Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
DR. THEOPHILE OBENGA AND ME
DR. THEOPHILE OBENGA AND ME
"We now come to the question: What was the actual attitude to illness to the thinkers of ancient pharaonic Egypt?
"From the view point of Egyptian philosophy, human beings are a combination of material and spiritual forces intimately intertwined . There is the body, 'khet,' with its organs and instincts ; there is the 'ka,' a vital force which gives the body life. Conceived of as a sort of specific, astral double of the individual being, the ka expressed the intimate essence of the ego. There was the 'ba,' a principle of divine origin, represented in figurative art as a bird with a man's head, clutching in its claws the ankh, symbol of life. The 'ba' was placed above the 'khet' and the 'ka.'
"Because they saw the human being as a synthesis of organic, mental, spiritual, and divine energies, the ancient Egyptians in no way interpreted disease as a punishment for sin. To them, illness was not the result of moral and personal disorder; it was a material reflection of a constant, universal struggle between health-giving forces and toxic ones. For the ancient Egyptians, in other words, illness seemed like the expression, on the human level, of a metaphysical drama."
P.394-5, AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 BC by Theophile Obenga (2004)
[By extrapolation, my cosmogony would extend the one human being identified by Dr. Theophile Obenga to humanity, at large; such that the "illnesses" of mankind become but byproducts of the very same "metaphysical drama," cosmic struggle between health-giving forces and toxicity on the myriad planes of human endeavor in time.]