ba and ka

• Egyptian and African teaching of soul and spirit

111:0.4In the con­cep­tion of the at­man the Hindu teach­ers re­ally ap­prox­i­mated an ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the na­ture and pres­ence of the Ad­juster, but they failed to dis­tin­guish the co­p­res­ence of the evolv­ing and po­ten­tially im­mor­tal soul. The Chi­nese, how­ever, rec­og­nized two as­pects of a hu­man be­ing, the yang and the yin, the soul and the spirit. The Egyp­tians and many African tribes also be­lieved in two fac­tors, the ka and the ba; the soul was not usu­ally be­lieved to be pre-ex­is­tent, only the spirit.

111:0.5The in­hab­i­tants of the Nile val­ley be­lieved that each fa­vored in­di­vid­ual had be­stowed upon him at birth, or soon there­after, a pro­tect­ing spirit which they called the ka. They taught that this guard­ian spirit re­mained with the mor­tal sub­ject through­out life and passed be­fore him into the fu­ture es­tate. On the walls of a tem­ple at Luxor, where is de­picted the birth of Amen­hotep III, the lit­tle prince is pic­tured on the arm of the Nile god, and near him is an­other child, in ap­pear­ance iden­ti­cal with the prince, which is a sym­bol of that en­tity which the Egyp­tians called the ka. This sculp­ture was com­pleted in the fif­teenth cen­tury be­fore Christ.

111:0.6The ka was thought to be a su­pe­rior spirit ge­nius which de­sired to guide the as­so­ci­ated mor­tal soul into the bet­ter paths of tem­po­ral liv­ing but more es­pe­cially to in­flu­ence the for­tunes of the hu­man sub­ject in the here­after. When an Egyp­tian of this pe­riod died, it was ex­pected that his ka would be wait­ing for him on the other side of the Great River. At first, only kings were sup­posed to have kas, but pres­ently all righ­teous men were be­lieved to pos­sess them. One Egyp­tian ruler, speak­ing of the ka within his heart, said: “I did not dis­re­gard its speech; I feared to transgress its guid­ance. I pros­pered thereby greatly; I was thus suc­cess­ful by rea­son of that which it caused me to do; I was dis­tin­guished by its guid­ance.” Many be­lieved that the ka was “an or­a­cle from God in ev­ery­body.” Many be­lieved that they were to “spend eter­nity in glad­ness of heart in the fa­vor of the God that is in you.”