The Egyptians’ view of the cosmos was complex and full of mixed metaphors. They imagined the sky as an ocean, crossed by the sun god Ra in his celestial barge, but also as the belly of an enormous falcon, or of the goddess Nut, either in the form of a cow or a woman, who arched over the Earth god Geb on her hands and feet, eating the celestial bodies each night and giving birth to them in the morning. Life was a daily cycle, which revolved around Ra’s repeated death and resurrection. At sunset, Ra died and passed into the netherworld below the Earth. During the night, he merged with the body of Osiris, depicted as a mummy lying deep in the netherworld. Through this union, he received the power of new life, and at sunrise was reborn.
The pyramids were built to enable the pharaohs to mirror this journey. They were made from stone to last for eternity, says Egyptologist John Taylor, and were intended as ‘not simply the resting place for the corpse, but the interface between the world of the living and the resurrected dead’. It’s an intriguing echo of theories about Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which was in use at about the same time. As with the sun, the pharaoh’s soul was believed to merge each night with his physical body – the mummy in the tomb – in order to be reborn the next day, and the Pyramid Texts were a collection of spells and incantations to help the process. They describe various stages, culminating in the king rising up with the sun and taking his place among the stars. ‘I row in the sky in your boat, Sun,’ declares one inscription, while another reads: ‘A footpath to the sky is laid down for me, that I might go up on it to the sky.’
The Saqqara pyramid chambers were laid out to reflect this daily journey, with the resurrected king initially travelling east out of the burial chamber towards the rising sun. The exit corridor then turns north, perhaps to point towards the circumpolar stars, which rotate around the northern celestial pole. The Egyptians associated these constellations with immortality, calling them the ‘Imperishable Stars’ because they never set. In several places, the Pyramid Texts name them as the deceased king’s ultimate destination, although other stars feature prominently too, including Orion’s Belt (associated with Osiris), Sirius (the goddess Isis) and the Lone and Morning stars (both thought to be the planet Venus, which appears as a lone, bright star at dawn and dusk).
Although the bigger, older Giza pyramids have no inscriptions, the kings who built them may well have shared similar beliefs. The Pyramid Texts are thought to have already been ancient by the time they were written down. And Giza’s three main pyramids all face due north, towards the celestial pole. The oldest and largest, Khufu’s pyramid, built in the twenty-sixth century BC, is oriented to within a twentieth of a degree. That’s ‘maniacal precision’, says Italian astrophysicist and archaeo-astronomer Giulio Magli, who has studied the pyramid, and strongly suggests an ‘obsessive interest in the circumpolar stars’. This pyramid also has internal shafts running north and south from the main burial chamber. Astronomers have calculated that at the time the pyramid was built, the two shafts pointed accurately towards the circumpolar stars, and to the highest rising point of Osiris (Orion’s Belt). Perhaps they were ‘symbolic pathways’, suggests Magli, to propel the king’s soul into the sky.
The Pyramid Texts were only available to the king and his family, who had their own pyramids. In later centuries, though, similar spells were written inside coffins and on papyri for non-royals too. The Book of the Dead, which emerged around 1600 BC, appears to have been commonly used, and included spells to help the owner pass a test in which his or her heart was weighed to judge whether they deserved to enter heaven. The Egyptians didn’t invent the idea of a divine realm in the sky – that seems to be an almost universal belief – but they are the first we know of to see it as an ultimate destination for virtuous human souls.
Egyptian beliefs are often seen as a historical dead end: a lost religion, fascinating but barely relevant to today’s concepts of the afterlife. But historian Nicholas Campion argues that in fact this is where it all started; that it was probably the Egyptians who inspired the concept of the immortal soul in Greece. The Greek author Herodotus said as much, Campion points out, writing that the Egyptians were ‘the first people to put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’. That’s not proof in itself – Herodotus got a lot of things wrong – but the link is plausible. In the sixth century BC, Greece and Egypt came under the common rule of Persia, providing the opportunity for Greek philosophers to mix with Egyptian priests. Ancient biographies of the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras – who is thought to have been among the first in Greece to propose the idea of an immortal soul and who heavily influenced Plato – claim that he studied at temples in Egypt before opening a school in southern Italy.
The Egyptians are often sidelined in the history of astronomy; from a scientific point of view they were nowhere near as advanced as their Mesopotamian neighbours. Nonetheless, says Campion, they were fundamental to the development of western cosmological ideas. While the Babylonians provided the maths, he says, the Egyptian contribution was metaphysical: ‘the inclusion of the soul’. Thanks to Pythagoras and Plato, the idea that our souls belong in the stars became popular throughout the Greek and then the Roman world, including the belief that contemplating the cosmos therefore draws us closer to God. ‘Observe the movement of the stars as if you were running their courses with them,’ advised the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. ‘Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.’ Plato’s ideas also contributed to a variety of ‘mystery’ cults, still popular in Constantine’s time, such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Mithraism. All promised to impart secret knowledge about how to prepare the soul for its journey to heavenly realms. Whereas the Jewish God was passionate and interventionist, these religions worshipped ‘the one’, an unchanging, immaterial deity that radiated knowledge and light.
Platonic concepts seeped into Judaism. The idea that the faithful could expect to join God in heaven is hinted at in the Hebrew Bible twice, but only in later books. Ecclesiastes, composed in the Persian period, is unconvinced, asking: ‘Who knows if a man’s spirit rises upward?’ But Daniel, written after the conquests of Alexander the Great, comes down in favour: ‘Those who are wise will shine like the brilliant expanse of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness will be like the stars.’ Centuries later, Islam inherited similar ideas about an eternal afterlife in the sky.
Plato’s biggest influence, though, was on the newborn faith of Christianity. ‘By the time Christians were beginning to construct their own literature, their writers clearly found such talk of the individual soul and resurrection completely natural,’ says MacCulloch, ‘and it became the basis of that Christian concern with the afterlife which sometimes has bordered on the obsessional.’
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Shortly after Easter 337, while preparing to invade Persia, Constantine fell ill. He visited a spa at his mother’s city of Helenopolis, then, too sick to make it back to Constantinople, he travelled instead to nearby Nicomedia, where he summoned a group of bishops. He switched his royal purple gown for a pure white robe and was finally baptised, just a few days before he died.
His body was taken home in a golden coffin, and placed in the sumptuously decorated Church of the Holy Apostles, where he had prepared himself a sarcophagus. It was surrounded by twelve empty tombs which were intended to hold the remains of Jesus’s disciples.6 Some historians see this as perhaps the clearest indication that Constantine really did equate himself with Christ. Others have suggested that as the Apostles symbolised the twelve signs of the zodiac, the emperor could equally have been presenting himself as the sun. Constantine’s official memorial coin, issued shortly after his death, featured him rising to the sky, like Sol, in a four-horse chariot and radiate crown.
Most likely, it was both at once. Constantine fixed Christianity into history as a major global force; scholars agree that he ensured the future of the Catholic Church and is largely responsible for the reach of Christianity around the globe today. But to do it, he embedded within the faith the image of his divine, radiant sun. It’s a story that reflects the broader religious ambiguities of his time, during which the changing fortunes of rival empires brought together clashing worldviews about the nature of the universe and our place in it. In many cases, monotheism