The Gates to Heaven Exhibit at the Louvre Museum
Osiris and the Door between Two Worlds
Jun 22, 2009
“Les Portes du Ciel” (Gates to Heaven) Exhibit running through to June 29, 2009 at the Louvre Museum in Paris provides a stunning depiction of Ancient Egypt’s belief in a cyclic continuum between life and death. While modern man has lost the central connection between this world and that beyond, Ancient Egyptians made it the focal point of their daily lives. Their funerary relics, specifically burial monuments and sarcophagi, function as passages or doors between two worlds.
Osiris and Egyptian Belief in Regeneration
Associating the god Osiris with the cyclic journey of the sun, the Exhibit provides a theoretical basis for the Egyptian belief in regeneration.
Osiris himself is the prototype of fluid renewal; he was dismembered by his brother who scattered his body parts all across Egypt. Osiris’ wife, Isis, managed to recover the pieces and restore them to their original form. In this way was Osiris resurrected, becoming in his reconstitution a symbol of the portal: the door between two worlds.
The Door Between Two Worlds
As the god of the afterlife, Osiris became associated with the Egyptian concept of the Underworld, an intermediary space between the limits of the visible and the vastness of an invisible primordial realm. The Underworld is a Venn zone of heaven and earth, light and obscurity all combined together. It is this composite concept that allows the entire exhibit to resonate with the quantum discoveries of modern science. Even though quantum entanglement remains a 21st century term, it seems that Ancient Egyptians understood it as an expression of cosmic coherence.
This composite perspective is most clearly expressed in the sarcophagus of Lady Taparet. The front side is illustrated with the picture of Nut, goddess of the daytime sky who is pushing the deceased towards the West; the back side depicts the Goddess of the West, standing behind the deceased, pushing her away towards Nut. This back and forth action suggested in the sarcophagus reaffirms the eternal cycle of death and regeneration.
Perhaps the most intriguing example is the Tomb Chapel of Hori made between the 12 and 13th dynasties, around 1800 B.C. A memorial monument built for Hori by surviving family and friends, the tomb chapel displays an inscribed text encouraging passers-by to lean on the monument and recite the inscribed litany which enables the dead person to benefit from the magical effects of words.
According to Egyptian beliefs, words and pictures can revive the dead. They provide the deceased with an anchor port or landmark, enabling them to come and go from one world to another. The goal of these tomb chapels is to ensure the survival of the deceased and the texts inscribed on these monuments are "survival devices" for the dead.
Funerary chapels are also equipped with “false doors” used as means for the dead’s return. In the False Door Stele of Senenmout, the left border is filled with images of cows and bulls, symbols of abundance in food and drink in the next life. In the center is a narrow slit doorway that allows the dead access between both worlds.
The “Gates to Heaven” Exhibit is well worth a visit. It provides a view of a culture intimately preoccupied with what the modern scientific world is just discovering: reality is composed of wormholes, passageways between the visible and the invisible.
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