Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

For the ancient Egyptians, there were two other entities that existed besides the body, the ka and the ba. ‘The former was regarded as a kind of double of the living person and acted as a protective genius: it was represented by a hieroglyphic sign of two arms upstretching in a gesture of protection.’ Provision had to be made for it at death and the tomb was called the het ka, or ‘house of death’.³⁰ ‘Of what substance it was thought to be compounded is unknown.’³¹ The ba, the second entity, is usually described as the ‘soul’ in modern works on ancient Egyptian culture, and was depicted in art as a human-headed bird. This was almost certainly meant to suggest it was free-moving, not weighed down by the physical limitations of the body. In the illustrations to the Book of the Dead, dating from about 1450 BC, the ba is often shown perched on the door of the tomb, or watching the fateful post-mortem weighing of the heart. ‘But the concept was left somewhat vague and the ba does not seem to have been conceived as the essential self or the animating principle.’³²

The Egyptians conceived individuals as psycho-physical organisms, ‘no constituent part being more essential than the other’. The elaborate burial rites that were practised in Egypt for three millennia all reflected the fact that a person was expected to be ‘reconstituted’ after death. This explains the long process of embalmment, to prevent the decomposition of the corpse, and the subsequent ceremony of the ‘Opening of the Mouth’, designed to revivify the body’s ability to take nourishment. ‘The after-life was never etherealised in the Egyptian imagination, as it was in some quarters, but we do find that as soon as man could set down his thoughts in writing, the idea that man is more than flesh and blood is there.’³³

In Mesopotamia the situation was different. They believed that the gods had withheld immortality from humans – that’s what made them human – but man was still regarded as a psycho-physical organism. Unlike the Egyptians, however, they regarded the psychical part as a single entity. This was called the napistu, which, originally meaning ‘throat’, was extended to denote ‘breath’, ‘life’ and ‘soul’. This napistu, however, was not thought of as the inner essential self, but the animating life principle and what became of the napistu at death isn’t clear. Although they didn’t believe in immortality, the ancient Mesopotamians did believe in a kind of post-mortem survival, a contradiction in terms in a way.³⁴ Death, they believed, wrought a terrible change in a person – he was transformed into an etimmu. ‘The etimmu needed to be nourished by mortuary offerings, and it had the power to torment the living, if it were neglected . . . among the most feared of Mesopotamia’s demonology were the etimmus of those who had died unknown and received no proper burial rites. But, even when well provided for, the afterlife was grim. They dwelt in kur-nu-gi-a, the land of no return, where dust is their food and clay their substance . . . where they see no light and dwell in darkness.’³⁵

The origins of the Hindu religion are far more problematical than any of the other major faiths. After Sir William Jones, a British judge living and working in India in the late eighteenth century, first drew attention to the similarity of Sanskrit to various European languages, scholars have hypothesised the existence of an early proto-European language, from which all others evolved, and a proto-Indo-Aryan people, who spoke the ‘proto-language’ and helped in its dispersal. In its neatest form, this theory proposes that these people were the first to domesticate the horse, an advantage which helped their mobility and gave them a power over others.