Anubis Speaks!: A Guide to the Afterlife by the Egyptian God of the Dead (15 page)

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Egypt’s First Pharaoh

My dad, Osiris, was an important guy, if I do say so myself. My people believed that he was Egypt’s first pharaoh. He brought farming to the land and showed humans how to live like people and not animals. He achieved many great things,
me
being one of them, of course.

Osiris ruled happily in Egypt while I was in charge of the underworld. All of it. Then the jealous god Set murdered his own brother Osiris. After lots of drama—including the cutting up and hiding of Osiris’s body parts—his wife, Isis, came to me for help in re-assembling Osiris’s body, which I did through the magic of mummification. Then we brought the old man back to life. The catch was he could only live in the land of the dead. (Hey, you can’t have everything, am I right?)

Still, let the record show that
I
, Anubis, revived and resurrected my own father. And how did dear old dad thank me for resurrecting him? He demoted me.

Yeah, Dad took
my
job. He became the top god of the dead, pushing me down to number two—as mere god of judgment and embalming.

Now, I ask you,
is that fair
? I mean without me, he’d still be in pieces! But I’m not bitter. Really, I’m not.

Anyway, thanks to my magnificent mummification 33

and resurrecting abilities, Osiris became the model mummy, the symbol of what everyone hoped for themselves in the afterlife—to be preserved in their earthly form and live forever. So despite the fact that he took my job, many of the prayers for the dead are aimed at me, because I’m the guy who made it all happen.

Just sayin’.

I Want My Mummy!

With Osiris as their example, my people

believed you needed your body to join the

party that never ended: no body, no afterlife.

Of course, in a pinch, your statue might do, but for the most part, people preferred a future in their own skins

. . .
literally
.

So how did it all begin? When the earliest

Egyptians buried their dead in the desert, the intense heat dried out the corpses, mummifying them in a crude way. My people noticed the dried-out bodies and figured that’s what we gods wanted for them.

Some bodies, though, were ripped apart by wild animals before they dried out. Nobody wanted
that
.

So they put the dead bodies in coffins to protect them from wildlife. But without direct contact with the desert sand to bake them dry, the bodies melted into goo. That’s when people began experimenting with 34

different preservation techniques. Eventually, they found the best process for preserving the dead, which went something like this:

Step 1—Purification

After death, the body was taken to the
ibw
(eeb-oo)
,
the tent of purification, where it was ritually cleansed and purified. The ibw was a temporary holding place, usually erected near a canal or the Nile so that all the yucky stuff could be washed away.

My priests learned quickly that when it came to mummification, moisture was not their friend. So they drained away the blood and other body fluids.

The head embalmer, known as the “Controller of the Mysteries,” acted on my behalf, often performing rites while wearing a gleaming black mask of my handsome jackal face. He was my favorite.

Step 2—Emptying the Body

After cleansing and draining all liquid from the body, the priests moved it to the
wabet
(wah-bet) or place of embalming, where the organs were removed.

Left in the body, organs decay and melt into a gooey mess. Mummification and gooey messes don’t mix, people. So everything that could—or would—liquefy had to go.

A priest called a “slicer” or “ripper up,” made a cut in the abdomen with a knife made of obsidian, a 35

volcanic rock. Then the other priests chased him away from the tent by hurling insults and throwing rocks at him. Why? Because he had “hurt” the body. You needed your body for the afterworld, so anybody who hurt it had to be punished! (It made sense to us.) Another priest put his hand through the cut and removed the lungs, stomach, intestines, and liver. The brains had to go, too. The priests stuck a long thin tool up the nasal passage into the brain, whipped the gray matter into liquid, then sat the mummy up to let it drain out of the nostrils. Sometimes they drained the brain through a hole in the back of the head.

Either way, fun times.

Finally, my priests popped the eyeballs out. Why?

They melt too, folks. The only organ they left in the body was the heart. I’ll explain why later.

Step 3—Preserving the Bits and Pieces

Once the body was emptied, the lungs, stomach, liver, and intestines were individually preserved and placed in containers called
canopic
jars. In this way the organs would still be available to the newly reborn body on the “other side.”

Each canopic jar sported the head of one of the four sons of Horus, minor gods who protected the organs. Naturally, they reported to me. Hapy, the baboon-headed god, guarded the lungs; Imsety, the human-headed god, looked after the liver; Duamutef, 36