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| A semi-conception rendition of the soul (ba) of a person flying off to "confess" on 42 sacred acts of Egyptian morality in the judgment hall of the afterlife. |
where Mm is the moral after death mass of one's soul, ba, or karma, and Cn is a specific negative confession, each associated with a specific confession mass. To determine whether or not one was overall a good or bad (or evil) person, this moral mass was weighted against the weight of the feather of truth Mf, where by the following inequalities would determine the outcome of one's soul (ba or karma):
This morality theory was reformulated in the B-ra-hma-ic religions, generally speaking, into a cyclical positive or negative reincarnation theory with the prospect of cycle escape (nirvana), and reformulated in the Ab-ra-ham-ic religions, generally speaking, into the ten commandments and onetime judgment (heaven or hell) resurrection theory. A full 72% of the modern world's morality system, at a minimum, is based on this Egyptian morality theory, in one way or another.
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| The 42 Nomes or cities (territories) of Pre-Dynastic Egypt, which when merged into the Egyptian First Dynasty, each previous 42 nome deities were given a place in the judgment hall over which the 42 negative confessions were read and the weight of the soul determined. |
Number 42
The significance of the number forty-two is a bit difficult to track down. The numbers 4, 9, 14, 18, 27, 42, and 110 are all said to have cosmic significance. [2] The number 42 seems to have arisen in Egypt’s predynastic period (5500-3100BC), during which period each settlement, called a nome, had its own local god or "nome god", and according to actual records there were 42 of these nomes (or 44 depending on list). [4] There were 20 nomes of Lower Egypt and 22 nomes of Upper Egypt. [7]
These 42 different nome gods were incorporated into the first dynasty period Ra theology, such that there were said to be 42 gods (or nome gods) in the judgment hall, each god presiding over judgment of one particular sin. Hence the number 42 seems to have been a syncretism of the older scattered tribal-settlement gods into a unified state religious system, with head gods and subordinate gods.
At the head judgment hall sat Osiris, the main judge of the dead and great-grandson of Ra, and passage of the deceased into this judgment hall was conducted by Horus, the son of Osiris.
In Christianity, a monotheistic version of Ra theology, the number 42, or the 42 judgment gods, were rewritten to the effect that there were said to be 42 generations between god (Ra) and Jesus (Osiris-Horus).
In modern times, the number 42 became popularized in Douglas Adams' famous 1978 science fiction comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the supercomputer answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything; although, supposedly, the number was picked at random. [5]
42 Confessions → 10 commandments
In terms of the actual list of 42 forbidden actions, in 1300BC, following the demise of the short-lived monotheism promoted by the pharoh Akhenaton at Amarna, the displaced priests of this sect merged and truncated the list into another list called the ten categories of sin, commonly known in this period, into the famous "ten commandments". [2] An outline of this truncation process is shown below, using the famous 1200BC Papyrus of Ani. [1] This these are compared with the so-called seven deadly sins, which were added to the classification of general sins, deriving from Greek monk Evagrius Ponticus’ 400AD list of eight evil thoughts. [6]
| Negative Confessions (1500BC) | Ten Categories of Sin (1300BC) | Ten Commandments (500BC) | Seven Deadly Sins (400AD) |
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An obvious issue in this system of morality is that it a relative system, which seems to change as the times change.
Modern morality
In modern terms, to upgrade the olden 42 negative confessions based system of morality, one must explain right and wrong behaviors in terms of the modern physical sciences.
The 1789 theory of utilitarianism, introduced by English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, defined as a sort of sum over everybody happiness calculus of positive and negative individual utilities of one's actions summed over the total populous, was a step in this direction.
Likewise, British philosopher John Stewart's 1789 "moral movement" theory, wherein he viewed a human as a type of intelligent animate matter, made of particles (atoms), and that all that exists in the universe is matter and motion, some motion being "moral" some "amoral".
In 1809, similar to Stewart's view of a person as type of animate matter, German polymath Johann Goethe's outlined his conception of moral symbols, in which a person was viewed as a reactive chemical whose reactions and behaviors to other people are determined by the forces of chemical affinity as outlined in the standard physical chemistry textbooks of his day, predominately Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman's 1777 A Dissertation on Elective Attractions.
Goethe's moral symbols logic equates, in modern parlance, to the explanation of morality or of specific second-by-second good (natural) or bad (unnatural) actions terms of firstly the Lewis inequality (1923), which describes what is "natural" and "unnatural" in human interactions:
Then, secondly, how these inequalities relate to thermodynamic coupling:
This would then define morality for the system. In the case of global conflicts of morality, a summation (similar to previous) would need to be done to determine if the overall coupled systems (e.g. countries at war), would be a natural or unnatural process.
In the big picture of things, all of this would need to be explained in terms of the spin cycles of the universe, which thus drive the coupling, and thus the individual measures of morality.
References
1. (a) Budge, W. (1913). The Egyptian Book of the Dead (pg. 576-82). Publisher.
(b) Papyrus of Ani – Wikipedia.
(c) 42 Negative Confessions (Papyrus of Ani) (Maat) – Wikipedia.
(d) Negative confessions (Papyrus of Ani) – TourEgypt.net.
2. Muller, Wilhelm and Scott, James. (1918). Egyptian Mythology (pg. 421). Marshall Jones Co.
3. Nantambu, Kwame. (2009). “Real Origin of the Ten Commandments”, TriniCenter.com.
4. Remler, Pat. (2010). Egyptian Mythology A to Z (42 nome gods, pg. 133). Infobase Publishing.
5. 42 (number) – Wikipedia.
6. Seven deadly sins – Wikipedia.
7. Nome (Egypt) – Wikipedia.
External links
● Negative confessions – PaganizingFaithOfYeshua.Netfirms.com.
