Let me get you up to speed.
Vickey and I are vacationing in Boston. Because Vickey is an artist, we’ve made it a point to visit art museums. If you’re in Boston and you want to visit art museums, you make it a point to visit The Museum of Fine Art, which is sort of the grand old museum of Boston.
It’s a great museum, full of classic works, but when we went we spent most of our time checking out an exhibit called The Secrets of Tomb 10A.
The exhibit displays the contents of the tomb of Djehutynakht (juh-HOO-tuh-nahkt), a bigwig Egyptian governor who clearly had a lot of wealth. Even though robbers cleared out most of the valuables from the tomb long ago, the plaster and wooden artifacts—such as the coffins—remained. A team of restoration experts spent a century restoring the contents of the tomb—which the robbers had thrown around when they ransacked it—and it’s a great exhibit, complete with, among other things, the restored coffins (which have extraordinary artwork on them) and 36 models of the various boats that were to carry Djehutynakht and his wife to the afterlife in style.
When we talk about Egypt and we talk about tombs, we need to talk, of course, about mummification. We know that mummification made the body’s face look like that of Osirus, the god of the dead. We know that mummification preserved the body for the perilous passage through the afterlife, one that would be either on land or sea. We know that passage on land took the soul through perilous peaks and valleys, and past The Lake of Fire of the Knife Wielders. We know that passage by sea took the soul past such monsters as Dog Face, Great Face, He of the Sharp Teeth, Protector of the Two Gods, and (my favorite) He Who is Driven off With Two Faces in the Dung.
It’s glorious stuff, this afterworld journey, and it sets the mind thinking of the pantheon of Egyptian gods. There’s Ra, god of the sun; Nut, goddess of the sky; Seth, god of the desert; Amun, god of creation; Thoth, god of writing and wisdom; Hathor, goddess of love, music and dance; and, in addition to many more, Horus, the patron god of Egypt.
And it is with Horus that we now come to Qebehsenuef.
To understand where Qebehsenuef fits into this, let’s go back to mummification for a moment.
Here’s another thing we know: when priests mummified a body, they removed the organs to aid in the preservation of the body. Each of the organs went into a container called a canopic jar. In the passage through the afterlife, various gods looked after each of these jars, making sure that the soul would have all the body parts it needed in the afterlife.
One of these jars was on display at the exhibit, and as the information placard said, this particular jar was protected by Qebehsenuef.
For this was the job of Horus’s children (and I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to pronounce their names). Imsety protected the liver. Hapi protected the lungs. Duamutef protected the stomach. Finally, Qebehsenuef protected the intestines.
When I said that I was glad I wasn’t Qebehsenuef, I wasn’t entirely accurate. What I should have said was that I’m glad I’m not any of these four guys. Let me elaborate.
If Christian theology is a good model for this kind of thing, being the child of a god is a lot like being Michael Corleone from The Godfather. Often, a parent has a career in mind for their child, and it’s usually an unpleasant job. To make things worse, the kid usually has no choice but to do whatever mom or dad tells the kid to do.
Granted, there are exceptions. Eros has a lot of fun making people jealous of each other, and Perseus did his father proud with that whole Gorgon business. Still, these are the exceptions; most of the time, the kid’s got a rough road ahead.
Which leads to my point, which is this: poor Qebehsenuef.
I mean, imagine the guy. He goes to college, probably majors in English. Maybe he writes a witty column for the school paper. People like him, and girls go out with him from time to time.
Granted, he’s not as cool as Thoth’s kids. Thoth’s kids write the kind of stuff that sparkles, and Hathor’s kids play in a band that’s going to be signed any day now. Even better, this is, for these kids, something that their parents totally support; after all, writing and making music are, for these kids, just carrying on the family business.
That’s not the case with Qebehsenuef, though, and that’s why he dreads graduating from college. Because no matter how witty those columns are, Qebehsenuef has to go into the family business. It doesn’t matter that he’d rather work at a radio station, or perhaps an alternative newspaper; once he graduates, he will, for the rest of eternity, need to guard one set of intestines after another through the afterlife.
Take a moment to imagine this. At cocktail parties, the children of Thoth discuss how they inspire poems and political manifestos. The children of Hathor discuss the music and dance that they inspire, which also, no doubt, fan the flames of passion and love.
Qebehsenuef, meanwhile, tries his best.
“You know,” he says, “it’s not just anyone who can shuttle intestines through the afterlife. It takes real skill.”
At this point, the woman he’s trying to talk up nods politely and strikes up a conversation with one of Thoth’s kids.
So think about this when you’re in your cubicle lamenting the less desirable parts of your job. You can always leave your job if it gets excruciatingly painful, but Qebehsenuef can’t. He’s stuck in that cubicle for an eternity, with a desk full of travel coupons, all of them for one underworld trip after the next.
But it doesn’t end there. Because one other thing that the exhibit made clear was that over time, mummification became something was no longer limited to the pharaohs. As Djehutynakht showed, if you had the money, you could be a mummy. This means that Qebehsenuef now had countless more intestines to shuttle through the underworld, again and again and again.
It just puts things in perpective.
1 comment:
Not quite on-topic, but what the hell... A friend and colleague of mine from Syracuse grew up on a farm, and used to say that it was a short step from shoveling horse manure to academia.
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