By the New Kingdom, the afterlife was understood as accessible to all who could afford their own Book of the Dead, a handy guidebook providing the spells necessary for the perilous, confusing and elaborate trials faced to earn eternal life among the gods. As religious beliefs on the afterlife changed, copies of the Coffin Texts – an adapted version of the Pyramid Texts – were written on coffins and included in the tombs of non-royals, such as wealthy Egyptians and elites. The oldest of these writings, the Pyramid Texts, were available exclusively to Egyptian royalty. The Book of the Dead first appeared in the New Kingdom, but the text evolved from a long tradition of magical funerary writing. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund I've always thought this poem was a little depressing but, and I'm going to avoid swearing here, but golly jee flying casperton if that is not the most depressingly gorgeously lonely and freeing idea it is possible for a human to think.Head of the God Osiris, ca. The emptiness is the meaning, and there is no other. Only its shadow can be seen, confined in the space of unfulfilled desire. V) No: the subject, the self, the soul lives neither here nor in deaths kingdom. The idea that we can be saved by living for this "eternal" space, and ever here the implication of a spiritual pursuit, is itself the dream of hollowness. We are without voices in death's dream kingdom as the broken columns collapse and even the stars cease to cast their light upon them and there remain anyway none to see it happen. The worshiped raised stones are the very same that were cast as salvation in (II) as the columns. III) It is intentionally unclear if this dead land is the temperal "life" of (I) or the eternal "death" of (II) because they are actually the same in different time scales. So salvation is to reject the day to day and take up deliberate acts to solidify myself in history. The sunlight illuminates it for these thousands of years. I don't know about some stone mason in ancient Greece having a hard time standing up to a bully, but I do see the work that he left: a broken column. The eyes, the looks of others that I fear from other people are here replaced with the sun. II) stuff that bothers me in the day to day doesn't even register in like. I) the stuff of life, the day to day, is without meaning. I gotta talk through this, and I don't think anyone that I know would care, so I will leave it here. I've been coming back to this poem for years and I never could figure out what its even trying to talk. I can understand the returned Tommies and Doughboys perception of emptiness, in themselves, in their world. Still carrying their war around in their minds, with many of the hallmarks of home gone, so little to on which to base the foundation of new selves, I can only imagine how hard it was to see any any meaning, to feel the enthusiasm for the almost crazed pursuit of prosperity, the new, the flashy, the next big thing. American and possibly British serviceman who survived, found himself expected to pick their lives back up again, to throw themselves into an increasingly bright, hectic, world which turned the home they remembered and longed for on its head. In The Great War, “shell shock”, utterly misunderstood, was a shameful thing, and it had been just long enough since the Spanish American War for all but its survivors to have forgotten veterans don’t leave just leave their war on the battlefields. Those that the war didn’t kill, found that Fate wasn’t done playing with them after all, as, their bodies made so vulnerable, so many sickened and far too many of those died of the Spanish Influenza. Field stripping their weapons, time and again. In between, the hurry up and wait of almost everything but battle in the military. Their minds were flooded over and over again with all the the hormones the body produces to get us through crisis. Surviving those horrors, what it took from them to do so. LaurieRose - I’m assuming based on when Eliot write it, 1925, that it has to do with the men who made it home from The Great War (WWI). Gathered on this beach of the tumid river With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Shape without form, shade without colour,
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