ANCIENT EGYPT THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
BOOK 10
THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT AND THE DESERT OF AMENTA
In reviewing M. Renan's work on Israel[10], a recent writer asks, what then is the origin and significance of the exodus and its attendant plagues and prodigies? 'Whence did they come, where or when were they invented? The monuments are never likely to tell us.'[11] No, not if we are looking for the Palestinian Jews in Egypt as an ethnological entity, or for the ancient Egyptian fables as biblical facts. But when we get clear of that cloud of iridescent dust which the Jewish writings have interposed between us and the monuments, we shall find they do tell us more or less what was the origin of the wonderful tale by which the world has been beguiled so blindly through mistaking verifiable myth for God's own historic word. The sufferings of the chosen people in Egypt and their miraculous exodus out of it belong to the celestial allegory of the solar drama that was performed in the mysteries of the divine netherworld, and had been performed as a mythical representation ages before it was converted into a [p.632] history of the Jews by the literalizers of the ancient legends. The tale of the ten plagues of Egypt contains an esoteric version of the tortures inflicted on the guilty in the ten hells of the underworld. We have seen somewhat of the descent of mankind from a celestial birthplace that was constellated as an enclosure on the mountain of the pole. We have now to trace the ascent from the regions of the nether-earth, which, as Egyptian, is an exodus from Lower Egypt and the 'desert' of Amenta. We shall have to make the journey through this nether-earth once more in following the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the character of the manes issuing from Amenta. The legend of the exodus or coming forth today, like those of the creation, the deluge, and the lost paradise in the Book of Genesis, belongs to that mythology which underlies and is the source of all the märchen and the folklore of the world. The clue, as will be shown, has been preserved in what is commonly termed the wisdom of the ancients, which we hold to be Egyptian in its origin and derivative on all the other lines of its descent. We find the mythos, the legends, and the folktales of the world are all involved in the Egyptian wisdom, and the Hebrew traditions are demonstrably the debris of Egyptian myth and eschatology. But, of all the various versions of the coming forth or exodus from out the underworld, not one has caused such deep perplexity as this of Israel issuing from Egypt, in which the mythos has been misappropriated and converted into an ethnical history. As Egyptian, it was not pretended that the children of Ra were ethnical, or that the mysteries of Amenta were transactions in the earth of time.
The way up from Amenta was variously portrayed as an ascent by means of steps; by scaling a mount, or by climbing a tree, a grapevine, a reed, a beanstalk, or a papyrus reed. In the legends of many races we find the tradition of a deliverance from some subterranean dwelling-place which was their primeval home. This exodus from the underworld is common in the märchen of the red men. With the Lenni Lenape Indians, the beginning was in a subterranean abode up out of which they were led by the wolf as their chief totemic zootype. Now, the wolf is an equivalent for the jackal. In Egyptian the wolf and jackal (Seb) are synonymous; and the jackal was the guide of roads in Amenta who led the people through its wilderness, and showed a way for them to ascend into the world of light. All the myths and legends of an underworld depend upon there being an underworld, or nether-earth, and this again depends on there being a double-earth which was hollowed out by the god who represented the nocturnal sun for the passage through the mount of earth by night, and who as Egyptian was Ptah, the founder of Amenta.
