DUALISM

A telling parallel between the experience of individuation at the level of the individual self and what was happening collectively in Egypt at this time is demonstrated by the appearance of the almost obsessional pairing (which was earlier described), the constant linking of apparent opposites in everything concerned with the emergent Egyptian state. As Jung observed;

It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these identifications we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. ... In this matter words and ideas count for little. This realm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannot be captured by any formula but can only be hinted at, to one who already knows.18

Jung also called individuation a ‘mysterious conjunction, the self being experienced as a nuptial union of opposite halves’.19 It is to this phase of the experience that the widespread idea of the special significance of the Twins belong: the pair of something more than mortal beings, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu (the most potent example of the type), who encapsulate different, often opposing characteristics but yet are ineluctably bound together, two halves, almost, of some more total being. To the same idea belongs Plato’s charming fairy tale of the Golden Age when the human race consisted of dual beings who, their felicity incurring the always spiteful jealousy of the gods, were divided by them and now roam the world, each looking for his (or her) pair. In the remarkable Egyptian preoccupation with dualism, the conviction was implicit that everything has its counterpart or opposite; even the king himself was conceived as a twin. In the ancient world twins were always regarded as uncanny, the possessors of unusual powers and distinctly odd. The Egyptians believed that at the time of the fashioning of the king prior to his birth, a task discharged by the ram-headed god Khnum who had charge of such matters, his twin was created and translated at once to the Beyond, where he existed in a sort of parallel existence to the king’s. It should be noted that the royal twin is not the same as the Ka, an etheric double possessed by everyone. The idea of the twin as the eternal counterpart of the living king is probably an African concept. The king’s placenta is regarded as a twin existing in a celestial dimension.

Another striking demonstration of this idea of the dual identity of the king is provided by his invocation as the ‘two-dwellers-in-the-palace; that is Horus and Set’. Here the king seems to be accepted as the personification of the two eternal opposites, the two perpetually warring ancient divinities who are only reconciled in his person. The queen was ‘she who looks on Horus and Set’; the great Khasekhemwy (‘the Two Powers are Reconciled’) proclaimed the resolution of this duality of personality in his throne name. By proclaiming it in the serekh, the ancient heraldic device which contained the king’s most sacred name, surmounted by both the falcon of Horus and hound of Set, he revealed the twinship of the two gods, though not in terms of their notional kinship, for Horus was Set’s nephew, at least in the explanation provided by Memphite theologians.

In Egypt this need to reconcile apparent opposites is one of the most explicit elements in the formulation of the early state. The Dual Kingdom; the union of Upper and Lower Egypt; the Horus of the north and the Horus of the south; the two contenders Horus and Set; the pairs of gods and goddesses at their creation; the Lions of Yesterday and Tomorrow; the shrines of Upper and Lower Egypt; the Two Ladies (one of the royal titles referring to the tutelary goddesses of the kingdoms); the Two Crowns; even the remarkable repetition of red and white symbolism in the crowns, palaces, and the lands themselves, all conspire to emphasize the duality of existence, as much as the fundamental duality which was so important a dynamic for the state which was evolving on the Nile’s banks. As we have seen, at the king’s coronation pairs of individuals representing the crafts which powered the economic life of Egypt appeared before him: milkmaids, butchers, and cabinet makers, for example, two by two like characters in a nursery rhyme.