The say­ing “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but it would hard­ly have made sense to an ancient Egypt­ian. One of the most wide­ly known qual­i­ties of that civ­i­liza­tion’s upper crust, after all, is that its mem­bers spared no expense try­ing to do just that. The most com­pelling evi­dence includes the tombs of the pharaohs, lav­ish­ly stocked as they were with every­thing from dai­ly neces­si­ties to reli­gious arti­facts to ser­vants (in effi­gy or oth­er­wise). And nobody who was any­body in ancient Egypt would be seen shuf­fling off this mor­tal coil — or what­ev­er the shape in which their poets cast it — with­out a Book of the Dead.

“A stan­dard com­po­nent in Egypt­ian elite buri­als, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the mod­ern sense of the term but a com­pendi­um of some 200 rit­u­al spells and prayers, with instruc­tions on how the deceased’s spir­it should recite them in the here­after,” writes the New York Times’ Franz Lidz.

“Com­piled and refined over mil­len­ni­ums since about 1550 B.C.,” the text “pro­vid­ed a sort of visu­al map that allowed the new­ly dis­em­bod­ied soul to nav­i­gate the duat, a maze-like nether­world of cav­erns, hills and burn­ing lakes.” Each of its “spells” addressed a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion the deceased might encounter on that jour­ney: a snake attack, decap­i­ta­tion, a turn­ing upside down that “would reverse your diges­tive func­tions and cause you to con­sume your own waste.”

We can cer­tain­ly under­stand why these high-sta­tus ancient Egyp­tians did­n’t want to take their chances. In the ani­mat­ed Ted-ED video above, you can fol­low the jour­ney of one such indi­vid­ual, a scribe from thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry-BC Thebes called Anees. After his body under­goes two months of mum­mi­fi­ca­tion, his spir­it makes its har­row­ing jour­ney through the under­world, call­ing upon the spells he’d thought to include in his Book of the Dead when alive. Then comes moral judg­ment by a bat­tery of 42 “asses­sor gods” and a weigh­ing of his heart, the final step before his admit­tance to a lush wheat field that is the Egypt­ian after­life. Whether Anees got that far remains an open ques­tion, but mod­ern phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal enshrine­ment of Books of the Dead (more of which you can see up-close at Google Arts & Cul­ture), has grant­ed him and his com­pa­tri­ots a kind of immor­tal­i­ty after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er that Ancient Egyp­tians Drank Hal­lu­cino­genic Cock­tails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Were the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Not Built Up, But Carved Down?: A Bold New The­o­ry Explains Their Con­struc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The appear­ance of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the most impor­tant doc­u­ment dis­cov­ery of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Yet, in some sense, they did­n’t deliv­er what many assumed to be promised with­in: that is, the basis for a com­plete revi­sion of every­thing we thought we knew about Chris­tian­i­ty. The real­i­ty of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ con­tent is less sim­ple, but also stranger — which makes it an ide­al sub­ject for the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga, giv­en its pen­chant for explor­ing the obscure byways of reli­gious his­to­ry. And indeed, as host Tom­mie Trelawny says in his new video above, they are the “old­est Bib­li­cal writ­ings ever found,” a sta­tus that, what­ev­er their specifics, cer­tain­ly jus­ti­fies the great scruti­ny paid to them over the past eight decades.

For it was only in 1946 that the Scrolls were found, by a Bedouin shep­herd look­ing for his lost goat in a series of caves in the vicin­i­ty of ancient ruins by the Dead Sea. Or so the sto­ry goes, any­way, and Trelawny explains some of the com­pli­ca­tions that emerge when it’s exam­ined more close­ly.

But the fact remains that those caves did con­tain, tight­ly rolled up and for the most part well-pre­served, a set of scrolls adding up to “around 900 indi­vid­ual man­u­scripts: 40 per­cent of them “resem­bled books found in the Bible”; 30 per­cent, apoc­ryphal writ­ings “banned” from the Bible; and anoth­er 30 per­cent, “writ­ings pre­vi­ous­ly unknown to schol­ar­ship.” Those last include “texts that described a secre­tive reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty and apoc­a­lyp­tic visions of a great heav­en­ly war.”

Most intrigu­ing­ly, there was also “a scroll made entire­ly of cop­per that lists the loca­tions of lost trea­sure.” None of it has ever been found, much as the con­tent of the oth­er texts has­n’t forced a great rethink­ing of the reli­gion at the cen­ter of so much of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. In fact, as Bib­li­cal schol­ar Robert Alter writes in the Lon­don Review of Books, “the notion that these sec­tar­i­an writ­ings are actu­al­ly Chris­t­ian has no schol­ar­ly cred­i­bil­i­ty,” though some researchers argue that “the blue­print for the Gospel nar­ra­tives,” mes­si­ah fig­ure and all, “was laid out in the Scrolls and fol­lowed by the first Chris­t­ian writ­ers.” They do, how­ev­er, reveal a great deal about the world­view of the par­tic­u­lar fringe faith­ful who took to the desert to keep their unortho­dox beliefs safe from the harsh judg­ment of main­stream soci­ety — and, for about twen­ty cen­turies, safe they remained.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Google Dig­i­tizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Com­mand­ments and Gen­e­sis

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The Gnos­tic Gospels: An Intro­duc­tion to the For­bid­den Teach­ings of Jesus

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It would be impos­si­ble to under­stand West­ern civ­i­liza­tion with­out under­stand­ing the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ties, plur­al. So sug­gests Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny in the new video above, which explains the Gnos­tic Gospels, the “for­bid­den teach­ings of Jesus.” As a sys­tem of beliefs, Gnos­ti­cism is a fair­ly far cry from the main­stream forms of Chris­tian­i­ty with which most of us are famil­iar today. But its sur­viv­ing texts may sound uncan­ni­ly famil­iar, despite also involv­ing out­landish-sound­ing ele­ments that seem to belong to anoth­er civ­i­liza­tion entire­ly. Gnos­tic teach­ings have long been con­sid­ered heresy by Chris­tians, but do they real­ly rep­re­sent just a dif­fer­ent evo­lu­tion­ary branch of the faith: anoth­er Chris­tian­i­ty?

Reli­gious schol­ars of many stripes have con­cerned them­selves with few mat­ters as inten­sive­ly as they have with theod­i­cy, that is, the mat­ter of how to square the notion of a good, omnipo­tent deity with the obvi­ous exis­tence of evil down here in the world. Since its loose coali­tion of beliefs came togeth­er in the late first cen­tu­ry, Gnos­ti­cism has pro­posed an ele­gant solu­tion: that the deity is not, in fact, good, or rather, that under the tran­scen­dent, unknow­able God is a much more poor­ly behaved “demi­urge” who dis­plays an indif­fer­ence, at best, to the lot of human­i­ty. In this view, our result­ing world is less a per­fect cre­ation than a cos­mic mis­take — a propo­si­tion that would account for cer­tain of its qual­i­ties we expe­ri­ence on the day-to-day lev­el, even if we have no par­tic­u­lar reli­gious pro­cliv­i­ties.

Thanks to the dis­cov­ery of Egyp­t’s Nag Ham­ma­di library in 1945, we can direct­ly access many of the teach­ings of the so-called “Gnos­tic Gospels.” They tell us, to make a few grand sim­pli­fi­ca­tions, that our real­i­ty is illu­so­ry and that we can only come to grasp the true nature of both it and our­selves through eso­teric learn­ing, gno­sis being the ancient Greek term for knowl­edge. This world­view may bring to mind that of cer­tain Greek philoso­phers, or indeed that of The Matrix, a near-oblig­a­tory ref­er­ence for a video like this. A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry on from that movie, it’s not hard to under­stand why it res­onat­ed with the siz­able-enough pro­por­tion of human­i­ty who feel alien­at­ed from who they real­ly are or what the world real­ly is — and who, any mil­len­ni­um now, would make rea­son­ably promis­ing can­di­dates to bring about a Gnos­tic revival.

Relat­ed con­tent:

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to The Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

The Ancient Greeks Who Con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Near­ly 70 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe in angels, at least accord­ing to a sta­tis­tic often cit­ed in recent years. But what, exact­ly, comes to their minds — or those of any oth­er believ­ers around the world — when they imag­ine one? Per­son­al con­cep­tions may vary, of course, but we can be fair­ly cer­tain of one thing: most of them will bear no resem­blance to the angels actu­al­ly described in the Bible. Here to give us a sense of their appear­ance is Tom­mie Trelawny, cre­ator of the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga, whose video above explains “Why Bible Accu­rate Angels Are So Creepy.”

Far from the winged, white-robed embod­i­ments of gen­tle­ness we might know from greet­ing cards, says Trelawny, the angels of the Bible, and specif­i­cal­ly the Old Tes­ta­ment, are “hor­ri­fy­ing abom­i­na­tions” who would be more at home in an H. P. Love­craft nov­el. Angel, from the Greek ange­los, which itself comes from the Hebrew mal’akh, means “mes­sen­ger.” That implies an innocu­ous-enough set of duties, but then, you may recall the sto­ry of Passover, with its angel who slaugh­tered the Egyp­tians’ first-born sons; or the angel who “struck 70,000 Israelites to death”; or the angel who “sin­gle­hand­ed­ly killed 185,000 Assyr­i­an sol­diers in one night.”

The Bible does­n’t say any­thing about those angels hav­ing wings. “In fact, they look like any ordi­nary per­son,” as do even the most famous exam­ples like Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. In the grand heav­en­ly scheme of things, such humanoid angels, or Malakh, don’t rank par­tic­u­lar­ly high. Still, they’re one rung above the Cheru­bim, who turn out to be less like Cupid and more like “the myth­i­cal beasts of ancient Mesopotamia, espe­cial­ly the Baby­lon­ian Lamas­su, which has the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a king” — with a more-than-pass­ing resem­blance to the Egypt­ian sphinx or the Hit­tite grif­fin. Even the pop­u­lar image of the pudgy, fly­ing cherub, which emerged much lat­er, seems to have been import­ed from Greek and Roman myths.

Ranked above the Malakh are the six-winged Seraphim, or “burn­ing ones.” The ori­gins of these “care­tak­ers of God’s throne” are sug­gest­ed by the Hebrew word Saraph, mean­ing “a ven­omous ser­pent in the desert,” much like the cobra whose image adorned the head of the Egypt­ian pharaoh. As for the Ophan­im, it’s any­one’s guess where they come from. Tak­ing the form of a wheel with­in a wheel float­ing in the sky, its rims lined with eyes, an Ophan would make for an intim­i­dat­ing sight indeed: per­haps a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the wheels of God’s char­i­ot, per­haps the result of “the prophet ingest­ing a psy­che­del­ic plant,” and per­haps — accord­ing to a fringe the­o­ry — vis­i­ta­tion by a space­craft. What­ev­er the evi­dence for those expla­na­tions, it’s safe to say they’re not quite as com­fort­ing as all those placid celes­tial harpists.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

The Ori­gins of Satan: The Evo­lu­tion of the Dev­il in Reli­gion

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Angels & Demons: The Sci­ence Revealed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.