Tea at Trianon: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 16, 2022

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

From Heritage Daily:

The Book of the Dead is the name given to a corpus of ancient Egyptian magical, ritual and funerary texts, aiming at protecting the body of the deceased and to accompany him or her during the journey in the regions of the Duat, the ancient Egyptian netherworld. The Egyptians called this collection “peret em heru”, “going out by day or in the sunlight”, which was a metaphor for rebirth and eternal life after the liminal stage of death. The corpus is attested for a very long span of time, from the beginning of the New Kingdom (1500 BC) to the Greco-Roman period (332 BC – AD 380). The objects where Book of the Dead spells and vignettes (illustrations) occur are part of the funerary equipment used for the burial rituals: papyri first of all, mummy bandages, linen, coffins, stelas, amulets, canopic boxes (used to keep the soft interiors of the body before mummification) and statuettes; selections of Book of the Dead spells occur also on tomb and temple walls. (Read more.)