “Fun”. More to come in this series.
Notes
- The Coffin Texts were the funerary texts used for people in the Middle Kingdom, as the so-called Book of the Dead was used in the New Kingdom and Late Period, and the Pyramid Texts in the Old Kingdom.
- As we’ll see momentarily, the creator god in this spell is implied, in the context of the Coffin Texts, to be Atum, but don’t get too hung up on any one particular god as the creator; remember, the Egyptians didn’t like these absolute, inflexible conceptions of religious “truth”.
- Atum is not so well known in “popular” Egyptology. An oversimplification is that he’s an alter-ego of Re, the sun god. More correctly, he’s the creator of the universe according to the mythology of Heliopolis, the great-grandfather of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, but he and Re are spoken of as virtually the same, if not actually the same, from fairly early Egyptian history. Again: Egyptian notions of their gods are waaaay more fluid than you’re used to from the Abrahamic religions. The Egyptians would have regarded Christian debates about the nature of the Trinity as pointless, because they would have thought something like “they can be one god in three persons and three different gods at the same time! Both things can be true! We’re talking about gods!”
- Entropy is a fairly rigorously defined concept in physics. I’ll have to pause to explain it. Don’t worry, I don’t really need to subject you to math. But it’ll be in the next post in this series.