A Night Journey Through the Egyptian Afterlife | Book of the Dead Sleep Story

Tonight, walk slowly through the long night of the Egyptian afterlife — the journey that the ancient Egyptians spent three thousand years writing down for themselves, spell by spell, on long scrolls of painted papyrus, so that they would know what to say when the gods of the dead spoke to them on the other side. This is a sleep story. There is no rising drama, no spike in tone, no call to action. The pace is slow and the voice is quiet. You are not expected to remember anything. You are not expected to stay awake. The story is long because the night the Egyptians imagined was long, and we are going to walk through it together, beside the fire, until you are asleep. We will begin in a workshop on the western bank of the Nile, where the embalmers are preparing a body for its seventy-day journey. We will walk through the dark country of the Duat — past the ferryman with his head turned backwards, past the lake of fire, past the great serpent who lies in wait at the edge of the world. We will enter the Hall of Two Truths, where the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat. And, if all goes well, we will step out into the soft pale light of the Field of Reeds, where the Egyptians believed their dead were sitting, in their small mud-brick houses by the canals, talking to their families, eating their bread, waiting. The story is drawn from the actual surviving funerary papyri — the Papyrus of Ani, the Papyrus of Hunefer, the Papyrus of Iufankh — held today in the British Museum and the Museo Egizio in Turin. The names of the gods, the demons, the gates, and the forty-two judges of the dead are the names the Egyptians themselves wrote down. The forty-two negative confessions are recited in full. The spell of becoming everything, spell seventeen, is read closely. The story of Osiris — the first murder, the scattering of the body, the gathering by Isis, the first embalming — is told at length, because every Egyptian funeral was a re-enactment of that story. Let it run. Settle in. The morning, in its time, will come.