We are live at MythVision Podcast, and today we're examining comparisons between the God Osiris, and I'm just going to say the Son of God, or God, Jesus Christ, as Christians call him. This book is a must-buy, and the other books that we're going to get into, by Egyptologist Professor Karakouni. I hope that everybody watching today will support our guest so that we can have her back, because you're going to be shocked by the information. that I think you hear today.
I really do think that. Hit the like button, check out the description, check out our website. We're going to plug that here in just a moment. But is there a good reason to compare Jesus to Osiris?
Son, do you want to know what the truth is? After this, there's no turning back. You take the blue pill and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to.
You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Dr. Cara Cooney, welcome to MythVision. Thank you, Derek. Really happy to be here.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. For those who don't know who you are, Cara Cooney is a professor of Egyptology at UCLA. Her academic work focuses on death preparations, afterlife beliefs, and gender studies.
She is currently investigating coffin reuse during the Bronze Age collapse. I'm reading off of Amazon, by the way. Allowing her to examine funerary objects in dozens of museums around the world, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Louvre in Paris.
Is that correct? Louvre. Louvre. Louvre in Paris, British Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
She appeared as lead expert in the popular Discovery Channel special, The Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen, and is the creator and host of Discoveries Out of Egypt. Sorry. The world. The world.
Women would be queen. There's two. So there's when women ruled the world, and then there's the woman who would be king. Get both of those. And of course, it seems like this is a dated bio, because by then, you've already published The Good Kings, which I've read.
And if you're interested, get the books, please, everybody. Get you some copies. Oh my God, I can't do the backward screen.
It's so hard for my simple brain. simple brain i'm more phd you have the less you could do these simple things i feel like so it's it's fair to say and i know this is going to sound kind of like what of course um you're like a serious egyptologist yeah yeah i devoted my life to this craziness i know yes is it fair to say because a central key point to christianity is the death right the burial the death of a figure whom they come to consider as god then you could in some way, not even necessarily genealogically, look at this figure named Osiris and say, wow, this professor here, she knows burial rites, afterlife beliefs, all this stuff pertaining to the Egyptian god Osiris and the kings. And then of course, maybe how it becomes more popular among general populace. And it's not just the elites who practice these rites. I want to take this journey with you, Dr. Kunis.
So I, without further ado, let me promote. I need to let everybody know they need to go to the website. If you want to be resurrected after you die, and I'm not talking about the Christian sense here, you heretics, I'm talking about in the Egyptian Osiris cult.
Okay. You need to go to the website. Seriously. What do you have on your website that people can get?
There's all kinds of information, information about my books. I put my links to academic articles up there through my research gate. So you can actually get the, the articles without having a prescription, a subscription through JSTOR or something else like a university library.
So all of my academic works are on there, including my first academic book about coffin creation. And information about my podcast is up there. Lots of, I do a ton of podcasts with people like you, Derek, and I put those up there as well. So if you're interested in Egypt, there's a ton of data and information here to keep you busy for a long time.
Yeah. Wow. So you are busy and you do have your own podcast?
Yeah. Yeah. It's a tiny little thing. And I do it with emerging scholar Jordan Galzinski.
She's a grad student here at UCLA. And we just chatter. about things that are happening in our world, things that we're interested in.
And it's really, since we're always talking all the time anyway, we're like, we should record some of this. And the last one we did was, so you want to go to Egypt and you're afraid and you think you need to go on a tour? Well, you don't.
And here's how you do it. These are the hotels you stay at. These are the restaurants you eat at.
This is how you get a taxi, like basic stuff. And that podcast has been really popular. And it's just a part one of three parts. So So, you know, lots of practical information and lots of like chatty girl times, which is which is really fun.
That's awesome, because my buddy Neil Gnostic Informant, actually, when we went over there to the Holy Land, he took an extra three day detour to Egypt. And he said it was a little bit wild. I mean, he's never been.
So Egypt is overwhelming because everyone everyone is. It's kind of like you're among 100 million in-laws. And everyone's kind of in your business and talking to you.
It's a very friendly place where strangers talk to strangers without compunction at all. And for somebody coming from a place where strangers don't talk to strangers as much, it can seem very off-putting and you don't know what to do. But once you realize this is the way Egypt functions, with so many people crowded in such a small space, then you're like, okay, I can figure this out.
And then it becomes quite joyful to visit Egypt. So, yeah. Well, I definitely need to visit it at some point.
I'm always fascinated by these large objects, but that was the point, right? You write about that in your book and everybody, please go. I've pinned this particular link to this particular book at the top.
You can go and click the author's name right here and it'll actually take you on Amazon to the various other books. The other way is to send traffic through your website and find your books here. Yeah. You can search or just go to the homepage, really just scroll down and you're gonna...
order a copy here, order a copy. There's a lot of options. I know I sound like a shameless plug or a beggar here with a cup in my hand, but my audience knows quite well that if they support the guest, the guest comes back.
The way they can do that is go to the website, get the books, check out the podcast, leave comments, show love and support. This is my way of making sure we can keep doing what we're doing. We also have the new course website.
If you want to take some of these courses, which I know you all do, we have three out right now and I'm editing more as we speak. Mind blowing stuff. So check that out.
And you can also check out our Patreon if you want to support what we're doing. Do you have a Patreon, Dr. Cooney? I do.
I do have a Patreon and we've got some subscribers and everything. And we do live classes, live Q&A with our Patreon members. We're linked to this. Yeah. So it's just, it's a, and I think it's up.
there. I don't remember, but I think it's on my website somewhere, but, um, but the Patreon is really fun because we just started this and it's, it's nice and small. So the last live we did, like everyone in there got to ask their own question and we just chatted. It was, it was really fun. It was really, really good.
Go hunt her Patreon down, help support her. We got a great community here, Dr. Cooney. So I, I can't tell you that enough. This is such a good community. Um, so Jesus and Osiris.
Where do you want to begin in this subject? I'm going to go even further back. So I'm going to go back to the beginnings of monotheism in the world.
And monotheism, because I have my notes here, Derek. I'm like, hmm, this is such an interesting topic, Jesus and Osiris. And people can roll their eyes and say, no, you can't talk about these things.
And it's absolutely not the case. The comparisons are real. And in some cases, I would argue quite direct, not just abstract like.
people think of divinity in similar ways in different parts of the world, but there can be direct contact between Egypt and the Levant. And these things are documented in the biblical text as well. So I don't see this as that outlandish or strange or bizarre. And when Christianity was taking root in Egypt, the old polytheistic ways formed and shaped that Christianity in Egypt in the same way that polytheism in Italy or polytheism in the Levant shaped the Christianity that was the Jesus cult that was growing there.
But more, well, just to start it off, there is even the suspicion in my mind that monotheism was invented in Egypt. by a king named Akhenaten, ruling around 1320 BCE. Actually, a little before that, like 1350 BCE.
And this guy used to be named Amenhotep, and he changed his name to Akhenaten, the one who is beneficial for the sun in the sky. And he says that there are no other gods. He funnels money only to his god, the Aten. He builds temples that have no idol, that are open to the sky.
You only worship this. this sun disc and he, he pushes this religion and it is an aberrant and top-down religion that only lasts some 17 years. And, and this, this religion then dies out. So we think it goes dormant, it goes dark.
And yet a couple hundred years later, you know, maybe around 800, 700, if you're looking at your book of second Kings and you see that Or you look at Exodus, right? And you see this idea that there is one God and it's a God of fire or a God that is speaking to you, a God that is pervasive throughout the world. This idea of one divinity and one divinity alone is potentially something that started in Egypt and then was quashed, but then had roots that went to other places and then found a new way of coming into the Levant.
and was very useful for those purposes. So I would actually argue that while Jesus has Osirian roots, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second, I think that monotheism itself, this idea that we move polytheism aside, the worship of many gods, and we call it paganism, we call it the religion of the simple folk, we move that aside and we have a different understanding of divinity, I think that's a, you can go further back. So I'll start with that.
Does that make sense? This idea that monotheism itself could have an Egyptian source? Absolutely. And this is the automatic thought that came to my mind was that, well, some people might try to argue, oh, well, the monotheism was actually influenced by some other group. And typically my research has led me to think it's really the ruling people that typically it's from the top down the influence happens.
So to argue that. you know, monotheism came from the Bible, right? Like imagine a Christian apologist trying to defend and say the Bible's right and everybody else is wrong.
Like this small people in the Levant, okay, like their ideas are going to impact the rulers and kings of pharaohs and whatnot. Or is it more likely the ruling people are going to influence the smaller by sending out decrees and telling people what to think and how to worship and what gods and all that more of a political push, which I think your book, again, plug. promotes this idea and showing.
So yeah, monotheism in some way, shape or form seems to be starting here in Egypt. And I make the case in the good Kings that it is a political push by Akhenaten that this monotheism is very useful politically because it's like a litmus test of who's with you or who's against you. It's a very black or white ideology.
And that's extraordinarily useful for Akhenaten in the short term. Then it goes away. Then it comes back.
But then, yeah, but then we have to bring the Jesus Osiris thing into it and work. Yeah, well, I mean, maybe we take a fast detour through the prophets too. When I'm reading about the prophets, they sound very black or white.
They sound very like you're either for Yahweh or you're against him. And in some of the language, I love the scholars who are starting to point out. I'm not saying I love the language itself, but how vivid, gruesome, sexually violent the God is. in the biblical text toward his own people through the prophets, which to me, it's just, these are men and their ideas that are projecting how God is. Um, but it's like, holy smokes, it's very black and white in many ways going down all the way into eventually new Testament literature.
Um, yeah. So the connections, it's not that crazy because you have Moses coming out of Egypt. You have the Sinai connection for the 10 commandments. You have.
Joseph and Mary going into Egypt when they're fleeing Herod. Egypt is a place of constant connection with the Levant. And they're so close.
The two peoples are very often intertwined in terms of ideology and politics. And that's not... That's not a crazy thing to say.
It's not only like a fact for the, like Julius Caesar, right? And like his company and what happened with all the drama with the emperors. I mean, the beginning of the empire, Roman empire, but also, you know, we have the translation of the Hebrew Bible into the LXX here in, I think it's in Alexandria, Egypt, where they're doing this most likely at the, at the library. But there's a constant communication, as you say, going on from Egypt to this area.
So the idea, the question I have, I guess, leading up to this is, is the Osiris mythology still around at this time? Is it still floating around? People still believing in something like this? And would it have been relevant?
So I'm not going to get into, so I'm not a New Testament scholar and I'm not going to pretend to be. And there are people that are doing that work and there are people that know their gospels inside and out. They're accepted gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then there are people that know the apocryphal gospels, Gospel of Thomas, which has an infancy of Jesus, for instance, and other gospels, right? And many of these found written in Greek, sometimes Coptic in Egypt on papyrus.
And so I'm not going to focus on that kind of minutia. There are wonderful scholars who can do that. But what I do want to do is focus on how these religions are.
they have very similar ideas about what divinity is and how divinity works. And the first thing I want to start with, because I made little notes, Derek made little notes, is this idea, like think of this, the idea that God is human enough to be killed, right? That's weird.
And the idea that you have that, so for Jesus, we're like, well, yeah, he was like human and everything. And, you know, placed on this earth. put into Mary. We'll get to that. But put in there as a human.
And so it's possible for him to be murdered, sacrificed. He can lose his life. And then through that transformation, become something greater than he was before.
All of that has an antecedent in Egyptian philosophy and religion with Osiris, who, despite being a god, could be killed by his brother Seth, hacked up into pieces, those pieces spread out all over. Egypt so that he could not reconstitute. But how many other divinities can be killed and murdered? Does that happen to the sun god? No.
Does it happen to Seth? Can he be killed and murdered? No. Does it happen to any of these other divinities?
It's really interesting that it's just this one god that can be killed and then through that rebirth become more than he was before. And then both of those divinities, this is another really cool parallel. are connected with a harvest. Now, what does Jesus say when he tells his followers, you know, eat this bread.
I am this bread. And Osiris is the wheat. He is the wheat.
And there are these, and everyone can Google this because it's super fun. There are these things in Egypt, they call them Osiris beds, like a bed that you lie in. And, and they take a bed of earth.
Like think when you order from Amazon or something, some little herb kit. And they send it to you and it has like little fake earth and it's got the little seeds and you water and you put it by your windowsill and you're like, oh, I have basil or whatever. But the Egyptians did this and they put these things in tombs. They would make a little little chia seed kit and they would put it out in the sun.
And as soon as the green sprouts came, they're like, got it. And they would put that in the tomb with the dead person. And then the dead person could be regenerated.
But the dead person was like grain. The dead person was. They are like Osiris. They are reborn seasonally like the harvest.
So both now Jesus doesn't say I am the wheat. I am the harvest. But he's like, eat this bread. Remember me, drink this wine. These are yearly commodities that that are harvested once each year.
Right. Then you keep all your flour and then you continue to make your bread, harvest all your grapes. You ferment it.
You continue to drink the wine. And he identifies with these commodities. And so both of them are harvest gods.
They are Dionysian harvest gods who must die and be reborn. And not every divinity dies and is reborn. So it is part of that rebirth cycle.
And I've got more notes, but you jump in and let me know what you think about that. I don't want to step on your notes. So if there's something I say, you go, oh, I got it right here.
Then cut me off and jump in. I love what you're saying here because the objections I've heard from those who are trying to go, well, this is agricultural, whereas this isn't. And when I'm reading the New Testament, I'm seeing what you're seeing. I'm not saying he's an agricultural, continual, cyclical, dying and rising deity.
I am saying, however, if you notice the ritual practices of Christians, yearly they practice the ritual of resurrection through Easter. They yearly practice the... birth, right?
And while it's not cyclical in maybe the exact same way it is in Egypt with Osiris, it is cyclical in memory, in practice. And so I find it ironic how there's this quick, it's not identical, therefore it's not this, stop the comparison because it's our belief. Right. Don't touch our sacred belief. This seems to be a big problem, I find.
Remember the word pagan and what it is. Pagan is an invented, I mean, it just means, my maiden name, or my mother's maiden name is Pagano, which is wonderful, but it means like peasant person. It means my Italian side is just a bunch of peasant people. But to call somebody a pagan is to call somebody a country bumpkin, a stupid farmer. And to then take all of these religions and say, oh, these polytheistic religions are just pagan.
You are... othering something. You have to differentiate yourself from these things.
So even though you are taking the winter solstice and putting the birth of your Lord on that day, or you're taking the spring equinox and you're putting the resurrection of your Lord on that day, you still want to differentiate and say, no, no, we're not doing that. And the creation of the Bible as we know it is a process of differentiation. So there were many more things in there.
that made these connections more explicit. There are many Gnostic discussions that make these, from Egypt, that make these comparisons much more explicit and understandable for people, but they need to be extracted from the text so that people can say, oh no, we are different. And here's another interesting comparison. You know, I mentioned that Osiris is killed by Seth.
Seth is, I mean, that's a really interesting one because Seth in many ways can be identified with Yahweh. almost directly with Baal, with the storm god, with the god of sandstorms and windstorms and great anger and destruction. And you do what I say or the highway. And this Sethian image, this is what murders Osiris. And it's a little before this time that Seth is actually demonized in Egypt.
And they start to go around, polytheists start to go around. and remove, chisel away Seth's image from temple spaces and start to see Seth as a kind of devil already anticipating Christianity before Christianity is even a thing. So this idea of there being one source of ultimate evil is something that the Egyptians arguably invented as well, and that also spread out into the world. So this idea of having ultimate good, you do have the other side of that coin and you have the ultimate evil. And Seth, Think of him.
He has these weird ears and this weird look. Or he can be the ibex. He can be an antelope and have horns. And so this idea of a horned devil-like figure, this demonization is part of the pagan process. And it's a process that takes hundreds of years.
And so we shouldn't expect these things to be just created as a fait accompli. It takes a long time to make these differentiations say, no, no, we're not like this. And think of politicians who... or president's administration who follows another president.
And he's got, he, it's always a he, right? He's got to say, I'm not like the president before me. I'm not going to do those things.
And so there's a very overt differentiation from what occurred before. Christianity must do this, but they must also speak to people's hearts and minds and help them to connect with the divinity that feeds their souls. And so they're playing a very dangerous game and walking a very fine line, trying to connect with people with what they need and want.
in terms of a yearly cycle that is all around them in their world of harvest and resurrection, while at the same time saying, oh, but that's of the devil, and this is of the light, and come and follow us. And everything's about money and politics, because money is taken from temples and put into churches. And it's a shift that is happening during the Christianization of the entire Fertile Crescent, Middle East, Levantine, Egyptian space.
Goodness gracious. There's so many good things you said. You know, recently been in dialogue with some of these Christian apologists who are kind of wanting to make Jesus special and nothing else like it, or try to divorce him from anything analogous. So we ended up emailing, having an email sent to Egyptologist Mark J. Smith, and I'm sure he's a wonderful Egyptologist.
But we asked him about comparisons, and his response kind of, to me, made me think he isn't really aware of even the New Testament narrative very well, because he kind of made it sound like he thinks Jesus rose himself from the dead. And he said, but in the Osiris myth, it was actually Isis who magically, through some type of ritual, Jesus resurrects Osiris from the dead. And I go like immediately in my mind, I went, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The new Testament. I mean, you might find a passage or two that tries to imply that Jesus had the power, but like, it's God who raised Jesus from the dead. So it wasn't Jesus who raised Jesus from the dead, but like, it's like his father who then raises him with Numa, by the way, which is a whole nother, like it's, it's a stoic kind of idea that is. a physical entity that gives him presence because he's not flesh and blood like paul says in it's it's it's a pneuma body like a glorified pneumatic body later you kind of see it more solidified in the flesh and luke and john where he's like eating and drinking and but the question i have is first on that it sounded like he kind of didn't know that so he didn't think to compare them mark smith of oxford the mark smith of oxford yes is it brilliant Egyptologists and he knows his shit.
So he knows, he knows what's going on. Um, I would, I would say that most Egyptologists aren't going to touch this topic because it's, it's a scary topic. It's, it's a topic that makes people angry.
Um, the direct connections are hard to make. Um, and so, no, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to talk about that. And that doesn't surprise me. It's fine.
Um, Mark Smith specializes in Osiris and he, he, he's, he's written a book. I think it's called remembering Osiris. I have. I have to look and see what the title is.
And he focuses on the idea that the dead Egyptians call themselves Osiris. So if I died in ancient Egypt in the New Kingdom, like the 18th dynasty or something, and I had a coffin made for me, my coffin would say Osiris. And then it would put my title, a professor at UCLA.
Like it would actually do that. And then it would put my name. And I would be identified and associated with the god Osiris, not Hathor, not Isis, even though I'm.
female. And Mark Smith and I've gotten into little debates, very friendly, very friendly debates about whether or not I as a dead person have actually become Osiris or whether I am of Osiris. And Mark Smith is of the opinion that I have not syncretized with Osiris, but I am of and kind of connected to Osiris, even though there's no preposition N in the text always. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't.
I am more of the opinion that I meld with Osiris during my death transformation. Even I as a female must become Osiris because it is only through Osiris that I find my transformation. And I've written a number of articles on this and you can find them on my webpage, which you already pointed out. And I actually argue that females have to have a kind of gender shift or even sexuality shift, become masculine, and then... be reborn as a male Osiris figure because it is only through, and I'm going to get a little sexy here.
Is everyone prepared? I love it. Okay. So the Egyptian creation mythology is very different from a Christian or Judeo-Christian Islamic creation mythology. Egyptian creation mythology is incredibly sexual.
It's nuts and bolts, male and female. And here's how it works. The God Atum. who is like the proto-sun god, is floating around in darkness, infinite space, infinite materiality, hidden space.
And he then wants to create himself. And to create himself, he gains an erection. He uses the female part of his self, the geret, ends in a T, like Smurf, Smurfette, right? He uses his feminine part, his hand. He has sex with himself.
He creates an ejaculation. That awakens himself that he then in some texts actually brings into his mouth like an autofillatio. It's complicated.
And then he he sneezes and spews out his own essence to create a void of empty space filled with light. Then in this empty space filled with light, he then he then creates it with that spewing and spitting. He's created two divinities who then have real sex with each other.
and create two more divinities who are the earth and the sky and then they have sex with each other and they create four more divinities who are Osiris, Seth, neftis and isis when you have the nine gods of the first creation the ennead so-called and and this is the first divine creation is it it is explicitly sexual and so autumn creates the world through that explicitly sexual way of being and then osiris who's in very many ways the recipient of this creation mythology is at the beginning at the end the alpha and the omega if you like right autumn does it and then osiris will do it as well and then osiris is there recreating himself in the same sexual manner. So the Egyptians show that when there's very explicit, if you wanted to Google like flicker images or something of Dendera roof temple of Osiris being reborn, you will find a cartoon like imagery of Osiris being dead. He's been put back together with all of his many pieces by ISIS, wrapped together into the first mummy of all of Egypt's creation.
And then he starts to awaken. And the awakening is his erect phallus. And you see that in the imagery. It rises up out of the wrappings like a Christmas tree.
It's like this beautiful thing that is erect out of him. And then you see his hand reach out, right, to the phallus. It's in the most sacred part of the temple on the roof where the sun strikes it. And then you see him acting with the hand.
And then you see Isis as a bird landing on the penis. and being inseminated to create Horus, right? And then you see Osiris rising up out of the bed.
And it's this whole series of cartoon-like figures, not cartoon in a silly way, but serial, that it's one thing to the next thing to the next thing. And you see Osiris's recreation in that seasonal way. What I'm trying to tell you with all of this and connecting it back to Mark Smith is that the Egyptians understood Atum, the sun god.
and Osiris, the grain god, the season god, to be sexually rejuvenating so that they did die. The sun died every night, went into the West and is reborn in the same sexual way. Osiris dies every winter and then comes out again with the spring season. And when a human died in ancient Egypt, they said, oh, you are like Osiris. We will name you as such.
Whether Mark Smith is right and it's Osiris of Kara or whether I'm right and it's Osiris Kara, it doesn't really matter because we're both connecting with that mythical tradition of sexual reawakening to connect to the human so that we can be reborn after death. So that is, you can't get more visceral in terms of the creation mythology. And it's very interesting. It's something that draws people in and they're like, I want to be reborn.
I will die. Humans know they will die. And in the ancient world, there is nothing more apparent. I think going through a pandemic, we realize this as well. We're closer to death now than we have been for a good hundred years as a human species.
This in the ancient world was ever present. And so to know you were going to die, to see your parents dying young, your children dying young, to have a a religion that connects with that great trauma. and pain, that ever-present human wound, and helps you to overcome it in some ways, is very powerful. And that's why I believe this Egyptian mythology was so powerful to people, and why Christianity then uses so much of this Egyptian mythology, but doesn't explicitly tell you that they're doing it. Because if they did, it would ruin it.
It would take away the differentiation. Oh no, that's not our administration. That's the old administration.
We are different, right? Yeah, and you- the in Christ, right? Which is clearly identifying with the Christ figure, becoming one with him as I am with my father.
I mean, there's some extremely, I guess the term would be esoteric, but it's like we imagine spiritual and I'm almost thinking they really think in some literal sense, they're really going to become this. And this leads to an idea that I'd love to get you to maybe tell us what you think. Osiris resurrection.
I've read some of these. these texts that sound like this is physical resurrection. Now there seems to be, and Derek helped me out.
There's a, there's a situation in here. Is it Heliopolis where he resurrects in the coffin tomb or whatever? He's justified. Or it seems like he's at least for a moment on earth resurrected, but then goes to the netherworld. Kind of like Jesus appears on earth for a moment.
And, and Christians make much to do with this, but it's like, he was never going to stick around and neither did Osiris. Is that true? Okay, I love this and I didn't even have this in my notes, but I can talk about this for a long time. This idea of resurrection being made physical is a very Egyptian thing. When you think of Egypt, what do you think?
You think of things preserved. You can go to a museum space. Like I was just at the Met last week and they brought back all kinds of things like from tombs where you have dried fruit that looks like unsulfured fruit from Trader Joe's.
It's crazy. And you've got sandals. You've got linen sheets, stacks of them.
You've got wooden things. You've got things preserved in Egypt that. are not preserved in other places where there is a rain fed agriculture.
Egypt is not rain fed. It is Nile fed. And thus where the Nile stops, it is bone dry.
And that bone dry tomb space preserves. Now the Egyptians understood that preservation. And when they placed a body in the dry desert sands, they knew that it would mummify it. Even if they didn't mummify it themselves, if they placed the body in direct contact with that dry desert sand, they would get those those mummified human remains.
And if you walk the desert in Egypt, you'll see dogs and animals that are mummified out in the desert landscape, which is extraordinary. Egypt has this idea of materializing infinity, materializing resurrection, materializing... Sorry. There's that cold we were talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fair warning, she's getting over a sickness here. It's been a bad one. Three weeks and I slept for the first time last night.
But anyway, we got a recall and we're going to make it through. But to be physically preserved is to live forever in the Egyptian sense. And rich Egyptians took this and ran with it with the invention of mummification, where you take out the organs.
You know, you make an incision on the left side. You remove the liver, the intestines, the lungs and the stomach. You dry those out.
You put those in the natron and dry them out. You dry out the body. You wrap the body like Osiris. And then you show people, I am preserved forever.
And all the poor people are like, oh, wait, I'm not preserved forever. I'm not special like that. I don't have that everlasting physical being. So to have a physical manifestation living forever, I can see how that can be a very Egyptian thing as well.
This idea that you have to physically manifest, be seen, be touched, and then you can go off into another place. But, you know, I've been in catacombs in Rome with all of the benches for the dead bodies to be laid because there was this understanding, even it got to Italy, that your body would be raised up. That to me is a very Egyptian understanding that your body itself needs to be preserved so that it can be raised up.
The Egyptians invented a very complex system of mummification so that that body could be preserved physically forever. Who else did that but the Egyptians? And this idea of the body being able to resurrect and walk around and eat and touch and speak, that's a very Egyptian notion and not a notion connected with Levantine afterlife beliefs. Right. So I would make that connection as well.
And then to take that from Egypt and then to put it into the Levant. It makes people go, oh, wow. That's it makes people's brains open up a little bit. But it's this miraculous thing coming from maybe the exotic Egypt, maybe.
But it gives a different understanding to divinity in a physicalized way that I really, really like. Wow. Yeah, that's I mean, there's so much here that you're saying. I want to I want to. I defend FGF Brandon for a second here and read a quote and tell me if you agree, disagree, what you agree on.
Maybe you think he's on the money. A crucial factor in the comparison here is that despite the vivid gospel accounts of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus, he is not related to have resumed his life on earth in contemporary Judea, but to have ascended to heaven where he was believed to live a supernatural existence. There is therefore justification for a phenomenological comparison between the deaths and resurrections of Osiris and Christ.
Each is raised to life again by supernatural means after an unjust death, but each is transformed into a new mode of being, i.e. neither Osiris nor Christ resume their earthly lives, but pass on to another world where they acquire a new status and office in which each case is that of savior and judge of the dead. The ritual identification of the deceased with Osiris is now extended to include his identification with Osiris in terms of his vindication by the divine tribunal of Heliopolis. And so as Osiris had been judged and proclaimed, I'm going to butcher this, Ma-keru?
Ma-keru. Ma-keru. True of voice. It means true of voice.
And I had justified in brackets here. The dead devotee of Osiris vicariously assumed this title, doubtless in the hope that as he participated in the resurrection of Osiris, so would he also share in his post-mortem justification. SGF Brandon, redemption in ancient Egypt and early Christianity, types of redemption, contributions to the theme and study of coherence, held at Jerusalem, 1970. I love it.
I think he's on the money. I don't see any issues with that at all. And this idea that you have this physicalized rebirth that you have to show the body in a sense and preserve the body. And yet Egyptians didn't believe that the mummies were walking around in their tombs and needing a space to eat and drink. And yet they kind of did because they gave them food and drink and would go to the tombs and make verbal offerings to give them food and drink.
But then they have in their afterlife papyri, they show. The dead are in an afterlife space, wearing their pure white garments, having passed the tribunal, having been transformed. So there is this very interesting understanding that, and let me be clear, and I think your quote really speaks to this, the transformation needs to be physical. The transformation needs a body. What happens afterwards can happen in a different realm, in a different space that is unseen, that is underworld or afterlife or someplace else.
But. But the actual transformation needs a physicality, which is why the ancient Egyptians create all these coffins that I study. And they nest them and they inscribe them and they put all these things on them.
You need the physicality of the body made into a thing with open eyes and arms and hands. And it turns you into something that can be physically transformed, worked upon, ritualized. Once you have that, then you go into the afterlife space.
And yes, Osiris is a god of the afterlife. He is the ruler, the king of the afterlife. Think of this idea of king, right?
King of the afterlife. And then Jesus physicalizes, comes, his transformation is made manifest through his body. And then Thomas sticks his hand into the wound and all of these things are physicalized.
Then he transcends into light, into the upper abode and is the judge, is the king of the afterlife. The similarities to me are striking. This is so, I'm so glad you vindicated him because we've had people try to say, oh, he wrote this in 1968. It's not even worth paying attention to. This seems to be very analogous. And this is the thing.
You're not saying how exactly genealogically, but it looks like it's definitely comparable. And there seems somehow it's found its way in. Where, how, who knows? But like, it's there.
Let me put it this way. Like if you go to Mexico City. and you see the cathedral, you go to the cathedral of Mexico City, it is built on top of an Aztec temple.
If you go to the mountain of Cholula and you see a church on top of a mountain, it's built, it's not a mountain, it's a temple with a hill of grass on it. And that church is built on that mountain. Sacred space, it continues within cultural memory to be thought of as sacred space, and it must be claimed.
And if you go to, think of a church in Rome, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. It's a church of St. Mary on top of a Minerva temple. And it's even there in the name. And they keep it, Santa Maria, Sopra Minerva.
It's wonderful, right? And you have all kinds of spaces in Egypt, in Rome, where the Christian space is built on top of the polytheistic sacred space. And it is claimed. It is extraordinary hubris, human hubris, to say that that cultural memory and that connection of sacred space between one and the other is a complete disconnect.
We have the same holiday dates. We have the same spaces. We have many of the same connections. And we're going to say, oh, no, it's wholly different. Jesus is this invented thing.
It's completely unique. No, it's not. It's all built upon what humans have already created in so many different ways.
Yeah. You have, please clip that somebody. And while you're at it, go to her website, please.
It is literally in the description. Get a copy of her books. I did have a question about heaven.
Derek, what did you think about the idea of heaven? Did you want to ask a question real quick? To the amazing Dr. Cara Cooney, everybody, just feel free to pop in here real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll just squeeze in here for a moment. Hello, Dr. Cooney. Hello there. I still have bedhead because I haven't had a shower yet today.
I have bedhead too. Disgusting person. I can't emphasize that enough. I've been studying comparative religion for over 17 years now.
I don't have any actual advanced degree or anything. I'm an autodidact. I've just done all this independently.
But I've been particularly fascinated with ancient Egyptian religion and the myth and legacy of Osiris and his resurrection and what that meant to ancient Egyptians. So I was struck long ago, years ago, at the kind of parallels, these correspondences between the Osiris myth and cult and that of Christianity, and particularly the soteriology that's involved, that Osiris'death and resurrection appears to be something of the, it's the prototype, it's the model upon which others can hope to be raised as he had been. And you find this eerily similar soteriology in Christianity as well. I think you've more or less kind of touched on this, but feel free to elaborate if you'd like. Yeah, I completely agree that it's like, you know, if an evangelical says you take Jesus into your heart, then you meld, in a sense, with Jesus and you become one with Christ, right?
This is a very Egyptian idea that you become like Osiris. Of Osiris for Mark Smith? like Osiris, melded with Osiris from my perspective. But this connection, I think, is very real so that then you can have the transformation. The idea of there being a gender shift is really interesting for the women involved.
I mean, some other things I want to, there's other little comparisons. I'm going to get my glasses on and look at my notes to make sure I get some of these things in. But think of the idea that both Jesus and Osiris are surrounded by women.
caretakers, protectors, who surround his body in its most vulnerable state of death, who stay there to mourn him, to keen, to make sure that he's cleaned and cared for. The women there to take him down from the cross to wash his body. That is ISIS-like activity. To wrap him up, to put him in the tomb, to stay there and surround him in that most vulnerable place that he is in until he can be transformed. So having those females around him, that is the womb, that is the regenerative space.
It is the hand, in a sense, as well, in the Osirian understanding. In a way, it's the Holy Spirit. It's that idea, it's that feminine aspect, that thing that is the feminine to the masculine that can help to recreate.
But the Egyptians understood that when the sun god died, he entered into the mouth. of his mother and impregnated his own mother, the sky goddess Nut, with his own future self. And that then brings up the idea of the immaculate conception, right?
Because this is, the death is the transformation in an Osirian sense, but the birth is the transformation in the Osirian sense. The idea that a birth can enter into a body without any need for a human, because the god is creating his own birth. He's impregnating himself into a female vessel. That is quintessentially ancient Egyptian. And so that also works very, very well.
Can I add something to this to get your thoughts? In the Gospel of Thomas, which is at least understood to be early, we're not sure how early, but pretty early. I go with Mark Goodacre getting into the details of scholars on this who think that maybe this gospel knows other gospels, the synoptics, and possibly John.
probably all four, either way, it doesn't matter. In it, it says, Simon Peter said to him, let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.
Now I'm not a fan of the idea, but nonetheless, it's for every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. Is that Egyptian? That's Egyptian. And I quote that in an article I wrote about rebirth, a masculine rebirth. And it seems on its surface to be extraordinarily misogynistic.
And I mean, you know, you could go there. It's a male's world. Yeah.
But it doesn't, you know, in Egypt, if a woman couldn't get pregnant, it was blamed on the man. And she was called dry because she lacked in semen in her body. And it was his fault.
So in a way, socially. In terms of repercussions, it comes back on the man. And so socially, it's not necessarily such a bad thing for the woman to have masculine rebirth imposed upon her.
And there's always a workaround. This is not a human people. This is not a people who are interested in just half of their people being reborn.
Women do become masculine in ancient Egypt from documented, probably going back to the sixth dynasty. They connect with Osiris in their funerary texts so that they can become masculine. So they can be transformed.
And every funerary text has Osiris and then the title and then the name. So there's also, I cite another discussion in, I can't remember which. Buddhist text it is, but there's a boot, the, the Lotus Sutra, I believe, and you can Google this to check me, but I believe in the Lotus Sutra. It says that those who want to become enlightened, you must become male first to become enlightened.
And that doesn't mean there's not a workaround for it. And remember, we live in a patriarchal society. Agriculture is patriarchalism. That's how it works.
Patriarchy is there, um, leading and hoarding the resources, hoarding the labor, hoarding the land. And commodifying the female, commodifying the child. And these agricultural religions of Osiris and Jesus are part of that patriarchal scheme. And we can't expect anything else. So this is why even though women are necessary to be a part of this religion of transformation, it's like, you can hold on my other book, When Women Ruled the World, where women are useful in the moment.
political moment or moment of transformation, but then they have to be shunted to the side because they don't fit the patriarchal scheme. And it's just, you know, another patriarchal wound that we inflict on our population because, lest I need to say it again, being anti-patriarchal is not being anti-man. Men suffer from patriarchalism as well.
Growing up in the Catholic church and, you know, anyone connected to the Boy Scouts, I'm sorry, men suffer from patriarchal systems. Your book spells it out, like almost like here's the instructions in history about the good kings. And if they haven't read this, don't make any judgments till you've read it, till you understand how old the political power and the struggle has been and how we're not that different today in what we're dealing with.
But we're trying. You can tell there's a shift trying to take place. And I hope it continues. Dr. Cooney, I have one more question to vindicate my friend here, Derek.
He's my brother, okay? He has made the claim, and correct me if I'm wrong, the, the, how is it? The duat or the netherworld, that it is something, it appears to me to be quite comparable to the Christian notion of heaven.
This is not a dark, shadowy place like the Hebrew Sheol or the Greek Hades, if you want to expound on that. Yeah, I love talking about the duat. The duat is everything that is inside of the sky.
in the Egyptian understanding. It is where the sun enters when he sets in the west at the 12th hour of the day. And the duat has 12 hours of its own.
And in the deepest, darkest part of the duat, in the sixth hour, the sun is reborn and is able to give off light again. And then he moves through the rest of the hours and the people who are the blessed dead. The Grateful Dead, and yes, the band got its name from these texts. The Grateful Dead are there with their arms upraised, feeling the heat of the sun in joyful celebration every time he moves through their afterlife spaces.
And you can be one of the Blessed Dead by being a moral and good person. And there is a chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead that spells this out quite explicitly. Stand before a tribunal, a tribunal full of terrifying demons and divinities. Demons, not like a devil, but a protector of the afterlife space.
And you must then profess, I have not killed. I have not ordered that one killed. I have not stolen the offerings, the bread loaves given to the temple.
I have not done this or that. And it is a whole list of things to show that you are pure and you profess, I am pure. I am pure.
I am pure. And you go through and the connections to a Christian baptism are very apt. as well, I would say.
The workarounds are very apt that you can bring a heart scarab. Everyone knows that human beings sin and commit misdeeds, but the scarab, it cleanses you. It heals you in the same way that if you receive your last rites right before death, you are cleansed.
Read your Dante. And you can go on into the next world as a pure being. So these things have very close connections, in my opinion.
And this Egyptian... Religion was in the bones of people for thousands of years. This is a very deep tradition that we're talking about. And so then when Christianity finds its way into this place, this most populous place, where people are going to work with this new philosophy and feed it into what they already know, it makes sense that these connections, these synergies would move back and forth. I want to paint one more analogy and then if you don't mind.
Some people, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know this. I'm guessing, making comparison. I do not know the Egyptian stuff. He knows more about it than I do, right? I know biblical.
But some people, I would imagine, if we're making an analogy, may not make it into the Duat. But they find their way into this place like the Lake of Fire. So I'm reading in Revelation, and the devil that deceived them was cast into the Lake of Fire and brimstone. where the beast and the false prophet are and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. I read in what we call the book of the dead.
It did in passing. There's this place called the lake of fire. What the heck is going on, Dr. Cooney?
So the lake of fire, it's interesting because the Egyptians kind of put these together, whereas the Christians separate them out. One is up high, one is below. They are separate and the earth is between, right?
But the Egyptians put it all together and lake of fire actually surrounds Osiris. And and the rings are around him. And if you look at a dead person in a coffin, you see them surrounded by a red rim series of nested coffins.
Putting the dead person into the coffin is like putting them into the lake of fire. They physicalize this stuff in beautiful ways, but the fire is then filled with the enemies of the God. And the Egyptian afterlife texts are very clear about this and they show it.
The book of the dead will say that if you are impure, You will go to a place where you drink urine and eat feces and everything is upside down. You exist in an upside down world. Or the Book of Gates shows the ungrateful dead, the bad people with heads cut off and just all mangled and tied up and completely succumbed to the power of Osiris, king of the afterworld.
But they're there as markers, as ciphers of what you will become if you do not do what is right. And. That kind of fear mongering in terms of what a person should be or should not be is very much a part of patriarchal society as well.
This you're with me or you're against me, you're in heaven or you're burning. These things are very much a part of patriarchal power moves in terms of how religion is used. And I think we can see that very clearly today in the United States with evangelicalism rising in our political culture.
I agree. Dee? Yeah, I'll just say all of this is fascinating. What I find most interesting is you're talking about how the deceased melds with Osiris, being identified with him, because that's kind of the concept you find in the Pauline notion of baptism.
One becomes identified with Christ, united, planted with him in his death so that they might be raised as he was. So I... That's fascinating. If you want to expand on that, that's fine, but that'll be my final question.
Can I add to that, just to add to specify the point that I think is interesting? When I heard Professor Smith, Egyptologist Mark Smith, mention that he didn't see this parallel because he thought Jesus rose himself from the dead instead of someone else like God, the Father. I also am reminded that baptism is literally like the act of burying oneself. It's this ritual magical practice that when I recently interviewed Robin Faith Walsh on our Paul course, which you're going to have to get when it comes out.
Literally, she says there's two things you have to do in Paul's theology, baptism and eating the Lord's Supper, which is the flesh and the blood, the sacrament. Those two things and you're in Christ. If you don't do these things, you are not in Christ.
So for those who don't think baptism is a. requirement for regeneration. You just haven't read enough to know this is what Paul's teaching.
Those two things sound like magical acts, almost like ISIS has to do magical acts for Osiris. Is there some comparison here in light of, am I stepping on your question? Okay. I want to make sure.
No, no, it's perfect because taking the bread and the blood into your body, taking the flesh and the blood into your body to make you as one with Christ would be the same way that the the deceased in Egypt is placed into a coffin and called Osiris. I do disagree with Mark Smith on this point, and I published this before, so it's no surprise to him that the deceased is becoming this thing, not forever, but for that moment of transformation. Then when they go into the next world, they're shown as male or female again. And the coffin makes this explicit. So for instance, the Egyptian nesting coffin set.
of the 19th dynasty, for instance, the outer coffin. even if it belongs to a female, is more androgynizing, more masculinizing than the inner coffin. And if you open up the nested coffin set, like say you have three pieces in there, the innermost piece shows her as a female with a white garmented dress and her like not long hair and all of her feminine things. That's the end result.
But the vehicle for her to get to that place is the outermost Osirian coffin, often with the divine beard of divinity. that she is placed within so that she can meld and identify with it. And it's kind of the opposite. If you take the flesh and blood into yourself as a Christian to meld with Christ, for the Egyptians, you placed the elite deceased into the body of the God.
You put the deceased into the coffin that once ritually activated, turned the deceased into the God himself, maybe for a short period of time, but so that then they could be reborn into the afterlife and become something. greater than themselves and then go off and be their identified blessed dead as their own name. Yeah. Is it okay that we say we love you? Like you're amazing.
Seriously, you're amazing. And thank you, man. I'm going to get, I'm going to take over. Yeah.
I'll just say, uh, thank you so much for appearing to vindicate what I've long been saying. Dr. Cooney, you have a lifelong, uh, fan and supporter in me. I will connect with you on social media.
Thank you so much. Love it. Thank you guys.
This has been so much fun. Get the book. So you don't go to the lake of fire unless you look at it in the Egyptian sense. Okay.
So questions, can we get to Q and a, if that's okay? Yes, please. I am.
Now, by the way, if you feel like there's more comparisons you need to make to get your notes, I'm yours. Let me, there's one thing that I think needs to be mentioned, maybe two, but one is that you want to look at the idea of. the mother and son, the Isis and Horus, right? Because that is the mother holding Jesus, Mary holding Jesus on her lap.
This is a very old Egyptian trope of Isis holding Horus. And Horus as the young God who inherits the kingdom, even as a child, that's so Egyptian. This idea that a child should be king and is marked as king. from that very young age. The Levant didn't allow child kings.
They killed them before they got to that. Some warlord would take the throne. But Egypt allowed children to be kings because the dynasty had to continue.
And so this notion of Horus defeating his uncle Seth through the tribunal by saying he inherits from his father and that you have this lineage from father to son, that is very Egyptian. Exactly. Exactly. So this idea of of suckling the young king, of the mother.
And this is my other book, When Women Ruled the World, this idea that female decision-making is so important to keep that young king safe while he's figuring out his way in the world. Look at the gospel. I think it's the gospel of Thomas, where Jesus doesn't understand his magical power yet and kills other children who make fun of him or get angry. I don't know if it's Thomas, but it's one of those. But he's like a superhero who doesn't know his own superhero strength yet.
Or it's like watching the omen, you know, before he realizes that he's got 666 in his head and he's like Damien. But he's got all these skills and he doesn't understand how to work it. There are texts that discuss Jesus in this way.
And he needs his mother to keep him safe. But this idea of a child God, this is, you might be like, but that's Horus, that's not Jesus. And I'm going to be like, no, we have to put these two things together because they are, this is the resurrection.
of Osiris, this Horus figure. This is what is created out of his death. And these two things in Christianity, they're like, you know what?
We want Horus too. And we want Osiris. We're going to put them together. Boom.
We got Jesus, right? But the two things are very much a part of the lineage that go from father to son. Again, a nice patriarchal sort of religion.
Wow. There's so many things to look at and analogize. And it makes me wonder about the the initial beginnings of Christianity.
If there was some early sect that literally does start from somewhere in Egypt. I mean, I'm not going to say it couldn't have been in a different geographic location because as you said, it's, it's spread its way out, but there are some scholars, I think in David Litwin, I don't want to put it in his mouth, but he sounds to, to me, he thinks Christianity really starts to rise in the second century. Like it's, and he sees Egypt like as a extremely important. initiation, like starting of the Christian movement in its various forms coming out of this area.
So you don't have to go to Egypt after Egypt and the Levant are always connected and they're always culturally connected. And I dare say ideologically connected. So there's always this back and forth in terms of thought streams and philosophies and ideas.
So, but, but yes, Mary and Joseph were in Egypt and then they. go back to the Levant and then they come back to Egypt. But Egypt is this, it is a place of safety, of refuge from dangers. It is a place where you kind of have a Petri dish for Christianity to develop in a sense. And then the other thing I wanted to mention, this is a little weird, but bear with me on this and then we'll go to your Q&A, that both Jesus and Osiris are castrated.
So let's settle with that for a little, think about it a little bit. But Osiris, all of his bits are put back together, except for his penis, which is said in the mythologies, Plutarch among them quite late, but there are other mythologies, to have been eaten by a fish and lost. And Isis must create it herself, magically, using her great magic. And there are all kinds of tales, Anubis and Bata, the tale of the two brothers, where An Osiris-like figure, when accused of having sex with his brother's wife, and he says, I would never do this. How dare you accuse me of this?
They're standing on either side of the river and they're yelling at each other. And the one brother says, you slept with my wife. And the Osiris-like figure says, I would never. And to prove it, he cuts off his own penis, casts it into the river where it is eaten by a fish.
This idea of castration, of that being a way of becoming divine. Jesus... is in the gospels sexless in a sense it's like he's not castrated like physically you don't see yes he does he does support the idea of eunuchs though in one passage it seems like he's very pro-unit but anyway i oh i don't know that and you have to send that to me because that's interesting this idea of the male nether region not being connected to him that he is somehow not of the physical sexual plane of humanity, I think is a connection with Osiris and that he needs help to, to recreate that part of himself. I think that's another thing that people could work with.
And, and I haven't seen this discussed in, in any texts, um, in any academic texts myself. So that's, that's an interesting thing to, to touch upon. Um, there's an interesting article.
This is totally, um, I just Googled it. I don't know, but it says the eunuch of Matthew 1912 has long been viewed as a symbol of chastity and celibacy, which we know the early church was big on. They factored it into some apocalyptic notion.
However, a study of ancient perspectives of eunuchs reveals a highly sexed and morally dubious third type of human. That would get us off the topic. Matthew 1912. So what I want to do is just go back here just to see what is said here. It doesn't say Jesus was, but I have heard people say maybe he was.
We don't hear him being married. We don't hear about him. Very strange, right? He is sexless in these gospels.
He is unlike the patriarchal man. He is as if castrated. Yeah.
So for there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men, and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. it. Now, it doesn't prove any...
No, but that's great. That's great. Good job, Derek. Okay, so we've discovered something live today that I think is really cool and something to focus more on and that fits very well with the Egyptian tradition.
And it may seem strange to people because you're like, wait a minute, you just said that you need the equipment to be reborn. But in a sense, if you lose that equipment... and can be magically given that equipment again, it means even a woman can become like Christ and be reborn.
So it gives everyone the opportunity to even a child to become like this, this being and to be and to be reborn. And then other little things like both Jesus and Osiris are betrayed by people close to them. One betrayed by Judas, one betrayed by Seth, but they are betrayed by people close to them. I think that's an interesting part. of the mythology.
And then, you know, just this idea, if we go back to the Horus idea, that the young... Christ or the young king, Horus, has to be kept safe from all kinds of dangers. You know, you have the Herod story of killing all the infants. Or in the Horus mythology, you have all of the scorpions and the snakes and in the marshes where he has to hide, where Isis uses her magic to keep him safe. You have to find a refuge.
Both of these things work very, very well in parallel discussion. Wow. Thank you so much for that. If there's anything else along the way that comes to mind during Q&A, feel free to rabbit trail.
These are just super chats to help support us. Again, I must mention for those who are tuning in, we got 451 people watching you right now. 451. Get the books. Oh, wrong page. Get the books.
Go to Amazon. I promise you, you will not be let down. You can also get it on Audible.
If you're driving, you're traveling, you're a trucker, you're anywhere, doing anything, working in the garden, outside mowing the grass. Doesn't matter. You can listen to the book, The Good Kings.
Um, she's got other books on, on audible as well as get the paperbacks. So that way we can have Dr. Cooney join us again in the future. There's so much to explore. So there's my little shameless plug. Camille Greger.
Thank you so much for the super chat and the support. We have a children's book at home with an Egyptian creation myth involving a cosmic egg that made me think of Orphism. Is this actually an Egyptian sources and is there a connection to Orphism?
What is Orphism? Let's all Google together. um because i don't know and the cosmic egg um is wait i'm looking up orifices um that may not be it that's that doesn't sound greek name given to a set of religious beliefs um ancient greek and hellenistic world orpheus um katabasis um several hero worships journeys dionysus i mean dionysian is yes um many would say that dionysian you And mythologies have connections to Osiris as well. They don't necessarily need them. If you have an agricultural-based religion, cycles of seasons will be important to you, and you will see death and rebirth all around you.
Even if you're a hunter-gatherer, your wild grains or wild things will come into harvest at a certain time of year, and they won't be there at another time of year. But the Egyptians had many creation mythologies, and this one is the hermapolitan creation mythology from a place called Hamun, eight town connected to the Ogdoad, the eight gods of primeval creation. You may remember when I was talking about Atum floating around in empty space, he was in the four elements of primeval creation, which are hiddenness, darkness, primeval matter, and oh crap, what's the other one?
I always forget one of these. Infinity. Aha, we got it.
So he's floating around in those four things. And then something within that chaotic matter appears. And in the Hermapolitan tradition, it's an egg and inside of that is Thoth. And you have more of a cerebral understanding of creation with the Hermapolitan Agdua.
But they can get a little subtly sexy at times as well. But yeah, that's a wonderful creation mythology. The Egyptians did not have one creation myth.
They had many. They connected them to many different divinities. Each and every one, however, is masculine in terms of who's creating. Thank you so much.
Cheryl in the chat. Thank you, Cheryl Lyle. Do you perceive the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit as a parallel to the relational nature between Egyptians and their gods? The Holy Spirit.
I mean, we could write dissertations about this and people who do Coptic Gnosticism. certainly do, because if you're, if you're looking at, and this is not my area of expertise, so I throw out that disclaimer right there, but there are Gnostic Egyptian texts that talk about the Holy Spirit in a feminine, feminine way that talk about the Holy Spirit as a breastfeeding divinity, the milk of the God, if you like. Um, I would say that the Holy Spirit is that connection between the divinity and his, and his bodily self. It is his hand, if you like.
It is his agency, that thing that can transmit from one to another. There are many ways of thinking about the Holy Spirit. When you look at, say, an Italian medieval painting of the Immaculate Conception, and the Holy Spirit is drawn as like this golden light that goes to the belly of Mary, you can see that as a masculine element, almost a semen.
An insemination moving into Mary. It is that. ejaculation that creates the next life.
For those of you that are like, oh my god, I can't believe she just said that word. For the Egyptians, that is the alpha and the omega. That is the most sacred part of their recreation mythology. Indeed, their earliest monolithic and monumental statues from the entire world are Egyptian, and they're of the god Min, who is sexually creating himself by means of his own hand.
And so if you doubt me, Just Google a min statue, Oxford, and you will find these monumental statues of the God creating himself. The penis is lost. Maybe it was made of solid gold.
We have no idea. But the hand is there wrapped around it, and he is recreating the world as we know it. And this makes us giggle.
But for the ancient Egyptians, it was the most sacred part of their cycle of death and rebirth. So it's a roundabout answer, but yeah. That was really, really well put, Cheryl.
Good question, because I'm thinking even the science of the day, as the philosophers would say, the pneuma, which they thought was physical but not visible necessarily, because you'd see the wind, breath, or the spirit blowing trees over. And they'd go, well, something physical is causing that tree to bend, because that tree is physical. So they had kind of in their stoic ideas of physicality to this pneuma. Then they also saw like wind eggs where chickens would like lay eggs and no male laid with them.
So how are they getting impregnated? It was the pneuma, the wind sperm that would literally impregnate them. And sure enough, the same language used in Luke on Mary in Greek using Denimos and pneuma, which M. David Litwa recently pointed out on an interview with me, Plutarch uses for the birth of Plato and says that the divine, the God impregnated Plato's mother.
with Greek terms, denomos and power and pneuma. So Mary's not the only virgin impregnated by a divine being through sperm, through a spiritual kind of what we would call pneuma. But it's really an interesting thing that you bring up because it all kind of connects, even though the philosophy changes, some of the notes and bolts are tweaked and whatnot, it's still... the predecessors before that we're building off of to come up with concepts.
Yeah. And the virginity part is a really interesting thing to settle on for a bit. This idea that the virginity is arguably a proof for the God's ability to create himself again. But virginity then becomes latched onto is this idea that you must be pure, not touched by another man previous. But also it becomes this this wound that women carry around.
as if having sex sullies them in some way or dirties them in some way, which would not necessarily be an Egyptian thing, but it just means that the proof of the divinity of God ends up socially harming women over a very long duration of time, still today, I would argue. I agree. Thank you so much for that.
Scott Duke says, what is the reputation of David Falkamon, Egyptologist? Comments about his misogynistic comments, Professor Stavrakopoulou. Responding to, so I don't know if you even saw any of that.
I saw it on my Twitter feed. I did. And I saw people all going nuts about it.
Oops. I don't want the basketball dude. But, you know, I don't know. Where does David Falk teach? Where is his affiliation?
Or was his affiliation? Where was it? Vancouver, I think. He got his degree at Liverpool. Okay.
And he has a PhD from Liverpool. I'm an Egyptologist living in Vancouver. And he's at the Vancouver School of Theology. To be quite honest, I don't know David Falk. And I don't know of him.
And from what I'm seeing, he's more of a Christian theologian than he is an Egyptologist. It's interesting how many people use Egyptology to then go back to their original religion and become apologists for those religions. I would say that Latter-day Saints have a tradition of doing this as well.
There's a professor, Kerry Molstein, who got his PhD at UCLA and now teaches at Brigham Young and tells everyone that the Book of Abraham is translated from the Egyptian to say exactly what is in the Book of Mormon, which is wrong. If you get the Egyptology degree, then you can say, oh, yeah, it's true. So, you know, Christian apologists or LDS apologists or whatever often will use a degree to claim certain things.
But I don't know David Falk, actually. I just I just heard his name the first time. from Twitter kerfuffle. To be fair, I don't really know him well or his work either, but I have seen him be used by Christian apologists to try and say, well, I know Egypt and I know Egyptian stuff. And he's written a book, I think on, um, on the arc of the covenant and he makes a lot to do with that.
And somehow he wants to put a lot of this as historical bedrock. So therefore this Exodus, you can rely on me to know the Exodus was a literal historical event. Just like you said, he's used in that kind of aspect to justify and prove the biblical narrative. So his main goal is not really Egyptology as much as it is, how does this prove my faith?
And so, yeah, I'm with you. It's just a way of creating authority in another field that people aren't as familiar with that you can then impose on your own field to manufacture more authority there. Whatever.
Agreed. Scott Duke, great question. M. Doug says, loving the education.
Thanks. If you love it enough, M. Doug, please give a copy of the book and leave an Amazon review. Let everybody know.
Go get The Good Kings and all the other books she has. I hope I can get some of these books and actually we can go into them in detail, just like we did The Good Kings before. Yeah, we'd love it. It'd be super fun. Absolutely.
Thank you. Max the Confessor, Derek, did your guts explode out of your body yet? I've had to put them back in.
In fact, he's been surgically removing all of my organs. weighing them on a scale actually um they weigh more than the feathers so i'm gonna have to just keep working at chipping away at that to become a better person i know i know um dr cooney you gotta help me figure out how i can get there you know huh he said it's a heavy feather too so this is bad this gotta be careful you gotta be careful scott duke again dang dr cooney you describe these things so well Oh, thank you. I try to, I try to, um, speak normal English, not use too many big words.
It is part of my jam. And, um, it's just part of, I believe being a public facing scholar is super important. And, and I try to do that to the best of my ability. Thank you for doing it.
You're good at it for real. Indo, any martyrdom in these religions like Christianity? Oh my God.
It's all martyrdom, martyr, martyr, martyrdom. Um, this idea of being sacrificed. is or self-sacrificing, right?
I mean, go back to the castration thing and this idea of the tale of two brothers. Look this up. Google this one.
Really fun. So go to your tale of two brothers and he's accused of doing something horribly immoral and he sacrifices himself. He sacrifices his own masculinity by cutting off his penis, throwing it into the river. He becomes very weak.
He melds with a tree. It's all very complicated how he becomes something else. But this idea of having to die so that you can be transformed is an essential mythology that is very helpful for us. So this idea that someone has to die for us helps us to see our own recreation, but then to make it about the martyrdom, this idea that it's a sacrifice that we are somehow guilty of causing, is interesting as well. I have to think more about that, right?
This idea that, like when I grew up Roman Catholic and we would have our Easter service, I remember we all had to speak aloud as if we were Judas. We all had to speak aloud the parts of the people saying, crucify him, crucify him. And I remember going, what the hell is this about? Why do I have to be the bad guy here? Why do I have to yell crucify him?
But apparently it's part of this play acting. This, this, um... This ritualization where we are meant to feel as if we are the guilty party so that we can then walk on our knees and pray, please, you know, forgive us. We have this ultimate sin.
Whether you have any of this in the Egyptian mythology, this idea that that you are born dirty, born wrong and you have to be cleaned. I think there's less of it. I think there's less of this. And so this idea of people having to have someone pay for their sins, we don't have that in the Osirian text. And that's a very strong and stark difference between these two theologies.
And that's the kind of thing that maybe would have made people sit up and listen and go, wait, what? And there's this idea of a right and a wrong, a devil and a god, Egyptian religion. Now, this is hard to understand.
I'm going to try to. explain. Seth kills Osiris and hacks him up into all of these pieces.
This mythology is thousands of years old, but that does not mean that Seth is the devil. Seth is power. He is physical force. He is a necessary element of the story. But Seth had temples dedicated to him.
Seth was revered for thousands of years. How do you square that? How do you deal with that? Well, part of what Christianity is doing is they're separating these things.
They're saying there is a good and a bad, and you can't have these things together anymore. And that's part of it. part of the transformation that's happening with Christianity coming into the Egyptian landscape from the Levantine landscape. And, and that's a really interesting part of the discussion. So yeah.
This is something we could always pick up later too, because I don't want you to go, it's that guy again. You know, he wants to do another show. Oh gosh.
But it's the idea of, like you said, with Yahweh equivalent to Seth. And there seems to be polemics against Jewish worship and like they got a donkey God or it looks like an ass and whatnot. And how that plays into this is like a polemic, but making their God the bad guy. And you even see some inscriptions of like a Jesus crucifixion with a donkey head on it and stuff.
And again, this precedes Christianity. This precedes Jesus as a historical figure. This idea of demonizing Seth as a donkey. as an antelope, as a tortoise, as many different animals.
He is demonized and he is sacrificed. And you can see this in temples like Edfu Temple with an image that dates to around 200 or 150 BCE, precedes the historical Jesus. And so Jesus, as a historical person, that's its own argument that I'm not going to get involved in. But whoever he was, whatever...
he was doing. One man, many men, whatever. This philosophy is already in play. And whoever Jesus was is stepping into philosophical ideas of binary ideas of light and darkness that are already being discussed by people that these two things must be separated.
We can't have these things together anymore. How people start to demonize Seth. This is a very interesting topic for me. I'd love for someone to come into UCLA and write a dissertation about.
the demonization of Seth? When does it start? 600 BCE?
500 BCE? Does it start with the sacking of Memphis and Thebes by the Assyrians? Does it start with empire taking over Egypt so that Egypt is now no longer in native control, but forever after in the hands of one empire after another?
Do they start to see the world in more starkly binary terms such that Seth cannot be a god of great power and windstorms anymore. He must become a devil-like figure. That idea of creating the devil, very new concept for human beings, that in many ways was born arguably partly in Egypt long before Christianity was fully formed, before Jesus even walked the earth. So it's complicated.
And I think of the Persian religion too, with the kind of dualistic world. So I wonder if Persia was influenced by Egypt or... Who knows? There's so much good stuff here.
Cheryl, thank you for the super chat. Is the gender transformation that took place for women in death the reason Hatshepsut was often portrayed in a masculine manner? Yes.
Really good, Cheryl. So this idea that a woman needs to be masculine to be reborn can also be equated with the idea that a woman needs to be masculine to be a king. It's a... it's more complicated than that.
There were five ancient Egyptian female kings, arguably if we include Cleopatra in this story, though she was Macedonian Greek, she may have had an Egyptian mother, we'll let her be in the group for now, but not every Egyptian female king masculinized. Really only Hatshepsut did this. So Tawassert of the 19th dynasty, she did not masculinize her form.
Neferusobac of the 12th dynasty, she did not masculinize her form. They both showed themselves wearing the dress of a goddess queen female, and then they layered elements of kingship upon themselves. They were still called king, however.
They used the term nesut or nebtawi, these different words that are associated with kingship. Because they use those words, I call them female kings rather than queens. But Hatshepsut, she has this very long reign, almost 22 years, or about 22 years, arguable, right?
But... But through the latter 10 years, eight to ten years of her reign, she shows herself as a man with like a strong jaw, with big biceps and pectoral muscles and you know even her face is masculinized, her shoulders, her body and you can see in her statuary that the very beginning she showed herself like Nefru Sobek wearing a dress, putting the Nemi's headdress on, so she was a female king and then she has this in-between phase and there's a wonderful statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. in New York made of a white limestone that shows her as a kind of androgynous female who's topless, but she has no nipples, but the breasts are hints of breasts. But is she a male?
Is she a female? How are we to understand her? And she's trying to kind of have her cake and eat it too. And then most of her statues show her as a man. And you look at them, you're like, oh, that's a male God.
But then you read the text and the text calls her the daughter of Ray, not the son of Ray. gives the name Hatshepsut, which is a feminine name, the foremost of noble women. And so it's two audiences that are being spoken to.
One, an audience that is only visually literate and needs this masculinity to feel that they are safe in the embrace of their king. And another audience that hangs out with this ruler, that knows she's female and can read this very difficult hieroglyphic text. And.
is able to understand that she's female and king at the same time and that that's okay. Hatshepsut arguably also, and I wrote a whole damn book about that. That's this one.
Oh, we're going to have to get on that. It's like a novel, this one. So it's a fun one.
But she masculinizes arguably because her co-king, Thutmose III, her nephew, child of her half-brother, dead husband, he's getting stronger. and more virile as the days go by, she's got to show some strength if she's going to be the king who's sitting in the primary seat of power. So she masculinizes as he gets stronger himself. So it's arguably a political move as well.
And just think of this the next time you go into an interview, ladies, women, you put on your pantsuit and your blocky heels and you've got your shoulder pads and you put your hair back and you don't wear a lot of makeup. and no cleavage, can't show that. And so you have to masculinize in the corporate world.
We do it every day. Think of Hillary Clinton, the first time she ran for president, she had a higher voice and then she ran again and her voice was very low. Or that Theranos chick with the low voice, right? These things that we do to masculinize ourselves, they're often felt to be necessary to play in this patriarchal world. And me being six foot, almost six foot two.
I kind of have that already. So, you know, I go to Egypt and I tower over everyone, male and female. And I kind of have that just in my body, which is helpful.
It's interesting how these masculinization themes work in today's world too. My ignorance is going to show, but I remember speaking to some scholar, because I have so many on my channel, who said something about one of the Greek goddesses. I don't know if it was Athena or... It was one of these female goddesses that she said, like, this is actually, while it's a female by name and look, is actually like a male thing. Like this was promoted by men.
This was something, and they made it look like it's female, but it's really got a male backing or support or sponsorship. I can't remember, but it's like-I would go with Athena. Athena being born from the head of Zeus, right?
So he gets-I think it was, yeah. His extension of himself. And she is a virgin goddess.
She is there as a goddess of war. So she is a feminization, just to nominalize what war is. Think of how we talk about the idea on the Capitol, I think you have an image of justice and it's a female goddess, right?
The Egyptians did this all the time. Maat is a female goddess. It's a goddess and yet it's also the concept of Maat.
And so Athena is the concept. of a masculine patriarchal physicality, that war that men impose on other people, that justice that men impose in a patriarchy. So I would put Athena in that category as well.
Another divinity that's fun to, or demon-like figure that's fun to play with in this way is the Gorgon Medusa, who was raped, I think by Poseidon, not a classicist, brutally raped and and then punished for this, this crime that she, this sullying of her body that she had no part in and turned into this frightful demon. And because she was so dirty herself, having been raped, every gaze that she gave to other people turned men to stone and kept men away from her. Which gives you an idea of what Greek culture thought of women who had been so sullied by rape. It's a brutal tale. So look into it from that feminist perspective, and I think you'll get a different.
I'm so fascinated with the feminist perspective. This is why I'm going to have you back, because there are things I, as a guy, would just read and not even notice everything. Even. one of my buddies steven nelson said in the greek uh world when they went to battle women lost their virginity by being penetrated by the phallus or penis but men saw it like it was almost a colloquial like hey i got cut in battle i got stabbed i lost my virginity in battle with to the sword so like there's things that like in in the sexual sense as you talk about from creation to mundane everyday life that are sexualized and i don't even notice it because i've just been raised in a military home you Hey son, my dad, Alpha, you know, he was a green beret.
And like, it just is, I'm blind and it's not my, I don't mean to, but when I see it, I really want to highlight it for people. Cause they're probably like me and they don't notice it. So yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
A few more here. I want to try and get through these so that you don't hate me. Uh, fascinating discussion, sending some love, uh, support and love for DD and Dr. Cooney.
Thank you, Brad. Thank you. Please get some of our books. Uh, Brad and everybody watching, the 450 people watching both on Facebook and YouTube. Conan Lee says, question, the raising of Lazarus in the form of a probably mummy or of probably a mummy.
Any thoughts or comments? And is there anything in the etymology of the name Lazarus that tied into the story? Thanks. And by the way, I'm going to make you full screen and be right back. Bear with me.
Sorry. Okay. So the, you know, I do have this in. in my notes, this idea of a rebirth and this miracle that, that Jesus is able to do to pull somebody back from the dead. And yes, he's in wrappings and he comes out of the stone mountain.
All of these things work very well from an Egyptian perspective. Again, I'm no biblical scholar, no new Testament scholar. So I don't know the etymology of the name Lazarus and here being on the screen single, I don't, I don't want to try to do that right now. But Lazarus is, you know, it's really interesting because some people, like, did you know Thomas Jefferson removed that from his own personal Bible?
Because he thought that that was a silly part of the Gospels. And he took all of the miracles out. But those miracles of being able to turn water into wine, create all of these loaves and fishes to recreate a human body. These are all things associated with that kind of Dionysian.
Osirian agricultural cult. So I think it works perfectly from an Egyptian perspective. I really do. But now let's look up, I'm going to look up the etymology of Lazarus because I don't, I don't know.
Okay. What have we got? So do you want to mention this real quick, just to throw it out? Yeah, please.
So Derek has something to just comment on. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Cooney, there may or may not. be something to this, but Lazarus, of course, in the New Testament is from the Hebrew Eliezer, and Eliezer could possibly be etymologically El-Azar.
Yeah, and I'm seeing here God has helped, God has aided, so he is helped by God, and then that would, yeah, sure, that could work as well. Yeah, thank you. So, okay, you want me to continue moving on?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Camille Greger says, how much of what Plutarch says about Egyptian beliefs in, what is this?
That's the Plutarch's text about Osiris. Okay. How much of it reflects actual Egyptian beliefs and how much is just Greek reinterpretation?
There is much discussion about this amongst Egyptologists, as you can imagine, because this is, and Plutarch is very late. We're talking about... I think...
It's like 100 CE. I'd have to check. This is just off the top of my head.
But very, very late for a religious system that had been going on for some 3,000 years already. You must know that Egyptians to this very day do not like talking about negative things in a direct verbal or written manner. And so every time the Osirian cycle of death and rebirth is discussed, it is done so through euphemisms. through around the, you know, around the bend kind of discussions.
They'll say things like in the pyramid text, like the day that Osiris fell. something like that. They'll use the passive voice.
They will not say directly what Seth did. They will not say anything about the killing directly. They won't say anything about the cutting up of the pieces of the body, the body into pieces directly. They'll only talk about the end result as a miracle.
And then you have to infer what's actually happened to Osiris. This is a typical Egyptian thing. It's so Egyptian that We have this in Herodotus that when a body was mummified, the person who made the incision on the left side, the priest, was chased out by the other priests who threw things at him and called him names because he was the one who was harming the body.
They must have traded off this role because not everyone wanted to have shit thrown at them all the time, right? As they're mummifying the body. But someone had to be the bad guy. And the person who made the incision on the side of the body to remove the organs was the Seth.
was the bad guy and had to be treated with that kind of violent propulsion out of one's midst, you know, get out of this space. And then they would probably cleanse themselves and take a bath in the sacred lake and come back in and mummify the person again. But this idea of what Seth did is so problematic, but so essential that you mention what happens after, but you don't mention the moment. And it's an interesting thing that Christianity... on the opposite side of that focuses on the moment it focuses on the betrayal it focuses on the crucifixion in excruciating detail that that christianity shows that the bloody christ right that this this cross this this symbol of roman persecution that had probably killed millions hundreds of thousands we don't know how many people romans killed with crucifixion but way more than one dude and way more than the three dudes that were killed along, you know, the two others with Jesus.
This was a symbol of great pain that people were using. And to use that symbol in many ways is un-Egyptian. And it's no surprise then, in my mind, that Coptic Egyptians, Egyptian Christians, do not use the cross as their symbol, but rather use the Ankh sign. Very Egyptian. ancient Egyptian symbol of life.
And they reject talking about the pain and the murder and all of these things so directly. They would rather focus on the life and the rebirth. And it is other places where arguably, geographically, they're much more competitive, places where more destruction happens on a repeated time scale, where where temples are burned down and empires mow over people with impunity, there the cross is embraced.
People are exposed to that kind of violence on a daily basis. And thus the cross is something they really connect with, but not in Egypt. So getting back to Plutarch, Plutarch is the first one, and he's not Egyptian, to write down what's actually going on. And he tells you in the text, you know, I talked to the priest, they didn't want me to put this in, they didn't want me to put pen to paper and write this down, but I'm going to tell you.
what they told me. So there is a verbalization of this, but people talked around it. And they don't want to actually touch this most painful part of the story directly. And when you're in Egypt, people are still this way.
So you don't want to talk about somebody's sickness directly. You talk about somebody's sickness, may they be healed, may they be healed. You say something like that.
But if you hear that, you know that person is really sick. and something's really bad. But it's just a way that this culture has of touching upon the painful by touching around it, but not directly on it. So how legit Plutarch is in some ways, we'll never really know.
We'll never really know. But you could look at Apuleius'golden ass, and you can get a lot of information from the Roman understanding of the Osirian cycle, because that's what the Isis cult is in a sense. It's Isis as the front for the Osirian cycle.
You can get a lot of that information through Roman sources because they're not afraid of writing down what is so difficult for the Egyptians to talk about. Especially when they're crucifying people left and right. Daniel Whitaker, around Ramesses III, pastoralism is introduced into Egyptian religions. This coincides with the Scythians entering the Levant.
Is this influence major? So I don't know about how pastoralism would be introduced into Egyptian religion with Ramses III. Daniel, can you maybe give us a little more info here?
Because Seth... He's a god with red hair. He's a god of the red land. He's a god associated with pastoralism, arguably.
He's a god of the desert. He's a god of the Bedouin nomadic peoples that move from place to place. And Seth has been a part of the schema from the very beginnings.
He is obliquely mentioned in pyramid texts and other kinds of things. I'm not sure about Ramses III, and maybe you're talking about, because you have here Scythians. It's not the Scythians who are entering the Levant. Maybe you're thinking of Sheridan or Shekelesh or some other sea peoples who are entering the Levant, people of the sea. And then maybe you have more Greek-style religion coming in, if the people of the sea are actually coming from the northern Mediterranean.
Maybe that's kind of a Libyan. uh, sort of understanding. Maybe that's what you're talking about, but I'm not sure.
I just want to tell everybody, thank you all for the super chats. No more super chat questions. Um, because I really want to wrap things up for her.
So she's wanting to come back. Um, like I told you before, people will get excited and you can tell there's some really thoughtful questions. I just don't want to leave anybody hanging. So if you're super chatting from this point forward, it's only just showing love and not. making us have to answer something which takes time.
I do want to have you back, Dr. Cooney, because we've got to read some of your other books. So Vesper says, Hi, Dr. Cooney, is there anything you could say about Egyptian mystery schools in relation to Akhenaten, Osiris, and Christianity? I mean, damn, I wish I could.
Akhenaten's religion, and for more about Akhenaten, you should look at my most recent book, The Good Kings, where I talk about Akhenaten, and I actually compare. his political use of that binary monotheism to some of the things that we deal with in today's politics. And you can imagine, you're like, damn, you really did that? I'm like, yes. And that's why the book has three and a half stars on Amazon, because it pisses people off that I say these things so directly.
It's really powerful though. So you should look there. What happens to what Akhenaten invented?
Where does it go? How is it taken into people's souls? How is it changing Egyptian polytheism? These are questions that Egyptologists have asked for some time. And I would say that Akhenaten's reach after his death is quite long because the Egyptians then start to create a kind of henotheistic understanding of divinity.
They'll have a text post Amarna, post Akhenaten's time that says all gods are... are three. And then they'll say that one God is the head, one God is the body, and one God is the spirit.
And then that means that all gods are one, in a sense. And there is this understanding that you can take the multiplicity of the polytheism and put it into one source. And this kind of theological, mystical understanding of Egyptian religion does continue in the Ramessid period through all kinds of theological discussions, glosses of the Book of the Dead. um glosses of all kinds of theological traditions what that meant for the initiated unfortunately we'll never know because initiated priests in a mystical tradition are not going to write a book that says step one this is how i became this step two it's mystical initiation that you're not supposed to know about it is shielded from our gaze so you know that these things existed and that these these priests were initiated into traditions of of profundity you and great age and arguably power. And how that works, we can only just try to glean the very, the bits that we can from the texts that are left behind.
And many of those texts, because of preservation, are afterlife texts. So a lot of what we have preserved from Egypt are rituals about the afterlife, Book of Caverns, Book of Gates, Books of the Underworld. But there are many other books that talk about the 12 hours of light during the day, and those maybe aren't as well preserved. But how do you understand a mystical tradition coming out of that? And then if you have this deep mystical tradition, when Christianity enters into Egypt, and you all of a sudden get this extraordinary Gnosticism, this gnosis of people trying to understand the very nature of divinity itself.
And this... cultural memory and cultural preparation is there embedded in the Egyptian consciousness and it creates a different kind of Christianity. And if you want, you can get to know Coptic Christianity, which I think is a nice way of understanding that more mystical gnosis.
Again, I'm no Coptic specialist, and I would encourage you to look to others and not to me. I'm an Egyptologist of bronze and late bronze Egyptian data streams. That's my jam.
Wow. One more question? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you. quick if you can, because we're getting close to the end. Here's one more question. Dr. Cooney, I just wanted to get some clarification on the idea of Egyptian resurrection.
If I understand you correctly, the mummified body, I suppose that stayed in the coffin, but what was raised up was some new kind of physical manifestation. Is that the correct understanding? This is a tough one. Because we don't want to say that the Egyptians are so simplistic as to think that they needed this physical body to be reborn. And if they didn't have it, they couldn't be reborn.
However, and I just wrote a book about this, a very short book with Oxford University Press, and it's called Coffin Commerce, because I'm a coffin specialist and I'm all about, I'm all about the coffins, right? And the coffin was arguably only meant for only 5% of Egyptians. could afford such a thing.
A nested coffin, three pieces of wood, wood which is extraordinarily scarce in Egypt, and you're going and it's pieced together from all of this wood plastered and painted and inscribed with the name of the dead associated with Osiris. Let me put it this way, a lot of what we understand about resurrection of the dead for Egypt is about dead rich people that they want us to see, that they want us to understand. What do rich people do in society today or yesterday?
They differentiate themselves from the rest of people. They do so materially. They do so through their clothes, in our case, cars and watches and all kinds of things, through their houses, through their yachts or whatever. In the ancient world, they did so through clothing, through homes, through boats, but they also did so through death. So if you're a dead rich person, And you are showing your community, say you're a wealthy landowner of Middle Egypt, and you own tracts and tracts of land, and everyone's working for you as a kind of serf, and you show your body preserved, organs preserved, body wrapped up, it's covered with this gilded stuff, you've become a god, you are manifesting that social separation to thousands of people who are watching your funeral.
You are creating the... Social separator par excellence. The best way of saying, oh, you guys, not only am I for generations over you and my father before me and my grandfather and so on and so forth, but my body as an ancestor will be divinized and will live on in this physical material space for you to come to my tomb and talk to and connect to for generations to come, if not forever.
You set yourself up as a saint in the land through this mummification. Now. Think of how, if you grew up Catholic like I did, you go to Italy for the first time, and you go to a church, and you see, say you're in St. Catherine's church, and you see her skull and the flesh, and she's there up on the altar, and you're like, oh my God, that's St. Catherine. And there's her physicalized body. And then you learn more about sainthood, and you're like, holy crap.
The way that you become a saint, one way is to show the incorruptibility of the body, that your body does not rot. that your body is opened up and they look at the priest, look inside, they're like, oh, the body is still intact. It's a saint. This idea of the body lasting is you are touched by God.
You are separated socially from everybody else. You have created something different. Does that Roman Catholic idea of sainthood come directly from ancient Egyptian ideas of the body being preserved for the rich who set themselves up as the blessed dead to whom?
to whose tombs people come to ask for blessings and connect with the next world. I would say there's a high likelihood. I don't see why not because cremation, right? Cremation was a big thing in the Greek world.
Why are they doing this? So, yeah. We don't have bodily preservation like that in Italy. It's a rain-fed agriculture.
Things get wet. This idea of the body being preserved is a very Egyptian notion that can really only happen in this desert place with a river agriculture. So what is raised up to live on eternally in the netherworld? The well, this is the Christians argue about this, too.
And early Christians argued about this as well. So you have this idea that you must not break down the body, that the body must be intact in you. That's why you have all these catacombs that take up so much space and people all have to be laid out and the body has to be there because the body needs to physically resurrect. Right.
And then people would tell themselves these things like, yeah, but we can't mummify because that's too much like the rich Egyptians. So we're not going to do that. We're just going to wash it, but then it's going to rot.
And when they go into, into the catacomb, They see the rotted bodies. They see the skeletons in front of them. And then they have to then deal with that and say, well, what does that mean? What gets risen up?
Well, then God will fix it, right? God's going to fix it and he'll give you your whole body back again. And you can read all kinds of discussions in Catholic catechisms, et cetera, about how this is going to happen. But you have the same issues with the Egyptians. You know, the Egyptians were not so facile to believe that they actually needed their body in the afterlife.
What? And I've argued this in some of the articles that are there on my website, is that what the physicality is, is that it's the connection to this world. It's the means of connecting the living here with the next world. There's a wonderful and kind of macabre practice that the ancient Egyptians engaged in, which is called animal mummification.
And so you would go to a temple of Thoth, for example. And you would buy a mummified ibis. And that ibis you would have carefully wrapped and you would order it. You would be like, okay, I want an ibis.
I want him clothed in gold leaf. And I want him in a coffin that's of sacred cedar wood. And then you buy that from the temple. And your payment is going to buy you a connection to that divinity.
And you having access to that dead bird, because that bird was grown on that temple land. and was then sacrificed by a priest and then mummified and then consecrated and then your name was attached to it now you have a connection to that dead flesh and bone and by having a connection to that physical material you can now send yourself your essence your prayer your wishes into the afterlife with the spirit of that dead thing you have a conduit you have a connection and it's the physicality of that dead thing that gives you that connection so I don't want to say that the Egyptians are so primitive that they would believe that they needed the physical body to live in the afterlife. I don't think so. But you need the physical body to maintain a presence with the living in this life, to be that blessed dead.
And there's ambivalence about this in the Egyptian text. There's one late period text that says about a dead woman, and I can't remember her name right now, but it's a wonderful late period text that says you are... You are thirsty even though we give you water.
You are hungry even though we are offering bread and it's right there next to your body. So there is ambivalence, confusion, anxiety about the system that they've set up. And I talk about this in that book that I mentioned, Coffin Commerce, where I say that the physicality of Egyptian resurrection or Egyptian afterlife beliefs is as much of a trap as it is a salvation because it creates a cognitive Trap where you're like, oh my god crap if I need a body to be reborn But my body's gonna break down and have to mummify But then if this religion leaves this space and it goes in a place where mummification is impossible like the Italian Peninsula Then what what am I supposed to do? How do I then square in my mind that I need this physical body even though it's not going to last And and this trap of physicality which works so well for the rich people in the short term for the long term of this Christian religion becomes an anxiety-ridden problem that theologians are probably still writing about. Because what do we hear?
Can you be cremated and be a Catholic? Do you have to be put into the ground? How do these things work? How you are buried is very important, right?
Like the Muslim faith says that you have to be put into the ground. The dirt has to be on your face within three days, right? So how do you square this with lack of space, lack of resources, lack of land?
What do you do? And all of these discussions are being had. So something that has maybe a very socioeconomic purpose of social separation and saying, I am now your saint, as was my father before me, of these lands becomes something when everyone has access to that kind of theology, a real problem for people as they try to work through it. So, I mean, obviously there's more than there's books one could write. Yes, I imagine.
And it's probably not one size fits all in terms of the ideas of the afterlife. And that's what you write on, specialize on. I want to blast through these here, if you don't mind, just so that you don't hate me. Yeah. I asked everybody not to super chat anymore.
So please, I am sorry I missed this live. Such an interesting concept. Did some of Jesus'teaching, like caring for the sick and poor, an Egyptian Seth concept before Jesus?
Oh, hells yes. So for this, I would quickly say, look at a Horus Sippus, C-I-P-P-U-S, Greek word, the last one. And you'll see Horus as a child.
standing on a crocodile who should be eating him up. And he's holding on to serpents and scorpions and all of the most dangerous creepy crawlies of the marsh. And he is unhurt. And people would pour water on such a sipis, a stela, and they would collect that water and they would give it to their sick children. They would connect their sick children with that Horus that is unharmed by all of those dangers.
So this idea of healing is very much connected to a young Jesus figure in the Egyptian mythology. Yeah, I would definitely. Yes, there you go.
I would definitely make that connection. And, you know, the Horus, the young. Jesus, if you like, escaping to the marshes, which is very dangerous to a child who could be snatched by a crocodile or a hippo or whatever, that he is unscathed and unharmed, that's a miracle. And that's his power.
And then you connect that with this Osirian Jesus idea that can then cure the sick child. These miracles are connected, I would say. Absolutely.
Thank you so much for that. Camille, your hot take on the Exodus. Do you think there are some historical events behind it? Canaanites revolting against Egyptian subjugation in Palestine? Hells yes, again.
So I'll say that there is absolutely a connection between the Exodus as it is written in the Hebrew Bible and historical circumstances on the ground. You didn't expect me to say that, did you? I actually think there is a cultural memory in some way to something. But yeah. I mean, let me put it this way.
The. Bronze Age collapse is what happens after the Ramesses. The Bronze Age collapse is the death of Pharaoh.
It is the fall of his army. In an abstract way, it is the fall of everything. And it is a resurgence of a multiculturalism in Egypt. And the kings who rule after the Ramesses are not Egyptian. They call themselves chiefs of Ma.
They are Libyan. They are from elsewhere. And so You have, if you look at, if you pull back from the story and you don't discuss the Reed Sea versus the Red Sea or Pharaoh's army and look for his weapons and all that stupid stuff.
How many millions of people, the whole nine. Silly. But you see it as a connection back and forth between Levantine peoples in and out of Egypt. We know that that was happening.
You know that Merneptah did invade the Levantine areas and take many live captives back. We know that that was happening. We know that Levantine peoples were finding their way into government. And were very important.
We know that was happening. We know at the end of the 19th dynasty, there was a king of the south who was called Amun-Mesu and was called Mesu for short. And he was contesting Seti II.
And those things are there. So there's all kinds of cultural memory that you can connect with the Exodus. But throw out the specifics of the story, trying to prove those specifics, prove the big picture analysis, and then you've got it. It's not a problem at all.
Yeah. And, but you know, the, the problem with doing that for them, they have a whole system of baggage of infallibility, inerrancy literally happened because they need it. They need it to, you know, somehow bolster their claims. Constellation Pegasus, do modern Egyptian Christians avoid the cross? I think, yes, I'm going to, again, I'm not a Coptic specialist, so I'll have to, I would have to research this, but they avoid certainly the Latin cross that was used as a Roman symbol of execution.
Remember my... my son, I haven't brought him to church. I'm not, I'm a fallen Catholic.
And the first time I brought him to church to hear somebody sing in a choir, he was only six years old. And he said, this, this is my son. He said, this is stupid. Why are we in a place that worships a device of execution? He said that.
And, and for him to, and I was like, oh my goodness, who are you? Where did you come from? And I've never brought you to a Catholic church or any church before.
How are you knowing how to say this? And I was like, damn straight. You're exactly right. But it's a very interesting thing that Coptic Christians do avoid that symbol of execution. It is too painful for them.
They don't want to touch on that wound directly and instead focus on the Ankh cross, a symbol of life. And I'm sure there's much written about this. So I would get on the Google Scholar train of that one and see what you can research out. It reminds me of the movie Life of Pi, where the young Pi goes into a Catholic church to drink the holy water. They dared him.
And then he goes in and he's like, why do you worship a guy on the? on the, on a cross who's dying. And that's, you know, and he's like, well, we have faith. And he says, well, why?
And he's like, stop asking questions. We just believe, you know, like, yeah. Thank you for that. Drugs for robots.
What was the grand meta narrative eschatology of the Egyptians? How does the end of their world compare contrast with the Christian? The end of the world is always avoided.
The end of the world is a pop fist, a peppy. Eating the sun, destroying the sun in the sixth hour of night. It would be the sun not rising again. There being a sunless day.
And the Egyptians would never explicitly put that into writing, but it would be the negation of the sun's recreation of himself. So essentially the, the end of the world for the Egyptians would be Jesus not rising again. It would be, it would be something that you can't even mention.
So that's why you have. Who is on the boat to kill Apophis? This is very important. Who is on the boat to kill Apophis?
Osiris is right, or the sun god is right behind him, not Osiris, sorry. Osiris has melded with the sun god. So the sun god is just giving off his first new light.
So Osiris and the sun god meld together as divinities. New light is born. The sun needs Osiris'death and rebirth himself to be reborn. And then at the front of the bark, with his spear, To kill Apophis is none other than Seth.
Seth's violence is essential so that the sun can rise again. So he's good in this. He's good. Okay. And when Horus and Seth are contending with each other over who will become king next, who is on Seth's side?
The sun god. He's like, I go for Seth. He's always kept me safe.
That's the dude that I want to be king. And everyone's like, but he's not the son of the king. Horus is the son. of Osiris, he must be king next.
And the sun god is like, Ray is like, I don't know. I like Seth. He's always there for me, even though he melds with Osiris to be able to give off new life.
And the Egyptians are very clear about this in the Amduat texts, where they show the corpse of Osiris and the light of the sun god melding. It was surrounded by protective serpents. And then he's able to shine again. And then they move into the sixth hour.
It's in the sixth hour, all of this that happens. And then Seth kills Apophis. So it is that violence of the devil that somehow, that will become the devil, that somehow can stave off the end of the world, which is a very patriarchal thing, in my opinion. How many patriarchs do we see that have wet dreams about the apocalypse to come so that they can control all the women? and have all their AR-15s and make their own bullets and whatever it is they want to do.
I mean, it's that sort of fantasy, right? So that's, yeah, I would make that connection. In some ways, that Seth is something we all want to be in a patriarchal society. Thank you so much for that.
DDR for the super sticker. Thank you. I didn't see a comment.
Carlos says, how plausible is it that the Hellenistic era Egyptians were at all exposed to Buddhist missionaries or perhaps Sanskrit texts. I don't think that's crazy. All kinds of things were happening. There's all kinds of connections when the world opens up.
And India is just across the way through the Red Sea and around Persian Gulf. I mean, you can get there. You can take a craft and move through the wadis of Egypt and get into Egypt. So I'm not going to say that these things didn't happen. Whenever we say, oh, no, there couldn't be these connections.
And then you're like, wait, South Indians are the Australians. And you're like, oh, wow. And they've been there for 50,000 years.
These things can, it's not necessarily a back and forth transfer of information, but you can have connections. And don't we have Buddhist imagery in, like, I think it's in a Swedish Viking burial or something like that. There's a small little stone that has some sort of Buddhist symbolism. I believe in a Viking burial.
I mean, that's much later, obviously, but all kinds of things are possible. Yeah. There's all sorts of stuff. I really appreciate you. I want to give a plug before we go.
And once we do our outro, please give me just a minute after to talk with you. Please go right now. I've posted this multiple times in the chat. There's 550 of you. Please show some love.
Dr. Cooney can use our help to make her think, all right, the headache was worth it. I'm going to come back and hang out with him again and do another podcast down the road. Here's her website.
I just posted it in the chat. I will make sure that we also put this in the comment section below. You can go on Amazon and just type in her name, Cara Cooney. You'll find her books. We're going to cover the other books too.
We did one on the good kings. I plan on doing on all of them, including even your publication that you did in the academic publication. I want to dive into all of this. How can people help you? Oh yeah, definitely go look for, look for the books.
I also have my own tiny, tiny little podcast, nothing like Myth Vision. Just a tiny little thing. It's called Afterlives of Ancient Egypt.
And it's me and a UCLA graduate student and emerging scholar, Jordan Galizinski. And we chat about everything we have experts on. We talk about all things Egyptian. And we've just recently talked about how to travel in Egypt, what kinds of things to bring, where you want to stay, what kind of restaurants you want to eat at, how to order a taxi.
see, it can be hard and, and you can, you can go without a tour. So look up the podcast and, um, yeah, go to my website and you'll see all the things that I, that I have to offer. There's, there's a lot out there.
Wow. Thank you so much. I have to plug you, you know, me.
Um, and then of course, if you're interested, I highly recommend checking out our course website. Who knows? We might make something happen with Dr. Cooney.
I don't know. This is why he wants me to stay on. He's like, you're going to do one of these.
I want to beg her. I'm going to beg her and try and make a course happen here. I'm telling you there's some good information, as you heard today.
I imagine going through some of your work and systematically, like, really educating people, giving them bibliography, and actually breaking down some of the stuff would be amazing. So please, please go help support her. Help support us. I'm going to do our outro here in just a second. Constellation, thank you.
Jehovah's Witness Scott. everyone beat when it comes to Armageddon. True.
Thank you. Thank you for that super chat. I'm going to play our outro and if I can get a moment with you before we go. Son, do you want to know what the truth is? After this, there's no turning back.
You take the blue pill and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.