“Woe is me for the grief of this time!” While this statement might sound like a modern lament, it was actually written by Ipu-wer, an ancient Egyptian (Kemetic) sage more than 3,000 years ago. Join the 196th Nisut-bity (AUS) of the Kemetic Orthodox Faith for a discussion of this and other Kemetic sacred texts, revealing the secrets of living alongside each other in harmony and how these truths are still applicable in today’s world.
“I wring out my body of what it holds, in releasing all my words… I meditate on what has happened, the events that occur throughout the land. Changes take place; it is not like last year, one year is worse than the last… While trouble entered in today and turmoil will not cease tomorrow, everyone is silent about it. The whole land is in great distress. Hearts are greedy… No one is wise enough to understand it, but no one is angry enough to cry out, and one wakes to suffering each day.”
Khakheperre-soneb
“I show you a land in turmoil; what should not be has come to pass. Men seize weapons of warfare, and the land lives in uproar….None weep over death, for each man’s heart is for himself…a man sits with his back turned, while one slays another. I show you a son as enemy, a brother as foe, a man slaying his father. Every mouth is full of “How I wish” and all happiness has vanished. The land is ruined, its fate decreed…what was made has been unmade…”
Neferti
“The land is full of gangs; a man goes to work with a shield… Crime is everywhere, there are no men like there used to be… Hearts are violent, storm sweeps the land, there’s blood everywhere and no shortage of dead… What shall we do? What can we do? There is no good man anywhere… The hotheaded man says “If I knew where God was, I’d serve him.”… If only this were the end of man, no more conceiving, no more births! Then the land would cease to shout and tumult would be no more! Woe is me for the grief of this time!.. The wise says “yes,” the fool says “no,” and the ignorant is satisfied… Authority, knowledge and truth are with us, but we only make turmoil, and nobody listens to what anybody says.”
Ipu-wer
“Who should I talk to today? Brothers are mean and the friends of today don’t love… One is content with evil and goodness is cast to the ground everywhere… He who should enrage men with his crimes merely makes them laugh…the past is not remembered and now one doesn’t help the helper any more. Wrong roams the earth and doesn’t end.”
A Dispute of a Man with His Ba
Does any of this sound familiar?
I could have written it on my way here…you could, and probably have, thought of it, either in the context of your spiritual life or even simply in the observations of every day. These are, however, not new thoughts. Each of these readings come from texts written more than four thousand years ago.
It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ancient Egypt, or Kemet as its own people knew it, is a place that holds great mystery, particularly in the spiritual realm, for today’s world. The greatest mystery of Kemet, perhaps, is not whether little green men from Mars built the pyramids or even which Pharaoh oversaw the Exodus, but revolves around writings such as the ones I’ve just shared. How did this culture last for four millennia and beyond if the sorts of things which destroy humanity today were happening then? How did they confront and then get past these events? What can we learn from Kemet, and apply to our lives today?
The readings I’ve shared all come from about the same period of Kemetic history, between 4,000 and 3,500 years ago roughly, and are often referred to either as “apocalyptic literature” or “wisdom literature.” While they are not officially scriptures in the sense that Deity transmitted them to humans, they were revered within the culture as the writings of the ancestral sages, and passed down to us as the beloved stories and collections of writings of the Kemetic culture. Most of the writings are couched in the form of one person talking to another, such as a father to a son: for the Kemetic, communication was a divine gift and writing a crystallization of the act of speech, which endured forever. Much as the writings of the Confucianists in China, these documents formed the backbone of moral literature throughout Kemetic history, and through them, we can understand something both of the conditions under which people lived, and the manner in which they responded to their environment, to each other and to Deity.
Herodotus referred to the ancient Egyptians as the “most pious people in the world,” and perhaps they were. However, even if their religious life was well-formed, from even a cursory reading of ancient documents, one can tell that everyday life was far from Utopia. Even this society, based upon the tenets of ma’at, an ancient word denoting order and truthfulness, was subject to disease, warfare, crime, and all of the attendant sufferings and ills that humans still experience today.
Like us, the Kemetic people worried about the future, complained about bad government and high taxes, and wondered if the world was going to be as good for their children as it had been for them. Unlike us in many cases, however, the Kemetic seems to have accepted a more active role in his future, rather than simply handing himself over to fate – for in the Kemetic mind, fate was only what you made of it, and part of Ma’at was making sure that you were taking an active role in your own life.
It is interesting that these moral documents, these pieces of “wisdom literature,” hold the place that scriptures do in the world’s major religions, and often say the same things, yet the Kemetic people had absolutely no problem accepting that these documents had been written by men for men, rather than being divinely inspired. They thought no less of the words of men than they did of the words of Deity – after all, men were Deity’s creation and to honor a man was to honor his Maker; and they certainly thought no less of the concept of Ma’at, as they believed it to be one of the very names of Deity itself: Ma’at represented both a concept and a feminine form of the divine Being.
Truth, in the form of Ma’at, was accumulative: if a man acted in Ma’at, then Ma’at was multiplied, and came back to him in the form of other blessings, or the reciprocal treatment of other men. Remember “Do unto others as you would have done unto you?” A Kemetic wisdom text states a very similar maxim: “Do not do to others what you do not wish them to do to you.” Not doing what one does not wish is as important as doing what one wishes, if not more – because the opposite of Ma’at, Isfet or wrongdoing, is also accumulative, and, to borrow another phrase from that same later Near Eastern prophet, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
Morality, then, for the Kemetic, is an active endeavor. One cannot simply sit and let the world pass him by – he must be active within it, and his actions, for good or for ill, cause reactions which have direct impact on his life. Good character engenders good responses in the world and in others. If a man loves his neighbor, his neighbor will love him in return. In such a reciprocal worldview, what happens to a person is more often than not a direct reflection of what he has physically done in the world, rather than what he believes in. As Dr. Maulana Karenga stated in his dissertation on Ma’at and ancient Egyptian social ethics, “It is an ethics concerned with building moral character and a moral community, which sustains and is sustained by such character.”
Imagining that the Kemetic people regarded the world only through a simplistic transactional morality, where “I’ll do this and you’ll do this back and we’ll all be happy,” does not give this ancient culture much credit. To be certain, the concept of Ma’at is very sophisticated and the Kemetic people were not naïve enough to believe the world would automatically conform to their wishes if they said the right words and did the right actions alone. They knew that sometimes people would act out of Ma’at, and that bad things would happen, either as a result of those wrong actions, or without any compelling reason whatsoever. So, how did the Kemetic deal with calamity, with the unexpected, or with suffering on a national or even global scale, if his morality was viewed on an individualistic scale?
By observing his own behavior, multiplied (all societies being conglomerations of individuals), and then remembering and re-instituting behaviors that were known in the past to have had positive result, the Kemetic sought to restore Ma’at by doing Ma’at again. Bad things happen, and will continue to happen, despite the best efforts of humanity to keep such things at bay. However, not only did the Kemetic people believe that a great deal of suffering was avoidable, they also believed that that which was not avoidable could still be mitigated or alleviated through the proper application of Ma’at to the situation – through taking responsibility, coming together, and working through. An unexpected calamity could then be seen as an opportunity for community, and Ma’at, to reaffirm itself.
The ancient texts talk about ways to restore Ma’at, and like the ancient lamentations, I believe these are as useful today as they were thousands of years ago when they were first written down. One way is through the cultivation of a spiritual life. Ipu-wer tells his readers to remember the way they used to worship: “Remember fumigating with incense and libating from a jar at dawn…making divine offerings…the observing of rules, the adjusting of dates, removing one who enters the priestly service unclean…” Through remembrance of ritual functions, the communication (and the community) between the Divine and man would be restored.
Another way to cultivate Ma’at revealed by these ancient texts is through a healthy dose of joy and happiness. A text where a man argues with his soul about how he wants to commit suicide because his life is so terrible, ends with the soul giving its own lecture: “Aren’t you a man? Aren’t you alive? What do you gain by complaining?..follow the feast day and forget worry!” The Maxims of Ptah-hotep teach that a man should do “only as much work as his household requires and then spend the rest of day in the pursuit of happiness.” It is perhaps telling of the modern attitude (and condition) that Ptah-hotep’s attitude would earn bad marks on an employee evaluation in most Western countries – today we believe we are unable to work hard enough, fast enough, or well enough, and relaxation is something we’ll do when we’re dead.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The ancients witnessed the same sorts of suffering and calamity that we do – and they survived and lived through it. We survive and live through our trials and tribulations as well, generally, so perhaps these ancient documents don’t teach anything except that the human condition has certain parameters that do not change in substance, only in outward expression.
However, the ancient moral view, where a person’s actions directly affect others and thus should constantly be reviewed and encouraged to perpetuate a state of moral appropriateness so as to engender this in others – is something which we can easily apply to our own lives, whether we follow the same cultural and religious ideas of the Kemetic, or those of other cultures. The return to ancestral practices like that set forth by Ipu-wer, while sometimes unpopular in today’s new and improved, linear time where the past is always inferior world, is compelling more and more people to stop, re-evaluate and respond in kind.
Ma’at, according to an eloquent peasant of the second millennium BC, was established by God and endures forever. And indeed, regardless of one’s own cultural background, the principles of Ma’at do seem to have universal relevance, and taking a cue from the Kemetic mindset can indeed be a stepping stone toward a better world. As people come to the realization of their power by taking responsibility for their lives and their actions through the cultivation of good character, said character can only grow – and Ma’at be restored through the unified effort of people in community, with themselves, with all creation, and with their Creator.
As it is said the ancient tongue: wen Ma’at hen’a-ten ra-neb: may Ma’at be with you, every day.
