Be not mine adversary before the Divine Circle; let there be no fall of the scale against me in the presence of the great god, Lord of Amenta.’ In the Egyptian Judgement Scene it is the ape-headed (less commonly the ibis-headed) Thoth, god of wisdom, who supervises the weighing; in the Tibetan Judgement Scene it is the monkey-headed Shinje; and in both scenes there is the jury of deities looking on, some animal- headed, some human-headed.[1] In the Egyptian version there is a monstrous creature waiting to devour the deceased should the deceased be condemned, whilst in the Tibetan version devils wait to conduct the evil-doer to the hell-world of purgation; and the record-board which Thoth is sometimes depicted as holding corresponds to the Mirror of Karma held by Dharma-Rāja or, as in some versions, by one of the divine jury. Furthermore, in both Books of the Dead, the deceased when first addressing the Judge pleads that he has done no evil. Before Osiris, this plea seems to be accepted in all the texts now known; before Dharma-Rāja it is subject to the test of the Mirror of Karma, and this seems to be distinctly an Indian and Buddhist addition to the hypothetical prehistoric version, whence arose the Egyptian and the Tibetan versions, the Egyptian being the less affected.
Plato, too, in recording the other-world adventures of Er, in the tenth book of the Republic, describes a similar Judgement, in which there are judges and karmic record-boards (affixed to the souls judged) and paths—one for the good, leading to Heaven, one for the evil, leading to Hell—and demons waiting to take the condemned souls to the place of punishment, quite as in the Bardo Thödol (see p. 49).[2]
- ↑ Such animal-headed deities as appear in the Bardo Thödol are, for the most part, derived from the pre-Buddhistic religion of Tibet called Bön, and, therefore, probably of very great antiquity. Like their Egyptian parallels, they seem to be more or less totemistic; and, through their impersonation by masked priests, as in the Ancient Egyptian Mysteries and surviving Tibetan mystery plays, may be—as our text also suggests—symbolic of definite attributes, passions, and propensities of sangsāric, or embodied, beings—human, sub-human, and superhuman. (See p. 1401.)
- ↑ The student is here referred to Section VII of our Addenda (pp. 238–41), concerning the Christianized version of the Judgement contained in the curious medieval treatise entitled The Lamentation of the Dying Creature.
