
14 Pharaonic and Mesoamerican “Temple Mountains”
In Heliopolitan cosmology, one of several accounts of creation current during the two millennia of pharaonic Egypt, Atum first “self-arose” or emanated himself as a mound or mountain, breaching the primordial ocean of chaos, a myth widely interpreted as representing the reappearance of dry land after the Nile’s annual inundation, symbolized by a pyramid and a ben-ben, the apex or pyramidion at the top of an obelisk. The pharaohs regarded themselves as the living embodiment of Atum’s great-grandson, Osiris, the first king; killed by his brother, Set, he descended into the Duat or underworld, only to be resurrected by his wife and sister, Isis, from which he came to be associated with the Nile and fertility. Osiris can thus be considered an example – one of the earliest – of Fraser’s archetype of the vegetative “god who dies,” including the Sumerian Dumuzid/Tammuz, Phrygian Attis, Greek Adonis, Mayan maize god, Hun-Nal – and, not least, Jesus. Atum was replaced as supreme deity in Theban theology by Amun, the concealed, “non-manifest” god, as Atum was the “manifesting” god.
The Old Kingdom (c. 2700 – 2200 B.C.E.) practice of pyramid burial, e.g., the step pyramid of Djoser, was replaced under the New Kingdom (c.1570 – 1069 B.C.E.) by inhumation deep inside the rockface of the left bank of the Nile opposite Karnak (Luxor) in what proved to be a futile attempt to elude the grave-looters who had pillaged the pyramids of Lower Egypt. The tomb or Hatshepsut (r.1479 – 1458 B.C.E.,) the sole female pharaoh, merges three colonnaded terraces, (cf. Khmer “temple mountains” such as the Baphuon, Angkor Wat and the Bayon,) with an actual mountain or escarpment. Thus it could be said to combine the solar aspects of Amum/Ra with the chthonic or cave-like connotations of Osiris in an architectural emblem of the cycle of death and resurrection, similar to that symbolized in Mesoamerican pyramids.

In the Popoh Vuh, an account of Mayan mythology compiled shortly after the Spanish Conquest,the maize god, Hun-Nah, was summoned to Xibalta, the underworld, and killed by the Lords of Death; his dismembered body, was brought to life again by his sons, the Hero Twins, (cf., Osiris and Isis.) He then emerged from a cave or crack in Yax Hal Witz, “First True” or “Sustenance Mountain, symbolized by Mesoamerican pyramids, from which he launched the present “Fourth Creation” by erecting Wakah Kan, the World Tree or “Raised Up Sky,” whose branches formed the Milky Way, where the gods, as planets, plied their fateful courses.
At Palenque, a “sky umbilicus,” symbolized by entwined “bicephalic vision serpents,” is expressed architecturally by a hidden shaft, (not unlike those in the pyramids of the Old Kingdom,) extended from the tomb of King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal (603 – 683,) deep inside his mortuary temple, to the small, corbelled sanctum at the top of the Temple of the Inscriptions. The lid of Pakal’s sarcophagus is engraved with a compendium of Mayan cosmology and shows the king descending into the underworld but in a fetal posture portending his eventual rebirth. The walls of the upper shrine are covered with a detailed chronicle of the Palenque dynasty where the current rulers could be infused with their deified ancestors’ kul/ ku’lel orlife-force,recapitulating the resuscitation of the Maize God by his sons. (An intriguing analysis of this monument can be found in: Schele, Lind and Mathew. Peter invaluable, The Code of Kings, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1998.)
