The Ka and Totality in Ancient Egypt

This is a speculative essay on the meaning of the Ka in ancient Egypt from May 1988. I'd forgotten that I'd written this, and I'm surprised to find that I'd written on this subject so long ago. The essay is written on the simple premiss that the Egyptians asked themselves the same fundamental questions about the nature of reality that the Greeks did (i.e., 'why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'is reality one, and if it is one, why are there many?' And so on).The most fundamental questions that can be asked of the world are likely to be universal.

My interest was in the possibility that these questions might lie at the root of religious thought and practice. A good way to find out if the Egyptians thought like this is to assume (for the purposes of argument) that they did. By the time I wrote this piece, I'd already read On the Mysteries by Iamblichus, which book suggests that the religious mysteries of both Egypt and Assyria are rooted in the same kind of intellectual territory discussed much later by Plato. Unlike modern specialists in Platonism, Iamblichus regarded Plato as a theological writer, who was discussing important theological questions in dialogue form. 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Egyptians were proto-Platonists. But the distinctions between the outward forms of theological and religious ideas does not preclude the possibility that the differences have a common root in the same fundamental questions which can be asked about the nature of reality. We already know that there were many common practices in the ancient world which suggest the presence of a common intellectual substrate, more or less lost to us. Sacrifice, worship of divine images, and so on. We write off these obvious similarities as the products of a more or less universal form of primitive stupidity. But the opposite may be true. And we won't find this out if we don't consider the possibility.  

The pages were scanned at 300dpi, and they are in JPG format. They can be saved and opened full size in an image browser. All the pages were typed using an IBM golfball typewriter. 

All eight pages have been assembled together as a PDF file, and uploaded to Zenodo. It can be accessed and downloaded at: https://zenodo.org/record/3383059#.XWuoZS5Ki02

TY, August 31 and September 1, 2019.