The Pyramid Texts: Spells to Turn a Pharaoh into a Star

The story starts with a breach in a wall. In 1881 the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero entered the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara through a break in the burial chamber and found something no one expected inside a pyramid: writing. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with vertical columns of hieroglyphs. Pyramids were supposed to be silent stone. This one was talking.

Unas was not alone. Over roughly the next two centuries the same kind of texts were carved into a chronological series of royal pyramids, and then, strikingly, into the pyramids of three queens. The corpus grew across the whole line.

Counted together and numbered by Kurt Sethe, in an edition published between 1908 and 1922 that is still the foundation of the field, the corpus runs to 759 distinct utterances. No single pyramid holds all of them: Unas' has 228, and Pepi II's has the most. Across all the pyramids the inscribed text amounts to roughly 4,000 lines of hieroglyphs.

And the placement is not random. The texts appear only inside the pyramid, in the antechamber, the corridor, and the sarcophagus chamber, never on the exterior the way later temple inscriptions would be, so that the spells physically surround the dead king's body. Their arrangement follows the journey they describe: spells for one stage of the afterlife are carved in one part of the pyramid, spells for the next stage in the next, the architecture itself laid out as a route through death.

The Unas inscriptions of around 2350 BCE are the oldest known copy of the Pyramid Texts. They are almost certainly not the oldest version. The language gives it away: the utterances carry archaic grammatical forms and vocabulary that were already obsolete by the Old Kingdom, and some spells describe conditions from before Egypt was unified, referencing the 'Followers of Horus,' nomadic life, and a political world that no longer existed. Both point the same way, toward material carried orally for a long time before anyone carved it. James P. Allen put it plainly in 2005: 'some utterances may go back to the time of unification or even earlier.'

How much earlier is a real question. A conservative reading places some of the underlying oral material at least as far back as 2600 to 2700 BCE; more speculative estimates push elements into the pre-dynastic period, before 3100 BCE. Either way, this is the oldest religious literature on Earth, and the comparison is not close.

Death is where the Pyramid Texts get to work, and their first move is audacious: the dead pharaoh becomes Osiris. Osiris is the god murdered by his brother Seth, cut apart, reassembled by his wife Isis, and brought back to rule the dead, and the texts simply assert that what happened to the god now happens to the king. They say it directly, and they say it as a denial: 'You have not gone away dead; you have gone away alive' (Utterance 134); 'Raise yourself, O King! You have not died!' (Utterance 258). This is, as far as anyone can tell, the first articulation of resurrection in world literature. The dead king is not merely admitted to an afterlife. He is put back together, his faculties restored, and stood back up.

Restored, he has to reach the sky, and the texts describe the ascent in a startling variety of ways, as if the writers were reaching for every image that might work. He climbs: 'A stairway to the sky is set up for me that I may ascend on it' (Utterance 267). He flies: 'The king flies as a bird, he alights as a beetle' (Utterance 302). He rides a reed float across the Celestial Nile, he is carried up by the wind, and he is born into the sky by the goddess Nut herself: 'O my mother Nut, spread yourself over me, that I may be placed among the imperishable stars' (Utterance 427).

The imperishable stars are the destination, and the Egyptians chose them for a precise astronomical reason: the circumpolar stars, the ones that wheel around the celestial pole, never sink below the horizon at Egyptian latitudes. A star that never sets is a star that never dies, which is exactly the point. The texts also tie the king's ascent to Orion, whom they call Sahu, and to Sirius, whom they call Sopdet, and they set him beside the sun god Re in his solar barque, sailing across the sky by day and through the underworld, the Duat, by night.

All of this ascending aims at a single transformation. The king is not just granted an afterlife; he is remade into an akh, the 'effective spirit' or 'shining one,' a luminous, immortal being formed when his ka, his vital double, and his ba, his mobile personality, are joined after he passes safely through the afterlife. The akh is what the whole apparatus is for: it is what the pharaoh is climbing the ladder to become. The fuller Egyptian map of the self, seven named parts in all, is laid out on our page for the Egyptian Book of the Dead; here it is enough to know the akh is the goal.

One text in the whole corpus stands apart, and it is the strangest thing the Egyptians ever wrote down. It is called the Cannibal Hymn, it occupies Utterances 273 and 274, and it is found only in the pyramid of Unas. No later pyramid repeats it, whether because it was thought too dangerous, too archaic, or simply superseded by a gentler theology. Its language is among the oldest in the corpus, and its uniqueness suggests it preserves an extremely early layer of Egyptian religion that the rest of the tradition had already left behind.

What it describes is the king devouring the gods. He hunts them like animals: they are caught, bound, slaughtered, cooked, and eaten, and the king grows mighty by consuming them. The lines are explicit. 'The king is the one who eats men and lives on the gods' (Utterance 273). 'It is the king who eats their magic and swallows their spirits,' the magic and the spirits of the gods themselves. 'The great ones are for his supper, the middle-sized are for his breakfast, the small ones are for his dinner.' And the result: 'The king's ka has been served with their ka's; he has swallowed the wisdom of every god.'

Egyptologists read the hymn two ways, and the file does not force a choice. One camp takes it more literally: an echo of genuine pre-dynastic rituals, cannibalistic practices long abandoned by Unas' own day but fossilized in a sacred text too old to discard. The other reads it as magic rather than menu, the king absorbing the power of the gods, their heka, their very magic, to take on their attributes and become divine himself, a kind of spiritual technology for turning a man into a god. Both readings are live, and the hymn is disturbing enough to carry either one.

Serpents are everywhere in the Pyramid Texts, and they cut both ways. On the king's own brow sits the uraeus, the rearing cobra, embodying the goddess Wadjet, and in these texts she is not a symbol but a living protector: 'The serpent is on your brow... she will strike at anyone who resists you' (Utterance 194). The cobra on the crown is described as a real entity, awake and acting on the king's behalf.

Other serpents are the enemy. The Duat, the underworld the king must cross, is infested with hostile serpents that have to be overcome or driven off, and the texts hand him the words to do it, a blunt repelling formula that recurs in the pattern 'Back, serpent! Fall, serpent!'

And one great serpent is on the king's side. Mehen coils protectively around Re's solar barque as it sails through the underworld, a guardian wrapped around the boat, the mirror image of Apophis and his sworn opposite.

So the same corpus holds both faces of the serpent at once: protector and destroyer, the uraeus and Mehen guarding, the Duat serpents and Apophis attacking. The file notes that this exact split, the snake as both guardian and monster, turns up in culture after culture rather than only in Egypt, the same pattern our page on the World Serpent traces across the world. It stops short of claiming to know why the pattern recurs; it only records that it does.

The Pyramid Texts were never meant to be read the way you are reading them now. They were performed. Embedded in the utterances are rubrics, stage directions telling the officiant how to act them out: 'To be recited four times,' 'To be said while facing west.' They belonged to a sequence of funerary rites that included washing and mummifying the body, the Opening of the Mouth ceremony that restored the dead king's senses, the presentation of offerings, and the spoken spells. And the architecture matches the liturgy: spells about emerging from death cluster in the sarcophagus chamber, spells about ascension in the antechamber, spells about departure in the corridor. Harold M. Hays argued in 2012 that the whole corpus worked as a 'liturgy of the afterlife,' recited by priests at the exact spots in the pyramid where each spell belonged.

The pyramids point at the sky, and not vaguely. In the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the northern shaft of the King's Chamber was aimed at the circumpolar stars, specifically Thuban, which was the pole star around 2560 BCE, and the southern shaft pointed toward Orion's Belt. Set that alongside the Pyramid Texts, which describe the king ascending to Orion and Sirius over and over, and the celestial orientation of the pyramids stops looking like coincidence. There is a real, unambiguous textual basis for it: the Egyptians told us, in the texts, that the king was headed for those stars.

This is where a famous modern theory has to be handled with care. In 1994 Robert Bauval, with Adrian Gilbert, proposed the Orion Correlation Theory: that the three Giza pyramids were laid out on the ground to mirror the three stars of Orion's Belt, matching their relative positions and even their brightness. The idea is seductive, and it is not accepted by mainstream Egyptology. The fit is inexact, it depends on selective scaling, and no Old Kingdom text anywhere states that the Giza plateau was designed as a map of the sky. The distinction is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to blur: the evidence that the Pyramid Texts treat the stars, and Orion in particular, as the king's destination is solid and textual. The stronger, specific claim that Giza was built as a literal star map is a different thing, and that one remains debated rather than demonstrated. It is neither proven right nor safely dismissed.

Some readers push further still. In his 2005 book Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts, Naydler argued that the utterances describe not only what happens to a dead pharaoh but what happened to a living one: initiation rituals in which the king symbolically 'died' and was 'reborn' while still breathing, with the pyramid serving as an initiation chamber rather than a tomb, and the 'journey to the stars' recording an out-of-body or visionary state reached through ritual. The file grades this Tier 3 and states the objection in the same breath: the texts consistently address a dead king, and the scholarly consensus treats them as funerary literature, which makes the paradoxical line 'you have gone away alive' paradoxical only if you pull it out of its funerary setting. It is a provocative reading, not an established one.

There is a last question the file is willing to raise but not to overreach on. If the oldest utterances really do reach into pre-dynastic times, before 3100 BCE, then they carry fully formed religious ideas, resurrection, a stellar afterlife, divine judgment, out of the same formative window that produced Göbekli Tepe and the first Sumerian settlements, which sits awkwardly with any model of religion as a slow, gradual climb. The file is careful about what that does and does not mean. It does not imply a lost civilization. It implies only that sophisticated concepts may have run ahead of the material markers, the writing and the monuments, that we usually treat as the proof that civilization has arrived.