13/08/2026
🌹⚱️The Christed, The Resurrection, and Divine Death from Ancient Egypt to Israel⚱️🌹
“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.”
Did Jesus physically die upon the cross or is there another layer to the story, one in which death and resurrection describe something that must happen within us while we are still alive?
Standing before this stained-glass window in Dunfermline Abbey yesterday with my tour group, I found myself caught by the intimacy of the scene.
Christ lies dead, pale and completely surrendered. Around him are those who mourn him, and at his feet appears Mary Magdalene, her long hair falling around her, accompanied by the vessel that became one of her most enduring symbols: the ointment jar.
And, naturally, it sent me down a rabbit hole.
Because long before Christianity, ancient Egypt possessed an extraordinarily sophisticated sacred language surrounding death, anointing, sacred knowledge, transformation and resurrection.
At the heart of it was Osiris.
Osiris is murdered. His body is recovered and mourned by his wife Isis and her sister Nephthys, and through the sacred drama surrounding his death he is regenerated— not simply returning to his former earthly existence, but passing into a transformed state of being, which is why he is green, to represent resurrection and eternal life.
But Isis and Nephthys were not merely mythological characters remembered from a distant story.
At Egyptian funerals, two special female mourners known as the djerty could ritually embody Isis and Nephthys.
They accompanied the deceased and reenacted the mourning of the two goddesses over Osiris. Other sources describe female relatives or priestesses taking these divine roles. The deceased himself could be identified with Osiris.
Think about the symbolism of that for a moment.
A human being dies.
The sacred drama is reenacted around the body.
Women become Isis and Nephthys.
The deceased becomes [God] Osiris.
Myth and human experience momentarily collapse into one another.
And death becomes not merely an ending, but the beginning of transformation.
This becomes even more fascinating when we look at the Egyptian Khoiak festival and the Mysteries of Osiris.
During Khoiak, the death, burial and regeneration of Osiris were ritually commemorated. Sacred figures of Osiris were fashioned, including forms made with earth and grain— and ceremonially processed and buried in a ritual garden landscape. The germination of grain itself became a magnificent image of life emerging from death, of the resurrection of Osiris.
The rites eventually culminated in the raising of the Djed pillar, the ancient symbol associated with the resurrection of Osiris and understood as the backbone of Osiris.
The fallen Djed is raised upright.
Osiris has overcome death.
Order and life have returned.
And perhaps it is worth remembering that John’s resurrected Christ first appears in a garden and Mary Magdalene mistakes him for its gardener. Long before Christianity, the body of Osiris was similarly joined to the imagery of a sacred garden, where grain germinating through the form of the dead god became the visible mystery of life arising from death.
And depending upon the historical period and conversion of the ancient Egyptian calendar, Khoiak could fall roughly within what we would recognize as the late-October/November season.
I find that fascinating when viewed beside the northern European season surrounding Samhain, not because I am suggesting Egyptians were secretly celebrating Samhain, because they certainly were not, but because cultures separated by enormous distances repeatedly located profound spiritual meaning in the imagery of death, darkness, descent and regeneration.
But Egyptian resurrection was something much more sophisticated than the idea of a co**se simply waking up again.
It was transformation into another state of being.
The deceased had to know.
To remember.
To acquire sacred knowledge.
Egyptian funerary literature equips the deceased with divine names, words, spells and knowledge necessary to negotiate gates, guardians and encounters in the world beyond death. The successful deceased ultimately becomes an akh, being transfigured or effective spirit.
Even the collection we call the Book of the Dead bore an Egyptian title more accurately rendered as the Book of Coming Forth by Day.
Death was not simply extinction.
It was a threshold.
And knowledge helped one cross it.
Which brings me back to Mary Magdalene.
Historically, the Gospels associate Mary and the women surrounding Jesus with his death, tomb, spices and the intention to anoint his body.
But symbolically, I cannot help noticing the much older archetype:
The sacred man has died.
The sacred woman remains beside him.
She mourns him.
She prepares his body.
She stands at the threshold of the tomb.
And beyond the tomb comes resurrection.
How can one study ancient religion and not at least wonder about the echo of Isis and Osiris?
Mary Magdalene can be contemplated archetypally as occupying the Isis position within this sacred drama the woman beside the dead divine man, associated with mourning, anointing and the threshold between death and renewed life.
And then we come to the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi.
Because one of them says something astonishing.
The Gospel of Philip warns:
“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.”
And elsewhere it makes the idea even clearer:
“If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.”
Read that again.
Resurrection is not merely something you wait to experience after your physical death. You must receive resurrection while you are alive.
The Gospel of Philip even connects this concept with baptism, another ritual involving descent into water followed by emergence into new life.
The Treatise on the Resurrection, another text discovered at Nag Hammadi, develops the same extraordinary idea further: resurrection is not merely an event awaiting us after physical death, but a transformation that can already be experienced in this life.
Suddenly the Christian mystery becomes considerably more interesting.
Because even before the texts preserved at Nag Hammadi, Paul was already describing baptism as participation in Christ’s death and resurrection: buried with Christ through baptism into death, we rise to walk in newness of life.
So perhaps Christianity preserved two dimensions of resurrection:
• the historical/theological claim that Jesus physically died and rose
• an initiatory/mystical teaching that the disciple must undergo the same pattern internally.
Which leads me to a question I cannot stop thinking about:
Did Jesus physically die upon the cross or could the Crucifixion and Resurrection also have been presented as a symbolic mystery through which the masses could understand an otherwise esoteric teaching?
And perhaps those possibilities do not even have to cancel one another out.
Perhaps a historical death could simultaneously become an initiatory teaching:
You must die before you die.
Not necessarily bodily.
But the false self, the ego, must die.
The identities we cling to.
Our attachments.
Our illusions.
Our fear.
Our division.
Our compulsive need to defend the person we imagine ourselves to be.
What we might today call ego death.
Descend into yourself.
Confront what is hidden there.
Know yourself. Know thyself.
Integrate what has been divided.
And emerge into an entirely different state of being.
Perhaps that is resurrection.
Not simply returning to the person you were before death, but becoming something you could never become without first surrendering that former self.
A movement:
from fragmentation to wholeness
from unconsciousness to spiritually awake
from division to integration
from ego-identification to gnosis
from the constructed self to the fully realized human being.
What if the command is not simply:
Believe that he died and rose, rather:
Die with him.
And rise.
Not physically.
Internally.
This initiation describes the discovery of something beneath the personality— something that cannot be destroyed when the temporary identities we have mistaken for ourselves fall away. In that sense, resurrection becomes less about returning to the person you were before death and more about becoming what you were always capable of being. Whole.
And perhaps this is why knowledge becomes so important within mystical traditions.
Not intellectual knowledge alone.
Gnosis.
Direct experiential knowing.
The Egyptians equipped the deceased with sacred knowledge to navigate transformation beyond physical death.
But certain early Christian mystical traditions pose an extraordinary possibility:
What if we are meant to acquire that knowledge and undergo that transformation before death?
What if resurrection is not merely an event awaiting us at the end of life?
What if resurrection describes an entirely different state of being available to the living?
What if “eternal life” isn’t simply endless continuation of our present personality, but realization of something beneath it, something eternal that becomes perceptible only when the temporary identity we mistake for ourselves has been stripped away?
And suddenly this stained glass at Dunfermline Abbey looks different to me.
A dead man.
A grieving woman.
An ointment vessel.
A tomb.
And the promise that the tomb is somehow not the end.
Whether we see Mary historically as the devoted disciple who remained with Jesus through death, mystically as the woman standing at the threshold between death and resurrection, or archetypally as occupying a position strangely reminiscent of Isis mourning Osiris, she remains there— in the space between life, death, and resurrection.
I believe the deepest mystery of resurrection was never merely that one man conquered death.
It was an invitation.
Die before you die.
Know what you truly are.
And while you are still living, resurrect, ascend.
In this case Christ is not only a person to be worshipped from afar, but a state of being into which the human being is invited to awaken.
What if the deeper invitation of Christianity was never simply:
Believe that Jesus became the Christ—
but:
Become Christed yourself.
Not to become the historical person of Jesus, nor to elevate the individual ego into God, but almost the opposite to surrender the illusion of separation sufficiently that the divine can be realized within and through the human being.
And remarkably, this idea of participation in what Jesus himself embodies is not confined to the later mystical or Gnostic writings.
It appears within the canonical Gospel of John.
On the night before the Crucifixion, during what is traditionally called Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer, he prays not only for the disciples gathered around him, but explicitly for those who will later come to believe through them.
He asks:
“that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…”
And then, in John 17:22–23, he says that the glory given to him has also been given to them, so that they might become one (through sacred union with the divine):
“I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”
That context matters enormously.
Jesus is not merely describing his own union with the God. He is praying that others enter into it.
Christ in humanity.
Humanity brought into unity with the divine.
This offers another way of contemplating what it means to become Christed.
Christos means “Anointed One.” Historically it is the Greek translation of Messiah, and I would not suggest that Jesus received the title simply because his dead body was anointed prior to resurrection.
But mystically, the symbolism is beautiful.
To “put on Christ,” or to allow Christ to be “formed in you,” and to become one as Christ and God are one are different expressions of the same extraordinary mystery:
the transformation of the divided human being into the integrated human being.
Not the inflation of the ego.
The surrender of it.
Not I am Jesus.
But:
the same divine life Jesus reveals is something in which humanity is invited to participate.
He came to show us The Way.
And suddenly death and resurrection acquire another possible dimension.
The illusion of absolute separateness dies.
And what rises is not another ego wearing a holier costume, but the human being brought toward wholeness— toward communion, gnosis, integration and the realization of what was always buried beneath the false self.
Maybe that is what it means, mystically, to become Christed.
Jesus’s prayer in John contains the mystery in remarkably few words:
“I in them and you in me.”
Not God merely above us.
Not Christ merely before us.
But the divine within— until, as Jesus continues,
“they may become completely one.”
— John 17:23
And lastly… to make that final point of the human being and God not being separate, Jesus says, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, look here or, look over there, for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
— Luke 17:20-21
