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.]
