I, Sennet, am the last priest of Osiris.  I am old and will soon begin my journey to the West.  No embalmers will prepare my body for eternity, nor will a priest bury me, for the knowledge of these ways dies with me.  For I have remained faithful to the old ways, even as my acquaintances and friends abandoned them and one by one even my colleagues either went over to the new religion or grew old and went West before me.

When I was a boy, I desired to become a priest.  In those days the old religion was everywhere, and all of my friends wanted to become priests.  Some desired it because they wanted an easy life, or because they noticed how fat some of the priests were.  For myself, from the earliest age I felt a great desire to serve as a priest of Amon.  I felt the creative power to Amon in everything around me.  When I was twelve I received my first great disappointment, for my parents dedicated me to Osiris instead of Amon.  At that age I had no desire to occupy myself with the dead.  I must clarify here that there was no question of me becoming an embalmer; that was the work of slaves, and I was nobly born.  I was a priest who performed the funerary rites to help each person start safely and well-prepared on his way to the West.  Still, when you are twelve, you do not want to spend your life accompanying the dead to their graves.  Yet in this as in so many things, all-seeing Amon led me in the right path.  For a long time now nobody has had any interest in the old rituals of life, but I have been needed to prepare the last of the faithful for their final journey.

Over the course of my life the new religion, which in my youth as practiced by only a few foreigners, spread like a fire, and like a fire destroyed everything.  We had accepted the Greek and the Roman gods into our temples, and we willingly accepted the new gods, too, but as soon as the Christians were numerous enough they tore down the temples and desecrated the statues of all the gods.  I have never understood how people could join the Christians, except out of fear.  Why would they worship a Semitic god-man, dishonor other people’s gods, and argue about words and pictures until they came to blows?  It is true that some of our priests were fat and lazy, and many of the people were appallingly ignorant of true religion, but it has always seemed to me that rejecting superstition and returning to the old ways was the solution to these problems.  But instead the people turned to new, foreign ways; the boys became priests of the new religion; the old priests ran away or joined them out of cowardice or indifference.  Many were beaten or even killed by these fanatics, as the temples were looted and desecrated.  Over the years we became fewer and older, and one by one the last of the faithful died, and those who were left performed their funeral rites.  Until at last nobody was left but me.

I alone had no one to prepare my body or to furnish me with the necessities of the future life.  If I had died earlier, some other priest would have done what was necessary for me.  But now as an old man, I did the embalming work of slaves; I prepared as well as I could what the family should have provided.  And my reward is to die alone.  Thinking these bitter thoughts, I retired to the desert beyond the west bank.  This barren and lonely country has always been the place where the dead are buried.  There are many reasons for this, but one is that the dry air here has a natural dessicating effect, so that sometimes in one of the many caves of the area someone will find the mummified remains of an animal or even a person.  I hoped that in my case this would substitute to some extent for the work of the embalmers, so that I would have at least a crude mummy and might enjoy some primitive form of afterlife.  I found a cave in the hills and sat down to wait for death.  I had food with me—I didn’t need much—and there was a tiny spring nearby, generous enough for my needs.  After a few days I ate still more sparingly, and felt myself becoming lighter and closer to the gods.

I had been there about a week when one evening, after a particularly beautiful sunset, I lay down in my cave and thought complacently that perhaps I would not wake the next day at all.  I commended myself to the gods as I closed my eyes.  I dreamed, but what to make of this dream I am still not completely sure.  Here is my dream.

I dreamt that I lay ready for burial on a funeral ship.  In the old days, after the funeral procession sailed west over the river, men or oxen dragged the funeral “ship” over the sands to the burial places.  You can still see this in the old paintings.  Of course, long before my youth the funerals had gone over to using ships mounted on wheels.  Yet in my dream I was in one of the old ships, being dragged westward from the river toward the funeral temple, I couldn’t see by whom.  It was a comforting feeling, since my great worry had been the lack of a proper burial.  Yet you can’t help but feel apprehensive as you are pulled willy nilly along to your own funeral.

When we arrived at the funeral temple, all was as it had been in the days of my priesthood.  In those days a priest wearing the mask of Anubis stood at the entrance of the temple and guided the dead man to the feet of the huge statue of Osiris, great Osiris who was murdered but whom Isis mummified, and who then gave her a son, Horus.  Now the temple is empty and dead and people haul the stones away to build new churches.  In the last years I have had to perform my rites in shacks and caves, in fear of discovery.  But this was just like in the old days.  In the funeral the priests always praised the dead man in order to assure the family that he will pass the judgment.  This is when his heart is weighed in the scale of justice, in the presence of Maat, the goddess of truth.  It doesn’t matter what the priest says about him, of course.  He will pass the judgment or not, according to how he lived.  If he passes, he goes to live in the West with Osiris.  If he does not pass, he dies the second death and his soul is annihilated—then his mummy is of no use to him.  While I have worked hard and lived an honest life, and really tried almost all the time to do what is right, at this moment all of my failures and petty nastiness sprang to my mind, and I was afraid.

But now we reached the door of the temple and I was amazed, not to say appalled.  For there stood, not a priest wearing the mask of Anubis, as I had done countless times, but Anubis himself.  At this point I thought that this was no dream but that I had truly died and must face the judgment, not in the funeral hall, but before the gods.  Anubis raised me up from the “ship,” not as one lifts a mummy, but as you would hold out your hand to help a man stand up.  I stood, but my knees trembled as he led me into the funeral temple.  I looked up to the statue of Osiris as it used to stand there, but instead, to my horror, I saw Osiris himself.  Now my legs would truly hold me no longer, and I sank to the ground and hid my face in dread.

“Stand,” said the god, and touched my shoulder.  Do the dead feel like this when they enter this hall?  In a lifetime of service in the funeral temple, it had never occurred to me that the dead would feel anything.  And yet my whole life was devoted to preparing them for this passage.  I got up, but I could not look up.  It seemed like a long time went by, and then Osiris spoke to me again.  “You are needed here,” he said, “to perform your office one last time before you too make the journey to the West.”  Then I looked up.  Osiris was gone.  Or rather, I suddenly realized, he was lying on the sled that we use inside the temple.  He was lying as a dead man at a funeral.

“But you have already died,” I cried out.  “You will not die the second death.”  I hadn’t really meant to say this, since dying the second death means that you are not accepted into the Western world because your life has been unworthy or evil.  But Osiris understood what I meant.  He was the god of the second life, the ruler of the Western world, who had gone before us and promised us life.  How could Osiris die again?

The hall was silent after my outburst.  There were only a few echoes such as I used to hear in the old days if I was in the temple alone, when there was no funeral going on, no music or wailing, no crowds of mourners and servants bringing provisions, wheat and wine, and favorite possessions of the dead person.  In those days I used to come late at night or long before dawn to enjoy the closeness of eternity, but now I felt all the weight of a command laid on me.  It could not be the right thing to do, and yet Osiris himself had told me to do this.  After what seemed like a long time, I realized that I must obey.  I approached the sled, put on the mask of Anubis, and began the funeral rites.  Some of the words sounded strange to me, like the part where I told the gods that this man—this man!—had lived a good life, and asked Isis to guide him through the judgment and see to it that he was judged kindly.  Most people believe that Isis pulls down a bit on the scales for those who are not truly wicked but just weak, and I have always thought so, too, but as this thought crossed my mind I again wondered how it could be that I, Sennet, was saying these prayers on behalf of a god—indeed, on behalf of Osiris, my master, who was our only leader and guide on this last journey.

Going through the familiar ritual, I became calmer, and recited the prayers and performed the motions as I had done thousands of times before.  At the end of the funeral rites, we open the mouth of the mummy.  This allows the dead man’s spirit to return to his body in the next life.  As I performed this part of the rite for Osiris my mood turned to black despair.  I placed the mummy in a beautifully decorated coffin.  I looked around, and now the whole hall was filled with the coffins of the gods.  Had this been the whole purpose of my life?  I, Sennet, was called to bury the gods of my people, who had preserved us since they created us and placed us in the land of Egypt.  What can become of a people when the very gods die?  It is worse than when the earth moves beneath your feet.  What hope could there be for any of us?  I looked around for my coffin, for it seemed fitting that having prepared all the gods for burial, I should go with them.  But there was no coffin there for me.

But one god was not in a coffin.  This was Maat, who came forward now with a pair of scales, as for the judgment.  She motioned to me to act as a scribe, and took a heart (I don’t know whose it was—mine?  Osiris’s?  Amon’s?) and placed it in the scale.  The scale sank down—a good outcome.  Whoever it was had passed the judgment.

As I stood there watching all this, and beginning to wonder how we would make our next step toward the underworld, I heard a sound.  Looking around, I saw that the lid on the coffin of Osiris was opening.  I threw myself on the ground and hid my face, for this was not a sight for mortal eyes.  Then again I felt the hand of Osiris on my shoulder and heard him tell me to rise.  Taking heart, I rose to my hands and knees—this is not easy for an old man—and summoning all my courage I looked up.  But suddenly I felt bewildered and outraged, for standing in front of me was not Osiris at all but the Semitic god-man worshipped by the Christians.  He said to me, “You have done well, O Sennet.  Do not be afraid.  These were your funeral rites.  Now go in peace into the West.”

Then I awoke.  I was still in my cave and it was still night.  When morning came the sun rose again in the east I was dazzled by its beauty and splendor.  I lived.  Amon lived.  Osiris lived.  Maat weighed the hearts of men, and perhaps of gods as well, and we did not die the second death.  I worshipped and set about composing this scroll that records my dream and that will be my introduction to the nether world.  I will take it with me as a proof of my service.  Its meaning is in the hands of the gods, but I know that it will be honored and that they will receive me.  Now I am tired, but all the bitterness and fear is washed away, and I go to dwell with the gods with a peaceful heart.