Ba In ancient Egyptian religion of the New Kingdom the ba is, generally speaking, the individual characteristics of a person, roughly analogous to the personality.
It was often understood in terms of the effect it had on others, not entirely unlike the New Age idea of the ‘past life review.’
In the Pyramid Texts’ vision of the afterlife, the ba is said to return to the mummified body at night, essentially going to Osiris, and then return to the land of the living during the day, free to roam as a spiritual presence (Donald B. Redford ed., The Oxford Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythology, 2003).
S. G. F. Brandon says that the ba originally connoted spiritual power (S. G. F. Brandon ed., A Dictionary of Comparative Religion, New York: Scribner, 1970).
Depictions of the ba might be present in Old Kingdom funerary statues, although scholars debate this point. More commonly the ba is said to be represented in the New Kingdom as a bird with a human head (Redford, 2003). » Ka
Image Source:
-
Resized and rendered into .gif format from original, “The ba-bird, one aspect of the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul” created by Jeff Dahl, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license versions 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, and 1.0
Add to this, report errors, suggest edits or voice your opinion by posting a comment
