In a comparative study on sacred landscapes, the anthropologist Jane Hubert reflects: “Not every stone or plot of earth can be treated with the same degree of respect. Does this mean that there are degrees of sacredness? Or is it, again, merely limitations in the understanding of the cultures and languages concerned?” (Hubert 1994, 18). On these lines, we might ask whether people in Egypt 3000-525 would live their lives in constant appreciation of all matter and being as infused with divinity. Or is such extensive sanctity a projection from more recent European traditions? Anthropology of religion charts the wide range of ways in which different human groups conceive of time and space, including the time and space of the body. Twenty-first-century citizens may separate out categories of time and space, each divided into ordinary and special, for example, between daily life and carnival days or between unmarked space and separated, sacred, or forbidden space. Space-time segments can frame our lives with greatest impact where we would not use the term religion. In contemporary urban societies, the most heavily marked space might be a mental asylum or a prison, where physical separation is reinforced by both interior policing and an external collective act of forgetting.
Against the patterns in secular cityscapes, other societies might, in theory, avoid separating out any time or space at all and instead consider all lived experience as sacred. In such a view, sacredness would be a permanent quality of earth, air, and all materials from water and rock to animal and human bodies. Archaeological sources, including writings and depictions, offer limited but still useful evidence for any attempt to identify the main approaches to sacredness in ancient Egypt. Writings on the earth god Geb or sky goddess Nut might imply that the earth itself was considered a sacred material on which we walk and the air a sacred material wrapped around us. If the names and roles of these deities suggest a world where everything is sacred, we then need to ask whether ancient individuals felt conscious
Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt, First Edition. Stephen Quirke. © 2015 Stephen Quirke. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Of that sacredness throughout their day and night. In this chapter, while bearing in mind the possibility of evenly sacred world, I examine evidence that some times and spaces were marked as more sacred than others.
The human body
Humans on the world: separation versus continuity
In traditional European-language division between culture and nature, human impact on the environment is contrasted with a world without humans. Anthropologists and historians have explored other ways in which different societies might think about, or express, the relations between humans in the world. In one radical review, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro identifies outside European tradition a widespread insistence on the continuity between all that exists. Only his term for this, perspectivism, seems still caught in other European traditions, where art, philosophy, and politics all maintained a belief in the individualized point of view of an all-seeing individual eye (introduction and critique Ramos 2012). Nevertheless, his writing takes most direct aim at the European instinct to classify and so to reduce all being to categories, starting with animate and inanimate.
In contrast to Viveiros de Castro, philippe Descola finds differences between human groups around the world in the way they relate the group member to others and to what European science would classify as nonhuman (Descola 2005). He considers varying expressions of physical exterior and interiority of beings or, perhaps more neutrally, the tangible externals and intangible other qualities. The logical product of these two options would be a quartet of possible combinations, where, at each encounter with any other physical being, the thinking individual might consider that other as having:
1. Similar physicality, similar interiority 3. Different physicality, similar interiority
2. Similar physicality, different interiority 4. Different physicality, different interiority
The quartet is intended not to straightjacket peoples by descriptive labels for their views, but instead as possible ways to see, or to think, around the variety of recorded accounts from groups across the world. For this rethinking, Descola finds new uses for terms that have been defined in more than one way in previous generations, and gives examples, geographical distribution and definition for each:
Totemism: Other beings are considered to have similar external and internal properties; some Australian groups identify a knowledge-man with an animal species (not an individual), which can assist him and, when damaged, can hurt him; other Australian groups identify their sub-groups with species. Naturalism: The physical construction is considered similar, but ethical and moral properties differ; in a European scientific approach, everything animal has similar bodily properties, distinguishing them from everything vegetable and mineral, but the human alone has such features of subjectivity as conscience and free will.
3. Animism: Differences in external appearance conceal underlying shared interiority; what may seem different species, such as human and jaguar, are kin, as among Amazonian groups in South America.
4. Analogism: Both exterior and interiority are different, in a great plurality of species that allows for an equally vast web of analogies; west African groups express the human body as a hybrid fusion of elements, for example, the Samo (Burkina) human as comprising body of flesh from mother, blood from father, breath (from blood of the heart), nyini essence (from blood of the body) generating heat and sweat, mental personality (understanding, memory, and imagination, may be reincarnation of that of an ancestor), double (immortal essence unique to each individual, traced in the shadow, also characteristic of plants, animals, and some inanimate materials such as clay and iron), individual destiny (determining the lifespan), and name.
The fourfold classification may be disputed, both in the differences between terms and in the number of categories. Dominant features in this account reside within the European philosophical traditions that Viveiros de Castro seeks to escape: the distinction between physical exterior and interiority of beings seems to recast a European dichotomy body-mind and the logical quartet as a philosophical device derives from Aristotle in fourth-century BC Greek writing, via the twentieth-century French writing of Greimas. Although Descola does not claim to describe all human societies in this tight frame, the danger of the Aristotelian quartet is that it induces such totalizing descriptions in reading and application. Nevertheless, the exploration by Descola provides fertile ground for considering how we understand the evidence from ancient Egypt. As ethnographers have recorded such varied expressions of being human in the world, where would ancient Egypt be placed? Or, perhaps more productively, which of these relations to others can shed most light on our fragmentary record?
World History
