Not everyone gets to become effective. Not everyone gets to matter after they’re gone. Not everyone becomes a saint. Your Ka, your Ba, your Ren — those showed up the moment you were born, automatic, no work required, the way your name did. The Akh is different. You had to earn it, build it. Amber and I have been in this journey about the different parts of the human personality for weeks now. This is the fourth episode in our series on the anatomy of the Egyptian soul, and definitely the hardest one so far. The Ka and the Ba you can make a go at describing. The Akh doesn’t allow that. It’s not really even a noun. It’s closer to a verb, the same energy as the Egyptian word kheper, “becoming,” transformation-in-progress. This podcast convo ended up going places I didn’t expect: gender, hubris, ecological grief even, and a king who tried to grab the most fleeting, liminal power in the whole Egyptian cosmos and hold it in his own two hands like in that Guardians of the Galaxy movie except without the happy ending. Akh as Photosynthesis In his dictionary of Middle Egyptian words, Faulkner tells us that akh means to be effective, glorious, useful, profitable. An Akh is what happens when something works or grows or becomes. This is not metaphorical but actual, like sunlight hitting a seed, the seed becomes a plant. That’s akh. If a person dies and manages to keep acting in the world of the living, that’s akh too, assuming the person passed the scales and saw his heart come out on top, assuming the funerary rituals did their job. The akh has the same kind of power as the plural bau of the word ba, for the soul of mobility. Bau is raw strength. Akh is strength that connects, that intervenes, that changes something. Florence Friedman spent her dissertation and a large part of her career on this topic, and her argument is that calling the Akh a “spirit” tells you nothing. She reads the word as something closer to sunlight. But what does that even mean? Friedman focuses on sunlight specifically, because it is effectiveness par excellence, the mechanism by which the divine reaches across into this world and makes something happen. Sun light is the tree growing, the fruit emerging, the people happily eating that fruit. If you think photosynthesis, you would come close, I think, to what the Egyptians had in mind with the notion of the akh. This effectiveness of spirit can be used for good or ill. The word survives into Coptic language where it means demon. That’s not later Christian problematizing of pagan things but sheer respect for power that cannot be contained. An Akh could bless you or smite you, same as any god could. The force that grows your wheat is the same one that can destroy it in a blight of grasshoppers. The bird that stopped migrating to Egypt :( The hieroglyph for Akh is a real bird—the northern bald ibis, common in Egypt through the Old Kingdom, and then, after that, poof, just gone. The bird’s habitat dried out, Egypt’s climate shifted, and the bird that had given its shape to effective transformation disappeared from the Nile Valley within living memory of the people who used its picture every day in their texts. I did not know this. I am still stunned to have learned it. The Egyptians kept drawing the bird glyph, of course. For thousands of years after its disappearance from their Nile waters, they drew it. A bird nobody living had ever actually seen, got more abstract and stylized the further it got from anyone’s lived experience, until by the New Kingdom it’s sporting something that looks suspiciously like a nemes headdress. The feathers Old Kingdom scribes had faithfully and realistically drawn to identify the bird were reimagined as a kind of linen headcloth or a nod at royal regalia. As far as I know, nobody’s done the actual philological legwork of tracing exactly when the faithfully drawn Akh starts dropping out of the textual record, and I wonder whether it clusters around the sixth through tenth dynasties, right when Egypt is drying up into famine and subsequent civil war. Let me know if there is work out there on this. Somebody go write that dissertation and tell me what you find. Ancient/Now is always free for all! Consider becoming a paid subscriber. All your $$ goes directly to paying Amber and Jordan, which means more of this, more often. Insemination, wombs, and who gets to make things happen Now it’s gonna get sexual, because… Egypt. The Akh is masculine. Akhet the horizon, the place where the sun is born and dies, the zone between worlds, is feminine. The akhet was a container, a womb, the hills cradling the sun like you would hold a newborn. There’s a strange archaic ritual Egyptologists called the Vogellauf, the “bird run,” where the king sprints toward a goddess with a live ibis in his hand and hands it over. This ritual helps us understand the akh’s purpose. The king is positioning himself as the one who delivers the divine spark, the inseminating force, while the goddess receives it, holds it, does the actual work of turning potential into life. That’s a patriarchal way of imagining creation, but also a very ancient Egyptian one that may have preceded patriarchal regional state pharaonic Egypt. The divine masculine principle initiates, the feminine principle receives what’s handed to her and transforms it within herself. Christianity arguably reinvented this same masculine creation theology millennia later in the Immaculate Conception; the Annunciation; when light entered the Virgin Mary’s womb by means of the Holy Spirit, credit going to the God who sent the light, while all the gestating, nurturing, protecting, and grieving belonged to the woman’s body. She does all the caretaking. The king who tried to own the light And this is where Akhenaten comes in! Because of course he does! He changed his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten—the one who is effective for the Aten, or the light of the Aten. He built a city, named it Akhetaten, “horizon of the Aten,” and covered it with offering tables and altars, as if he could physically catch every sunbeam, to transform his own person, his Great royal wife Nefertiti, his daughters, and Egypt, however he named it and understood it. His hymn to the sun describes the Aten as the force that makes the baby grow in the mother’s womb. Akhenaten’s theology really helps us to understand the akh better. He was worshipping the sun, yes, but he was also trying to become the only intermediary for transformation itself. The sunlight came to him. He wanted to own the Akh outright. Of course it all failed, because of flying to close to the sun on waxen wings and all that, but let’s not mix mythologies. The Akh is also time! It’s a spark an instant, that liminal, in-between space, present for a handful of minutes (seconds?) at dusk and dawn and then gone. Akhenaten tried to drag it out permanently into the material world, into his own body, his own city, and claim ownership over something whose entire nature is that it doesn’t stay put. You cannot pin down a migratory bird. Trying to materialize and hoard something that’s ephemeral, that’s always on the move, that’s always in flight is what guaranteed the collapse of his new theology. After he died, the Akh went back to being the purview of the gods and the superhero ancestors who had made it past the scales and beyond. I don’t think any Egyptian king ever tried to claim it as personal property again. (One could do a whole discussion of the ancient Egyptian Akh theology influencing the emerging Jesus cult inserting ideas of ephemeral existence, sacrifice death and rebirth, but I’ll not do that here…) It’s an interesting story to hear right now as strong men and techbros rule the world. There are too many men convinced they have found the shortcut to fate and effectiveness, doling it out or withholding it as they see fit. The Egyptians watched in real time exactly how such hubris ends. What you do with a thing that doesn’t stay Every person who’s ever lived has wanted some edge on the uncontrollable in this material world, some way to fix their fate, some way to touch God and know the future, to bend the future in your favor. These are old human worries. The Egyptians tried to control their fates too, and one of the best ways to do that was to reach out to the akhu spirits (plural for akh!) and ask for their intercession. They wrote letters to dead relatives they thought had become akh. They mummified animals, then killed them (!), to carry messages into the next world. They stood in the temple portico at Esna temple and had their astrological charts read. You do the same thing checking your horoscope, or asking a dead grandmother for help in prayer, or telling yourself that if you just work hard enough you can outrun whatever’s arbitrary about your life, or wearing your baseball hat upside down and inside out at the key moments in the World Series. We reach out for hope wherever we can find it. But remember the akh is ephemeral. You touch it, and it’s already gone. You can spend your whole life trying to contain it and hold it, and you’ll never get there. That’s what living an earthly life is all about. That’s probably the right way to hold this strange ancient Egyptian conception of the soul—not as religious doctrine, but as an ongoing race that you will never finish. It’s a verb, not a noun! Good luck out there. Reach for your ancestors, your gods, whatever gets you through the dark part of the day—because it’s squirrelly out there. Just don’t try to own the whole horizon. It didn’t work out for the last guy who tried it. This episode, the fourth in our series on the ancient Egyptian soul, following the Ka, the Ba, and the Ren, is up now up on the Afterlives of Ancient Egypt podcast, available wherever podcasts are heard. If this newsletter is useful to you, consider becoming a p
