least some privileged beings to construct a method of entering and dealing with the underworld fully prepared for the encounter. The purpose of mummification of royalty and the preparation of elaborately supplied tombs was to set the stage for an "transfigured body that resembled its earthly counterpart yet surpassed it in both size and abilities." Properly prepared, the body could "rejuvenate itself" and reverse the vicissitudes of time and aging, or as it were imitate the action of the sun in surviving the course through the underworld. The relevance of this idea to divine communication is that the observable behavior of the sun could be interpreted as a set of rather practical and definitely detailed divine instructions about how to negotiate one's way through the netherworld. Now of course these instructions were also "esoteric," as Hornung explains, for "only the pharaoh, as the sun of the sun god and the earthly sun, knows all the secrets" of the underworld.
The cosmology of the underworld constructed by Egyptian thought contained multiple levels of endurability. At the lowest, darkest level, the underworld was unendurable, and life itself was obliterated. In that regard, Gunn notes that the prospect of blindness, whether physical or spiritual, was viewed with special dread among the poor classes of ancient Egypt. That is relevant because at the highest level, nearest the sun, the afterlife/underworld would be experienced positively, as "a creative, transforming power," associated with the restorative powers of the sun/light, that would enable the "whole, intact human being [to] experience reawakening." Indeed, only in the underworld could the deceased king imitate, or more exactly embody, the trope of the eternal cycling of Osiris through life and death; what closer communication could ensue from god to man than for the god to enter and unite with the physical being of the man, allowing the man to be reborn in full? To be...