Ancient Egyptian Symbolism & Mysticism
I've been fascinated by Ancient Egypt for as long as I can remember, although what interests me about it has changed quite a bit over the years. When I was younger, it was the obvious things: pyramids, mummies, strange gods with animal heads and all those wonderful stories about curses and hidden tombs. Later, when I began studying different spiritual traditions more seriously, I became interested in something rather different. I started noticing just how many Egyptian symbols had escaped, for want of a better word, from Ancient Egypt. They're still around us. Living on the West Coast, I see Ankhs on necklaces, Eyes of Horus in tattoo designs and scarabs in stores selling crystals and spiritual jewellery. Go into almost any large bookstore and somewhere among the shelves on mythology, meditation and mysticism you'll probably find Ancient Egypt. Four thousand years later, it still has a remarkable hold on our imagination.
Of course, there's a danger in that. The Egypt we encounter in a modern spiritual store isn't necessarily the Egypt an ancient Egyptian would have recognized. We've borrowed their symbols and, quite naturally, added some of our own meanings to them. I don't actually think there's anything particularly wrong with that, as long as we're honest about what we're doing. Symbols have always travelled. What I find more interesting is going back and asking what these images might have meant before we inherited them.
One thing that took me a while to properly understand is that Egyptian symbols weren't simply decorative. We tend to look at an image and ask, "What does that stand for?" The Egyptians seem to have had a rather more intimate relationship with symbolism. An image could participate in the thing it represented. Life, death, order, creation, protection and the divine weren't abstract subjects discussed somewhere away from everyday existence. They appeared on walls, jewellery, coffins, household objects and amulets. The symbolic and practical worlds constantly overlapped.
And this went on for an astonishingly long time. We casually use the phrase "Ancient Egypt" as though we're describing one historical moment, but Egyptian civilization endured in recognizable forms for more than three thousand years. Think about that for a moment. Three thousand years. Inevitably, beliefs changed. Dynasties disappeared, foreign rulers arrived and gods became more or less important at different times. There was no single Egyptian religion that remained perfectly unchanged from beginning to end. What fascinates me is that certain ideas nevertheless kept resurfacing: balance, protection, renewal, order, justice and the possibility of life continuing beyond death.
Egyptian Symbolism & The Ankh
The "Ankh" is probably the obvious place to start because almost everybody recognizes it, even if they don't know its name. It's that looped cross we see held by Egyptian gods in paintings and carved reliefs. It's often called the "Key of Life," which is a wonderfully evocative name, although its basic ancient meaning was simply connected with life itself. But "life" for the Egyptians wasn't necessarily limited to the years between birth and death. The Ankh could suggest vitality, divine life and the continuation of existence beyond physical death.
I remember seeing rows of Ankhs in a spiritual store years ago, hanging alongside pentagrams, Buddhist imagery, crystals and symbols from several other traditions. Nobody looking at that display would have imagined they were entering an Egyptian temple. The symbol had clearly acquired another life of its own. Today people use it to represent eternal life, spirituality, personal transformation or the connection between physical and spiritual existence. Some of those interpretations are modern. Yet I find it rather appropriate that a symbol of life has proved so difficult to kill off.
The "Eye of Horus", or "Wedjat Eye", has travelled just as far. Its original story is connected with conflict and restoration. Horus loses his eye during his struggle with Seth and the eye is subsequently restored. Because of that story, the image became associated with healing, protection and wholeness. Egyptians wore it as an amulet and placed it on objects associated with the dead. It was protection made visible.
Today you'll sometimes hear the Eye of Horus described as an Egyptian version of the "third eye," representing psychic perception or intuition. That's where I think we need to be slightly careful. Those ideas belong much more to later and modern spiritual traditions than to ancient Egyptian theology. We don't have to throw them away, but neither should we quietly pretend they're four thousand years old. Personally, I find the older idea of restoration every bit as interesting. An eye is damaged and then made whole again. There is something very human in that image—the possibility that what has been injured doesn't necessarily have to remain broken.
Then there is the scarab. I'll admit that a dung beetle probably wouldn't be my first choice if somebody asked me to invent a symbol of spiritual rebirth, but this is exactly why context matters. Egyptians watched scarab beetles rolling balls across the ground and connected that movement with the journey of the sun. The scarab became associated with Khepri and the rising sun, and therefore with creation, renewal and beginnings.
Once you know that, the symbolism suddenly makes sense. The beetle isn't important because it's conventionally beautiful. It's important because of what it does. It pushes something forward and, from the Egyptian perspective, appears connected with the mysterious emergence of new life. Scarabs were carried as amulets and placed with the dead. Thousands of years later, we still use them as symbols of transformation. We've changed the language around them, but we haven't moved very far from the original idea of beginning again.
Of all these concepts, though, the one I return to most often is "Ma'at".
Ma'at is difficult to translate neatly because she's both a goddess and something much larger: truth, justice, balance, harmony and the proper ordering of things. The Egyptians believed that Ma'at had to be maintained. A ruler had responsibilities toward it, but so did ordinary people. The way you behaved mattered because individual behaviour belonged to a much larger order.
The image most people know comes from the "Weighing of the Heart." After death, the heart of the deceased is shown being weighed against the feather of Ma'at. It's one of those ancient images that needs very little explanation. I can show it to people who know almost nothing about Egyptian religion and they immediately understand that something important is being judged.
What does your heart weigh?
I love that question. Not because I literally expect to encounter a set of supernatural scales after death, but because I understand exactly what the image is asking. What have you carried? How have you lived? Have you been honest? What have your choices done to other people? We still talk about having a "heavy heart" or a "clear conscience." Different language, perhaps, but not an entirely different idea.
Egyptian Symbolism & Animals
The animals of Ancient Egypt are another area where our modern assumptions can get in the way. I've often heard people say, rather casually, that Egyptians "worshipped cats" or "worshipped jackals." That's a little too simple. Animals provided a way of expressing divine characteristics. A falcon could communicate qualities associated with Horus—height, vision, kingship and the sky. Bastet's feline associations carried ideas of protection, fertility, motherhood and domestic life. The jackal, an animal familiar around desert cemeteries, became associated with Anubis and the care and protection of the dead.
When I think about it this way, it doesn't seem particularly strange. We still use animals symbolically. We describe somebody as brave as a lion, sly as a fox or wise as an owl without believing they've literally become one. The Egyptians developed this symbolic relationship with the animal world to a degree that can look unfamiliar to us, but the basic human instinct behind it really isn't so alien.
The lotus is perhaps easier for a modern person to understand immediately. It grows from muddy water, rises toward the surface and opens into a beautiful flower. Egyptians associated it with creation, the sun and rebirth. You don't need much imagination to see why. Something beautiful emerges from somewhere dark and murky.
I've encountered lotus imagery in several different spiritual settings over the years, particularly in Hindu and Buddhist contexts. Those traditions have their own histories and meanings, and I wouldn't want to squash them together into some vague idea that "all ancient religions believed the same thing." They didn't. But different cultures can look at the same natural phenomenon and find something spiritually compelling in it. Mud, darkness, emergence, light. It's a powerful sequence.
The Egyptians even built symbolism into their architecture. Temples weren't simply large buildings where religious ceremonies happened. Their design could reflect an ordered universe. Columns took the forms of papyrus and lotus plants. Sacred space echoed the landscape. Architecture, nature and religion flowed into one another.
And then there are the pyramids.
I'm almost reluctant to mention them because we've surrounded the pyramids with so much modern mythology that it can be difficult to see the actual ancient structures underneath it. I've heard claims about alien builders, mysterious energy fields and technologies supposedly unknown to archaeology. None of that is necessary for me. The pyramids are extraordinary enough without giving them supernatural assistance. They belong within Egyptian ideas about kingship, death, resurrection and eternal life, and the sheer human achievement involved in creating them is quite capable of producing wonder on its own.
Our modern obsession with Egypt really took off again during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign helped fuel European interest, archaeological discoveries followed, and then the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 sent the fascination into overdrive. Suddenly Egypt was everywhere. Jewellery, cinemas, hotels, furniture and fashion borrowed Egyptian forms. Art Deco designers fell in love with its geometry. Ancient Egypt had become fashionable again, although now it was being filtered through modern Western imagination.
Egyptian Symbolism & Modern Mysticism
Something similar happened within modern mysticism. Egyptian symbols were adopted enthusiastically, but they were often given new jobs. The Ankh became a general symbol of spirituality and eternal existence. The Eye of Horus became connected with intuition and psychic awareness. Pyramids acquired supposed connections with energy and higher consciousness.
I'm always slightly torn when I encounter this. Part of me wants to say, "Well, that's not actually what the ancient Egyptians meant." The other part recognizes that human beings have always borrowed and reinterpreted symbols. Perhaps the important thing is simply knowing which is which. We can say, "This is how the Egyptians seem to have understood it, and this is what the symbol has come to mean to some people today." Both stories can be interesting without pretending they're the same story.
Carl Jung gives us another way of looking at all of this. Jung was fascinated by the way certain images and themes seem to reappear across cultures, and he argued that some of them express deep patterns within the human psyche. I'm not sure we need to accept every aspect of Jung's theory to see his point. Human beings everywhere have had to deal with birth, death, fear, love, loss, uncertainty and change. We all know what it is to need protection. We all understand the hope of getting another chance. We all struggle with questions of justice and fairness. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that images dealing with these experiences continue to find audiences long after the civilization that created them has disappeared.
Where I become more cautious is when Ancient Egypt gets turned into a kind of mystical blank cheque. I've read plenty of claims over the years suggesting that the Egyptians possessed some vast body of secret spiritual or scientific knowledge that modern civilization has somehow forgotten. Ancient Egyptian culture was sophisticated enough without us inventing things for it. Its religion and philosophy emerged from a particular landscape, language, society and historical experience. The Nile mattered. The desert mattered. The sun mattered. Death mattered enormously. If we remove all of that and simply use Egypt as an exotic backdrop for modern beliefs, we actually lose much of what made it interesting in the first place.
One thing I do think we can learn from Egyptian thought is how naturally it brought together the spiritual and the everyday. Balance wasn't simply something you meditated about. Justice wasn't merely an abstract philosophical idea. How you lived, how society functioned and how you behaved toward other people all belonged to the same moral and spiritual landscape.
I find myself increasingly drawn to that as I get older. Spirituality can sometimes become another thing we schedule—meditation at seven, yoga on Wednesday, perhaps a retreat once a year. Then we return to "real life." The Egyptian idea of Ma'at challenges that separation. If balance and right action matter, they presumably matter when you're dealing with the difficult colleague, speaking to your partner, making a financial decision or deciding whether to tell the truth when lying would be easier.
Perhaps that's what keeps bringing us back to these ancient symbols. The Egyptians are gone, but the experiences behind their symbolism aren't. Things still break and need to be made whole. People still lose their way and want another beginning. We still worry about whether justice will be done. We still fear death, celebrate life and hope that somehow what we do while we're here has meaning.
I sometimes wonder what an Egyptian living three or four thousand years ago would make of the modern world. Almost everything surrounding me as I write this would be incomprehensible: the computer, electric lights, cars outside, a phone capable of speaking to somebody on another continent. Our worlds could hardly look more different.
But show that person a grieving parent, somebody frightened of dying, a couple celebrating the birth of a child, or someone wondering whether they've lived a good life, and suddenly the distance between us becomes much smaller.
That's where I think the real power of Egyptian symbolism lies. The Ankh, the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the lotus and the feather of Ma'at don't survive simply because they're beautiful designs. They survive because the people who created them were wrestling with many of the same things we are. How should we live? What happens when something is lost? Can we begin again? What do we owe one another? And, eventually, what will our own heart weigh?