Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Symmachus wrote:I suspect that one reason Nibley was so obsessed with this Egyptian stuff, even if filtered through his own bizarre Mormonism, was because it spoke to his own experience as someone who had lost a child.
How did you get there with that statement?
- Doc
Do you mean my inference or the fact that one of his children died as an infant? The latter is fact, the former a suspicion, not an argument. One of Nibley volumes contained some personal writings, including a graveside speech for a son-in-law that he gave, that are replete with reference to Egyptian texts any time the subject of death comes up. That is the impression I get from reading this sort of Nibleyana. It could be way off.
Chap wrote:The huge majority of the population in ancient Egypt were tumbled into the earth without anything but the most minimal provision for the afterlife. What comfort could they possibly have drawn from the knowledge that the tiny minority of the privileged went to their graves nicely mummified, comfortably entombed and well provided with all the required guides to how to get on in the next world?
A non sequitur. What enjoyment can a retiree living on a government pension possibly derive from his one kayak with the knowledge that there are billionaires who own ten yachts or more?
We have little (but not no) idea what non-elites thought about their situation or the afterlife, but you're making some rather grand claims about them all the same. I am making an assumption: that the average Egyptian's worldview had much more in common with elites in their own time than it did with the egalitarian sensibilities of middle class western Europeans or Americans in the 21st century. Magic spells and elaborate funerary ritual were a significant in the parts of their world that we can recover, so I would need evidence to show that these values were rejected in any considerable way further down the social scale, and there is none to suggest that.
You seem to think the fact that a peasant was illiterate and poor gives you some special insight into their psychology, or conversely that because a text is produced by elites that it says nothing about the wider society in which it was produced. Those are, to my mind, also non sequiturs. Just because someone was not elite does not mean that they rejected values espoused by the elites; on the contrary, elites tend to set cultural agendas that emanate outward—except of course in Marxist fantasies, or in capitalist ones where we all determine our own agenda based on our desire for personal fulfillment and happiness (of course, that is something itself invented by elites on Madison avenue in the early 20th century). Even to take a cynical view, that ideology is merely the tool of elites to reinforce their political power and material wealth, is to admit that elite values were not only promulgated but accepted on a wide scale.
And your portrayal is not entirely accurate. Funerary practices that were originally the domain of the ruling elite were clearly spreading out through the population over the centuries. That kind of emulation does not suggest mass resentment.
And, may I point out, that we have no access whatsoever to the thoughts of the illiterate mass of the population that did all the work for the tiny elite from whom our ideas of 'Egyptian religion' are drawn. You have access to the preoccupations of a thin slice of society right at the topmost levels. No more.
Agreed (somewhat), but for some reason this leads you to draw the rather grand conclusion that Egyptian peasants were unable to draw any comfort from their religious practices. Perhaps you would feel slighted knowing that somewhere someone else was better mummified, but that doesn't mean they felt that way, and we have no evidence that they did to any considerable extent. In addition to being without evidence, the claim that millions of people for 3,000 years drew no meaning whatsoever from their religious practices simply because theirs were a pale shadow of elite practices is absurd.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie