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the words of which were ascribed a magical effect. The chapter
reads as follows:“O heart (ab) of my mother, O heart (%ati) of
my transformations! Let there be no stoppage to me as regards
evidence (before the judges of the dead), no hindrance to me on
the part of the Powers, no repulse of me in the presence of the
guardian of the scales! Thou art my Ka in my body, the god
Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come thou to the good
place to which we are going. Let not our name be overthrown by
the lords of Hades who cause men to stand upright! Good unto
us, yea good is it to hear that the heart is large (and heavy) when
the words (of life) are weighed!^37 Let no lies be uttered against
me before God. How great art thou!”
Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the“Ka”of it, which is
addressed in the words just quoted, had made its way through
the region of the other world, until it finally reached the place
known as“the Abode of Hearts.”Here in the judgment-hall of
Osiris it met the dead man to whom it had formerly belonged,
and here, too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts
he had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good thoughts
and words of which he had been the author. For the heart, though
the organ through which his thoughts and words had acted, was
not the cause of them; in its nature it was essentially pure and
divine, and it had been an unwilling witness of the sins it had
been forced to know. Eventually it was weighed in the balance
against the image of Truth, and only if the scales turned in favour [067]
of the dead man could it rejoin its former body and live with it
for ever in the islands of the Blest.
The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the religious
conceptions which gathered round the name of Osiris, like the
Paradise which the risen mummy looked forward to enjoy. It was
only after the worship of Osiris had become universal throughout
Egypt, and the older or local ideas of the future life had been
(^37) Or, according to Renouf's translation:“Pleasant unto us, pleasant unto the
listener, is the joy of the weighing of the words.”