Tag: historical

First stop on the soul’s trip was the Halls of Ma’ati, where the dead person’s heart would be weighed on a two-armed scale of the kind used in Ancient Egypt for weighing gold and jewels.

Ma’ati meant Double Ma’at — double not in the evil-twin sense of “double,” but in the times-two sense — double strength. As for Ma’at, she was a goddess, sometimes pictured as two goddesses, or a pair of twins — teenage twins, with wings on their shoulders and ostrich feathers in their headdresses.

She was one of the presiding deities at the weighing of the heart, the others being jackal-headed Anubis, who did the actual weighing, and ibis-headed Thoth, moon god and thus, in a society that used the lunar calendar, the god of time. He  was also the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and engineering skills, and in addition he was a supernatural scribe or clerk. In heart-weighing scenes, he’s often shown with his wax tablet at the ready and his stylus poised, just as a scribe would have been present at a real-life gold-weighing to record the results. 

The constellation is Libra, the scales or balance, and as a present-day zodiac sign it rules from September 23 to October 22. One explanation of its name is that it rises at the time of the autumnal equinox, when the day and the night are of equal length, a balance being a device for determining equivalents. A more questionable interpretation is that it appeared at harvest time, when farmers were weighing their produce for marketing purposes.