The “myth” of the soul concept.

Soul is the incorporeal entity that leaves the body upon death continuing to live itself and should not be confused with the notions of “spirit,” “mind” or “vital spark.”
Any living creature embodies the spark of life and its spirit is reflected in its eyes. “Spirit” and “vital spark,” although not empirical ideas, are ideas that would occur naturally and independently to persons of any culture while the idea of the “soul” has to be taught and be conveyed from one culture to another.

The idea of the soul originated in ancient Egypt and by means of the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers spread to the rest of the world.

The concept of soul, as we moderns understand it, was known to the ancient Egyptians by the time the papyruses containing chapters of the Book of the Dead were written (1600 – 1100 BCE). The following passage is from chapter 154 of the Book of the Dead:

[FONT=; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS Mincho']Preserve me behind you, O Atum, from the decay you reserve for every god and every goddess, for the animals all, for the reptiles all; for each passed away when his soul left after his death; he perished after he passed away.[/FONT]

The Book of the Dead contains vignettes on which the soul is depicted as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb or spreading its wings protectively over the sarcophagus of the dead body.
The term used both in the above passage and in the name of the human-headed bird of the depiction is ba. No other Egyptian term should be translated as “soul.”

The term ba has been translated by Egyptologist as “soul” for two hundred years. The term, however, looses the meaning of “soul” as we go back in time by studying older texts, and this fact obliged the translators of the hieroglyphic script to stop translating the word and use its transliteration (“ba”) instead.

An example of a passage of the Pyramid texts will demonstrate the problem (Faulkner’s is the older translation and Allen’s the modern one):

Utterance 436 §789

Translated by Faulkner: “This mighty one has been made a spirit for the benefit of(?) his soul".
Translated by Allen: “Τhis controlling power has been akhified for his ba."

The hieroglyphic text reads:

sAx \ sxm \ pn \ bA \ =f

purified \ divine being \ this \ ba \ his

No rational translation is possible without rational analysis of the texts, but that is an entirely different subject.

In the above passage the term ba can be rendered as “soul” but in other passages where reference is made to the “house of Ba,” which the king went to visit, or to “the neighborhood” where the Ba lives, or when the Ba is said to be “at the head of his brothers“ it becomes apparent that the word ba was once used as an epithet or a title of a person: of the Ba!
From the Book of the Dead it is known that the Ba operated as witness of defense at the procedure of the test of the judgment and thus it can be said that originally the term Ba meant “supervisor” or “caretaker”.

How and when did the term acquired the meaning of “soul”?

As to “when,” judging from the fact that the term Ba occurs 59 times in the Pyramid texts (2400 – 2200 BCE) and that only in two passages out of the 59 it occurs with a meaning close to that of the soul, the obvious chronology would be sometime around 2500 BCE.
As to “how,” it can be said that it happened by accident!

The Ba as supervisor, caretaker and protector was said, in the prayers to be recited, to be “above” the person been judged (the entire corpus of the Egyptian funerary texts is focused on the subject of the judgment of men by the gods), thus reassuring the man for success at the ordeal of the judgment.

There are also prayers where it is said that the Ba is “all around” the person being judged; the expression deriving from the fact that the Ba was standing by his side.
And then suddenly appears a passage where it is clearly stated that the ba is inside the man!
The said passage occurs in three pyramids (Pepi I, Merenre, Pepi II) with the word “inside” written in three different ways thus leaving no doubt as to the meaning of the particular word.

The phrase in question reads:
bA \ =k \ n \ =k \ m - Xnw \ =k
ba \ yours \ belongs \ to you \ inside \ you

Those who manage to go through the judgment successfully are recognized and are accepted as being gods.

One to be god has to have a god’s body.

In Utterance 539 it is said that 25 members of the body of King Pepi come from different gods. It is in this way that the man becomes god: by exchanging his body members with body members of god (which is actually achieved when a god impregnates a woman: the child may be born a god)

There are some standard expressions relative to the transformation into a god:

Srt \ =k \ n \ =k \ Hr
Nose \ yours \ to \ you \ Horus (or King. Usually the man being judged is called ceremonially Osiris)

xpS \ =k \ n \ =k \ Hr
hands \ yours \ to \ you \ Horus

xt \ =k \ n \ =k \Hr
belly \ yours \ to \ you \ Horus

Hnn \ =k \ n \ =k \ Hr
phallus \ yours \ to \ you \ Horus

Such an expression is the one above which locates the ba inside the body of the man.

In those cases that the protégé of the Ba failed the examination of the judgment he was exterminated (gulped down by the Ammit monster) and the Ba, having finished his mission, would leave the Hall of judgment alone.
Upon the death of the man his Ba was leaving!

The ba which found its way inside the body of the man preserved the behavior of the Ba the caretaker: it was also leaving the body of the man upon his death !!

A combination of unique circumstances produced accidentally the idea of the immortal soul. It appeared, therefore, only once and only in Egypt.

No one conceived it. It is no philosopher’s conception!

Interesting. So the soul can be like a record kept by the caretaker. Or even a record kept in written texts by humans?

I am afraid I do not quite understand your questions.

There is no such thing as a soul. The records prove that the idea of the soul was produced accidentally by factors at play only in the environment of the Egyptian culture.

That's what I was referring to. It may be that the idea was so normal for Egyptians that they didn't repeat the statement, or maybe it was just a small sect which developed the idea of the caretaker becoming soul.
Akhenaton started a sect which then ended.

A parallel may be the Hindu/Buddhist karma which is the sum of a person's actions deciding his fate. Then it may be said that a person "has" a good karma or "vibes".

The Egyptian case is very particular. I’ve made a research on the 59 passages where the term ba occurs in the Pyramid texts but the study is in Greek. If you would like, however, to have an idea you may have a look at the pdf file
http://dtango.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ceb7-cf88cf85cf87ceae-cf83cf84ceb1-ceb9ceb5cf81cebfceb3cebbcf85cf86ceb9cebaceac-ceb1cf80cebfcf83cf80ceaccf83cebcceb1cf84ceb1.pdf
where all 59 passages are cited. You will find the hieroglyphic text and two translations in English (Faulkner’s and Allen’s), passage No.1 is on page 10.

Egyptologists have serious problems with the term ba. You may know a text entitled “The Dispute of a man with his Ba,” which Egyptologists have failed to understand after approximately 70 or 80 official translations.
They insist that the man referred to in the text is conversing with his own soul while the man is actually conversing with his caretaker.

You may ask: “Why don’t they consider the possibility that the man is conversing with his caretaker?”
Because if they do so they will have to realize that the texts are describing judgment of people alive, which means that life after judgment is not life after death.
It cannot be said openly by Egyptologists that afterlife, immaterial souls and immortality are not Egyptian concepts but mere jokes by which the Egyptian priesthood fooled the ancient Greek philosophers... who accordingly fooled the Egyptologists !!

I agree with you about the Hebrew soul "nephesh" being mortal, and spirit "ruach" and life-force
"neshamah" being different.
Are you saying that Ba takes the Pharaoh's life through judgement while the Pharaoh is not alive? And he then gains new life after Ba has done that?

What I am saying is much simpler: The judgment described in the Egyptian funerary texts is a judgment of people alive and therefore the life after that judgment is a life of people living, who were found to be of the quality expected and were permitted to live a happy life; a much better life than the one they had before their judgment.

The priests transformed the judgment of the living people into a judgment of the dead and thus the concepts of the immaterial souls, afterlife and immortality were produced.

Most probably the priests knew the truth because Plato, who was a pupil of the Egyptian priesthood, wrote that the judgment was originally a judgment of people alive.

“And in the time of Cronos, and even quite lately in the reign of Zeus, the judgment was given on the very day on which the men were to die; the judges were alive, and the men were alive; and the consequence was that the judgments were not well given. Then Pluto and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus, and said that the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: "I shall put a stop to this; the judgments are not well given, because the persons who are judged have their clothes on, for they are alive; and there are many who, having evil souls, are appareled in fair bodies, or encased in wealth or rank, and, when the day of judgment arrives, numerous witnesses come forward and testify on their behalf that they have lived righteously.”.”(Gorgias 523a)

In the Greek tradition no judgment of the living is mentioned (except for the legend of Procrustes) and therefore this information Plato got from the Egyptian priests, which means that the priests were aware of the fact that a judgment of the living was described in the texts.

The judgment takes place just before death, but only for the unlucky ones who failed to pass the test and were executed. The rest go to live happily in the “Gods’ place,” not in some “afterlife.”

The conclusion we arrive at is that there was no soul concept before the texts were misinterpreted (most probably voluntarily) by the priests.
The Egyptians –even the priests themselves- did produce their own writings (the funerary texts are nobody’s work but the scribes who recorded oral traditions) but they kept copying the older writtings and thus there were texts in use where in some ba meant “caretaker” and in some “soul.” If this fact is not known, excuses on top of excuses have to be invented in order to rationally explain the unexplainable.

P.S. You seem to have special linguistic knowledge and so I am taking the opportunity to ask you if you consider it correct to translate Nephilim as “the fallen ones.” I have a special interest in that word because the Egyptian word “m(w)t” which is rendered by the translators as “dead, ” I suspect that it also means the “fallen ones.”

How does that fit in with the ritual expressions on pharaohs' tombs for the process of going to a future place after death? Another parallel may be the Catholic crucifix painted on hospital patients who may die in surgery, and the cross "carries" them on to judgement, almost as caretaker.
But I don't have much linguistic knowledge, just a few reference books.
"Nephilim" is from Heb. verb naphal "fall" and is plural meaning "those who cause others to fall down".
It seems that "Egypt" as "K.m.t" means "a cloth, wrapping", the wrapped mummies in tombs.

To me the rituals of the various priesthoods are of value only when their origins can be reached.

As regards Nephilim you are right; they are regarded as the bad guys who fell others. The point, however, is that it is them who were felled and exterminated.

The information on the term Kmt I’ll have to question. Km means “black” and according to Gardiner Kmt means the Black Land of Egypt. Most probably the Egyptians called their land Kmt before commencing to wrap mummies. Don’t you think so?

The purpose of mummies would indicate an after-life. Who gives a person a better life in this world after a favourable judgement while still living?
The extermination of Nephilim from judgement to death would be the opposite of an ideal favourable judgement for pharaohs. Otherwise good and bad people get the same final result . Are you saying Egypt had no belief in after-life?
Kmt as "cloth. mummies" is wrong, it was suggested as the Greek sense of their similar word so is not the Egyptian meaning.

Mummification aimed in preserving the body because it was the body that was examined at the procedure of the judgment. The texts are adamant on this point and Egyptians revered the texts and had to comply.

You most probably know that there are hundreds of myths of “Imperfect creation” from many different cultures. According to these myths the gods were incapable of creating the correct people and had to continuously destroy the faulty ones. The means to discriminate between faulty and no-faulty was the judgment. Thus those created as expected were given a better life after their judgment (the most important of all it was that they were given permission to have sex, which was entirely forbidden before judgment).

The man standing in front of the judging gods had to state:

n\ nk \ =j
Not \ copulated \I. (The Book of the Dead. Ch. 125)

This belief was imposed on the people by the priesthood. It was not a natural belief found in the recorded oral traditions.

It is impossible to make sense of the beliefs of the Egyptians as they are presented by the Egy0tologists because Egyptologists refuse to confirm the fact that a judgment of living persons is described in the funerary texts.

You are right about the complexity of "Ba", but your explanation is not reasonable. How can a wrapped body be judged while the person is alive? If the Book of the DEAD says that a man had no sex, then no pharaoh had children before being dead. Why were the body organs removed and preserved if the judgement took place previously? If the priests "had to comply" with the texts about judging a mummified body, then that was the religious belief.
(In fact, the idea of the immortal soul has been embedded in almost all humans).

Well, let us try another approach to the subject.

The texts written in the pyramids (2400- 2200 BCE) were copied from texts written on papyrus.
When was it that the texts were recorded for the first time, we do not know. What we know for sure is that the priests who edited the pyramid texts were already falsifying them. I’ll give you an example: The word “qbHw” means “ The land of cool waters”. It is the land where the gods lived because in a passage we read “Oh you gods who live in “qbHw”.

The word consists of the four phonograms q,b,H,w which are followed by four determinative signs. These are: A water pot with water running from it, three zigzag lines (the sign for water), a bird that lives in rivers and lakes and an ideogram depicting sandy hill-country over edge of green cultivation.

When the priests said that the gods ascended to the skies, the name of their home place was still known to the people as “qbHw.” The priests removed the last sign, that of the sandy hills, and substituted it with the sign for the sky to show that the gods lived in the skies!!

What happens today?
Faulkner translates “qbHw” as “Firmament” and Allen as “Cool Waters.”!!

Thus, we have on the one hand texts where memories of which a culture is made are recorded and on the other hand the priesthood which is falsifying the old texts in order that they conform with their teachings.

In the judgment issue the texts describe judgment of people alive and the happy life they live after their judgment while the priests preach of a judgment of the dead and their afterlife. Yet, the priests cannot get rid of the older texts. The texts are not mentioning judgment of souls but judgment of bodies and the texts have to be satisfied. The solution was mummification that combines a judgment of the dead and of the body at the same time.

Humans are capable of believing unthinkable things once they are taught to believe them as kids.
If you were born and raised in a culture where promissory notes payable in afterlife were accepted, you would be happy to sell your house and collect the money in afterlife to buy a new house there! (The Celts, having learned the custom from the Egyptians, would accept promissory notes payable in afterlife).

You wrote:"In the above passage the term ba can be rendered as “soul” but in other passages where reference is made to the “house of Ba,” which the king went to visit, or to “the neighborhood” where the Ba lives, or when the Ba is said to be “at the head of his brothers“ it becomes apparent that the word ba was once used as an epithet or a title of a person: of the Ba!
From the Book of the Dead it is known that the Ba operated as witness of defense at the procedure of the test of the judgment and thus it can be said that originally the term Ba meant “supervisor” or “caretaker”.
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I'm thinking of a law court and how in English language the church priest-clerics in Church Courts were "soliciting" money from relatives of dead people, and thus we have "solicitor" lawyer. The Ba may have been a religious idol or person who gave favour, a good reputation or "good name" to clients, in the view of the gods. Maybe the Ba was an oracle, as at Delphi, and spoke as a person's reference. This good position could "speak for" a person, or could "leave" him if he was destroyed in judgement. It could apply before and after death.
If a king went to the house of Ba, then it must have been to gain some benefit which money and power could not obtain otherwise. Then the idea of a speaker, or reputation, within the king, may have naturally flowed to the afterlife. Again, it may resemble the Catholic crucifix (or Orthodox?) which gives Christian identity to a person facing death and judgement.

You are quite right!
Here is the relevant passage:

n \ iwn \ is \ Wnis \ Dsf
not \ came \ really \ King Unis \ himself

Unis has not come himself (to the Hall of Judgment)

ini \ wpwt \ iit \ r =f
arrived \ message \ that came \ for him

A dispatch having come for him

swA.n\ Wnis \ Hr \ pr \ bA \ =f
passed \ Unis \ by \ the house \ of Ba \ his

Unis has passed by his ba’s house

nhy \ n =f \ At \ wr(t)
avoided \ he \ the estate \ grand

he avoided the grand estate (where presumably the judgment was taking place)

The above is from the pyramid of King Unis. The following passage is from the pyramid of Teti.

Your dispatches arrived for him,
Divine words elevated him,
Teti passed from the house of his […]

If one had the means he could avoid judgment. In spell 507 of the Coffin Texts, the ‘deceased’ seeks the protection of the two Enneads (groups of nine gods) which had been created by the god Atum. When the prayer reaches the point where the god himself is addressed, the text reads:

…. Atum himself who watches over the many faces which are in the sky, (even he) whose shape is invisible, who wards off the Tribunal on my account.

The point, again here, is that in the texts there is no mention of afterlife because whoever fails to go through the judgment successfully is killed instantly and nothing further is said of him. Those found to be pure are the ones who continue living after the judgment but they are alive not dead.

The title “Book of the Dead” for the corpus of the funerary texts is an entirely wrong one. The word m(w)t translated as “dead” does not mean dead.
Consider the following: those who have to be judged in order to acquire the status of human being are called m(w)t. Some of those m(w)t will be found to be pure human beings, will be named Akhs and go on living. Those found to be definitely m(w)t are killed. The Monster who is supposed to gulp them down is called Ammit. His name means “Devourer of the m(w)t”.

So, Ammit is killing the dead and no dead person lives after the judgment!!

A new pharaoh performed a ritual dance to show his physical fitness to be king, which was required by tribal warrior barbarians. The Ba may have been a tribunal to reject (and kill) an unworthy candidate, much like US presidential candidates...As the warrior dance degenerated into a token formality, so the Ba may have also.
With growing military organisation, the Egyptian ruler had a changed level of "Ba" judgement. Rome was quite different as a Church state than its early days on the Tiber.

You are either pulling my leg or the Pharaoh’s

tanist (ˈtænɪst)

— n
history the heir apparent of a Celtic chieftain chosen by election during the chief's lifetime: usually the worthiest of his kin

[C16: from Irish Gaelic tánaiste, literally: the second person]

'tanistry

—
The text "the Ba at the head of your brothers" is possibly connected with early kings of Egypt being chosen from relatives, not only the oldest son, of the previous king.
US president candidates: the stripes of the US flag are sun-rays like the gold rays across the head dress of pharaohs. The stars in the blue indicate that, and a pyramid is on the dollar note. "Pharaoh" means "white house".

The hb sd festival is interesting. It was held at irregular times, possibly involved wearing the sd garment while sitting on the 2 thrones, the pharaoh did a ritual dance and was probably re-confirmed as high priest.
Just as a guess, the Celtic "camelot" seems to be a fine robe, Greek chimairos / chimere robe of khamlat / kemel cloth of Angora goat wool_ OED 'camlat'. Welsh eisteddfod festival is from eisted "sit", bod "be".
sit (v.)
"to be seated, to seat oneself" (class V strong verb; ), from PIE root *sed- "to sit" (see sedentary).
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It's possible that Celts borrowed the Egyptian hb sd , or Heb Sed, in turn derived from an Indo European contact.