Extract from Awakening Osiris : a new translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead by Normandi Ellis (Phanes Press, 1988)

I flew straight out of heaven, a mad bird full of secrets.
I came into being as I came into being. I grew as I grew.
I changed as I change. My mind is fire, my soul fire.
The cobra wakes and spits fire in my eyes.

I rise through ochre smoke into black air enclosed in a shower of stars. I am what I have made. I am the seed of every god, beautiful as evening, hard as light.

I am the last four days of yesterday, four screams from the
edges of earth – beauty, terror, truth, madness –
the phoenix in his pyre.

In a willow I made my nest of flowers and snakes, sandalwood and myrrh. I am waiting for eternity. I’m waiting for four hundred years to pass before I dance on flame, turn this desert to ash, before I rise, waking from gold and purple dreams into the season of god.

I will live forever in the fire spun from my own wings. I’ll suffer burns that burn to heal. I destroy and create myself like the sun that rises burning from the east and dies burning in the west.

To know the fire, I become the fire.
I am power. I am light. I am forever.

On earth and in heaven I am.
This is my body, my work. This is my deliverance.

The heat of transformation is unbearable, yet change is necessary.
It burns up the useless, the diseased.

Time is a cool liquid; it flows away like a river.
We shall see no end of it.

Generation after generation, I create myself.
It is never easy.

Long nights I waited, lost in myself, considering the stars.
I wage a battle against darkness, against my own ignorance, my resistance to change, my sentimental love for my own folly.

Perfection is a difficult task.
I lose and find my way over again. One task gives rise to others.

There is no end to the work left to do.
That is harsh eternity.

There is no end to becoming.

I live forever striving for perfection.
I praise the moment I die in fire for the veils of illusion burn with me.
I see how hard we strive for truth, and once attained, how easily
we forget it.

I hold that fire as long as I can.

My nose fills with the smell of seared flesh, the acrid
smoke of death, so that years from now I might look on that
scar and remember how it was to hold the light, how it was to
die and come again radiant as light walking on sand.

I change and change again, generation after generation.
I find anguish then peace.

I am satisfied with my birth and the fate to which it led me.
I do not regret the discomforts and terrors of my mortality
any more than I regret the company of angels.

I have entered fire.

I become invisible; yet I breathe in the flow of the sun,
in the eyes of children, in the light that animates the white
cliffs at dawn.

I am the god in the world in everything, even in darkness.
If you have not seen me there, you have not looked.

I am the fire that burns you, that burns in you.
To live is to die a thousand deaths,
but there is only one fire, one eternity.