The Mouth of the Abyss: The power in ancient icons of death
This post is only tangentially related to the usual topic of this site, so thanks for entertaining the digression. The goal of the post is to show, using an example, how we create mythic images to address our fears and needs.
The democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed... there is no such society anymore as the gods once supported. — Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
“Dead are all the gods.” — Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
There are few people these days who can truly understand or empathize with the religious beliefs of people who lived and died thousands of years ago. The icons of ancient gods, whose influence dominated the psyche of entire civilizations, now appear to us only as oddities and faded frescoes. We read tales like Beowulf and The Illiad, which defined whole cultures, and can barely keep awake. How can a person living in today’s world ever hope to bridge the gap to an ancient mindset, to feel the fearful, reverential awe in the presence of those images, as they felt? This post will provide a glimpse into that mindset, and show how those long dead symbols are in fact still present in today’s culture — you need only dig for them.
First, let’s begin by considering the figure below (I’ll have a question about him later):
If you don’t know, this is Anubis, the ancient Egyptian jackal-headed god. His role in the Egyptian pantheon was to guide recently dead souls into the next world. He was the guardian and gatekeeper of the road through the afterlife.
The newly arrived soul would meet with Anubis, who then placed their heart on a set of scales, weighing it against the feather of truth. If the heart weighed less, Anubis would conduct the soul through the next stages of his or her journey. If it was heavy — laden with guilt — the soul would be eaten by the crocodile-like monster, Ammit.
This trope of being judged before entering the afterlife is a familiar one to modern readers. It is reminiscent of the popular Christian tale of St Peter judging the newly dead at the gates of heaven, by checking if their name was written in the Book of Life. And although having a “clear conscience” meant something different in ancient Egypt compared to modern Christianity, the basic concept of evaluating a soul after death, and the subsequent transition through the medium of a spiritual guide is still quite comprehensible to us.
All this is familiar. The question I wanted to ask, however, was this:
Why does Anubis have a jackal head?
It is likely that you have never asked yourself this question. Many ancient Egyptian gods had animal heads, so a jackal seems by no means a stretch. Perhaps, you might say, a black jackal head looks impressive or intimidating. At this point, however, your train of thinking would come to a stop, because you have nothing else to latch onto, no way to get traction on this riddle. You don’t know enough about their culture or historical circumstances, so any further guesswork would be pointless.
If you’re like me, such a conclusion might feel unsatisfactory. Anubis was the dominant god of death for Egyptians for over two and a half thousand years. He has been an icon and symbol longer than Jesus has in modern Christianity. Something about this jackal-headed image resonated so powerfully with an entire civilization, they kept it alive for millennia — and yet I have no way to access this vital thread. That makes me feel like I’m missing a piece of my psyche. And in a way I am, because, as it turns out, the jackal-headed symbol of Anubis is still alive in our modern cultural notions of death.
To understand how, you must first take yourself back to the early days of Egyptian civilization — that is, ancient, ancient Egypt — almost 4500 years ago. In those times, when a person died they weren’t guaranteed a proper burial, especially if they died in battle. And there were a lot of battles. Very often the body of the freshly dead would be left on the Egyptian strand, or buried in a shallow grave. Such bodies were liable to be eaten by scavengers.
One of those scavengers was the jackal.
Now picture yourself as an ancient Egyptian. You’re watching the body of your neighbour, or friend, or fellow soldier be eaten by a jackal. The corpse still looks like the person you remember. The grotesqueness of this moment is accentuated by the realization that one day this will inevitably be your own fate, to be food in its filthy maw. All dignity has vanished, leaving only humiliation.
It’s hard not to feel, in such moments, the pointlessness of human existence, as you watch human life reduced to a biological activity of animals eating animals. You’d prefer, if possible, to find some way to reinterpret this event, to understand it in a new light that would “make sense” for you. This means you must re-construe the facts so that you can feel comfortable with the situation (that’s what it means to “make sense”), while still aligning with the truth as it is plainly evident to you. So what interpretation would do the job?
Here’s a possibility: what if, instead of perceiving your friend’s ingestion as a cold fact of biology, the jackal was, in eating him, introducing him to his new stage of life. It’s like an onboarding session. The jackal is communing with the dead man, and guiding him through to his next state of existence. In the process the beast is also transmuting your friend’s corporeal body into its newer, higher form.
If this sounds far-fetched, recall what is involved in the modern Catholic ritual of Communion: namely, eating the flesh of Christ, which has been transmuted from the Eucharist into the body of the Savior.
And you don’t have to look at modern Catholicism for comparable themes; the notion of communing with the dead by eating their body was common in ancient times.
By travelling halfway around the world, to ancient Japan, we can read the story of Izunaki and Izanami as related in the Kojiki. These two were the parents of all the gods, their king and queen. When the queen died, her husband went to the underworld to get her soul back. The queen was delighted that he had come to retrieve her and agreed to go with him; except that he should wait a moment. She asked to have a quick conversation with the Lords of the Dead in their chamber, and afterwards she would leave with the king. But on no account should the king peek inside their chamber. He must wait outside until she returned.
The king waited for her. Soon, his curiosity got the better of him. He decided to peek inside — to look beyond the veil, so to speak, between life and death. And what did he see? The decomposing body of the queen, being eaten by maggots. Those maggots were the “Lords of the Dead”, and the “conversation” was them eating her.
As long as humans have existed, we have known that when things die — including humans — they tend to get eaten by other things. Being eaten by death has therefore been an ongoing theme in images of passing, a theme which continues to this day.
Consider for instance, who is the most iconic personification of death in modern times. Who is the guide and the guardian of the passage to the next world? Without a doubt, it’s the grim reaper, the hooded figure with the scythe. But what is a scythe for? What does “reap” mean? For those who are unfamiliar, a scythe is a tool for harvesting (reaping) grain. You know… to eat. The grim reaper is eating all of us.
It’s worth noting that the tone of this personification of death as the grim reaper is slightly different from the previous two stories. It is actually more optimistic (really, it is). This is largely due to the more recent influence of Christianity. In the case of reaping wheat or grain, the harvested plant can grow back. This reflects the emphasis in Christianity on the resurrection of the dead through Christ. Ultimately, however, the basic concept is the same: Death eats all of us.
Though death as the consumer of bodies has been a common theme throughout human history, not every culture adopted this allegory. The instances in which it is absent are just as informative. The ancient Greeks did not expect to be eaten by death. Their guide, Charon was merely a ferryman to the land of the dead. The reason is that in ancient Greece allowing the dead to be eaten by scavengers was considered a supreme disgrace, an unforgivable offence, which condemned the soul to be deprived of an afterlife. Many well-known Greek tales centre around characters going to great lengths to prevent the body of a loved one from being left to rot and be scavenged. The most famous of these is The Iliad, whose climax involves the Trojan king Priam begging the hero Achilles for the body of his son Hector, to give it a proper funeral.
Having understood all this, and seen what these stories continue to tell us about the faces of death, let’s go back to the image of Anubis, to see it with new eyes and a new perspective.
Consider again this jackal-headed god; the devourer of bodies, and comforting guide of souls. The terrified man who is on the brink of death, who is alone even if he is surrounded by family, knows he is about to lose everything he values and has ever loved into an abyss of nothingness. Now he brings to mind this image of the comforting monster, Anubis, his black maw as hungry as the abyss into which he will fall. Anubis combines in his image the fearful with the sublime, the transcendent with the terrifying, one’s inescapable destruction with a newer, freer life. Pairs of opposites are embodied in him, and these find a strange intersection, belying their contradictions. The devotee overcomes, and he learns, even in his terror, to love the personification. He makes a companion out of a black scavenger, who approaches him like an old friend, and they welcome each other with open arms.
In this light, the image of Anubis may now strike you as almost ironic, like a kind of dark humour. Is death really that friendly? This presence of ironic contradiction should not be surprising. Death has never been an easy topic for humankind, even more so four thousand years ago, before the invention of painkillers or modern hospitals. The use of dark irony has been a common way for people to deal with difficult topics, and continues to be so today.
You can now see why the image of Anubis may have resonated with ancient Egyptians, a people twisted with the omnipresent fear of anguish and war, followed everywhere by the spectre of painful death. The figure of the jackal-headed devouring god may have seemed like an guardian angel, helping them confront their most difficult final transition. It gave hope and meaning to the inevitable. His monstrous appearance is part of this sublimity — a necessary feature, and not a bug, of that spiritual resonance.
My goal with this post was to help you see this divine symbol with a new perspective, as well as to shed some light on why these images resonated so powerfully in their time. The rest of the Egyptian pantheon have similar origins, as symbols and imagery that help people confront difficult facets of life. In the interest of brevity I won’t exhaust the list, only to remind you of how impactful such icons would have been, especially in moments of crisis, terror, and despair. By personifying the horrors of the world with a living face you give it a more acceptable shape, and it makes the hard journey that much more approachable.
