Coffin Texts

Coffin Texts — Breasted 1912 selected English quotations and context — sourcepage 299

\\ ** TRIUMPH OF OSIRIS 277 result is that Re is intruded into the subterranean here after. The course of events may be stated in somewhat exaggerated form if we say that in the Pyramid Texts Osiris was lifted skyward, while in the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, Re is dragged earthward. The resulting confusion is even worse than in the Pyramid Texts. We shall shortly find Re appearing with subterranean functions on behalf of the dead, func tions entirely unknown in the Pyramid Texts. The old Solar idea that the dead might become the scribe of Re, we have already found in the Coffin Texts; but while the title is given as " Being the Scribe of Re," the text begins, " I am Kerkeru, scribe of Osiris." l We can hardly con ceive a mass of mortuary doctrine containing a " Chapter of Reaching Orion," 2 a fragment of ancient celestial belief, side by side with such chapters as "Burial in the West," 3 "That the Beautiful West Rejoice at the Approach of a Man," 4 "Chapter of Becoming the Nile," 8 which is, of course, a purely Osirian title although the text of the chapter is Solar; or a chapter of "Becoming the Harvest- god (Neper)," in which the deceased is identified with Osiris and with barley, as well as with Neper, god of harvest and grain.6 The Coffin Texts already display the tendency, carried so much further by the Book of the Dead, of enabling the deceased to transform himself at will into various beings. It was this notion which led Herodotus to conclude that the Egyptians believed in what we now call transmigration of souls, but this is a mistaken impression on his part. Besides identification with Re, Osiris, and other gods, 1 LACAU, LIII, Rec. 31, 10 /. 2 LACAU, XI, Rec. 26, 229. 3 LACAU, LXII, Rec. 31, 19. 4 LACAU, XLIII, Rec. 30, 192 /. * LACAU, XIX, Rec. 27, 217 ff. 6 LACAU, LVIII, Rec. 31, 15 /.