Funerals,initiation and rituals of life in Pharaonic Egypt

Writing about Egyptian religion has typically focussed on what an ancient Egyptian believed, rather than what he did, tending to describe the history of Egyptian religion in terms of a cultural evolution of belief, and to stress the implicit theology of an official cult. The primary data for Egyptian religion is, however, largely ritual and performative, with text as glossing accompaniment to ritual action; only in special cases do we have explicitly discursive or expository (didactic or proselytising) material. From an opposite assumption, that ordinary people practiced religion at all periods, the theme of rites of passage poses questions about the ritual behaviour of individuals, that provides social integration into both visible and invisible worlds. Egyptian funeral liturgies widely exploit themes of initiation as well as re-birth. New Kingdom mortuary literature stresses that knowledge of the ritual text is valuable to the living, and also that the ritual is itself a million times effective from experience. These emphases are taken to reflect the importance of life rituals, even though, outside the mortuary corpus, there is a lack of texts clearly formatted as rituals for the individual. Only in magico-medical texts does direct evidence survive for the specialist performance of ritual for private needs. In practice the unbalanced preservation of evidence from Egypt means that the search for individual ritual behaviour involves the weighing of fragments and of incidental evidence from a full range of sources and periods. Only in this way can rituals of life be sought; for birth, naming, coming of age, marriage, initiation, and succession