Body and soul

    The ancient Egyptian view of what made up a person is confusing. [1] The main constituents were the body, its ka, and its name which remained always in close proximity to each other even in the tomb, and the shadow, the ba, sahu and akh which were more mobile and independent.
    Some of these terms were at times (at least in our eyes) almost interchangeable, and they acquired new aspects during the three millennia of their use, changing their meanings. There are no proper unequivocal translations for them, though attempts have been made to equate them with modern psychological terms: The akh is referred to as the Id, the name as the Ego and the ka as the Super-ego. Like all such comparisons this one is only partially apt.

The body ( X.t , saH )

    Khnum, the sculptor who gives lives, created the children's bodies, the khats, - together with their twins, the kas - on his potter's wheel and inserted them with the sperm into their mothers' wombs. The Egyptian view of the body was, from its conception to its death, mostly magical. The biological aspects of the body's functions were largely unknown, instead it was populated and surrounded with spiritual and demonic entities whose evil influence caused the diseases and ailments people suffered from.

The mummy of Hont-m-pet
Source: Smith, G. Elliot. Catalogue Général Antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire: The Royal Mummies.
Le Caire: Imprimerie de L'institut Français D'archéologie Orientale, 1912

    The preservation of the body by mummification in order to enable the deceased to enjoy a life after death was at first only performed on the corpse of the divine pharaoh, but became widespread as the notion of everybody being capable of having an afterlife took root. This afterlife was a continuation of life in the here and now: Their tombs were decorated with scenes of daily life (above all during the Old Kingdom), things they had used were left in their graves, and they were given servants in the form of little statuettes, ushabtis to stand in for them and perform their civic duties in the beyond.
    The body, after its transformation into a mummy, a sah, had to undergo the Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth to have its senses restored as it was the body which had to justify itself before the judges of the underworld.

The heart ( jb )

    A special part of the body was the heart, the essence of life, seat of the mind with its emotions, intelligence, and moral sense.

My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My heart whereby I came into being!

The prayer of Ani
Budge The Papyrus of Ani

    When the heart got tired the body died. After the deceased had begun his journey into the underworld, the jb as a record of a person's moral past was weighed by Anubis against a feather representing Maat. If found too heavy it was devoured by the monster Ammit, terminating its owner for eternity.

The heart of Osiris hath in very truth been weighed, and his Heart-soul hath borne testimony on his behalf; his heart hath been found right by the trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him; he hath not wasted the offerings which have been made in the temples; he hath not committed any evil act; and he hath not set his mouth in motion with words of evil whilst he was upon earth.

The speech of Thoth
Budge The Papyrus of Ani

Heart Scarab of Hatnofer,
ca. 1466 B.C.E.; Dynasty 18, reign of Hatshepsut;
New Kingdom
Western Thebes
Rogers Fund, 1936 (36.3.2)
Source: Metmuseum website

    During the embalming the heart was not removed together with the other interior organs. A scarab was inserted into the mummy's bindings right above the heart in an attempt to prevent it from speaking out against its owner, lest my name appear stinking and putrid before the lord of the other world.

The name ( rn )

    The name is the foundation of a being as an individual. Only when it has a name, i.e. when it can be addressed and related to, does it begin its proper existence, with its name as its essence. The various aspects of the being are reflected in the different names it is given: In the Book of the Dead, chapter 142, Osiris had one hundred different names.
    Names were closely bound up with magic. Knowledge of somebody's names gave you insight into his being and power over him, but speaking out a name could also be dangerous

It is the king who will judge the dead, accompanied by Hell's chief executioner He-who-must-not-be-named, on the day the revered gods are slaughtered.

Pyramid Texts 273-4 (tr. Jacob Rabinowitz)

    'True' names were often kept secret. In the Pyramid Texts (# 394) a god is mentioned whose name was not even known to his mother.

An adoration of Ra who rises on the horizon, when he makes his ba, the visible form of his soul, rise like a powerful ghost from the underworld—the shining spectre of Ra that is our physical sun; when he raises himself, rejoicing in the power of his ka; an adoration of Ra, his ba and his ka, when he has the sun-boat's steersman shove off from the east and head out into deep sky while addressed in these words by the Osiris X:
Hail Ra!
Hail to your ba!
Hail to your ka!
The Osiris X knows our name, and the names of your ba and your ka in all their aspects.

Book of the Dead 15a (tr. Jacob Rabinowitz)

    An important part of assuring the continued existence after death was the perpetuation of the name, in accordance with the Egyptian saying He lives whose name is spoken.

Erased inscription and picture of Hatshepsut
Luxor
Excerpt. Source: V.Easy
 
The reasons for Thutmose III trying to obliterate all references to
his stepmother 20 years after he came to power are unclear

    Inscribing the names in stone gave them permanence. Obliterating them was a kind of postmortem punishment or revenge: the person was assigned to oblivion. This was the fate post-Amarnan pharaohs had in mind when they erased inscriptions containing the name of Akhenaten.

The ka ( kA )

    Unfortunately the ancient Egyptians never defined clearly what was meant by the ka. It has been variously translated as soul, life-force, will etc. but no western concept is anything like it. Because it was pronounced like the word for 'bull', a symbol of potency, it may be closest to a life-creating force.

The king's kas and hemesets stand behind him and sustain him;

Pyramid Texts 273-4

    The ka came into being when a person was born, often depicted as a twin or double, but, unlike the body it belonged to, it was immortal provided it received nourishment. Being a spiritual entity it did not eat the food but seems to have extracted the life-sustaining forces from the offerings, be they real or symbolic. It was a constant close companion of the body in life and death. Upon the body's demise it rejoined its divine origin, but always remained in close proximity of the body. Dying was referred to as going to one's ka.

Ka statue of Harawibra, 13th dynasty
Courtesy Jon Bodsworth

The Osiris X, may he rest in peace, knows the names of your ka, the aspect of your soul that abides in the ground:
Nourishing ka,
ka of food,
lordly ka,
ka the ever-present helper,
ka which is a pair of kas begetting more kas,
healthy ka,
sparkling ka,
victorious ka,
ka the strong,
ka that strengthens the sun each day to rise from the world of the dead,
ka of shining resurrection,
powerful ka,
effective ka.

Book of the Dead 15a (tr. Jacob Rabinowitz)

The ka as a life-sustaining force was contained in the food. The plural of ka, kaw, meant food offerings.
    The ka has also been interpreted as meaning "will" somewhat in the sense Schopenhauer used it. The hidden, transcendental god of the Late New Kingdom is described as

Thy being is the infinite neheh [2]
Thy image is the unchanging djet [2]
From thy planning ka emanate all occurrences

Jan Assmann, Ägypten, Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur, p.280

    In tombs false or ka doors were supposed to give the spiritual parts of the deceased access to the world of the living.

The shadow, ( xAjb.t , Sw.t )

    In the light of the life-giving sun body and shadow are inseparable. But the pitch-black xAjb.t was not an ordinary shadow of a body, it rather belonged to the world of the 'soul' and partook of the funeral offerings.

Shadow and ba-birds
Tomb of Irinufer, Thebes
Source: Ägypten - Schatzkammer der Pharaonen

    In New Kingdom tombs it was at times depicted leaving the body's grave accompanied by the ba-bird.

Let not be shut in my soul, let not be fettered my "shadow", let be opened the way for my soul and for my "shadow", may it see the great god,

E.A.W.Budge The Book of the Dead Chapter 92

May I look upon my soul and my "shadow".

E.A.W.Budge The Book of the Dead Chapter 89

    Shadows were a blessing for those who could rest in them in a hot country like Egypt. Metaphorically, gods threw shadows too, shadows of protection: Kings were described as being in the shadow of the god. The holy sites at Amarna were called Shadow of Re. We can easily understand the divine shadow and its effects, but it is unclear what the function of the human shut was.

The akh ( Ax )

    According to the Pyramid Text #474 The akh belongs to the heaven, the corpse to the earth. The body is buried while the akh, the Shining One, ascends to the sky, becoming a star. It is the part of the body least bound to the others, but just as important as the others in assuring the immortality of the deceased. The king Unas joins the stars

This Unas comes to you, O Nut,
This Unas comes to you, O Nut,
He has consigned his father to the earth,
He has left Horus behind him.
Grown are his falcon wings,
Plumes of the holy hawk;
His power has brought him,
His magic has equipped him!

The sky-goddess replies

Make your seat in heaven,
Among the stars of heaven,
For you are the Lone Star, the comrade of Hu!
You shall look down on Osiris,
As he commands the spirits,
While you stand far from him;
You are not among them,
You shall not be among them!

M. Lichtheim. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Vol. 1 - Pyramid Texts, Utterance 245

    The gods would best be described as akhu. The pharaoh, having a divine nature, had always become an akh and joined the stars after the demise of his mortal shell, but later ordinary mortals too attained this status when they became transfigured dead.

Shining Ra, in your celestial aspect, as an akh,
you are Atum within the sky,
an old man as you set on the horizon,
a judge within your palace - which is the heavens,
a king enthroned in the sunset,
and when you've sunk west into the underworld, a king down there as well.
Atum, ancient one, who first dawned from Nun, from the black deep of her primordial night.

Book of the Dead, chapter 15a (tr. Jacob Rabinowitz)

    Akh has been translated as spirit, ghost or as transfiguration. In the Debate between a man tired of life and his soul the protagonist quarrel with his akh, which is rendered in this context as 'soul'.

The ba ( bA )

    Originally, gods who manifested themselves anonymously were called ba, later it became also the visible form a god assumed, thus the Phoenix was the ba of Re.

Ba-bird of Tutankhamen
Courtesy Jon Bodsworth
Excerpt

    From the end of the Old Kingdom onwards the ba was the sum of the immortal forces inherent in human beings which made up his personality. It might be called a person's psyche and is generally translated as soul.
    The ba was mostly represented in the form of a bird, generally with a human head and, according to grave images, often perching on trees planted by the tomb. It could move about, sometimes in the company of the shadow, but always returned to the body it belonged to. Spells enabled it to assume any shape it wished. It partook of the offered nourishment and seems also to have had creative powers.

Ithyphallic Amen-Re ba-bird
Source: Samivel, The Glory of Egypt
Excerpt

The Osiris X knows the names of your ba, the form in which you travel our world - the sun.
Ba pure of body,
health-embodying ba,
ba bright and unharmed,
ba of magic,
ba who causes himself to appear,
male ba,
ba whose warm energy encourages copulating.

Book of the Dead 15a
In Egypt's declining years Amen-Re is addressed as Hidden ba, who is revered, at the same time Bes Pantheos, a seven-headed daemon was a manifestation of the power of Amen-Re:

Bes with seven heads: he embodies the ba's of Amen-Re

Jan Assmann, Ägypten, Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur, p.282

The sahu

    The sahu has been variously described as the spirit-body, as a self-defined psychic boundary or the repository of the soul (Budge). It was seemingly immortal and similar in form to the mortal body it sprang from.

Thou goest round about heaven, thou sailest in the presence of Ra, thou lookest upon all the beings who have knowledge. Hail, Ra, thou who goest round about in the sky, I say, O Osiris in truth, that I am the Sahu of the god, and I beseech thee not to let me be driven away, nor to be cast upon the wall of blazing fire.

Book of the Dead

[1]   Not that our own views are less so: many of us speak of the body and its resurrection without having a clear notion of what that entails. We speak of having a mind, spirit, and soul but are hard put when having to define what they are
[2]   Neheh and djet are dimensions of time. Assmann speaks of them (in analogy with the 'united double kingdom') as 'united double time', where neheh, the imperfect time dimension, is associated with change, Kheper, the One who Becomes, and djet, the perfect aspect of time, is related to completion, Atem, the Perfect One.