OPINION (AN COLÚN): Expressions of the divine in the ancient world

My love affair with ancient Egypt goes back many years. There is so much to admire, so much to learn from this ancient civilisation. Aesthetically, they were magnificent; and spiritually they were more advanced than some of us might think.
In fact, when it comes to their relationship with death they were streets ahead of many of us nowadays.
One of the great tasks of our lives should be to develop a relaxed and mature relationship with death. Death of course is something which none of us can escape, no matter how rich or powerful; no matter how beautiful, how talented, how lauded; we are all travelling in the same direction.
Christianity teaches us a mature relationship with death. However, a lot of us have turned our backs on Christianity, thereby throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
There are fascinating echoes and correlations between Christianity and the spiritual canon of ancient Egypt. I saw several examples of this during a recent long weekend in Munich.
It was the first time that Rosalind and myself had been abroad in three years and we loved it. It was fantastic to be on the road again, leaving behind the beloved island upon which we live most of our lives. Dublin Airport was bustling and very busy, crammed with countless numbers of people (even at 4am), all strongly desirous of escaping the country for a while after the exigencies of a two year pandemic.
One of the things which I love about travelling is when the plane rises above the clouds. Below you is an endless carpet of cloud; above is the blue sky and the sun. It feels as if you are in a place where paradise is not far around the corner.
In Munich we stayed with a couple of old friends, who we've known since the early 1990s. The four of us went to a couple of operas together in the city's National Theatre. This is one of the world's great opera houses and it lived up to the billing, providing two very special evenings.
On one of the days we visited the State Museum of Egyptian Art. This magnificent museum is located in the city centre, beside the wonderful art gallery the Alte Pinakothek. The Egyptian museum was opened in 2013 and its design is masterful. The entrance is marked with a portal wall reminiscent of the pylon gateways to Egyptian temples. You descend a flight of steps to the entrance and as the visitor descends it feels as if he is entering an Egyptian tomb. It sets a suitable tone for what you are about to experience.
Within, I was moved by a statue of a husband and wife seated together. The statue was about 3,000 years old and there was a tenderness in it, expressing the love between these two. The message was powerful - our bodies might decay and expire, but our love will not.
The information panels beside the exhibits were insightful and well written. They were an excellent overview of the vast and complex subject of Egyptian spirituality.
“For the Egyptians,” says one panel, “the concept of God was never a fixed notion, but instead mutated and expanded over time. Indeed, Egyptian religion never attempted to provide a definitive definition of the divine principle; rather than seeing itself as a protector of a dogmatic creed, it was engaged in a never-ending quest to unravel the sacred mysteries, a quest that stretches over three millennia. The multiple aspects of a single deity were an expression of the depth and complexity of the divine essence, something a single manifestation could never adequately convey.”
The divine essence of the universe, the energy force which created all things, manifests itself in many different forms. We can sense this essence in the myriad sculptures in pagan cultures of creatures of the natural world. We can sense this essence in the beauty of the forms created by the Egyptian sculptors. For these masters their highest calling was to try to capture the nature of God in a physical likeness. An impossibility of course, but they had to try. Often they combined elements of man and beast in their sculptures to try and express this nature. “Their sculptures,” said another of the panels, “are an imagining of the unimaginable, materializing religious experiences and theological speculation into unique configurations. Egyptian art serves to reveal God's ineffability.”
The museum doesn't show any mummies, because it was taboo in ancient Egyptian culture to display mummies. In a room filled with sarcophagi, one of the panels states powerfully, “Egyptian religion's deeply-rooted belief in overcoming death in resurrection and in an afterlife, defies the use of such terms as 'death rites' and in fact rejects the moment of death as being relevant to the deceased in any way. The sun, exemplifying the eternal circle of life, plays a central role in the texts designed to guide the soul through the Afterlife - texts that are painted and inscribed on the insides of coffins, on tomb walls or on papyrus. On his journey to everlasting life, the deceased must first pass the Judgement of the Dead before crossing the Underworld to be reborn with the dawn. No dark Hades awaits him then but the Blessed Fields, under the immutable light of the sun.”
This blessed vision of immortality encourages the overcoming of grief, replacing it with the certainty of a paradisiacal afterlife. Life in the immortal community is illustrated by hieroglyphic texts and divine images on painted wooden coffins; while the coffin mask, the lifelike gesso heads and mummy portraits all show happy, optimistic faces. Egyptian art is an antidote for the nihilism and despair of materialism and atheism. The narrow definitions of life that exist all around us are transcended.
The Pharaoh Akhenaten (who reigned from 1353 to 1334 BC) wrote a famous monotheistic poem, about the Aten, an aspect of the sun god Ra (the poem features in a wonderful Philip Glass opera). “How manifold it is,” the Pharaoh wrote, “what thou hast made! O sole god, like whom there is no other! Thou didst create the world according to thy desire, Whilst thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts, Whatever is on Earth, going upon its feet, And what is on high, flying with its wings...The earth came into existence by your hand, and you made it.”