Martin Aitken

This, then, was what constituted a human in ancient Egypt, a composite of independent parts: a physical body, a spiritual body, a heart, a doppelgänger, a soul, a shadow, a spirit, a form, a name.
Apart from the body, all these components lived on after death. The living, the dead and the gods were closely connected, and the land of the dead was to be found in the Eastern firmament, though in other epochs (and we must remembe

Although we have access to a large number of extant texts from the Egyptian high culture, as well as many artifacts and construction works, there remains something very alien about what they express, something so remote that one can barely relate to it other than intellectually, which is to say in ways that are non-intimate, abstract, non-emotional—it is as if their very dimensions are different from ours, that what they express is so great and at the same time so very far away from us as to appear almost un-human.

Against this vague and cloudy background we have the first extant works of literature of the ancient Greeks, from around the eighth century BC—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, the Works and Days—a veritable revelation of human lif

It is easy to think that with the Greeks everything was suddenly brought close to us, the Divine and the human, life and death, but this is so only because it was they who laid the foundation of the reality in which we live today.

we can peer into the depths of our own minds by viewing the Greek tragedies, which to this day continue to be staged by theaters across the globe, and if we wish to consider the nature of the world and our own circumstances in it, we begin with Plato or Aristotle, or perhaps even earlier, with the pre-Socratic philosophers.

The most usual way of making contact with the dead was to offer something to the deceased at the site of his or her grave: honey, for instance, or wine, oil, milk or blood (in the latter case there was a name for it, haimakouria, or the moistening by blood). On a grave discovered at Mycenae there was an altar through which ran a duct, allowing blood to be poured directly into the mouth of the corpse. After the offering, it was customary to lie down to sleep on the grave, and the dead would then appear in dreams. The Greeks consulted the dead because they could see into the future, presumably on account of their existing beyond time.

The Odyssey, naturally, does not describe an actual place either, but the ritual Odysseus performs is realistic, it was how the dead were summoned, and the obscurity with which the journey to Hades is described—as if they sail into an eternal night—is supplanted by clarity when considered from a different angle: the encounter between the dead and the living takes place in a borderland, neither here nor there, in a kind of non-place, at the very periphery of existence.

the crystal-clear waters of the cave,

There was something great and unfathomably ancient that could not be put to rest by the New.

But gradually, immeasurably slowly, albeit not as slowly as man had left the animals,