Duat

The Duat had no single address. The Egyptians placed it beneath the earth, below the fields and the tombs, yet they also placed it in the sky, inside the body of Nut, the starry goddess who swallows the sun each evening and gives birth to it each dawn. Its name was written with a star enclosed in a circle, a sign for a realm that was both celestial and buried, and its geography was real to them: rivers of fire, lakes, deserts, caverns, and a series of great gates, each one barred and guarded by knife-wielding demons whose names had to be spoken before the doors would open. At its heart sat Osiris, the green-faced lord of the dead, wrapped in white, holding the crook and flail, ruling over the blessed and presiding over the punishment of the damned. Everything that died, from the poorest peasant to the sun itself, had to pass through his realm.

The most important traveller of the Duat was the sun god Ra, and his journey was the engine of Egyptian time. Every evening the sun sank into the western horizon and entered the underworld, and for twelve hours Ra sailed in his barque through the twelve divisions of the night, each one walled behind its own gate. The books painted in the royal tombs, the Amduat, the Book of What is in the Underworld, and the Book of Gates, record the voyage hour by hour: the god giving light and judgement to the dead as he passes, the crews of gods towing his boat through caverns of flame, and the serpent Apep, the demon of chaos, rising from the dark waters to swallow the sun, held off by the spears of the defenders and the fire of the cobra on the god's brow. At the deepest hour, in the middle of the night, the miracle happened: the barque of Ra reached the corpse of Osiris, and the two gods merged, the living sun resting within the dead king, Ra in Osiris, Osiris in Ra. From that union the sun drew the strength to be reborn, and at the end of the twelfth hour it emerged from the eastern gate as Khepri, the scarab beetle who rolls the sun into the sky, and the dawn broke. Every sunrise was proof that the Duat could be survived.

Every Egyptian expected to make the same journey, and they prepared for it all their lives. The dead were buried with spells from the Book of Going Forth by Day, the collection of magic that guided the soul through the underworld, because the Duat could not be crossed by the unprepared. The soul had to recite the names of gatekeepers, doorposts, and ferrymen, had to charm the knife-wielding guardians, had to sail the rivers of fire and avoid the traps, nets, and decoys set for the unwary. The road ended in the Hall of the Two Truths, where the heart was weighed against the feather of maat, the principle of truth, under the eyes of Osiris and forty-two assessor gods. Those who passed were ferried to the Field of Reeds, a perfected Egypt where the grain grew taller than a man, the beer never ran out, and the dead lived with their families forever. The whole route was painted on the walls of the pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings, so that the king's burial place was also his map.

The Duat had a second face, and it was terrible. For the enemies of Osiris, the rebels, the liars, and the damned, the underworld held the Place of Slaughter, where executioner demons beheaded the condemned, hacked their bodies, and burned their souls in the Lake of Fire. The books of the underworld describe cauldrons in which the guilty are boiled, pits where their shadows are consumed, and gods of punishment who feed on their screams. This was the second death, annihilation without return, the fate worse than any hell of torment because it had no end and no existence at all. Between the blessed and the damned wandered countless spirits, demons, and the akhs, the transfigured dead who had gained power in the beyond, and the Egyptians wore amulets and spoke spells against the dark ones all their lives, for the Duat was not far away. It was below every footstep and behind every sunset.

The Duat outlasted Egypt itself. Its images of gates, judgement, fire, and rebirth flowed into the afterlife visions of the Greeks, the Copts, and the whole Mediterranean world, and its guidebooks are the oldest detailed maps of the beyond that humanity has. When the tombs of the Valley of the Kings were opened in the modern age, the walls still glowed with the twelve hours of the night, painted three thousand years ago to light a dead king's road. No other ancient people described the land of the dead so precisely, or loved the journey through it so much. For the Egyptians the Duat was not a place of despair. It was the proof that darkness is only the middle of the story, and that every night, somewhere beneath the world, a boat is sailing toward the dawn.