Democracy of the Defiled

In a 2005 Syracuse University dissertation on purity, Yohan Yoo traces some of the changes in purity regulations that took place in his three selected ancient purity systems – Egypt, Israel, and Greece. In the first, he finds what he describes as a “democratization of the mortuary texts” during the New Kingdom period.

In the Old Kingdom, only Egyptian priests and Pharaohs had to be concerned about purity. Later documents indicate that common people “came to believe that they could not only be accepted
in the divine realm but could also become divine beings. And succeeding in settling
down among the divine beings in the world after death required all Egyptians – not just the king – to acquire the ritual purity of the
divine realm” (139).

As a result, “the public began to share,
or at least
aspired to share, the divine attribute that until then had been monopolized by
the king.
Of course, certain modifications occurred in this process. Unlike The Pyramid Texts, which
go so far as to emphasize the superiority of the kings over the gods, the newer texts
praise the gods with whom the dead person identifies himself or herself. The Book of the Dead, for example, demonstrates these
types of praise: ‘Osiris has vanquished his foes!’;
and ‘I praise Re every day.’ Furthermore, most of the various versions of BD, including the papyrus of Ani, start with hymns to Re and
Osiris ” (140).

In short, “ritual purity, or the requisite condition of the divine realm, was
extended to common people upon death” (142). Participation in purity regulations was was a sign of elevated privilege, not marginalization.