Representation of Evil in Ancient Art

Note: My father went back to college in 1956. Despite having had two years plus in the 1930s, he chose to start all over again as a Freshman at the University of New Hampshire. He went to school, commuting from Cape Porpoise Maine, three days a week, did his homework, and served as the minister of the Cape Porpoise Methodist Church. This paper is one of his research papers for college:

Representation of Evil in Ancient Art

By Clevis O. Laverty

When thou risest in the eastern horizon
Thou fillest the land with thy beauty,
Thou art beautiful, great, gleaming and high over every land
Thy rays, they embrace the lands to the limits of all thou hast made.

Thou are Ra and bringest them all,
Thou bildest them for thy beloved son
Thou art afar off, yet they rays are on the earth;
Thou art in the faces of men yet thy ways are not known. . .

So wrote the Pharoah Amenophis IV more than a thousand years after the first pyramid was built. Transition from a modern to an ancient culture stretches endlessly into oblivion to the imagination and presents a physical impossibility. Yet, a five-mile ride from Cairo across the Nile ends in the ancient city of Giza, sprawling on its bank. An open streetcar careens and bumps along uneven rails, through broad, paved avenues, past imposing white residences surrounded by green lawns to come to an abrupt halt at the very edge of Egyptian antiquity. The paved avenue disappears into the desert sands from which rise the Great Pyramid of Cheops with its streets of mastaba-tombs, Khafre’s Second Pyramid guarded by the Sphinx, the Third Pyramid of Mycerinus with those of his Queens, reaching for the sum whose rays they emulate in structure.

Standing at the base of Cheops, the mystery of the Nile and centuries of forgotten magic formulas overpower the observer. Its hugeness, purpose, and magnificence emphasize the ineffectiveness of the onlooker. It is majestic and haughty. It is foreboding. Is a structure evil? Was it built for evil purposes? No, just a tomb built to satisfy a king’s ego; yet on entering, chills run up and down the spine. An unnatural silence transports the modern back to antiquity, and evil spirits abound. A bat flutters in the darkness, and one can almost hear an ancient curse being intoned that would trap the intruder’s soul within the evil atmosphere to be pursued by mummified incarnations for an eternity.

Stepping out into the bright Egyptian sun again, the presence of evil falls off like an unwanted mantle, and there is just a pyramid of huge stone slabs rising out of the sterile sand.

We are told that the ancient Egyptian of the Old Kingdom could not conceive of any evil in himself, only good. However, good and evil are relative to one another; perhaps ancient evil is represented by its omission or by the insistence in depicting good in his architecture, paintings, steles, amulets, furniture, sculpturing, and writings. His innate belief in magic, whereby he drew pictures and made models on the walls of his tomb, showed that he was seeking protection. Protection from what: good?

The very tombs he built depicted evil; the evil lies in the hearts of men who would pilfer them. He constructed solid mastabas and then went to considerable pains to disguise the location of the burial chamber. Several entities made up a man, he believed, and evil would befall him if they were permanently separated. Every precaution was taken to insure that the ka, aakhu, ab, sahu, hkaib, and sekhem remained together in the hereafter. His art, therefore, was utilitarian: to protect his several entities from the evil forces which were at work to destroy him. The ka soul was painted or modeled in his burial chamber so that it would be handy to the sahu body when it was awakened for the trip through the underworld. Every burial chamber depicted the ka in some manner; every funerary painting shows the importance of the ka in the hereafter. For if it were to be destroyed, a man would be placed in the evil position of having no soul and the trip would be impossible.

At the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, there is a boatpit and in it are the remains of the funerary boat of Cheops. Although the construction of the boat is not in itself an object of evil, it was built so that Cheops could make the trip to the underworld. It leaves the impression that without it he would be stranded and thereby denied his proper position in the hereafter, an evil happening.

Many slate palettes have been found dating from the First Dynasty. One of these depicts the enemies of the king as evil and the Bull Palette shows the enemy of the king being gored to death by a victorious bull, evil lies prostrate. Other slate palettes actually show the ass, crocodile, hippopotamus, and gazelle as evil because they ravaged crops. The first three are shown in connection with Set who according to the myths attempted to destroy his brother, Osiris, by cutting him into fourteen pieces and scattering them far and wide. Isis collected the pieces and Osiris’ son, Horus, avenged his father by defeating Set and banishing him to the desert country. While Set is not actually set up as god of evil, things that are evil are connected to him. the ass head appears on figures of Set and festivals are shown where the ass is sacrificed or starved in hatred of Set.

Throughout the Old Kingdom and during most of the Middle Kingdom, there was a continued inability to look at evil, at least in the paintings and writings in the temples and tombs. However, there appeared to be an almost desperate reaching out for immortality and even in the scenes of the hereafter it can only be presumed that the good man fared better than the evil man. This early Egyptian did not want to see the evil within himself whereby immortality might be denied to him.

Grant thou that I may enter into the land of everlastingness, according to that which was done for thee, Osiris, along with thy father Tem, whose body never saw corruption. Let not my body become worms, but deliver me as thou didst thyself. I pray thee let me not fall into rottenness even as thou didst permit every god and every goddess, and every animal, and every reptile to see corruption when the soul hath gone forth from them after their death.”

During the 13th Dynasty at the end of the Middle Kingdom and through the Hyksos Period, a definite change took palace in the provision for a future life. A strong Asiatic influence is shown in the depiction of the hereafter, the recognition of evil forces and the need to prepare defenses against them. From this point on through the New Kingdom, the Book of the Dead is used profusely to illustrate the journey of the departed in the netherworld.

Egyptian paintings of the New Kingdom were primarily utilitarian, their burial chambers were seldom decorated except with texts from the Book of the Dead. The visible part of the tomb was the chapel, the dead man’s future home, whose walls were adorned with scenes of his earthly life, his life beyond the grave, and the rites performed over the dead body. Following the rules of the priests, the artists showed little originality and although the religious symbols and divinities are flawlessly drawn, they do not come to life or have any emotional effect on the viewer.

These painting divide themselves into three categories, mythological, ritualistic, and biographical. Later on these divisions will be shown in connection with paintings from the Book of the Dead where they are more intertwined than separated.

The mythological paintings show the spirituality of the Egyptian, full of hidden meanings known to the priests and the initiates. Concepts of evil symbolized by darkness and fire are overcome by the gods through the use of charms, charms which they also use to repel the Great Serpent, Apap, the evil force who would draw them toward their execution.

The evil of a decomposed corpse is signified in the ritualistic paintings by a greenish skin. At this time great care was taken to preserve the body; the ancient Egyptian thought he would need that body in his after life. Half-human-half-animal forms supervise the ritual in which the heart of the dead man is weighed on the Scales of Truth to discover if he be good or evil, whether he should have immortality or eternal death. These ceremonial scenes are enacted on an earthly plane and their purpose is to glorify the individual in death. All stages of the funeral are represented, but the purification of the body is significant along with its glorification, for it is to wash the evil from the deceased in order that he may be better equipped for the judgement.

No evil which is not biographical in the strictest sense is depicted in the biographical paintings, but an idealized version of life. An attempt to bring more evidence to bear in favor of the dead man would be defeated by the inclusion of evil in his lifetime.

A complete about-face in the New Kingdom opposed to the Old Kingdom is the concept of the location of the future life. Rather than the east, it is the Kingdom of the West to which the dead man must arrive. The paintings show the king following in the footsteps of the god, Ra, traveling in the sunset of his life to the west where the sun has fulfilled its course. Along the way, the evils that can befall him are denoted by darkness, fire, the Great Serpent, and the reluctance of the boatman to take the new passenger. When these evils have been surmounted, the pharaoh is united as one with the god, to sail in the “bark of millions of years” to the netherworld.

In the burial chamber of Tuthmosis III, the king is shown being suckled by the Sycomore Goddess, Isis, to insure that no evil will be found in him.

The murals on the four walls of the sepulchral chamber of the Tutankhamen picture the funeral processions already mentioned ending with the purifying rite of “the opening of the mouth.” The evil removed, the goddess of the sky welcomes the pharaoh.

Female mourners betoken their grief in the tomb of Userhet with tears and putting lower lips.

The representation of the overpowering of evil is probably best illustrated in the colorful and well-drawn vignettes of the Book of the Dead. A few scenes from the Papyri of Hunefer, written during the reign of Set I, will illustrate the concept of evil of the Egyptian of the New Kingdom. His belief is that the more evil ways a man follows in this life, the more difficulty he will have in gaining immortality. The paintings also show that even the good have many evils placed in their path to test them and to be overcome before attaining unity with the gods. The scene of the Weighing of the Heart of the Dead is impressive. Led by Anubis, god of the dead, Hunefer enters the Hall of Truth where his heart (conscience) is placed on the scales. The heart must be very free from evil for it is balanced by a feather which is the law. Judging over this are fourteen gods who take no part in the interrogation, but they pass judgement on the results. The jackal-headed Anubis tests the tongue of the scale to make sure that Hunefer gets a “fail shake.” Standing close to the scale is the monstrous evil Amemit, “Eater of the Death,” represented as a crocodile-lion-hippopotamus, ready to pounce if the conscience outweighs the feather. The Scribe, Ibis-headed Thoth, stands behind the scale recording the result. Evil is defeated as Hunefer is found to be just, whereupon Horus leads him into the presence of Osiris to take his place among the immortals.

The scene of the funeral procession to the tomb is actually a succession of scenes in which the representation of evil is very definitely taken into account. In the opening scene, the mummy of Hunefer lies in his coffer which has been placed on a standard in the bow of the boat. Standing before him in the bow, the jackal-headed Anubis recites the funeral service. In the next scene Hunefer is being embraced by Anubis who then leads him to Osiris. He is then identified as Osiris Hunefer as they are inseparable in all of the accompanying festivals. Here Thoth is shown in a cartoon-like drawing making Hunefer victorious on the day of the Weighing of the Words.

The next few scenes involve the overpowering of evil. Hunefer and Osiris slay the enemies of Osiris, and the fiend Sebau, the symbol of evil, is kept in bonds. Then the egg is shown and the force arising from the egg to quench the Flame of the Pool of Fire. The rite of the opening of the mouth is performed four times, once by Horus, once by Thoth, once by Sep, and finally by Seb. By this rite, Hunefer is purified of evil.

Hunefer is pictured going both ways, symbolizing his power over the underworld, and then his soul stands on a pylon-shaped building, proclaiming its triumph. Two lions are shown standing back to back, symbolical of the fact that Hunefer has gained all knowledge of Yesterday and Tomorrow. Yesterday he knows through Osiris and Tomorrow through Ra. With this knowledge, the enemies can be destroyed.

The concluding scenes deal entirely with evil and with the enemies of Hunefer and Osiris. Kneeling before seven gods, or judges, armed with knives, the deceased waits for them to cut away all evil that may be clinging to him and float it away on the water, and the Flame, no longer evil, is brought under his control to destroy the souls of his enemies. Symbolizing his enemies is the serpent with the Great Cat cutting off its head. The final scene is triumphant; five ram-headed gods hold aloft the symbol of life which has conquered the fiends of darkness; evil is represented and defeated.

The Pyramids of Giza, who were ancient even to Cleopatra rise out of the sands reaching for the sun; the mysteries of thousands of years locked within their Kas. They have a bond with the Nile they overlook, in whose bosom lies the solution to the countless enigmas of ancient Egypt.

The Gods that were aforetime rest in their Pyramids,
Likewise the nobles and glorified, buried in their Pyramids.
They that build houses, their habitations are no more.
What hath been done with them?

I have heard the discourses of Imhotep and Hardedef
With whose words men speak everywhere.
What are their habitations now?
Their walls are destroyed, their habitations are no more,
As if they had never been.

None cometh from thence that he may tell us how they fare,
That he may tell us what they need, that he may set our hearts at rest,
Until we also go to the place whither they are gone.