In ancient Egypt, soul houses and false doors connected the living and the dead | Hacker News Reader

In ancient Egypt, soul houses and false doors connected the living and the dead

atlasobscura.com

71 pointsdiodorus21 comments

There is evidence for this kind of thing in Judaeo-Christian tradition:

Saul from the book of Samuel tried to talk to a dead Samuel, and was divinely bollocked for it. (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Samuel+28%3A1... or more fun, rendered in lego: https://thebrickbible.com/legacy/david_vs_saul/saul_and_the_...)

the Sumerians also had local accommodation for their dead, with libation tubes to provide sustenance for them in the after life. Irvine Finkel in "first ghost" explains this really well, and entertainingly. Do get the audio book if you can.

Possible evidence for this sort of thing in Peru too: "doorways" carved into rock faces etc. at local spiritual sites ("huacas") although little solid evidence of what they were actually used for, or exactly how old they are.

Centuries later, archeologists will be puzzled by the black mirrors that the past civilization was so attached to. They will notice that nearly everyone had a small mirror clutched in his hands, even in the moment of death. The few scriptures will tell bewildering things that the owner of such a mirror could talk to other realms, and even see alive and the dead, in the reflections of a sub-physical plane called Eenthair-Neth. But the price was high: that plane slowly destroyed attention and will of the naive sorcerers, who eventually became possessed by the Neth demons. The civilization died because in the end nearly everyone was possessed.

If the stories are true the most powerful demon of all, the infamous Teq Thuk, could posses a mind in mere seconds. They did not stand a chance.

The nam-shub of Enki ain't got nothing on that!

By the way, if this kind of techno-occult crossover thing is your jam, read the Laundry Files.

That sounds like it could be my next favorite book, or I'll drop it out of cringe, depending entirely on the style.

Indeed, for some time, the natives had the cult of Tek Thuk, who demanded its worshippers to sacrifice more and more of their attention, but it was the arch-demon Ae-eye, invoked in XXI century, that reduced the entire society to animals. The last scripture found says "...everyone talks to Ae-eye now, every waking hour they spend with their eyes transfixed on the black mirror, from which the Ae-eye stares back into them."

“How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dûr that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither? And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would—to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!”

— Gandalf

I think you would like "The Book of Sand" by Borges. It's basically a description of a smartphone/internet addiction, from a time before it was technically possible.

iPhones?

These devices all interact via theater. Like there's a fiction, or a dream, that we can interact with via fiction/dream things.

The afterlife and dreamland are one and the same?

You see it in other cultures too. Little houses for the spirits and little people. In japan, Scandinavia...

It also reminds me of the demon in "The Exorcist". A master of language and also bound by it. A creature of theater.

Theater, imagination, the suspension of disbelief? Theater was a central Bacchic practice, and Bacchus/Dionysus is at once the height of loss of self control, and deeply cthonic. Death overturned by the relinquishing of self, through social enactment or personal initiation.

Any links? Am curious, ta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries#:~:text=Th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bacchae

https://uen.pressbooks.pub/mythologyunbound/chapter/dionysus...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/311453#:~:text=opposite%20aspec...

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-0...

Suspension of disbelief. Or assuming a different set of beliefs. These beliefs being a set of assumptions or rules underlying a story or a game.

To move from one world to another.

To enter a movie, story, game... we are all pretty familiar with that.

I don't think people are familiar with how that structure implies the part is greater than the whole. A lunar ideology hiding within the solar.

How would one interact ?

The input would probably be like they say. Create or modify the "spirit door" or "elf house" or whatever.

Output... maybe watch for phenomena in your imagination (which becomes distinctly visible in half-sleep, hypnagogic states, certain kinds of meditation, drug induced hallucinations)

If you are good at visualizing you might be able to use that instead of carpenting up an elf house. You might end up with a technique similar to that used by the Pure Land Buddhists.

Have you experimented with this?

Before tombs, Egyptians would bury their dead under the sand, only for jackals to dig some of them out. Then they started covering the graves with rocks to deter digging.

Things escalated from there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h58uT_BGV4

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