The Unexpected Reactions of a Traveler in Egypt, February 1914 (draft)

THE UNEXPECTED REACTIONS OF A TRAVELER IN EGYPT.

We have so long been taught that the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt are the very earliest of the surviving records of ideas and men, that we approach them with a certain sense of familiarity, quite ready to claim a share in these "family papers and title deeds of the race." We fancy that to know this first inheritance from the past will make it easier forevermore to adjust the things of the present to the things that have been; to realize "where we are in regard to time," as Emerson said; or, to quote him further, "to establish a relation between the days of our life and the centuries of the world."

The traveler in Egypt may also consider it probable that these primitive human records may stir within him certain early states of consciousness, having learned with the readiness which so quickly attaches itself to the pseudo-scientific phrase, that every child repeats in himself the history of the race. Nevertheless, what I, at least, was totally unprepared to encounter, was the constant revival of primitive and overpowering emotions which I had experienced so long ago that they had become absolutely detached from myself and seemed to belong to someone else -- to a small person who no longer concerned me and who was certainly not in the least responsible for my present convictions and reflections.

When visiting the imposing fragments of rituals and theogonies at Memphis and Thebes, or in the wonderful museum in Cairo, or when reading the fascinating books recently [page 2] written by historians and archeologists, it became obvious that the ancient Egyptians had known this small person quite intimately and had most seriously and naively set down upon the walls of their temples and tombs, her earliest reactions in the presence of death.

Of course Egypt meant infinitely more than this and there were days when I experienced no such reactions. On the other hand, often when looking at the spirited portrayal in relief of the conquests of the great Ramses, or at [Akhenaten's] marvelous attempt to substitute monotheism for the worship of the myriad gods of Egypt, or at the valiant efforts of the first feminist, Queen [Hatshepsut], to hold her constantly disputed throne, or at the rich and varied speculations concerning the life after death accumulated through centuries of an hereditary priesthood, my adult intelligence would be unexpectedly submerged by the emotional message which was written underneath it all. Rising to the surface like a flood, this primitive emotion would sweep away both the historic record itself and the adult consciousness which was interested in it, leaving only a child's mind struggling through an experience which it found overwhelming.

It may have been because these records of the early Egyptians are so endlessly preoccupied with death, portraying man's earliest efforts to defeat it, his eager desire to survive, to enter by force or <by> guile into the heavens of the Western sky, that the mind is pushed back into that earliest childhood when the existence of the soul, its exact place of residence in the body, its experiences immediately [page 3] after death, its journeyings upward, its relation to its guardian angel, so often afford material for the crudest speculation. In the obscure renewal of these childish speculations, there is nothing so definite as memory; it is rather that Egypt reproduces a state of consciousness which has so absolutely passed into oblivion that nothing but the most powerful stimulus could revive it.

This revival doubtless occurs more easily because these early records in relief and color not only suggest in their subject the matter that a child has been endowed with sufficient self-consciousness to wish to write down his own state of mind upon a wall, but also because the very primitive style of drawing to which the Egyptians adhered long after they had acquired a high degree of artistic freedom, is the most natural technique through which to convey so simple and archaic a message. The squared shoulders of the men, the stairways done in profile, and a hundred other details constantly remind one of a child's drawings. It is as if the Egyptians had painstakingly portrayed everything that a child has felt in regard to death and, having during the process gradually discovered the style of drawing naturally employed by a child, had deliberately stiffened it into an unchanging convention. As a result, the traveler, reading in these drawings which stretch the length of three thousand years the long endeavor of the Egyptians to overcome death, finds that the experiences of the two  -- the child and the primitive people -- often become confused, or rather [page 4] that they are curiously [interrelated].

Certainly we can all vaguely remember when death itself or stories of ghosts had come to our intimate child's circle, going about saying to ourselves that we were "not afraid," that it "could not come here," that "the door was locked, the windows tight shut," that "this was a big house," and a great deal more talk of a similar sort.

In the presence of these primitive attempts to defeat death and without the conscious aid of memory, I found myself living over the emotions of a child six years old, [page 5] saying some such words as I sat on the middle of the stairway in my own home which yet seemed alien because all the members of the family had gone to the funeral of a relative and would not be back until evening, "long after you are in bed" they had said. In this moment of loneliness and terror, I depended absolutely upon the brick walls of the house itself to keep out the prowling terror, and neither the talk of kindly Polly who awkwardly and unsuccessfully reduced an unwieldy theology into child language, nor the strings of paper dolls cut by a visitor, gave me the least comfort. Only the blank walls which flanked one side of the stairway seemed to afford protection in this bleak moment against the formless peril.

Doubtless these huge tombs were built to preserve from destruction the royal bodies which were hidden within them at the end of tortuous and carefully concealed passages, but both the gigantic structures in the vicinity of Memphis and the everlasting hills themselves which were utilized at Thebes inevitably give the traveler the impression that death itself is defied and shut out by massive [defenses].

Even when the traveler sees that the Egyptians defeated their object by the very success of the [Giza] pyramids -- for when their overwhelming bulk could not be enlarged nor their bewildering labyrinths multiplied, effort along that line perforce ceased -- there is something in the next attempt of the Egyptians to overcome death, which the child within us again recognizes as an old experience. The traveler who takes [page 6] pains to inquire concerning the meaning of the texts which were inscribed on the inner walls of the pyramids and <the> early tombs finds that the familiar terror of death is still there although expressed somewhat more subtly; that the Egyptians are trying to outwit death by magic tricks.

One who reads in translation hundreds of these texts finds that they are designed to teach the rites that redeem a man from death and insure his continuance of life not only beyond the grave but in the grave itself. "He who sayeth this chapter and who has been justified in the waters of [Natron] he shall come forth the day after his burial." Because to recite them was to fight successfully against the enemies of the dead, these texts came to be inscribed on tombs, on coffins, and on the papyrus hung around the neck of a mummy. But woe to the man who was buried without the texts; "He who knoweth not this chapter cannot come forth by day." Access to paradise and all its joys was granted to anyone good or bad who knew the formulae, for in the first stages of Egyptian civilization, as in all others, the gods did not concern themselves with the conduct of man toward other men but solely with his duty to the gods themselves.

The value of the magic formulae could scarcely be overestimated. They alone afforded protection against the shadowy dangers awaiting the dead man when [illegible] first he entered the next world and enabled him to overcome the difficulties of his journey. The texts taught him how to impersonate the particular gods, who can <and by this subterfuge to> overcome the various foes he must [page 7] encounter because these foes, having at one time been overcome by the gods, are <were> easily terrified by such pretense.

When I found myself curiously sympathetic with this desire "to pretend" and with the eager emphasis attached by the Egyptians to their magic formulae, I was inclined to put it down to that secret sympathy with magic through which all children, in moments of rebellion against a humdrum world, hope to wrest something startling and thrilling out of the environing realm of the supernatural; but beyond a kinship with this desire to placate the evil one, to overcome him by mysterious words, I found it baffling to trace my sympathy to a definite experience. Gradually, however, it emerged, blurred in certain details, surprisingly alive in others, but all of it suffused with the selfsame emotions which impelled the Egyptian to write his Book of the Dead.

To describe it as a spiritual struggle is to use much too dignified and definite a term -- it was the prolonged emotional stress throughout one cold winter when revival services, protracted meetings they were called, were held in the village church night after night. I was, of course, not permitted to attend them, but I heard them talked about a great deal by simple adults and children who told of those who shouted aloud for joy or lay on the floor "stiff with power" because they were saved; and of others -- it was for those others that my heart was wrung with sympathetic understanding -- who, although they wrestled with the spirit until midnight and cried out that they felt the hot breath of hell upon their cheeks, could not find salvation. Would it do [page 8] to pretend, I anxiously asked myself, why didn't they say the right words so that they could get up from the mourners' bench and sit with the other people who must feel so sorry for them that they would let them pretend. What were these words that made such a difference that to say them was an assurance of heavenly bliss but if you failed to say them you burned in hell forever and ever? Was the preacher the only one who knew them for sure, was it possible to find them without first kneeling at the mourners' bench and groaning? These words must certainly be in the Bible somewhere and if one read it out loud all through every word, one must surely say the right words in time; but if one died before one was grownup enough to read the Bible through, tonight for instance, what would happen then? Surely nothing could be so important as these words of salvation. While I did not exactly scheme to secure them, I was certainly restrained only by my impotence and I anxiously inquired from everyone what these magic words might be and only gradually did this childish search for magic protection from the terrors after death imperceptibly merge into a concern for the fate of the soul.

Perhaps because it is so impossible to classify one's own childish experiences or to put them into chronological order, the traveler at no time feels a lack of consistency in the complicated attitude toward death which is portrayed upon the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. Much of it seems curiously familiar; From the earliest times the Egyptians held the belief that there is in man a permanent [page 9] element which survives -- it is the double, the Ka, the natural <soul in contradistinction to the spiritual> soul, which fits exactly into the shape of the body but is not blended with it. In order to save this double from destruction, the body must be preserved in a recognizable form.

This insistence upon the preservation of the body among the Egyptians, antedating their faith in magic formulae, clearly had its origin, as in the case of the child, in a desperate revolt against the destruction of the visible man. Owing to this continued insistence upon [corporeal] survival the Egyptians at length carried the art of embalming to such a state of perfection that mummies of royal personages are easily recognized from their likenesses to portrait statues. Such confidence did they have in their own increasing ability to withhold the human frame from destruction that many of these texts inscribed on the walls of tombs assure the very dead man himself that he is not dead and endeavor to convince his survivors against the testimony of their own senses, or rather they attempt to deceive the senses. The texts endlessly repeat the same assertion, "Thou comest not dead to thy sepulcher, thou comest living," and yet the very reiteration as well as the decorations upon the walls of every tomb portray a primitive terror lest after all the body should be destroyed and the element of life be lost forever. One's throat goes dry over this old fear of death expressed by men who have been so long dead that there is no record of them but this, no surviving document of their once keen reactions to life itself. [page 10] 

Doubtless the Egyptians in time overcame this primitive fear concerning the disappearance of the body, as we all do, although each individual is destined to the devastating experience and the memory of mine vividly came back to me as I stood in an Egyptian tomb: I was a tiny child, making pot-hooks in the village school, when one day -- it must have been in the full flush of spring, for I remember the crab apple blossoms -- during the afternoon session, the A. B. C. class was told that its members would march all together to the burial of the mother of one of the littlest girls, in the school. Or course, I had been properly taught that people went to heaven when they died and that their bodies were buried in the cemetery, but I was not at all clear about it, and I was certainly totally unprepared to see what appeared to be the very person herself put deep down into the ground. The knowledge came to me so suddenly and brutally that for weeks afterwards the days were heavy with a nameless oppression and the nights were filled with horror.

The cemetery was hard by the schoolhouse, placed there, it had always been whispered among us, to make the bad boys afraid. Thither the A. B. C. class, in awestruck procession, each child carefully holding the hand of another, was led by the teacher to the very edge of the open grave and bidden to look on the still face of the little girl's mother.

Our poor knees quaked and quavered as we stood [page 11] shelterless and unattended by family protection or even by friendly grownups, for the one tall teacher, while clearly visible, seemed inexpressibly far away as we kept an uncertain footing on the freshly spaded earth, hearing the preacher's voice, the sobs of the motherless children and, crowning horror of all, the hollow sounds of three clods of earth dropped impressively upon the coffin lid.

After endless ages the service was over and we were allowed to go down the long hill into the bustling <familiar> life of the village. But a new terror awaited even there, for our house stood at the extreme end of the street and the last of the way home was therefore solitary. I remember a breathless run from a blacksmith shop, past the length of our lonely orchard until the carriage house came in sight through whose wide-open doors I could see a man moving about. One last panting effort brought me there, and after my spirit had been slightly reassured by conversation, I took a circuitous route to the house, that I might secure as much companionship as possible on the way. I stopped at the stable to pat an old horse who stood munching in his stall, and again to throw a handful of corn into the poultry yard. The big turkey gobbler who came greedily forward gave me great comfort because he was so absurd and awkward that no one could possibly associate him with anything so solemn as death. I went into the kitchen where the presiding genius allowed me to come without protest, although the family dog was at my heels. I felt constrained to keep my arms about his shaggy neck while trying to talk of familiar things -- would the cake she was making be baked [page 12] in the little round tins or in the big square one -- but although these idle words were on my lips I wanted to cry out that "their mother was dead, whatever, whatever would the children do?" These words which I had overheard as we came away from the graveyard referred doubtless to the immediate future of the little family, but in my mind were translated into a definite demand for definite action on the part of the children against this horrible thing which had befallen their mother.

It was with no sense of surprise that I found this long-forgotten experience spread before my eyes on the walls of a tomb opened <built> four thousand years ago into a sandy hill above the Nile at [Aswan]. The man so long dead, who had built <prepared> the tomb for himself, carefully ignored the grimness of death. He is portrayed as going about his affairs surrounded by his family, his friends and his servants: grain is being measured before him into his warehouse while a scribe by his side registers the amount; the herdsmen lead forth cattle for his inspection, two of them, enraged bulls paying no attention to the [somber] implication of tomb decoration, lower their huge heads threatening each other as if there were no such thing as death in the world. Indeed the builder of the tomb seems to have liked the company of animals, perhaps because they were so incurious concerning death. His dogs are around him, he stands erect in a boat from which he spears fish, and so on from one marvelous relief to another -- but all the time your heart contracts for him and you know that in the midst of this [page 13] elaborately prepared nonchalance he is miserably terrified by the fate which may be in store for him and is trying to make himself believe that he need not leave all this wonted and homely activity, that if his body is but properly preserved he will be able to enjoy it forever.

<[Although],> the Egyptians in their natural desire to cling to the familiar during the strange experience of death, portrayed upon the walls of their tombs many domestic and social habits whose likeness to our own household life constantly gives us that sense of <quick> satisfaction with which a traveler encounters the familiar and wonted in a strange land, Although such discoveries give the traveler <afford but> a momentary sense of likeness <thrill>, [illegible] is quite unlike the thrilling assurance <abiding sense of kinship> which is founded upon the unexpected similarity of ideas <and --> it is the latter which the traveler encounters on the walls <tombs> of the eighteenth century dynasty, tombs. The paintings portray a great hall at the end of which sits Osiris, the god who himself had suffered death on earth, awaiting those who come before him for judgment. In the center of the hall stands a huge balance in which the hearts of men are weighed -- once more reminiscent of the childish conception but making clear that as the Egyptians became more anxious and scrupulous they gradually made the destiny of man dependent upon morality, and finally directed the souls of men to heaven or hell according to their merits.

Whether or not <the> tremendous result of good and evil <<in> the earliest awakening to them,> were first placed in the next world by a primitive people sore perplexed in the [page 14] partialities and injustices of life, this simple view is doubtless the one the child naturally takes. In Egypt I [illegible] was so vividly recalled to my first apprehension of it, that the contention that the very belief in immortality is but the postulate of the idea of conscience and retribution, seemed to me at the moment a perfectly reasonable one.

The incident of my childhood around which it had formulated itself was very simple: I had been sent with a message, an important commission it seemed to me, to the leader of the church choir; that the hymn selected for the doctor's funeral was "How blest the righteous when he dies." The village street was so strangely quiet under the summer sun that even the little particles of dust beating in the hot air were more noiseless than ever before. Frightened by the noonday stillness and instinctively seeking companionship, I hurried toward two women who were standing at a gate talking in low tones. In their absorption they paid no attention to my somewhat wistful greeting, but I heard one of them say with a dubious shake of the head that "he had never openly professed nor joined the church." <and in a moment I understood that she thought the doctor might not go to heaven.> What did <else did> it mean, that half-threatening tone? Of course the doctor was good, as good as anyone could be. Only a few weeks before he had given me a bright new penny when he pulled my tooth, and once I had heard his buggy pass by in the middle of the night when he took a beautiful baby to the miller's house: he drove to the farmhouses miles and miles away when people were sick, and everybody sent for him the minute they were in trouble! how could anyone [page 15] be better than that!

I dimly felt the challenge of the fine old hymn in its claim of blessings for the righteous, and I was defiantly ready at the moment to combat the theology of the entire community. The claim of reward in the next world for [well-doing] in this thus came to me first in regard to one of whose righteousness I was quite certain and whom I was eager to champion before all the world and even before the judges in the world to come.

This state of mind, this mood of truculent discussion, was recalled by the wall paintings in the tomb of a nobleman in the Theban hills. In an agonized posture he awaits the outcome of his trail before Osiris. Thoth, the true scribe, records on the wall the just balance between the heart of the nobleman which is in one pan of the scale and the feather of truth which is in the other. The noble appeals to his heart which has thus been separated from him to stand by him during the weighing and not to bear testimony against him. "Oh my heart of my existence, rise not up against me; be not an enemy against me before the divine [illegible] powers, thou art my ka that is in my body." The noble even tries a bribe by reminding the ka that his own chance of survival is dependent on his testimony at this moment. The entire effort on the part of the man being tried is to still the voice of his own conscience, to maintain stoutly his innocence even to himself.

The attitude of the self-justifying noble might [page 16] easily have suggested those later childish struggles in which a sense of hidden guilt, of repeated failure in "being good", plays so large a part. That the definite reminiscence the tomb evoked belonged to an earlier period of rebellion may indicate that the Egyptian had not yet learned to confess his sins and certainly did not commune with his gods for spiritual refreshment.

Whether it is that the long days and magical nights on the Nile lend themselves to a revival of former states of consciousness, or that I had come to expect landmarks of individual development in Egypt, or, more likely still, that I had fallen into the temptation of proving a theory at all hazards, I am unable to state; but certainly as the Nile boat approached nearer to him "who sleeps in Philae," something of the Egyptian feelings for Osiris, the god to whom was attributed the romance of a hero and the character of a benefactor and redeemer, came to me through long-forgotten sensations. Typifying the annual "great affliction," Osiris, who had submitted himself to death, mutilation and burial in the earth, returned each spring when the wheat and barley sprouted, bringing not only a promise of bread for the body but a healing comfort for the torn mind; intimation that death itself is beneficent and may be calmly accepted as a necessary part of an ordered universe.

Day after day the traveler, seeing the rebirth of the newly planted fields and on the banks of the Nile, touched by a fresh sense of the enduring miracle of spring [page 17] with its inevitable analogy to the vicissitudes of human experience, comprehends how the pathetic legends of Osiris, by providing the Egyptian with an example for his own destiny, not only opened the way for a new meaning in life but also gradually vanquished the terrors of death.

Again there came a faint memory of a child's first apprehension that there may be poetry out-of-doors, of the discovery that myths have a foundation in natural phenomena, and at last a more definite reminiscence.

I saw myself a child of twelve, standing stock still on the bank of a broad flowing river with a little red house surrounded by low-growing willows on its opposite bank, striving to account to myself for a curious sense of familiarity, for a conviction that I had long ago known it all most intimately although I had certainly never seen the Mississippi river before. I remember that much puzzled and mystified, at last I gravely concluded that it was one of those intimations of immortality that Wordsworth had written about, and I went back to my cousin's camp in so exalted a frame of mind that the memory of the evening light shining through the blades of young corn growing in a field passed on the way, has remained with me for forty years.

Was that <fugitive> sense of "having lived before" nearer to the fresher imaginations of our remote ancestors as it is to the mind of a child, and did the myth of Osiris make them more willing to die because the myth came to embody a confidence in this transitory sensation of having continuous [life]? before? [page 18]

Such ghosts of reminiscences coming to the traveler as he visits one after another of the marvelous human documents upon the banks of the Nile may be merely manifestations of that new humanism which is perhaps the most precious possession of this generation, the belief that no altar at which living men have once devoutly worshiped, no oracle to whom a nation long ago appealed in its moments of dire confusion, no gentle myth in which past generations have found solace, can lose all significance for us, the survivors. Such unexpected reactions may also indicate the growth within <us> in of an almost mystical sense of the life common to all the centuries and of a share in the unceasing human endeavor to penetrate into the unseen world.

Jane Addams [signed]