An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul: Introduction

When functioning normally, the arrangement of our various souls is seamless. This is an important distinction to make, because I doubt that I am the only one who, upon first hearing about the Kemetic concept of the soul, wrongly assumed that I should be able feel all of the individual pieces… and nearly drove myself crazy trying to because I was almost certain that not feeling them meant something was “wrong”—much as it would be “wrong” if I could not feel sensation from each of my individual limbs. But the reality is that most of our souls are less like limbs and more like organs. Just as we aren’t consciously aware of our lungs—unless we work to be aware of them through breathing exercises or when an illness, like asthma, unavoidably brings them to our attention—we also aren’t often aware of our myriad souls. If they are performing their intended functions correctly, they simply continue to do so without any effort on the part of our conscious selves.

Thus, the topic of etheric anatomy is largely an intellectual one (outside the realms of healing and mystical work). It is also important to note here that, when things do go wrong and draw our attention to our pieces, it is not a matter of the souls themselves being “defective” in any way: I believe that Netjer made all souls perfect. But just as we may fall and break bones, so too may the less physical parts of us be injured by forces in our environment and events in our lives, and just as a broken bone is not a moral comment about a person, a broken soul isn’t either.

For my part, it was trying to understand the long-term ramifications of just such an injury that led me to write these essays. I speak to you from a place of experience, not a place of authority or a place of academia, and it may be useful to keep that in mind so you can put my descriptions in proper perspective: I do not claim that any of this is taken from actual ancient beliefs. It is largely inspiration born of UPG (my own and that of others) and as with all such things, you should take my personal theories with a large pinch of salt, for exactly that reason: they are ultimately personal—your mileage may vary.

I will close this introduction with the two things you’ll need to see from whence this series of essays has been derived: an image and a statement. The statement first, for it encapsulates the core concept of what I learned through my explorations and was the guiding principal for the creation of the accompanying image:

“The components of the soul are balanced against each other such that they are bound to one another through the mechanism of an interlacing set of dualities, and one best learns about them by observing and studying the connections between them.”

And of course, the infamous image which consumed my life for several days as I unpacked its meaning:

A full explanation of everything in this graphic is coming soon, I promise. :)

Next time I’ll be talking about the Ka and the Khat (and to a lesser extent, the Ib) and why they are more complicated then we often make them out to be.