Egyptian Remixing

As twenty first century persons trying to recreate ancient Egyptian culture we (that is the population of the communities I studied) have more in common with the ancient Egyptians than it would first appear. Otto argues that the Opening of the Mouth ritual is a “confused amalgamation of many different rituals”1 and that “the cult functionaries who performed it were entirely ignorant of the origins and meanings of the implements and words they employed”2. Certainly not all ritualists are equal. In all endeavors of human activity some actors are more conscientious, skilled, learned or motivated than others. Religion in ancient Egypt was a giant machine that permeated the society entirely and employed a large percentage of the population, in one capacity or another. It is inevitable in such a situation that there is a great variety of qualitative difference in the performance of priestly activities. But it seems to me that Otto is judging the priests a bit harshly and that what he has noticed is that the Egyptians were doing institutionalized remixing, which is also a major feature of present day culture. We live in a remix culture where “we all expect that we can quote, or incorporate, other people’s words into what we write or say, and so we do quote, or incorporate, or remix what others have said”3. The ancient Egyptians lived the same thing, albeit limited to the much smaller percentage of the population that was literate.

How was this remixing evident in ancient Egypt? As noted above, Otto describes the Opening of the Mouth as being a remix of earlier rituals each designed for a specific discrete purpose; statue construction, embalming, burial, slaughtering and offering, that were later compounded together4. But this wasn’t the end of the process. The Opening of the Mouth Otto describes was itself later remixed into the demotic Opening of the Mouth for Breathing. Smith notes the close relationship between these two rituals, describing seven substantial sets of similarities and posits that “…the liturgy for The Opening of the Mouth for Breathing was inspired by the Rite of Opening the Mouth, and probably ultimately based upon it”5. This demonstrated chain of remixing stretches from the 4th Dynasty (2613-2494 BCE) when The Opening of the Mouth is first attested6 through to the appearance in the first century AD7 of the Opening of the Mouth for Breathing.

This remixing wasn’t restricted to only The Opening of the Mouth. The Books of the Dead are likewise the product of a long line of remixing. They are derived from the Coffin Texts, which appeared in the first intermediate period (2181-2055 BCE), which are in turn derived from the Pyramid Texts, which were inscribed on the walls of pyramids in the fifth and sixth dynasties (2494-2181 BCE)8. Individual copies of The Book of the Dead were then remixed from the pool of two hundred9 possible scenes, which were selected and combined appropriately for the situation at hand and according to the preferences of the person for whom the book was intended10, in much the same way that the Catholic mass is a set of basic liturgical elements that are changed to meet the needs of the daily festivals or seasons. The same was true of the daily offering ritual and The Opening of the Mouth ritual11.

This process of compilation by remixing is also an accurate description of the composition of Cleopatra’s ritual. It is a remix, but with important differences. These differences are; Cleopatra’s stated purpose is to invoke the goddess’ Ka into the cult statue, for which the Egyptians would have used the daily offering ritual, but she is using a funerary ritual to do this and she is performing the ritual in a setting, and with an audience, that do not match the practice of the Egyptians. This particular remix is certainly at variance from that of the ancient Egyptians, but authenticity is less interesting than the question of what is it doing for Cleopatra? Why is she doing it? I want to answer this question to examine how what she is doing is different to the things I did when I did rituals. In order to answer these questions a close examination of both forms of the ritual, and their specific applications, as well as a description of the variances between the ancient forms and Cleopatra’s form will prove useful.

Cleopatra gives the source of the ritual as simply “The Book of the Dead”. The exact words she uses in her remix reveal her particular source to be The Papyrus of Ani, a 19th dynasty version of the book known to the Egyptians as The Book of Going Forth by Day. This book is commonly known in English as The Book of the Dead12. Cleopatra sourced this information from “The Chapter Of Opening The Mouth Of The Osiris Ani” on the Tour Egypt website13, the site of a travel company providing information on Egypt as a marketing device.

The Book of the Dead is not one book, but rather the name given to a collection of funerary literature, of which we have hundreds of examples, and which all vary slightly in their contents14. While all the extant versions are composed of a collection of scenes, not all versions contain all scenes15 16. Each extant copy of The Book of the Dead is a different remix.

The Opening of the Mouth, which is often found included in Books of the Dead, is concerned with the nourishment of the Ka. The human Ka is a non corporeal part of each person that is born with their body but lives on after the body dies. It is described as the life force (internal Ka) but it is also any representation of an individual (external Ka). The statue of a God is a Ka, but it is their Ba that is induced to enter statues in the daily temple offering ritual17. The god’s Ba was omnipresent and Teeter describes it as “a free flowing emanation that could be summoned”18. Once the Ba is awakened in the statue then the god’s Ka can be nourished19. Both the human and divine Kas require nourishment that is provided in the form of food and drink20.

There are two cases in which The Opening of the Mouth could be performed on a statue. Each case has a different purpose. The first case is for use in the sculptor’s workshop when a statue was first manufactured. This was performed in order to cause the statue to be a fit thing for cult use, which Lorton describes as a process of “quickening the statue”21, while Roth describes it as “activating the statue”22. The second case is when it is performed in the tomb when a statue is used as a representative of the mummy, in which case it was performed to enable the deceased’s Ka to receive the benefit of offerings via the statue23 24.

The funereal form of the Opening of the Mouth was performed in the tomb and there would have been a number of priests and family members present25. The workshop form of The Opening of the Mouth was performed in the workshop of the sculptor where there would be at least two priests and the sculptor26. The daily ritual was performed in the holiest and most central part of the temple where the god’s statue lived and only the most high ranking priests were allowed to enter27. Cleopatra’s form was performed in an outer part of the temple with several priests as well as non priestly members of the community present.

Roth argues that The Opening of the Mouth ritual has its origins as a funerary ritual in the Old Kingdom, which was the source from which the variant of the ritual used to animate statues developed28 in the fourth dynasty29. Otto however posits that the use of the ritual for preparing statues in the sculptor’s workshop was its earliest use30. The only copies of The Opening of the Mouth ritual that are extant are the funereal forms found in Books of the Dead31.

Otto, who identifies a maximum of seventy five scenes of which a New Kingdom book could be composed32, argues that there would have been more than one form, which is to say different remixes, of the Opening of the Mouth and that the different forms would have been used in different contexts33, i.e. use in the tomb or use in the sculptors workshop immediately after the statue’s construction. Lorton argues that there was one form but that there may have been differences in the wording and personnel employed34. Lorton admits the two applications have much in common and suggests they may have been a “shared solution” to the problem of animating an inert object35. I think that both of these suggestions have merit. That, like The Book of the Dead, the funereal form and the workshop form of the Opening of the Mouth would differ by being a different remix. Many scenes that appear in the funereal form may well appear in the workshop remix, but other scenes specific to the purposes of the workshop ritual would appear in only that remix.

The scenes used in Books of the Dead varied over time36 and by the time of the Ptolemys, the time in which the sims were set, the ritual had had many scenes added to it, with two hundred now known to us37. However there is no agreement as to exactly what comprises a complete Book of the Dead, with many very short versions having been found, some omitting scenes that seem crucial38. It has been suggested that scene 64 is complete enough to stand alone39. Cleopatra’s remix does not contain scene 64, but it does contain extracts from the The Opening of the Mouth scenes found in Books of the Dead, which are the versions of the former used to ensure the reception of offerings for the deceased’s Ka. At one point Cleopatra says;

“Great God Ptah open the mouth of this vessel, and unfasten the bindings of this effigy, which are over Her mouth.”

and at another;

“Come forth Thoth, you who is equipped with words of power in great abundance, and untie the fetters, even the fetters of the god Set which are over this divine statue’s mouth.”

Both of these phrases are paraphrases of “The Scene of the Opening of the Mouth of the Osiris Ani” in the Papyrus of Ani. Ani, the subject of the text, is a deceased person, and the moniker Osiris is applied before his name in order to indicate that, like Osiris, he is about to be reborn into a new life. In the first section Cleopatra is asking Ptah, a creator god, to release Isis from the bindings of her mummy. But Isis was never mummified. In the case of humans, divinity is realised through the Ka. The Ka hieroglyph holds the serekh (the precursor of the cartouche) with the king’s Horus name, one of a number of names a king would have and which identified him as a son of Horus. Thus the royal Ka is related to the presence of Horus in the king. This portrays the dual nature of the king, who had both divine and mortal components40. A goddess however has no human components.

Cleopatra then goes on to combine other scenes from the Book of the Dead into her ritual, including this text from The Chapter Of Bringing Words Of Power To The Osiris Ani;

“Tem-Khepera who produced himself on the thighs of his divine mother. Those who dwell in Nu have been made wolves, and those who are among the Tchatcha Chiefs have become hyenas.”

And this text from another scene of The Book of the Dead, The Chapter Of Giving A Heart To The Osiris Ani In Khert-Neter;

“Let Isis’s (sic) heart be with us in the House of Hearts. Let Her heart-case be with us in the House of heart-cases. Let Her heart be with us, and let it rest in this sacred statue.”

The scenes Cleopatra has chosen are all specifically funereal in content rather than her stated goal of invoking the goddesses’ Ka in the temple. She has amended the text to replace the words “and unfasten the bindings of this effigy, which are over my mouth”, which the deceased speaks in the mortuary form, with “and unfasten the bindings of this effigy, which are over Her mouth”, to refer to the statue’s mouth, and has also replaced “even the fetters of the god Set which are over my mouth” with “even the fetters of the god Set which are over this divine statue’s mouth”. Are these changes the kind an ancient Egyptian would have made? It seems to me the answer must be no, as they would not have used a mortuary form for a daily offering purpose. This remix would not be to their taste.

Isis is a special case in relation to The Opening of the Mouth. The Opening of the Mouth contains funerary and mummification spells which are based on descriptions of Isis’ actions in the Osiris story41. It was she, with her sister Nephthys, who attended to Osiris’s prototypical mummification42. Cleopatra is employing a remix that is based on information given to humans by a goddess in order that humans may be revivified after their mortal death but she is using it in order to call the Ka of the goddess into a statue. Because Cleopatra’s stated purpose is to invoke the goddess’ Ka and because she is performing this ritual in the temple, rather than in the sculptor’s workshop, I conclude that Cleopatra should have been performing the daily offering ritual rather than the Opening of the Mouth if she was to replicate ancient Egyptian practise.

There are no extant versions of The Opening of the Mouth as used to activate statues in the sculptor’s workshop43 so I cannot make a detailed textual comparison. However Lorton44, noting the commonalities of content between the daily offering ritual in the temple and the Opening of the Mouth, makes a comparison between these two in order to explicate the differences between the two version of The Opening of the Mouth. He points out that these two rituals had quite different purposes. The Opening of the Mouth was used on a statue immediately after its manufacture to activate it while the daily temple ritual was used to invoke the god’s Ba into the statue.

The daily offering ritual follows a similar form to the Opening of the Mouth, it begins with purifications of the priest, then incense is burned followed by the unsealing of the god’s shrine and the removal of the statue from same45. Once removed the statue is cleansed, offerings of cloth are made and cosmetics are applied along with jewellery, scepters and the appropriate headdress46. Once this preparation had been completed the statue was offered food and drink and after the god was considered to have received the benefit of these offerings they were removed and the god was prepared to return to sleep47.

It is important to note that one of the purposes of incense in the daily offering ritual was to effect the daily awakening of the statue. Wise explains how incense was emblematic of the power that brought life, and gives the example of Seti I thurifying statues of Horus and Osiris in a way that makes it clear that he “bestows life on the images through his own breath”48. Wise further points out that Egyptians had an understanding of their gods as corpses constantly needing to be resurrected49. Such ideas support the suggestion that we can imagine the Opening of the Mouth as being very similar to the daily temple ritual. Lorton disagrees on the basis that while the latter parts of both the daily ritual and the Opening of the Mouth have a “significant amount of shared material”50 the earlier portions contain little. The early parts of the daily temple ritual are concerned with the awakening of the god and are quite distinct as to the theological meaning of this awakening51 so it is not surprising that this material is not included in either a funereal ritual for a human nor the initial activation of a statue, as the rebirth of the human into the next life, the activation of a statue in the first instance and the awakening of the god each day are theologically quite different things. However given the propensity of the Egyptians to remix from a pool of data, and the absence of an extant workshop form of the Opening of the Mouth, we can only speculate as to whether or not the workshop form of The Opening of the Mouth was a remix that included references to awakening the god, bringing the god’s Ba into the statue, and references found in the later sections of the funereal Opening of the Mouth related to the animation of the Ka.

Like most Ancient Egyptian rituals, both the Books of the Dead and the Daily Offering Ritual generally begin with a great many purifying actions, lustrations and thurifications, and praises for the deity in question52 53 54. Both the Book of the Dead and the Daily Offering Ritual contain a large number of serial offerings. Indeed they are a central feature of both rituals, for example in the Papyrus of Ani, from which Cleopatra has taken her excerpts, the very first vignette shows Ani giving praise and making food offerings55. There is one incidence of a single word of praise to Isis in Cleopatra’s ritual, near the beginning she says “Hail Goddess Isis”. Cleopatra does sprinkle water on the statue three times in her ritual, but these actions are not in context as they are not associated with any words of purification, as would have been the case in ancient Egypt. There is an offering of fruit and wine towards the end of the ritual, but the purpose is not that of the ancient Egyptians. Cleopatra states her purpose here as “we bring you forth into this world great Goddess to teach us and nurture us”, whereas for the ancient Egyptians the purpose of the ritual was to nourish the goddess.

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  1. Redford, D. B. (ed), (2001), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, New York, Vol. 2, p. 606. ↩︎
  2. Redford, D. B. (ed), (2001), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, New York, Vol. 2, p. 606. ↩︎
  3. Lessig, L., (2008), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Bloomsbury Academic, London, p. 82, https://archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix, Accessed 31/01/2014. ↩︎
  4. Smith, M., (1993), The Opening of the Mouth for Breathing, Griffith Institute, Oxford, p. 13. ↩︎
  5. Smith, M., (1993), The Opening of the Mouth for Breathing, Griffith Institute, Oxford, p. 16. ↩︎
  6. Smith, M., (1993), The Opening of the Mouth for Breathing, Griffith Institute, Oxford, p. 13. ↩︎
  7. Smith, M., (1993), The Opening of the Mouth for Breathing, Griffith Institute, Oxford, p. 2. ↩︎
  8. Faulkner, R. (tr), (1994), The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, pp. 139-140. ↩︎
  9. Taylor, J. H. (ed), (2010), Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey Through the Afterlife, British Museum Press, London, p. 13. ↩︎
  10. Faulkner, R. (tr), (1994), The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, p. 193. ↩︎
  11. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 148. ↩︎
  12. Budge, E. A. W., (1986), The Book of the Dead, Arkana, London. ↩︎
  13. Tour Egypt, Book of the Dead – Mouth of Osiris Ani, http://www.touregypt.net/bod53.htm, Accessed 09/02/2014. ↩︎
  14. Redford, D. B. (ed), (2001), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, New York, Vol. 1, pp. 193-195. ↩︎
  15. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 148. ↩︎
  16. Otto E., (1960), Das Ägyptische Mundöffnungsritual, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. ↩︎
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  21. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 130. ↩︎
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  34. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 151. ↩︎
  35. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 150. ↩︎
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  39. Redford, D. B. (ed), (2001), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, New York, Vol. 1, p. 195. ↩︎
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  42. Redford, D. B. (ed), (2001), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, New York, Vol. 2, p. 189. ↩︎
  43. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 149. ↩︎
  44. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., pp. 148-151. ↩︎
  45. Teeter, E., (2011), Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 47-48. ↩︎
  46. Teeter, E., (2011), Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 47-48. ↩︎
  47. Teeter, E., (2011), Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 47-48. ↩︎
  48. Wise, E., (2009), “An ‘Odor of Sanctity’: The Iconography, Magic and Ritual of Egyptian Incense”, Studia Antiqua, Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 72. ↩︎
  49. Wise, E., (2009), “An ‘Odor of Sanctity’: The Iconography, Magic and Ritual of Egyptian Incense”, Studia Antiqua, Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 72. ↩︎
  50. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., p. 153. ↩︎
  51. Lorton, D., (1999), “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt”, in Dick, M. B. (ed), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind., pp. 153-154. ↩︎
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