This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Skeptics claim the figures below the lion couch are “canopic jars containing the deceased’s internal organs,” and Figure 8 is “Imset,” one of four Sons of Horus. Does this debunk Joseph Smith’s explanation that it was the “god of Korash”?
No. The Egyptian context matches what Joseph Smith explained. Here is an investigation of Imset and the name Joseph Smith applied to this figure, “Korash.” They display very similar qualities, which indicates that Korash was the Mesopotamian version of Imset and that this was what Abraham was familiar with.
Imset: The Kindly One
Broken Heart – The Egyptian name Imset means “the kindly one.” Imset was associated with “human emotion” and portrayed as a young human. Imset was unique as having a human head, while the other sons of Horus were portrayed with animals heads. He was distinctly human. He was involved with human emotion and “associated with a broken heart or death due to excess of emotions.” Emotion is what made a person human, after all.
Egyptians considered the heart to be like an engine that animated the body. The Book of the Dead talks about “my heart whereby I come into being.” The deceased boldly claims, “I know my heart, I have gotten the mastery over my heart,” and therefore: “I have gotten the mastery over my two hands and arms, I have gotten the mastery over my feet, and I have gained the power to do whatsoever my ka [spirit] pleaseth. My soul shall not be shut off from my body.” To master the heart is to master the human body. But then in the Book of the Dead, trouble arises. In chapter 29, a “messenger of all the gods” arrives to “come to carry away this my heart which liveth.” A vignette shows “Ani standing, with both hands raised in prayer, before four gods who are seated on a pedestal in the form of Maat [justice]; before him is his heart set upon a pedestal. This arrangement reflects the four sons of Horus on each side of the rectangular altar of the Sed-festival.
“Hail, ye who carry away hearts, ye who steal hearts!” the deceased calls, “take ye not away this heart of Osiris Ani in your grasp, this heart of Osiris… The heart of Osiris Ani is pleasant unto the gods; he is victorious, he hath gotten power over it… His heart obeyeth him, he is the lord thereof, it is in his body, and it shall never fall away therefrom.” The Book of the Dead then refers to the ritual battle in which the deceased was victorious: “I am the lord of hearts, the slayer of the heart… Let not my heart be taken away, let it not be wounded, and may no wounds or gashes be dealt upon me because it hath been taken away from me…. May naught rise up against me in judgement in the presence of the lord of the trial.” This refers to the final judgement when a person’s heart is weighed against their sins and determined admittance into heaven. Next, another vignette shows: “The decease holding his heart to his breast with his left hand, and kneeling before a monster with a knife in its hand.”
This monster is the messenger of the gods who consumed the heart which had departed from the body. In Egypt, the “Cult of Sobek, a crocodile god” sacrificed people on an altar and tossed the remains to the crocodiles in the Nile river. Sobek was therefore “fed with the offerings of human sacrifice.” The priests threw the heart and body parts of proxy sacrifices for the king for the Sed festival into the river Nile for the crocodiles to consume. Sobek thus “steals hearts” away just as the Book of the Dead says. And yet Sobek was worshipped wasn’t an evil monster. That was simply his function, but he also served good functions as well. By consuming the proxy sacrificial victim he helped restore the body of the king and invigorate his rulership.
A hymn praised the crocodile god Sobek: “All you gods of the South, North, West, East, All Nine Gods who follow Sobk-Horus of Shedyt, Let your spirits rejoice over this king–Sobk-Horus of Shedyt, As Isis rejoiced over her son Horus, When he was a child of Chemmis.” (via AncientEgyptOnline.co.uk)
The crocodile Sobek aided Isis in restoring Osiris’s body and bringing his ressurection. Sometimes Egyptians equated Sobek with Horus, Osiris’s father, in restoring the body. “Sobek was sometimes considered to be an aspect of Horus because Horus took the form of a crocodile to retrieve the parts of Osiris’ body which were lost in the Nile. Yet Sobek was also thought to have assisted Isis when she gave birth to Horus. He also rescued the four mummiform sons of Horus.” (via AncientEgyptOnline.co.uk)
So, this crocodile god Sobek, who consumes the heart of the human sacrifice and rescues the heart of the Egyptian king–where is Sobek located in Facsimile 1?
Due south. This is not just coincidence, because not only is Imset the god of the heart, but he is also the god of the south cardinal direction. Each figure to the north, south, east, or west in Facsimile 1 match up to the character of the son of Horus for that direction. The crocodile’s eye is perfectly centered and perfectly aligns with the priest’s knife. The association between the knife and the crocodile is clear, and the crocodile’s role in this scene is explicit. He consumes the heart of the sacrificial victim and helps restore the body of the deceased king. He rescued the sons of Horus in a net and provided safe passage across the Nile, which represented passage to the afterlife.
Egyptians located their Temple to Sobek the crocodile in Kom Ombo, lower Egypt to the south. This is why Sobk was shown wearing the “red crown of Lower Egypt.” The Nile flows from south to north, from lower Egypt to upper Egypt, which may explain why the southern direction came to be associated with Sobek and the heart. Imset represented the restored heart in the reborn child Osiris. Interestingly, this reflects what we read in the New Testament: Joseph and Mary traveled south to Egypt when Jesus was a small child to avoid his destruction at the hands of a wicked man.
Korash: To Bestow Care
Joseph Smith gave the name “Korash” in his explanation for this figure. What is Korash? The most similar word in the mesopotamian language Abraham spoke was kuras. This word kuras was also a Mesopotamian name, and translates as “to bestow care.” This definition evidently made its way all the way down to Roman times, because in Latin, “cura” means “spiritual charge of souls.” And “cura” means “care, healing.” The “u” here made an oo sound in ancient languages, so “cura” would sound very similar to “korash.” In Middle Englih and French “cura” means “care of souls.” Thefore, the name Korash from the Book of Abraham refers to human kindness, emotion, and Sobek’s role as carer for human bodies and souls.
Kan: Devourer Of Heart Sacrifice
I have noticed remarkable parallels between Facsimile 1 and Mayan mythology. One of these similarities is that four gods represented the four quarters of the earth, supporting the king in his revivification. The Mayans believed in four gods for the four quarters of the earth, exactly like the Egyptians did. The Mayan god of the south, Kan, bears interesting similarly to Imset.
by orientalizing, creative commons license
The Mayan altar of sacrifice often had a giant jaguar mouth opening up in the at the bottom, the southern region. This represented passage into the afterlife–a slightly different meaning. But the crocodile symbolism was very similar in Mayan mythology. The creation gods shot a cosmic bird out of the creation tree, the Milky Way galaxy, with a “crocodile head as the dark cleft in the Milky Way.” The crocodile was thus the means of human generation. The Egyptians saw the Milky Way as a cosmic reflection of the Nile river, and thus the crocodile’s head serves the same function as the saving crocodile in Egyptian mytholody. Mayan art shows “the crocodile tree emerging in the form of the king” on the lower or south part of the stele.
The Kan glyph “represents the ripe maize” corn and is “frequently associated with offerings of food.” Each god of cardinal direction was also associated with a year of the calendar. The Kan year was a lot like the other years, with the construction of a stone altar, the ritual cutting and anointing of blood on the stone, and ritual of cutting off a bird’s head. But the Kan year was considered a bringer of good fortune–as long as you fed the gods proper sacrifice. Proper sacrificial ritual was required to keep the “evil spirit exorcised according to their deluded beliefs,” explorer Diego Landa recorded. He also observed the Mayan priest “placing on his shoulders an angel as a sign of water and of a good year, and these angels they painted so as to make them frightful in appearance.” This matches Egyptian Imset’s association with water.
But it is also interesting that they painted the gods of a good year to look frightful in appearance, like monsters. Why would they do that? Same reason as the Egyptian Sobek monster–the devouring monster provides life and good fortune as long as he is satiated by sacrifice. They believed of Kan “in him there was no sin as in his brothers, and because of that no evils would come upon them. But since they often did so come, the evil one provided ceremonies therefore, so that when they happened they might throw the blame on the ceremonies or celebrants; and thus they continued always deluded and blind.” (Diego de Landa) Doesn’t this sound an awful lot like the attempted sacrifice of Abraham? The deluded Egyptians held these Sed festival sacrifices because they believed that they made the king’s heart pure and spotless, but in order to do so they had to throw the blame on someone else through the use of ceremony. The blame was laid on celebrants, which in this case was Abraham.
Now for the most impressive part. The Mayans sacrificed a dog or human being for this proxy sacrifice ceremony. They threw the human sacrifice from the top of a sacred hill (which matches the sacred hill in the sun temple complex mentioned in the Book of Abraham) onto an altar, the priest cut him open with a knife, and they removed his heart as an offering to the idol. It’s like a scene from Indiana Jones. They believed a messenger from the gods came and devoured the heart. “In the temple court they erected a great pile of stones, and then placed the dog or the man to be sacrificed on something much higher, from which they threw him, tied, upon the pile below; there the attendants seized him and with great swiftness drew out his heart, raised it to the new idol, and offered it between two plates… They say that an angel descended and received this sacrifice.” (Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, Diego de Landa)
It’s quite a coincidence that this heart ceremony contains the same sensibility and understand about the human heart and its function for proxy sacrifice. It’s also quite coincidence that it is associated with the southern direction in exactly the same way as the Egyptian heart is associated with the south. This indicates that the Mayans were to some degree influenced by Nephite or Mulekite theology which passed on this imagery from Egypt.