R.P. Selegin
Abstract. This paper considers the essence and development of the spiritual component of the ancient Egyptian civilization in its dynastic period, which lasted about 3 thousand years. The paper addresses the primordial spirituality of our civilization, the essence of spirituality as such; its urgency is caused by the peculiarity of the present moment experienced by civilization in the precessional cycle of history. This peculiar feature consists in the fact that our time hits the peak of materialism on the planet, while the spiritual and moral spheres of civilization go down to the lowest level for the entire precessional cycle, from which a new spirituality begins to revive. Appeal to the original spirituality is necessary not only to understand who we are in the series of the last two hundred generations, but also to understand where from and where to we are going, and thereby to understand who we will be for the subsequent generations.
As is known, it was spiritual not materialistic aspirations of the ancient Egyptians that formed the virtue of their souls during life and gave them “eternal life” after death. Their spiritual aspirations were determined by their cosmogonic mythology and displayed in a whole complex of funeral rituals, described in the so-called “Book of the Dead”. Therefore, the present work is aimed at studying this mythology and rituals, as well as general features of the development of rituals for the entire period under consideration, especially those relating to the ascension of the pharaohs to the throne and the acquisition of “eternal life”. An important aspect of the study is how their cosmogonic views determined the entire order of Egypt’s life from the pharaoh down to the common Egyptians, how their conception of the duality of the spiritual and the material in the universe determined the meaning of their existence on earth and in the next world. What helps to understand this is model of the origin of the Universe from the Great Void, or the model from Nothing, on the basis of which the entire cosmogonic mythology of the ancient Egyptians was constructed; this idea has already been clarified in previous works and finds new confirmations in the present one. The use of the model from Nothing predetermines the novelty of this historiosophical study of the essence of the spiritual life of the ancient Egyptians; it also reveals its natural scientific origin and explains the motivation of the Egyptians in their imitation of the cosmic order of the nascent universe.
The analysis of mythology and ideas about the afterlife of the Egyptians made it possible to establish that the primordial high spirituality of the pharaohs’ power, from the Ancient Kingdom till the end of the dynastic period, acquired a steady declining trend caused by the superposition of natural cosmoclimatic cycles, with a general growth of material side and the extinction of the spiritual dimension. The superposition is the precessional cycle of history during the last third of the state of “spring”, the First climatic (historical) cycle, coinciding with the entire dynastic period, and several climatic cycles during the First cycle. This tendency of spiritual decline and undeification (loss of the idea of the divine character) of power of the pharaohs, caused by the extinction of the spiritual principle in the superposition of cycles, alongside with the growth of the material component that led to the desire for material enrichment of the priesthood, for the military occupation of neighboring lands, for decentralization and democratization of power in the country, eventually led to the end the Great Ancient Egyptian civilization.
The establishment of a complete correlation between the aspects of the model from Nothing and Egyptian ideas of the afterlife with regard to its connection with the earthly life, makes it possible to draw a conclusion not only about the existence of the natural scientific basis of Egyptian ideas, but also about the reality of the existence of the afterlife, or the other world, and also about the reality of a certain interconnection between the worlds. It may be concluded that the likening of one’s life to the cosmic order of the origin of the Universe (First Time or Zep Tepi), in which the Primordial Ecumenical Spirit predominates, as well as the existence of the interconnection of the living with the world of spirits, is the truly spiritual life of people. The diverse manifestation in the life of the ancient Egyptians of the cosmogonic philosophy of the model from Nothing gives grounds to believe that it permeated the whole life of the Great Ancient Egyptian culture, which therefore could be inherited only from the highly developed previous civilization of terrestrials. The revealed patterns of the spiritual and material life of the ancient Egyptians allow shedding light on their actual role in the foundation of the modern cultural life of Europe, through the mediation of the Greek, Jewish and Roman cultures in which spirituality continued to degrade, while the materialistic component progressed. The discovery of the new historical patterns over the past five thousand years of history will allow these patterns to be used to solve the problem of long-term and reliable historical forecasting.
The cult of spirituality of the ancient Egyptians in the last two or three thousand years has been replaced by the antipodal trend of the modern world: the cult of materialism. Comparison of the ancient spiritual worldview with the modern materialistic worldview, ancient life with modern life makes it possible to clearly understand what a modern society is, see the newly arisen global threats that could lead to its self-destruction, and outline common measures for the safe and prosperous existence of people in a new natural world on the planet. Specifically, from the height of knowledge of an Egyptian pharaoh, an attempt is made to assess the situation in Russia and to estimate the possibility of taking the country out of a deep systemic crisis and into a fundamentally new path of creative development.
Keywords: Ancient Egyptian mythology, First time of the universe, cosmogony, duality, triplicity, cyclicity, model from Nothing, Supreme Being, God, Satan, afterlife, funeral rituals, spirituality, cult of the soul, Book of the dead, deification of the pharaoh, undeification, cosmic-climatic determinism of history, spiritual degradation, materialistic chaos.