Massey - 'Ancient Egypt' - "It has also been said that the historic Jesus came to glorify the lot of labour, which antiquity despised, whereas the Egyptian paradise was the reward of labour, and Horus the husbandman in the harvest-field of the Aarru is the worker, personified.      No one attained the Egyptian heaven but the worker, who reaped solely in proportion as he had sown.      The portion of land allotted to the Manes for cultivation in Amenta was enlarged only for those who had been good labourers on earth.     The Shebti figures in the tombs are equipped for labour with the plough or hoe in their hands.     As agriculturists they put their hands to the plough.      There was no unearned increment for loafers in the earth of eternity.      A flash of revelation lightens from the cloud of Egypt's past when we learn from the Ritual that a part of the work to be performed in the Aarru paradise or field of harvest in Amenta was to clear away the life-choking sand.     These fighters and conquerors of the much detested desert still retain that image of the earliest cultivators, the makers of the soil which they enclosed and first protected from the drifting, sterilizing sand.      The Manes, addressing the Shebti figures, says to them, "O typical ones!      If I should be judged worthy of doing the work that has to be done in Amenta, bear witness for me that I am worthy to fertilize the fields, to flush the streams, and transport the sand from west to east" (Rit., ch. 6).     He became one of the glorified elect in being judged worthy of the work.     This will show that in making the primeval paradise they were still the cultivators who had conquered on earth by their long wrestle with the powers of dearth in the desert when they made their passage through the wilderness of sand and held on to the skirts of Mother Nile, who led them to a land which she herself had made for them to turn into an oasis and a paradise of plenty with her waters for assistance in the war against Apap, or Sut, the Sebau, and the burning Sahara.     It may also explain why the Pharaohs from the time of the eleventh dynasty were officially entitled "Masters of the Oasis", the oasis, that is, which had been created in Egypt by human labour to be localized in Amenta as the promised land that was to be attained at last among the never-setting stars in the oasis of eternity.

     The prototypes of hell and purgatory and the earthly paradise are all to be found in the Egyptian Amenta.

      The darkness, fire, and chains, as well as the brimstone, which was the stone of Sut, and other paraphernalia of the Christian hell, are also Egyptian.     But the chains were employed for the fettering of Sut, the Apap, and the Sebau, the evil adversaries of Osiris, the good or perfect being, not for the torturing of souls that once were human.      The Egyptian hell was not a place of everlasting pain, but of extinction, for those who were wicked irretrievably.     It must be admitted, to the honour and glory of the Christian deity, that a god of eternal torment is an ideal distinctly Christian, to which the Egyptians never did attain.      Theirs was the all-parental god, Father and Mother in one whose heart was thought to bleed in every wound of suffering humanity, and Whose son was represented in the character of the Comforter.

      Also the hell-fire of Christian theology, the hell-fire that is unquenchable (Mark 9: 43, 44), is a survival of the representation made in the Egyptian mysteries.      The Osiris in Amenta passes through this hell of fire in "which those who are condemned suffer their annihilation.      He says, "I enter in and I come forth from the tank (or lake) of flame on the day when the adversaries are annihilated at Sekhem" (Rit., ch. I).      When the glorified deceased had made his voyage in heaven "over the leg of Ptah" and reached the mount of glory, he exclaims, "I have come from the lake of flame, from the lake of fire and from the field of flame".      He has made his escape from destruction, and attained the eternal city at the pole of heaven.     This lake of fire that is never quenched was derived from the solar force in the mythology on which the eschatology was based.     Hence the locality was in the east, at the place of sunrise.      The wicked were consumed by fire at the place where the righteous entered the solar bark to sail the heavenly waters called the Kabhu, or the cool, and voyage west- ward toward the heaven of the setting stars.      The lake of flame was in the east, the lake of outer darkness in the west.     For when the bark of Ra or the boat of souls had reached the west at sunset there was a great gulf fixed between the mount called Manu in the west and the starry vault of night, the gulf of Putrata (Rit., ch. 44), where the dead fell into darkness unless supported by Apuat the star-god, by Horus in the moon, and by Ra the solar deity, the visible representatives of superhuman powers in the astronomical mythology.

     Ezekiel (20:36) makes an allusion to "the wilderness of the land of Egypt," which points to the lower Egypt of the mythos in Amenta.     Egypt itself, as the land of the living, the cultivable land, was the very opposite of the wilderness.

      Amenta in the Book of Hades, and also in the Ritual, is described as consisting of two parts, called "Egypt and the desert land or wilderness."      This latter was the domain of Sut in the Osirian mysteries.     One part of the domain, named Anrutef, is self-described as the place where nothing grows.     It was a desert of fruitless, leafless, rootless sand, in which " there was no water for the people to drink"; or, if any, the water was made bitter or salt by the adversary Sut or the Apap-dragon.

     The lower Egypt of Amenta was a land of dearth and darkness to the manes.      It was the domain of Sut at the entrance in the west.      Here was the typical wilderness founded on the sands that environed Egypt.     Aarru or the garden far to the eastward was an oasis in the desert ready for the manes who were fortunate enough to reach that land of promise.      The domain of Sut was a place of plagues; all the terrors of nature were congregated there, including drought and famine, fiery flying serpents and unimaginable monsters.     There were the hells of heat in which the waters were on fire; there were the slime-pits, the blazing bitumen, and brimstone flames of Sodom and Gomorrah.     The desert of engulfing sands, the lakes of fire, and the deluge of overwhelming waters had to be crossed, and all the powers of death and hell opposed the passage of the glorified elect, the chosen people of the Lord, who were bound for bliss in the land where their redemption dawned upon the summit of the mount.     This then was the land of bondage where the manes were in direst need of a deliverer.