The shadow was an essential part of the living person that took on great importance in death, and shared with the ba the responsibility of fetching food for the corpse.96 The akh was said to possess a shadow in the Book of Gates: one who offers to them on earth ‘is a powerful excellent akh, who possesses a shadow’,97 either implying a close association between the two or suggesting that the akh, as a transfigured person, was able to retain the shadow he possessed in life.
The shadow has a solar connection, being the image of a person on the ground, the most powerful of divine manifestations.98 In Amarna beliefs, the shadow was a visible expression of Re/solar energy.99 It is pictured in Book of the Dead, Spell 92 leaving the tomb and ‘going out into the day’ in the company of the ba (Figure 4).100 The shadow had a close affinity with the ba, and they were judged together in the netherworld.101 The destruction of the shadow by knives or by being devoured by a demon102 suggests that the swt was understood as corporeal rather than ethereal, and the fact that the extermination of the shadow leads to the annihilation of the entire being103 shows how fundamental it was to the continued existence of the deceased. Shadows were considered to be in some way attached to the deceased (even though they were depicted as independent of one another), because they could be ‘cut off’.104
Book of the Dead Spell 188, a spell for sending forth the soul and going forth by day as a man, states:105 ‘You have blessed me with a (ba)-soul and shadow, so that we may be seen yonder.’ Coffin Texts Spell 413 is a request for the divinisation of the ba and the shadow,106 again suggesting that these two entities are closely connected in Egyptian thought. The association between the ba and the shadow and their relationship with the corpse in turn may partly explain the sexual aspect of the shadow. There are a few texts in which the word swt associated with a god describes the sexual power of that deity.107 The connection between the shadow and the sexual aspect of the deceased may explain why the shadow is depicted with a penis in some vignettes to the Book of the Dead Spell 92,108 going forth in the day, when the shadow was free to walk the earth at will before returning to the corpse in the evening.
Figure 3: Rock-cut statues wearing unguent cones. Tomb of Neferrenpet (TT178), Khokha, 19th Dynasty.
Figure 4: Ba leaving and returning to the tomb, and shadow with phallus. Tomb of Amennakht (TT 218), Deir el-Medina, Ramesside. Altenmuller 1990: 16, fig. 6. Reproduced with the kind permission of Hartwig Altenmuller.
World History
