Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entirely UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your mileage may vary.
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I started my book with a simple goal to write a fantasy novel which eschewed the classical concept of ghosts in favor of something more Kemetic in nature and feel. I knew the shift would be a difficult one for audiences unaccustomed to the underlying philosophy I intended to use, so I focused on imagery in the early part of the tale to set the tone, starting with a glimpse of my atypical vision of the dead, in the very first paragraph of the novel:
“Somewhere amid the bare clacking branches of the trees, the dead fluttered their wings. Ariadne stopped walking; the crunch of her boots in the morning frost echoed into silence. They watched her with unblinking eyes, their bird-forms sleek and unruffled as they waited for her to notice and pay her respects to them.”
I sometimes find myself thinking of my own soul as a bird which, as Ariadne would say “perches behind the cage of my ribs, waiting a lifetime for the chance to fly”. I have come to believe that as much as we write stories to entertain each other, so too do we write them to better understand ourselves—our stories may not be themselves instructional, but the images should resonate with us and if they do, we may find meaning in them all the same. I think my fantasy vision of “bird ghosts” is not all too far off from how the ba that inspired them functions in actual reality.
As keepers of our intuition, our eternal/essential being, and our true names, the Ba perches within us quietly and ventures out at night, if only briefly, into the world of dreams (one of many spaces in the duat) where they share company with those bau who no longer return to living flesh at dawn. The logic of the Ba is different from the Ka’s logic, which we experience during the day when we are awake, and thus dreams have a fuzziness about them because of the translation between the souls.
When we tap our intuition, the “sense of knowing” that responds is the ba speaking its language, so it stands to reason that those gods who speak to us in waking moments, who speak in that same language of knowing, might do so through our Ba. The Ba is familiar with the Names, after all, since as mentioned, it also keeps the Ren spoken by whichever Netjeru was responsible for its creation. I have heard the Ren called the song that one’s soul sings through the act of living, and if this is true, then I imagine the Ba giving voice to that song. The Ba also casts one of our shadows, our Sahu, into the duat and it is though that mechanism which we see what is unseen.
[I know I have teased you twice now, but the essay about shadows is coming after this one, I promise.]
The Ba is the eternal soul (which may or may not have walked in life before, and may or may not do so again after its current life) and it has no sense of linear time—if you have ever lost track of an hour during what started as a fifteen minute meditation, you already know how poor it is at understanding your schedule. The wisdom it gathers, it gathers from unseen places, and it whispers into the Ib those things which guide us through life and make our paths unique. Where the Ka and Khat concern themselves with social and material living respectively, the Ba is obsessed with meaning and originates our feelings of destiny and purpose.
It has been called our subconscious, though I think that is only part of the story, for it is a natural part of our conscious mind as well. I think our creativity and our drive to create is the visceral substance of the Ba that we experience during our waking hours. Inspiration probably finds its source in the Ba as well. For the Ba is also that part of us which responds to poetry and music and art. It is the part of us where hope dwells and where faith resides. It is the part which can fully inhabit the present moment with no regard to past or future, and it is a spirit which can grow larger than the form which contains, and often does during periods of trial and hardship.
The Ba knows the Ren intimately, and thus is familiar with our core being, the desire of our creator, and keeper of the secret of that which transpired during the act of our creation. Because it is keeper of the sacred true name of ourselves, it is the soul which responds most strongly to the speaking of that name. For though the Ren was spoken at the creation of the Ba, I do not believe that this was the only speaking of the name. I believe it was spoken once again at the seating of the souls.
Full disclaimer: if you haven’t figured it already, I believe in reincarnation. In a Kemetic definition of reincarnation, the Ba must be the soul to travel on though multiple lives, because the Ka, once judged, remains as an Ahku in the duat, eventually returning to the ancestral Ka from which it was born. The Ba is free to incarnate again, and it takes with it the Ren. That is not to say the Ren is unknown to the other souls: we know it is possible for the Ka to discover it, and my UPG is that all of the souls heard it at least once, whether they remember it after the fact or not.
My theory is that the Ren, when spoken the first time, is an act of creation, and when spoken again, is a powerful heka which seats the various souls within a Khat. When a Netjeru speaks the Ren it brings those souls into proper alignment and binds them together in a single life and a single being. Death is the violent and frightening process that it is because it undoes those bonds and disassociates the parts. And this is not entirely conjecture: my UPG about how the Ren functions comes mainly from personal experience.
When I was a teen I sought to know myself. I was told by friends and family alike that I already did. That I was the sum of my parts and that I was already uncharacteristically aware of my inner being. But I could not shake the nagging feeling that something was missing. Something was still beyond my ken. I asked my gods for help, and, on a sudden intuition, pleaded with them to give me my name. To this day, I do not know exactly what possessed me to make that request, but for better or worse, it was granted. I was given knowledge of my Ren, and my life was changed by it.
When Bast spoke of the night she intervened in my moment of crisis, she said “I have stood before you and uttered your name in that moment of darkness which almost claimed you forever.” It was in understanding what she meant by “uttered your name” that I realized what exactly happened that night. I remember the pain of it clearly, the sense of coming apart, of being a stranger in my body and disconnected from my deeper self…the sense of isolation that comes with dissolution of the bonds between souls. When she uttered my name, meaning when she spoke my Ren, she brought the souls which were coming undone back into alignment-- rooting them once more in the Khat, seating them, back where they belonged.
If that sounds somewhat esoteric and outside the realm of the usual, I assure you it is: the situation is not natural and may have been caused by another instance of me being stupid with my Ren. This is not the first time. In fact, “me being stupid with my Ren” is a recurring theme ever since they gave it to me. This latest incident led to Their insistence on my being instructed in these things so I can learn to be more careful without having to do that learning through experience. (There was, of course, more to what happened that night, but this is the humbling core of it.)
And for the record, I think the Ren functions differently when spoken in the language of the Netjer (and by that, I mean spoken on the tongue of a god, not merely spoken in ancient Egyptian). It certainly functions different for Them than it functions for me when spoken in mortal language, though I won’t deny that there are certain similarities when it is spoken with no specific purpose in mind and outside of formal heka. I have noted that speaking my own Ren aloud offhandedly makes my Ba sit up and take notice in a way which makes it disconcertingly separate from my Ka for a brief instant. But when I speak it casually in my mind, as when I meditate upon the sounds of it, it has the opposite effect: it draws the Ba and Ka closer together so that the boundaries between them grow thin and permeable. Make of that what you will.
And before I get into things too esoteric to be wrapped up within this essay, I will let that mark the end of our discussion of the “body” souls…that is to say, the souls with their own inherent motivations and concerns. The others are more accessories to the whole, embodiments of the natural ramifications of one’s existence. Yes, next time I will finally get around to discussing the shadows and the vital energy. Khaibit, Sahu, and Sekhem. I will also trot that diagram back out and briefly explain how it all fits together in the image. (There may even be a tarot activity to assist one in making contact with the main parts of one’s being). I think I can fit all of that in one very long entry, but if not, I’ll split it into two parts.
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