...of the dead we speak

One wonders, now and then, over the grandeur yet simplicity of human life as we know it. For ages, there have been thoughts and ideas of grander things, true, but no proof of anything from this world as we should know it. The Egyptians, however, make you wonder.

The one phenomena that throughout cultures and ages strike man to his core, is death. The Egyptians, thought of nothing but death and t he dead. Conceiving of a literal resurrection of the body, which made them mummify their bodies with desperate care, while preserving all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the physical body they believed in two other elements, the soul and ka. The soul, after its weighing and approval by Osiris, dwelt in the land of the blest, while the portentous ka or life-principle, which wandered about the upper and lowers worlds in a most horrid way, demanded occasional access to the preserved body, consuming the food offerings left by priests and pious relatives in the mortuary chapel. Sometimes -- as men whisper -- the ka would take its body or the wooden double always buried beside it and noxiously stalk abound on errands surely repellent.

For millennia these bodies would rest gorgeously encased and staring glassily upward, if not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris both ka and soul should restore, and forth his stiff legions of the dead lead from the sunken houses of eternal sleep. A most glorious rebirth, to be sure, but not all souls were to be approved, nor all tombs given rest from prying eyes and thieves. Hence, certain grotesque mistakes and fiendish abnormalities were to be awaited. Still today the one can hear certain Arabs murmur of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether abysses which only soulless mummies and winged, invisible kas may visit and return unscathed.

Obscene and macabre, ghastly even? Just wait, as probably the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse products of decadent priestcraft, namely composite mummies. Made by artificial and unholy union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of elder gods and other unnamed things, these things were thought to be strangely related to the sacred animals that throughout all stages of history have been mummified; consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like were to return some day to greater glory. But only decadence of mind could lead to the mix of human and animal in the same corpse -- only in that decadence when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul.

Publicly it is not told of what has happened to those composite mummies -- certainly no Egyptologist ever found one. The Arabs' whispers can be very wild, and should not be relied upon, as they even hint on that old Khephren -- he of the Second Pyramid, the yawning gateway temple and the Sphinx -- together with the ghûl-queen Nitocris would far underground rule over the mummies that are neither man nor beast. Yet today certain Arabs pay homage to Khephren and his ghûl-queen, so as to not draw their wrath and their armies of abominal dead.

...one can wonder, then, what temples of abominations and depths unknown lie under the pyramids and carven riddles of the desert. Surely madness entertains, for what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?