Egyptian Book of the Dead -
     It would seem that Moses lost most of the Commandments when he broke the Tablets at the base of The Great Pyramid.    Or, perhaps the Scribes invented this part of the story, should it ever be discovered that the Gods had handed down many more laws.     Many of the familiar Ten can be identified in 'The Negative Confession' which features in the misnamed Egyptian Book of The Dead. (known to Egyptians as "The Sayings for Coming Forth By Day".)

THE NEGATIVE CONFESSION

Hail, Usekh-nemmt, who comest forth from Anu, I have not committed sin.
Hail, Hept-khet, who comest forth from Kher-aha, I have not committed robbery with violence.
Hail, Fenti, who comest forth from Khemenu, I have not stolen.
Hail, Am-khaibit, who comest forth from Qernet, I have not slain men and women.
Hail, Neha-her, who comest forth from Rasta, I have not stolen grain.
Hail, Ruruti, who comest forth from heaven, I have not purloined offerings.
Hail, Arfi-em-khet, who comest forth from Suat, I have not stolen the property of God.
Hail, Neba, who comest and goest, I have not uttered lies.
Hail, Set-qesu, who comest forth from Hensu, I have not carried away food.
Hail, Utu-nesert, who comest forth from Het-ka-Ptah, I have not uttered curses.
Hail, Qerrti, who comest forth from Amentet, I have not committed adultery, I have not lain with men.
Hail, Her-f-ha-f, who comest forth from thy cavern, I have made none to weep.
Hail, Basti, who comest forth from Bast, I have not eaten the heart.
Hail, Ta-retiu, who comest forth from the night, I have not attacked any man.
Hail, Unem-snef, who comest forth from the execution chamber, I am not a man of deceit.
Hail, Unem-besek, who comest forth from Mabit, I have not stolen cultivated land.
Hail, Neb-Maat, who comest forth from Maati, I have not been an eavesdropper.
Hail, Tenemiu, who comest forth from Bast, I have not slandered [no man].
Hail, Sertiu, who comest forth from Anu, I have not been angry without just cause.
Hail, Tutu, who comest forth from Ati (the Busirite Nome), I have not debauched the wife of any man.
Hail, Uamenti, who comest forth from the Khebt chamber, I have not debauched the wife of [any] man.
Hail, Maa-antuf, who comest forth from Per-Menu, I have not polluted myself.
Hail, Her-uru, who comest forth from Nehatu, I have terrorized none.
Hail, Khemiu, who comest forth from Kaui, I have not transgressed [the law].
Hail, Shet-kheru, who comest forth from Urit, I have not been wroth.
Hail, Nekhenu, who comest forth from Heqat, I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.
Hail, Kenemti, who comest forth from Kenmet, I have not blasphemed.
Hail, An-hetep-f, who comest forth from Sau, I am not a man of violence.
Hail, Sera-kheru, who comest forth from Unaset, I have not been a stirrer up of strife.
Hail, Neb-heru, who comest forth from Netchfet, I have not acted with undue haste.
Hail, Sekhriu, who comest forth from Uten, I have not pried into matters.
Hail, Neb-abui, who comest forth from Sauti, I have not multiplied my words in speaking.
Hail, Nefer-Tem, who comest forth from Het-ka-Ptah, I have wronged none, I have done no evil.
Hail, Tem-Sepu, who comest forth from Tetu, I have not worked witchcraft against the king.
Hail, Ari-em-ab-f, who comest forth from Tebu, I have never stopped [the flow of] water.
Hail, Ahi, who comest forth from Nu, I have never raised my voice.
Hail, Uatch-rekhit, who comest forth from Sau, I have not cursed God.
Hail, Neheb-ka, who comest forth from thy cavern, I have not acted with arrogance.
Hail, Neheb-nefert, who comest forth from thy cavern, I have not stolen the bread of the gods.
Hail, Tcheser-tep, who comest forth from the shrine, I have not carried away the khenfu cakes from the Spirits of the dead.
Hail, An-af, who comest forth from Maati, I have not snatched away the bread of the child, nor treated with contempt the god of my city.

Massey - 'Ancient Egypt' - " In the Egyptian hall of judgment there are forty-two assessors, and the deceased has to plead in their presence that he has not broken any of the forty-two commandments (Rit., ch. 125).     A version of these is retained in the Pistis Sophia in the shape of forty-four renunciations, two having been added to the Egyptian forty-two.      By renouncing these forty-four sins the deceased is saved from the dog-faced devourer of souls, from the dragon of outer darkness, from Ialdabaoth=Sut, prince of the powers of darkness, and from the torments of the twelve dungeons of the outer darkness, all of which are Egyptian."

Massey - 'Ancient Egypt' - "Let-the-earth-be" is one of the titles of Ptah as the god who calls the earth into existence.     Which looks, at first sight, like a cosmo-graphical creation.     But the earth which was evolved by Ptah and his associate-gods, the Ali, Phoenician Elohim, is not this world, not our earth.     If it were, it would not be the double earth, the earth that was duplicated in the making of Amenta.     In the text from Memphis (line 6) it is said that "Ptah was satisfied after making all things, all the divine names".      He saw that it was good, and this [Page 410] satisfaction of the creator in his work is repeated in the book of Genesis.      Seven times over Elohim saw that the work was good, and like Ptah, or the Put-company of gods, he or they were satisfied.     But the making of Amenta by Ptah and the great paut of gods or Ali was an actual creation of imagination, not a mere "calling" of things into existence by naming them.     It was also the creation of an earth, but not of the earth on which we stand.     It was known as Ta-nen, the earth in the Nun; also as the lower earth distinguished from the upper earth, to which it was added when the earth was duplicated as the work of Ptah and the associate-gods.     The firmament of upper earth was raised aloft by Shu, when establishing the pole of Am Khemen.     The firmament of the nether earth was lifted up by Ptah.      This was celebrated as his suspension of the sky.      But the lower firmament is the sky that was raised up by him in Amenta, the earth of eternity, not in the upper earth of time.

      After coming into being himself Kheper-Ptah is called the creator of all things that came into being.      And here, if anywhere, we may identify the Word that was in the beginning, and was God.      For Kheper says he brought his name into his own mouth; he uttered it as the word that was in the beginning.     Other things were spoken or called into being by the word of his mouth.     Of these things he says, "I raised them up from out the Nun (or Nu) and from a state of inertia".     He had found no place where he could stand.     But he laid a foundation with Mã, who, as we know, became the co-worker with Ptah the divine artificer.     In version B. of the Egyptian document the creator, as Kheper, says, "I made what I made by means of divine soul; I worked with the spirit", which is the action assigned to the Elohim, however differently stated.     Soul, it is said in one of the texts, is "the breath of the gods" (Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, Vol.I.. i., ch. 8).      Creation by means of the word was the work of Ptah in his character of "Let the earth exist".      Stated in modern language, he might be said to have called his creations into being by word of mouth in uttering the word to his co-workers.      This word, as Egyptian, was the well-known Hekau or great magical word of power, which was female before it was assigned to the deity as male; the living word of Apt; the great magic power of Isis or of Mã, before it was ascribed to Ptah in the monotheism of Memphis.      Creation by the word is calling into being things which did not pre-exist or were not previously entified, figured, or known by name. In the Ritual the word of power becomes a ceremonial act, and, as a mode of sign - language, to be said or uttered magically, is to be performed.     Creation by the word is expressed in the character of Ptah by his title of "Let-the-earth-be".      This is the creation by fiat, or the word, in the book of Genesis, when the Elohim say, "Let there be light" -"Let there be a firmament" - "Let the dry land appear" - "Let the earth put forth grass" - "Let the earth bring forth" - "Let us make man in our image" - and it was so.     The word and act were one.      And this was the Kamite creation by the word that was in the beginning; the word of Kheper-Ptah, who said, "Let the earth come into existence" - that is, the lower of the two, called Amenta, the secret earth.     This mode of calling and coming into being by means of the word explains how the god could issue forth from silence as a word, how created things or beings could be said to have emanated from the mouth of the god, and how the divine wisdom, whether as Mã or Kochmah, could be said to come out of the mouth of the most high.     It is known that the name was often held to be an equivalent for the thing, the act, or person, and in the text from Memphis the creation by Ptah is in a measure resolved into a process of naming.     In this it is said, "Now the creation of all the gods (that is to say, of Atum and his associate-gods) was when proclamation was made of all the divine names in his wisdom" - the wisdom of Ptah.      Thus things, in this case gods, or powers, were created when names were given to them.     The principle is applied in the book of Genesis, when it is said that "out of the ground lahu-Elohim formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.     And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field" (ch. ii. 19-20).      In these and other texts creation is reduced to a process of naming as a mode of representation, and in this way the uranographic mythology was founded on the figuring and naming of the constellations.

      Thus, the creation of Amenta was not the commencement of the external universe, although another heaven and earth were then called into being.      At first there was no heaven and no earth in this unformulated realm of desert darkness.      Or, as the Hebrew version has it, "the earth was waste and void".      There was no light of day or lamp of night, as neither sun nor moon could pass that way until the earth was hollowed out and a sky suspended overhead by Ptah the opener and his Ali, or companions, who were afterwards repeated in the Elohim of the Hebrew Genesis.      So in the enclosure of Yima there was at first no light of stars, or moon, or sun.      This was the condition of primeval darkness in which the Elohim said, "Let there be light, and there was light".     The question being where and how?     In the making of Amenta Ptah was the uplifter of the lower firmament, with which he roofed the under-world within the earth.      This is recognized in the Ritual (ch. 64), when the speaker down in Amenta says, "Mine is the radiance in which Ptah floateth over his firmament" - that is, the light of this new heaven and earth, which were solely a creation of the astronomical mythology.      In another text we read, "Hail to thee, Ptah-Tanen.      The heaven was yet uncreated, uncreated was the earth, the water flowed not; thou hast put together the earth, thou hast united thy limbs, thou hast reckoned thy members; what thou hast found apart, thou hast put into its place.     O let us give glory to the god who hath raised up the sky, and who causeth his disk to float over the bosom of Nut, who hath made the gods and men and all their generations, who hath made all lands and countries, and the great sea, in his name of Let-the-earth-be" (cited by Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 222-3).      This, being late, has the look of cosmology.      But the sky raised up by Ptah was over the earth in Amenta; the sky that was imaged by the sign of heaven reversed.     When Ra is being exalted above all previous gods in the glosses to the seventeenth chapter of the Ritual it is said that he had exercised his sovereignty as Unen the opener when there was as yet no firmament.     That is before Ptah had created the firmament below the earth, which is called the "lower firmament" in the Babylonian legends of creation.      This beginning with the raising of the firmament is alluded to in the name of the gate-keeper to the second hall in the House of Osiris, who is designated "Him who raised up or created the beginning" (Rit., 147, 7).      But, as before shown, there were two upliftings of the firmament, one above the earth and one below.

      There is hieroglyphic evidence that the Egyptian creation of the earth by Ptah was not cosmical but a mode of hollowing out Amenta in the lower earth", and of tunnelling the mount to make a passage through.      The sign for Ta, the earth, is a hollow tube, a pipe, a reed, or the tibia (leg-bone).      Thus, a passage hollowed out is an ideograph of the earth that was formed by Ptah and his Khnemmu, "the moulders.      It was the tunnel of Ptah with its gates of entrance and exit that first gave significance to the expression, "the ends of the earth".      The manes in the Ritual who has passed through exclaims, "I have come out of the tuat: I am come from the ends of the earth" (ch. 75, I).      The opening of Amenta was a primitive mode of thinking through the ground of solid earth, as it stood in the waters of the Nun, and of making out a pathway for the sun or solar god to travel by in passing through from one horizon to the other.     Thus, the making of Amenta was a work of imagination based upon a ground of natural fact.      Before the earth was known to float and revolve in space, it was thought of as a fixture like a mountain or an island, a tree or a stalk of papyrus standing in the firmamental water.      Then it was made out, as mythically rendered, that somehow the sun passed through the under-world of earth by night.          This was portrayed in several ways.      In one, a tortoise was the type.      With Kheper-Ptah, the beetle was the burrower in and through the hidden earth.     Ptah, as the divine worker, shaper, or creator in this subterranean world, was also imaged by an embryo-in-utero as way-maker in the womb of matter, or the earth.     Fire was another solar type.     Hence Ptah was the worker with that element, and his associate-gods became the blacksmiths and metallurgists, who blazed their way below from west to east through Tanen, earlier Tanun, termed the earth of Ptah.     Then followed Ra in his primordial sovereignty as Atum, son of Ptah.     He crosses (later) in the solar bark that sailed the Urnas water by night.     But first of all he had to wriggle through the mud of the abyss in the likeness of an eel.

      Before Amenta had been moulded by the Put-cycle of powers there was a secret and infertile earth conceived of in the Nun, where nothing grew and nought was cultivated, as no soil or sata had been yet prepared, and no light had then appeared.      But this earth of eternity was not the world of human life, and consequently no human beings were created in Amenta.      Atum, though a man in form, was not a human being.      This will explain why neither man nor woman was created or formed by Kheper-Ptah, in the Book of Knowing the Evolutions of Ra.     There was no man or woman in the genuine mythos.     These only came into existence when the gods and manes had been euhemerized and creation was set forth as cosmogonical through literalization of the astronomical mythology and adulteration of the ancient wisdom.

     Eons after today's religions become defunct and forgotten, some future archaeologists will come across ruins, wherein crosses will be found upon some fallen altars.    We can forgive them for concluding that at some far distant age in the past, a pagan people once worshipped a Cross.    With every human failing, especially cruelty of one to another being completely unthinkable, they will not deduce any other possible connotation.    So it is today with ignorant fundamentalists who claim that Egyptians once worshipped the Sun, whereas the symbol of the Aten was merely showing the power and glory of their own God, for Aten means Adhon the Lord God, and was another name for the Hebrew God.

     Should any biblical texts be found, what would they make of a people who believed in a God who ordered the massacre, rape and slaughter of so many million innocents?    What would the make of a Saviour who commanded hatred within families? (Matthew 10:35 to 36); what would they make of a religion that demeaned and belittled women? (1 Corinthians 14:34); what would they think of people who prayed to a messenger who promised not peace but war and division? (Matthew 10:34).    The centuries of persecution perpetrated by the Roman Church, of massacring the population of an entire region, of torture, and persecution, would only make sense to them if they came across Mark 8:33 naming the founder of the Roman Church as being Satan.

Massey - 'Ancient Egypt' - "A religion of the cross was first of all established in the mysteries of Memphis as the cult of Ptah and his son Iu-em-hetep, otherwise Atum-Horus, who passed at Annu into Atum-Ra, the father in spirit, with Iusa, son of Iusãas, as the ever-coming Messianic son.

      We have evidence from the pyramid of Medum that from 6,000 to 7,000 years ago the dead in Egypt were buried in a faith which was founded on the mystery of the cross, and rationally founded too, because that cross was a figure of the fourfold foundation on which heaven itself was built.     The Tat-cross is a type of the eternal in Tattu.     But whether as a fourfold, a fivefold, or a twelvefold support it was a figure of an all-sustaining, all-renewing, all-revivifying power that was re-erected and religiously besought for hope, encouragement, and succour, when the day was at the darkest and things were at the worst in physical nature.      The sun apparently was going out.      The life of Egypt in the Nile was running low and lower toward the desert drought.     The spirit of vegetation died within itself.     The rebel powers of evil gathered from all quarters for the annual conflict, led by Apap and the Sebau in one domain, and by Sut and his seventy-two conspirators in another.

      At this point began the ten mysteries grouped together in the Ritual (ch. 18).     The Tat for the time being was overthrown.     The deity suffered, as was represented, unto death.      The heart of life that bled in every wound was no longer felt to pulsate.      The god in matter was inert and breathless.     Make ye the word of Osiris truth against his enemies!     Raise up the Tat, which portrayed the resurrection of the god; let the mummy-type of the eternal be once more erected as the mainstay and divine support of all.     It was thus that the power of salvation through Osiris-Tat was represented in the mysteries.      Fundamentally the cross was astronomical.      It is a figure of time, as much so in its way as is the clock.      It is a measure of time made visible upon the scale and in the circle of the year instead of the hour.      A cross with equal arms denotes the time of equal day and night. Hence it is a figure of the equinox.

      Another cross is a figure of time in the winter solstice.     It is a modified form of the Tat of Ptah (The Symbol of Tat may be viewed in the web pages of Gerald Massey's 'Ancient Egypt') on which the four quarters are more obviously portrayed in the four arms of the pedestal.      This was re-erected annually in the depths of the solstice where the darkness lasts some sixteen hours and the daylight only eight - the measure of time that is imaged by this Tat-figure of the cross.      These two are now known as the Greek and Roman crosses, and under those two names the fact has been lost sight of that the first is a type of time in the equinox, the other a symbol of the winter solstice.     The two crosses are scientific figures in the astronomical mythology.     They were symbols of mystical significance in the Egyptian eschatology: and they formed the ground plan of the Ka-chambers of King Rahetep and his wife Nefermat in the pyramid of Medum (Petrie, Medum).

      The tree was first of all a sign of sustenance when the sustainer was the Great Earth Mother; Apt in the Dom Palm, Uati in the papyrus plant, Hathor in the sycamore, or Isis in the persea-tree.     On this the type of Ptah was based as the Tat-image of a power that sustained the universe.     Osiris-Tat then typified the power that sustained the human soul in death.      This was buried with the mummy as a fetish in the coffin, where the dead were seen to lie at rest in the eternal arms.     And thus a cultus of the cross was founded many thousand years ago. The Christian doctrine of the crucifixion, with the human victim raised aloft as the sin-offering for all the world, is but a ghastly simulacrum of the primitive meaning: a shadowy phantom of the original substance.

      The doctrine had its beginning with an idea of up-bearing, but not in the moral domain.      When the sky was suspended by Ptah in Amenta the act was symbolized by raising up the Tat-type of stability and support.      This not only sustained the sky of the nether-world, it also imaged the divine backbone of the universe. The Tat, was a figure of the pole and the four corners, which united in one the "five supports" or fivefold tree of the Egypto-gnostic mystery (Pistis Sophia, B. 1, 1-3).      Otherwise stated, it was a symbol of the power that sustained the heavens with the supporting pole and the arms of the four quarters.      This power was personified in Ptah as well as figured in the Tat.     Hence the god is seen within the type as Ptah-Sekari or the later Asar-Tat.     Then the type of the eternal is the eternal's own self: the power that sustains the universe in very person who is Ptah in one cult, Osiris in the other.     The superincumbent weight and pressure on the sustaining power is probably indicated by the squelched face and compressed features of the Osiris-Tat (Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. 3, pl. 25).     The sustaining power within the Tat would make the god and the cross to be one as they are in the Osiris Tat.

     The deceased arises from the tomb as the Tat.      He says "I am Tat, the son of Tat" (Rit., ch. 1), or of the eternal who establishes the soul for eternity in the mystery of Tattu (Rit., ch. 17).      Hence the figure of a god extended crosswise as the sustainer of the universe could be equivalent to the cross.      The Hindu figure of Witoba, for example, is portrayed in space as the Crucified without the cross (Moor's Hindu Pantheon).     On the other hand, the Swastika is a form of the cross without the crucified.      In the Christian Iconography, as Didron shows, Christ and the cross are identical, as were Horus and the Tat. The cross takes the place of the Tat as symbol of supporting power, and the god as the sustaining force within the Tat may account for the legend of the gospel Jesus being the bearer of the cross on which he was to suffer death.

     A resurrection of Osiris from death in the month Choiak is mentioned in several texts (as in the Pap. Biling. Rhind., II, 4, line 8, ed. Birch, plate 8) without giving the day of the month, but of course rebirth and resurrection in Amenta were identical, and the resurrection is also signified there by the raising of the Tat-pillar or cross.     When the Tat was annually overthrown it was raised again by the uplifting power of the god represented by the Son as the sign of resurrection.      Thus the genesis of the legend of the cross, like to that of the Christ, can be traced in Egypt to the cult of Ptah at Memphis, where the religion of the cross originated; and to Annu or On, where it was continued in the cult of Atum-Ra with Iu-em-hetep as the Egyptian Jesus.