Wazgood? my journeys through the DAMU as Anubys

[5/02/07- updated with my story near the end] This is a picture of Anubis. He was the ancient Egyptian God of the Dead. He was also the coolest character from the movie Stargate. I’ve always thought he was the coolest, most mysterious character I’d seen ever since watching that movie.

Recently, in the last 150 years or so, he has also found his way as a character from the Pearl of Great Price (although someone drew in a different head on him for this particular picture):

It’s understandable, though, that the artist had to improvise- just look at what parts are missing, yeah, the same parts the artist got wrong:

Because this same picture (which has been found hundreds [thousands even?] of times) usually looks more like these:

Notice, none of them have this head:

…This is what the papyri would look like if the torn parts had been drawn correctly:

Pretty simple, right? Kind of an open-and shut case for me. As soon as you see these other papyri that are almost identical in their features to the Joseph Smith facsimile, it’s really easy to see the blaring errors in Joseph Smith’s “inspired” restoration. I’ve heard of people who walked through Egyptian exhibits in a museum and upon seeing these Breathing Permits, their jaws drop to the floor. For me, my story is thus (as written in my journal entry for that day):

The Book of Abraham

(July 5, 2006)  Today I received a DVD in the mail called The Book of Abraham: Investigating a Remarkable Mormon Claim. It basically has some Egyptologists explain how the Book of Abraham we have in the Pearl of Great Price could not be a translation from the facsimiles given. It went into detail about hieroglyphics and Egyptology. That sparked my interest to grab a big coffee-table book I have on ancient Egypt and start reading from it. Lo and behold, I was able to find out many things about the facsimile hieroglyphics found in the Pearl Of Great Price. What’s fascinating to me is that I was not specifically searching for an explanation of the facsimiles- I was just looking at any and all things Egyptian in my book. It’s interesting, though, how I unwillingly came across all of the items in facsimile one by just studying for a few hours in my book! My book is a very basic book on Egyptology and it had almost everything from the facsimile shown in detail in my book. That means that this type of facsimile (what is believed to be called a Breathing Permit or Book of Breathings– in this case it was Hor‘s) must be very commonly found in Egyptian burials and mummifications.

According to my own research in my coffee-table book of general study of Egyptology (the book is called Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs), I have found the following explanations, or the true meanings of the Book Of Abraham facsimile 1 (and this must be very basic Egyptology since it was covered even in this everyday book that was sitting on my bookshelf):

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 1. This is Isis. Sister-wife of Osiris. Osiris died and Isis turned into a falcon. She flapped her wings making air and that air gave Osiris life once again.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 2. There are many drawings like fac. 1 and fig.2 could be anyone, really but in this case it is Osiris, not Abraham. The reason we know this is Osiris is because the papyrus hieroglyphics accompanying fac. 1 has now been translated and this Book of Breathings is about Osiris, “Lord of Eternity”, or “King of the Kingdom of the Dead”. Osiris, actually, served as a general example of the story of the resurrection or rebirth to Egyptians. Osiris is the reason for mummification to have commenced. He was believed to have once been a righteous king who was killed by an evil brother named Seth who cut his body up into fourteen pieces and threw them in the Nile River. Isis looked for him for a long time. Anubis joined the body parts together, wrapped them in bandages and made him the first mummy. This is when Isis turned into a hawk, flapped her wings and gave air/ life to Osiris who came back to life and also impregnated his sister.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 3. This is Anubis. In these kinds of mummification scenes, Anubis is always present- if even as a Priest wearing a dog/ jackal mask. He is not wearing a mask in the facsimile because this is the part of the papyrus that has been torn off. Joseph Smith simply drew a human head on Anubis trying to improvise. The knife in his hand was also an invention of Joseph Smith because Anubis was not depicted as such in these scenes (as far as I know).

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Something I just noticed… Osiris is actually wrapped in clothes for mummification. The design of his “clothing” is depicted exactly as the one in my book of this same type of scene. Very interesting.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 4. This is an embalming table. All of the pictures of embalming tables I have seen have been of lions, as is the embalming table in Fac. 1. Many times at the rear end of the table were two bowls to catch the blood and liquids that came from the body going through the embalmment procedures.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 5-8. When I saw all of the above items with these jars as well, I had to scramble for my BOA to see if I was really seeing this. The Egyptians used these Canopic Jars to hold the four vital organs: The liver, stomach, lungs and intestines (the brain was thrown away). They were decorated with the heads of people, baboons, falcons and jackals (just like the BOA). Like I said, when I saw this, my jaw dropped. In my book was a perfect match to what I had believed was a unique hand-written document by the Prophet Abraham.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 10. After the wrong translations/ explanations for the other items above, I don’t think that fig. 10 is “Abraham in Egypt” (please not note the heavy sarcasm here- in other words, there is NO WAY that that table is “Abraham in Egypt”- it’s just ridiculous), rather it’s the embalming table shown in many such drawings. The insides of the body were removed and the blood and liquid drained from the table to two bowls at the end of the table. The table is almost always a lion such as the one in facsimile 1.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Fig. 11. I do not know if these are the pillars of heaven.

Anyways, I just wanted to write these down because you always learn better when you teach and because it was really was exciting to find this out on my own with my own resources here at home!

That is what I wrote down a year ago in my journal. Bottom line, is that it doesn’t take an expert to figure that Joseph Smith did not translate the BOA. It was a failure at best and fraudulent at its worst and you don’t HAVE to be an expert to come to a conclusion on this. Many people like to say “well I’m no Egyptologist so there’s no way for me to know if he really did translate it wrong or not”. Well I have two things to say to that:

1. You can quite easily find out what the consensus among Egyptologists is on the subject of the Joseph Smith Papyri (and let me tell you it is no where near in favor of the LDS Church’s claims).

2. Saying “there’s no way for us to know” or “we’ll never have the ability to read Egyptian and therefore I can indefinitely suspend my judgment on this issue” is simply a great example of the following logical fallacy:

Ad ignorantum– The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.

The BOA issue is probably the strongest and easiest to come to a conclusion when investigating the veracity of the church. Seeing that the human priest in the facsimile is really Anubis brought a whole new appreciation for him. He saved me from Mormonism, essentially so I’m taking his name as I travel the waters of the DAMU on my journey ever forward towards light and truth.

~ by Anubys on April 12, 2007.