Alma 37:12: One Eternal Round: Thoughts on Egyptian Cosmology and Intellectual History

In Alma 37:12 we read:

[God] doth counsel in wisdom over all his works,

and his paths are straight,

and his course is one eternal round.


Here we discover yet another place in the Book of Mormon that calls to mind the delightful Egyptian and Hebrew expressions about Lady Wisdom, both Ma'at and Hokhmah.

Note how Wisdom (or Ma'at) governs all his works; how "his paths are straight (m3')." Since the Egyptian verb m3' marks movement along a straight line, the co-incidence of Wisdom (Ma'at) and her "straight" (m3') paths makes for a typically Egyptian play on words. But there's more. The Wisdom governing all His works includes both God's paths and His course, a duality of expression that both brings together and comprehends, in the compass in two brief phrases, all His works and all His ways, the works and the ways of salvation.


Alma's poetic recitations to his son Helaman reflect the anaphoric expressions of his (again, poetic) discourse to the Saints at Gideon:

For I perceive that ye are in the paths of righteousness [cf. Eg. m3'.t, or Ma'at; straight paths];

I perceive that ye are in the path which leads to the kingdom of God;

yea, I perceive that ye are making his paths straight.

I perceive that it has been made known unto you, by the testimony of his word, that he cannot walk in crooked [Eg. isf.t; the opposite of Ma'at] paths; neither doth he vary from that which he hath said; neither hath he a shadow of turning from the right to the left, or from that which is right to that which is wrong;

therefore, his course is one eternal round (Alma 7:19-20).


Because some may yet wonder whether God's laws of morality and chastity are subject to change, Alma, anticipating the matter, immediately adds: "And he doth not dwell in unholy temples; neither can filthiness or anything which is unclean be received into the kingdom of God." Purity thus exemplifies God's unvarying ways.


The Doctrine and Covenants (3:2) also cites the ancient formula:

For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said,

therefore his paths are straight,

and his course is one eternal round.

The idea of "a shadow of turning from the right to the left," or from the right hand to the left, glossed by Alma as a reference to "right" and to "wrong," clearly shows astronomical reference: the sun at ascension or meridian, the limiting of solar shadow, the right hand (imn) as the West (imn) in Egyptian (Hebrew has the right hand as the South), the left hand as the East, the idea of solar turning, the solstices, etc. The Path and Course of God reflects the path of the sun.


And wording in Alma 37 not only suggest the Hebrew idea of the tequfah, what the Greeks would term a periodos (a period, or complete cycle), they also recall a poetic Egyptian theologoumenon from a New Kingdom text we name the Solar Litany (Solar Litany 152) that "summarizes, perhaps harmonizes, conflicting notions about the movement of the sun":

phr jtn.f
m3' b3.f

May his jtn (manifestation as solar globe) revolve (or wind) back-and-forth--
but his b3 (spiritual manifestation, radiance) follow a straight course.

Or:

His jtn shall wander in revolution;
His b3 shall proceed in a straight line.

The verb m3' gives the punchline to the couplet, for "when written with the cartouche," as here, the verb "paradoxically describes a regular circuit along a straight line," or a "going round in a straight line." The goddess Maat, whose name derives from the very same verbal root, thus personifies Egyptian notions of right, rightness, correctness, truth, justice, and candid honesty.

(Val Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 112).


The Egyptian couplet forcefully recalls another in the Hebrew Bible, though I doubt the specific textual comparison has ever been made, given how little read the obscure Solar Litany remains. We speak of Psalm 17, a cosmic psalm, to which Egyptian influence has famously been attributed. The peculiar manner in which the Hebrew Psalm unpacks the duality of solar movement, as both straight line of ascent and revolution, reveals the Egyptian influence as much as any other feature of the cosmic psalm already identified by scholars:

Miqtzeh hashamayim motza'o
utqufato al-qetzotam

From the extreme bounds of the heavens is his going out (or his ascension, cf. Eg. prj),
and his circuit (cf. Eg. phr) reaches to its extremest bounds, [and thus making One Eternal Round].
(Psalm 17:8).

If rendered into Egyptian, the couplet would feature a telling play on words, a fairly common correspondence in solar texts, between prj (to go forth or to ascend, often used of heavenly bodies) and phr (to describe a circle, make a circuit).

For the sun, ascension culminates as a full revolution, from noontide to noontide, and the motion described is therefore but one whole consisting of two complementary parts or paths. Yet, even so, the image of the motza', the linear "going forth," contradicts that of the tequfah, the "circuit." So we're left wondering whether the sensible, run-of-the-mill translations positing a simple circuit--a commonplace, really, in Bible translation--satisfy original intent. The solar course described in Psalm 17:8 involves something more than meets the eye--the sun moves far from our perception into the "extremest bounds."


Nor is such a contradictory (or complementary!) model to be found in the Egyptian texts alone; the wall murals of the contemporaneous New Kingdom tombs paint the solar course both as fixed line and as a winding, even serpentine, movement, which reflects the phr-model of solar movement. The Egyptians held to both symbolic and realistic visions of cosmic movement, the ideal and the observed. The sun to the watchful observer is indeed all over the place, at every hour and at every season (see descriptions in Joshua Aaron Roberson, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth, 2012).

"The juxtaposition of phr and m3', as descriptive of the sun's movement (or any travel for that matter), speaks both to the principle of complementary pairs [as found throughout Egyptian literature] and to a fundamental contradiction. Both jtn and b3 describe the sun, yet the words suggest distinct [or alternating] visions of what that body is [or what it may be]; for each takes a distinct [though complementary] verb (or requires a distinct model) of solar movement. The notion of m3', countering the planetary drift inherent in phr, provides the corrective element; one may say, the adjustment of the cosmos. The two modalities, movement along a straight line and turnings, keep things in balance; what the verbal pair reflects is only the true nature of any road" (Sederholm, 113).

"The complementary pair (m3', phr) occurs again in Urk. VI, 11, 22-13, 1 [another obscure text]:

Wpj-W3w.t hr m3' n.f
phry jb nj phry jm.f

Wepwawet [the swift jackal, Opener of Paths] straightens the road for him,
and thus soothes, lit. encircles or rounds, the heart of him
who makes his rounds therein (113 n 64).

The Opener of the Paths prepares a straight path before the traveler,
and thus calms (or encircles) the traveler of encircling roads

or: calms the wanderer in wandering roads.

"The hints of a cosmological reflection in the couplet lend it deep interest and suggest that the Egyptians held two, contradictory, models of celestial mechanics. Mortality is swept along by the same contrary winds. After all, the fundamental rule of life is "Follow Maat" [while also understanding that] "Life is a phr.t (phr.t pw 'nx)--either finished cycle or back-forth spin. Nevertheless, whereas life's cycle. . . mimes Fortuna, the centerpiece of Egyptian values remains the attainment of Maat [Order, Justice]" (Sederholm, 113).

The reader will recall the Wepwawet-standard (the Opener of the paths standard), in the hand of the standing figure at the apex of the round hypocephalus, who also stands directly above the seated figure of the Transcendent Amun-Re-Shu at the heart (qrb, or Kolob) of the circle. Movement from the heart to the apex of the circle marks ascension and manifest glory (the ba of Shu), which, at once, signifies culmination of the solar circuit. As Hugh Nibley would have it, the hypocephalus (which he also describes as "one eternal round"), is to be understood as a globe or sphere rather than mere circle. Ascension is thus as much circuit as line. That the circle or rounding of the hypocephalus also signifies the divine aureola encircling and thus protecting the deceased comes now as no surprise, "thus encircling, he calms the traveler of the encircling solar highways," a traveler who, as the text of the hypocephalus rim informs us, has joined the solar retinue and will soon enter into rest with the heavenly host in the tabernacle of the Elder One, in the heavenly Pillar City (or Heliopolis) at the apex of the circle.


Here is the wanderer's rest, Abraham's longed-for city: "for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God"; "but now they desire a better country, a heavenly"; "he hath prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:10, 16). Abraham, the strict follower of Ma'at, or of righteousness (see Abraham 1:1), also knew that the eternal quest for eternal life was a phr.t, a circuit or progress, from altar to altar, and back home to God. (Hugh Nibley, some forty years ago, wrote of Abraham's circuit, or progress, from altar to altar, a prominent theme in the Book of Abraham.) Phr.t also wraps the heart of the traveler in calm and quietness, no matter how exposed to the perils of the road: "[we] came forth in the way to the land of Canaan, and dwelt in tents as we came on our way. Therefore eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed from Haran by the way of Jershon, to come to the land of Canaan" (Abraham 2:15-16).


So what does the standard manual on Egyptian Religion, a textbook still used three decades after publication, have to say about the contradictory nature of solar movement?

"Clearly the earth was not thought to revolve around the sun,
but neither was the sun thought to revolve around the earth"

Leonard H. Lesko, "Ancient Egyptian Cosmogonies and Cosmology," in Religion in Ancient Egypt, 117-118.


"Neither was the sun thought to revolve around the earth."


That's a startling statement! Did the Egyptians not hold to a geocentric universe, to the plain and the simple--and predictable? Surely Professor Lesko faced immediate dismissal from Yale University for making such an unhistorical and unscientific claim about the cosmology of the ancients, a claim overturning the fixed knowledge of every ten-year-old on the planet! Cornell University nevertheless published the textbook in 1991, and it has been standard college fare on both sides of the Atlantic ever since.

While "The universe was 'all that the sun encircles,' [yet] if this phrase implies that the sun was thought to have gone around the world on a single circular course, then apparently the phrase reflected a cosmology different from that in the religious texts discussed here."

Again: "Obviously the ancient Egyptians viewed and described the world around them in a variety of ways [a various semiotic]. The personifications and metaphors of the myths and stories were imaginative, poetic, very complex, and often humorous, but they certainly did not represent the sum total of the Egyptians' cosmological or scientific thinking on the subject" (Lesko, 117).

In other words, let's not mistake metaphor, image, and icon about sun and stars for the sum total of cosmological speculation.

Other questions spring to mind: Was the Egyptian heaven a flat roof? or was it rounded or "bent"? Both representations appear in the sources. Did the sun move? or was it moved by outside agencies? Again, both ideas appear.


In 2008 I published a few speculative paragraphs about the possible rotation of the Akhet, a "place" or "moment" usually associated with the "Horizon" (and Akhet is usually translated as Horizon):

"The iconography of the Akhet shows the rounded sun. . . half manifest, half hidden, between the twin hills that, properly speaking, stand for the east and west horizons, although pictured as but one horizon. Entry into the Akhet thus answers [with immediacy] to egress on the eastern skyline."


So do the writings and iconography describe the sun as circling about a static earth? or do they rather describe a sort of continual flip-flop in the horizon in which Entry and Egress occur at the same point yet mark different moments in time, dusk and dawn? Somehow, as Professor Derchain has suggested, "the perpetual cycling of the sun" (the eternal round) must "rely upon the equation of east and west, thus linking the solar death/descent with rebirth/ascent" (Robeson, 26 n 82). Again, the flow of the iconography that marks the path from descent to ascent can take either a horizontal or a vertical model (Robeson, 43). There was nothing static about the Egyptian presentation of the solar cycle.

Some iconographic labels, in purposeful mistaking, bizarrely describe dusk at the east horizon, dawn at the west, a hint at the mysterious reversibility of the system. But this pert reversal of space and time is so typically Egyptian: "today we're saying that the sun rises in the West and sets in the East." Note the Western bafflement at encountering, and attempting to right, yet another transgression of logic: "Coming out of the Eastern (sic) Mountain, resting in the Western (sic) Mountain, every day." Note that this is "Every Day"--the continual workings of the cosmic gears. What other culture says this sort of thing? plays like games with space and time? Yet examples of such mismatch are clearly not error nor are they, after all, reflective of a pert playfulness. No. They are (we hope) "possibly intentional textual interchange of west and east, as an expression of the perpetual motion of the sun" (Roberson, 153 n 178, referencing Derchain and Piankoff). Still, we note that what moves perpetual are the cardinal points themselves, the directional markers of the earth; the in-volved sun itself "has nothing to do"--not even "roll around heaven all day."

If the earth rotates eastward on her axis, does not west mountain come round to merge with east mountain--one single point on the eternal horizon? Isn't the place of solar ingress and egress essentially, then, the same for a sun standing still? That's what the egyptologists have long been mulling over, though it remains a delicate point. The ancient record continuously teases the reader, teasing out divergent threads and imagery, that is, until he yearns for some--any--logical, Western, formula to tie the threads together into Text, into semiotic Encyclopaedia, and tell us once-for-all how the Egyptians ordered their universe. And that yearning sums up the entire egyptological enterprise--how to weave nonsense and contradiction into explanatory models. There's a bit of cosmic speculation, here, to say the least, on the part of the solar priests who composed the netherworld books for the tombs of the royal high priest of the sun, and even though we are not yet able to build a model of the Egyptian universe out of it all, the matter does deserve something better than the notation (sic!). The sometime fluidity of the cardinal points at the Akhet-horizon deserves its own chapter in the intellectual history of the human family. 

A chapter in intellectual history? Here is a culture that conceived, like many others, of fixed cardinal points as the bedrock of cosmology--and then happily, at will, shifted east and west and dawn and dusk and line and circle. Is there something worth pondering, balancing, there?

Or shall we just rest content believing that the Egyptians, like all primitives everywhere, held the Ptolemaic view? Shall we posit that they were neither philosophers nor scientists, that they didn't even know about such things as, say, the circulation of blood? (In Egypt, they did!) A placid contentment would require less thought as we page through the primitive, but even so, we're going to have to revive the already archaic signature of sic for use on nearly every translated page of obscure Egyptian writings. I await the book entitled Ancient Egyptian Cosmological Thought (sic!).

While we await tidy answers, the speculation rolls wildly on: Might the Egyptians have understood the Akhet as a rotating axis?

Certainly the round Duat, or Netherworld, which is somehow involved in the Akhet, takes shape as a temporal-spatial moment of turning. The hieroglyph that writes the logogram for Duat is a star, some say the sun, enclosed in a circle, an encircling that turns in One Eternal Round.


Again: "The inversion and righting of the sun raises questions about the Egyptian model of celestial mechanics. These states [inversion, flip-flop, righting] are merely perceptual, being symbolic of the journey through the Netherworld.


"One explanation for the inversion and [simultaneous?] righting of the sun centers round the rotation of the Akhet [itself]. If it is the Akhet that daily turns 180 degrees, and not the sun, the movement of the sun is merest illusion. Indeed the cryptographic hieroglyphs that paint the setting of the sun with the image of a man plunging headlong with outstretched arms and its rising with a man arms uplifted [Papyrus Salt 825] hint at a celestial mechanics in which the Akhet serves as the axis of revolving sky and Netherworld. The Akhet is a place of turning and the dynamis of [the complementary temporal modalities] nhh-and d.t-time, the axis of the workings of renewal in respect of which all other celestial bodies move.

"Where the Akhet lies is unknown, even unknowable; like our horizon it marks a boundary or hollow between the visible and invisible worlds. Indeed the revolution of the Akhet parallels and even motivates that of the invisible world. Osiris, who personifies, surrounds, and controls the Duat, receives the disk [or globe] at dusk and uplifts the same at dawn in perpetuum mobile. As the Akhet revolves so turns the Duat with its night sky from darkness into daylight. Gears of baffling complexity work the thing; for the movement is really a complete shift back into daylight, West to East and East to West--erasing the dark hours, and still dawning Eastward all the same.

"The Akhet and Duat together make up a temporal-spatial continuum, the Akhet as the place that holds the sun and keeps its flame; the Daut, a mostly temporal feature, a space composed of hours. Osiris [the mummified corpse in the Duat, the dead king], in his name of 'Yesterday' and acted upon by the force and wheel of time, uplifts the ponderous sun at dawn with no perceptible motion of his part. Yet it is his uplifted arms that serve as the sign of rejuvenation. Both Osiris and the sun are righted by the turning of the Akhet in the unresting hours and, as consequence, together stand upright--with arms outstretched--as symbols of towering strength and power. Here is the cosmically sized Re-Osiris standing 'with extended arm at the eastern horizon' [as one resurrected solar power].

The union and resurrection of the cosmic Re-Osiris realizes the greatest mystery of Egyptian religion.

"Egyptian theoria but subserves the theology of solar renewal for which the movements of the heavenly bodies provide the hoped-for signs. If the Akhet does turn, the axis of turning still centers in Re because he provides the motivation [the force or the focus] for that turning. The same holds true of Re's relation to the p.t [or sky] and its shape and roadways, as the iconography shows. At times the Egyptians envision the p.t as a 'bow-shaped' roof or vault (pd.t, bow), the so-called 'bent' sky. The notion of bending, when applied to the static, flat rooftop, implies a potential, even motive, force. The imagery of the bent heavens reflects (cf. Lat. reflectere, to bend backwards, like a bow) both the observable re-turn of the sun to the day sky and the nature of the road it travels. The aquatic solar roadway inclines, winds, and bends, as lead the channeled waters" [the winding phr-cycle again] (paragraphs taken from Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808, 110-111).


These few and premature thoughts only hint at the baffling complexity of the gears that work the thing--the very universe in its cosmic revolutions. Then perhaps the texts, no matter our pains, will never yield anything more than hints.

But when did the Ancient Egyptian books ever promise the reader definitions, certainty, answers? Whether they yet deliver enlargement of mind, an enlarged horizon of cosmological speculation for the curious seeker, certainly depends on our response, for deep answers to deep. We can at least read the ancients afresh--letting labels go, foregoing models.


The Book of Mormon, with which we began, is at pains to show us that the Lord's ancient covenant people understood the workings of the cosmos (Helaman 12:15)==and wanted to reader to know it: "for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun!"

As for the book of Abraham, the father of the faithful makes abundantly clear that what he terms the "set time of the earth," or "the reckoning of the time of the earth," has to do with the measurement of its axial rotation in comparison with which the moon "moveth in order more slow." In other words, both the earth and the moon spin, but because the moon spins much slower, "therefore the reckoning of its time is not so many [as the earth] as to its number of days, and of months, and of years." Do we understand what Abraham plainly though poetically sets forth? (And most readers down the decades do understand.) The numbering of day and night, month after month and year after year, comes as consequence of the earth spinning on her axis--thus "surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun!" (See Abraham 3). In Abraham's Egypt, then, to borrow a line from the standard undergraduate textbook on Egyptian religion and cosmology, the sun clearly "was not thought to revolve around the earth."

Should we thence wish to hie to Kolob, we'll need something more than the basic manual--and the deeper dive into Egyptology, the nearer our reach.