The Book of Gates - A Magical Translation

Introduction

The Book of Gates is a powerful and profound royal magical funerary text that emerged during Egypt’s New Kingdom (sixteenth to eleventh century b.c.). It first appeared in use at the end of the eighteenth dynasty and continued in use until the twentieth dynasty. Using images and text, it maps out the descent of Re into the Underworld and through twelve hours and gates.

Though many other ‘Books of the Dead’ existed in ancient Egypt, The Book of Gates stands out for its absolute magical detail and the coherence of its Mysteries. Each hour marks a stage in the transition of a soul’s passage and evolution through the Duat, while casting light into dark corners of the Duat to show you who—or what—is waiting there, what happens there, why, and how. It is a remarkable text, within which magicians can find the roots of many different magical Mysteries to do with the passage of the dead, and of Re, through the Underworld.

It is unlike the other funerary texts that we know about, such as The Amduat, The Coffin Texts, or The Book of the Dead—the main players—which consist more of spells to avoid adversaries. The Book of Gates is a magically intelligent, subtle, and highly sophisticated Underworld text seemingly reserved specifically for the monarch. It dispenses with the overcomplicated drama of The Amduat; and it has nothing to do with the more degenerate collections of spells in The Book of the Dead, which were widely used by anyone who could afford them. Instead it focuses on the evolution of the soul through descent, rebirth, ascension, and becoming as gold: one with the gods.

And that is where it becomes interesting for the living magician. Hidden in its many layers is the path for a living magician towards Justification—the transformation from mundane lead into the gold of a Godly One through stages of magical Justification.

Structure

The Book of Gates is written in Middle Egyptian, and contains a hundred scenes spread out over twelve sections, one for each hour. Each hour is divided into three horizontal sections, and ends with a gate. There are also some repeating numerical patterns: twelve (hours), nine (Ennead), and seven (completion/resurrection).

The language and vocabulary in The Book of Gates is extraordinary in its expression and complexity. There are many puns, and multiple layers of meaning that can apply equally to a living candidate of the Mysteries as well as to a dead one.

The gates themselves are different from other funerary texts, like The Amduat, in that they appear at the end of each hour rather than the beginning, and they are described in detail.

Eleven of the gates present as the power of a goddess, protected by a serpent on the door, two Uraeus serpents, two guardians, and nine mummies. The first hour and gate, however, are very different.

The first hour and gate are set in the Western Desert, the Zemit, known to adept magicians as the Inner Desert. The First Gate is the threshold between the Zemit and the Duat, the Inner Desert and the Underworld. After passing through the First Gate into the realms of the Underworld, the deceased—or living—candidate begins their long descent into the depths of the various aspects and areas of the Duat. The First Gate is guarded by a single vast serpent described, simply, as the Guardian of the Desert.

What also makes The Book of Gates stand out from other funerary texts is its use of deity names—or rather its lack of them. Few deities appear in the Gates. In The Amduat and The Book of the Dead, the pertinent deities are clearly shown and named; in The Book of Gates, the key players are often Finished Ones, or Justified humans. Similarly, most of the many characters depicted in the Gates are obviously human, not gods. Many times the name of a deity seems to appear, but the god determinative is missing. This is saying that a character or power is like that deity, but not the deity itself; it is showing you the power and dynamics present in that scene.

Similarly, in The Amduat, the Solar Barque’s crew consists of quite a collection of deities, but in The Book of Gates, its crew is simply Sia, ‘Perception,’ known to magicians as ‘inner senses,’ and Heka, ‘Magic’: the two powers needed by the candidate to traverse the Gates safely.

The Judgement Hall of Osiris appears inside the fifth gate, and instead of the familiar scene we see in other funerary texts, of the heart being weighed against a feather of Ma’at on the scales, in The Book of Gates the candidate/deceased is themselves depicted as the fulcrum of the scales: their inherent Ma’at stands before Osiris for acceptance.

Discovering the Gates

The Judgement Scene of the Book of Gates in the Tomb of Horemheb (KV57)

I first came across The Book of Gates unknowingly in the winter of 2011 while exploring tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. In one of the tombs I visited, which was visually unimpressive and cramped, something tweaked my magical antenna. The tomb was busy with tourists, packed with everyone jostling to find space. So I could not penetrate through the distractions to listen to the quiet voice doing the tweaking. This was the tomb of Ramesses I—decorated only with The Book of Gates.

I came out of the tomb and searched for the last one I wished to visit. I was not sure which tomb would be best to use my final ticket on, so I closed my eyes and magically sought for where I should go next. Many ‘lights’ were shining in that valley, but one shone much brighter than others, so I aimed for it. It was a tucked away tomb that no one seemed to be visiting. A relief: I needed to get away from the herds of tourists and their noise.

The tomb’s magic was evident the moment I started down its passageway. It was a large and impressive tomb, with a stillness and power above and beyond all the others I had visited. Its walls were alive with a balanced, finely-tuned magic that I can describe only as beautiful. It was the tomb of Twosret (KV14), a queen who briefly became Pharaoh at the end of the nineteenth dynasty. Her tomb was quickly usurped by Sethnakht, the first king of the twentieth dynasty, and Twosret’s images were plastered over and replaced with images of him.

It is a long and beautiful tomb, orientated west, with two burial chambers. While the corridors are decorated with The Book of the Dead and The Amduat, the two burial chambers are decorated with The Book of Gates, and with the closing scenes of The Book of Caverns.

I spent a long time in that tomb, and was truly astonished at the level of magic that flowed through it despite its troubled history and ransacking. I did not know about The Book of Gates; I just bathed in the magic and marvelled at the high quality paintings.

Years later, when I was coming to the end of writing the Quareia magical course in the autumn of 2016, the editor of the course, Michael Sheppard, told me that there was a book I should get and take a close look at. I had made use of some Egyptian funerary texts in the course to introduce students to the magic of Egypt, but I was unfamiliar with The Book of Gates. He contacted me one day and said, The Book of Gates, get it, you will be astonished. It is like Cliff Notes for the Quareia course.

I was used to the Egyptian Underworld books, which are mostly collections of spells aimed at pushing the dead through death as safely as possible. But the Gates was a totally different animal. The closer I looked, the more astonished I became. What I was looking at was a very ancient version of the mystical magical process that takes someone from the beginnings of serious mystical magical development through to magical Justification and beyond, yet presented in an Underworld ‘funerary’ text. Michael Sheppard and I decided at that point to publish this book once the course was finally finished, as we were in the last month of work on Quareia.

It was not till we had just started work on The Book of Gates that I realized, on very close inspection, that this was not only a book for the dead, but also a book for the living. The living Justification process was hidden beneath the funerary layer—something common in old magical texts, and which can be found in such texts until at least the sixteenth century a.d..

The steps towards Justification, and the magical processes outlined in the Gates, were very, very similar to the steps that Quareia students are guided to take on their path to Justification. They were steps that many other adept magicians in the Western magical tradition will recognize. Those steps have survived, largely intact, hidden away, buried deep in magical writings that have walked down through time.

A closer look

Superficially, The Book of Gates is about the passage of the solar deity, Re, through the Duat (the Underworld), and what he has to say to the dead as they go through their various stages of development in the Duat. It talks about the various things that can happen to the dead, depending on what stage of development they are at, and how their life actions have defined what will happen to them as they undergo the different stages of transformation.

As the dead pass through the gates of the Duat, they are taken apart and slowly put back together. Those who succeed in this process rise with Re to traverse the sky and become reborn with the dawning of the sun.

Various characters in the Duat are introduced, nearly all of whom have names which merely reflect their function. The same is true of the ‘adversaries’ of those who are ‘developing,’ who are also looked at: what they do, why they do it, and who they are. The candidate traversing the Gates is given clues on how to develop beyond their adversaries—advice more pertinent to the living than the dead.

This is a subtle but important aspect of the Gates which is also reflected in other true magical texts that have travelled down through time to us today. Beings are mostly not given names, but identified by function. This is often a subtle clue that you are dealing with a real magical text. In The Book of Gates, this is often done by using deity names without god determinatives—hieroglyphs at the end of names that tell readers the name belongs to a deity.

We also come across people ‘resting’ or ‘waiting’ in the Duat until they are ready to move forward and continue their journey, and people helping, advising, and accompanying the dead through certain sections of the process.

Beneath this surface layer hides another, a layer that speaks to living people attempting to undergo the Justification-in-Life process, known in magic as the ascent, or the alchemical ‘Lead to Gold’ process well known in some corners of adept magic to this day. It is an initiation-through-life process that guides the magician, or king, through various stages of development towards the goal of becoming Justified while still living—a Justification subsequently tested in death.

This is fascinating because in Ancient Egypt, while there are many records of rituals that revolve around temples—rituals involving priests, priestesses, and the general public—there is nothing specific in any texts that refers to an esoteric initiatory process. This has led many Egyptologists to hold the opinion that such a process did not exist in Egypt—and for the longest time, this opinion was also mine.

However, over time, and through close examination of various structures and texts, as an adept I was able to begin to recognize not only references to initiatory processes hidden in funerary texts, but also to understand their delivery methods. Whereas the Greeks hinted heavily about their esoteric initiatory processes, the Egyptians opted for a more silent, hidden approach.

To date I have seen evidence of such Egyptian initiatory processes only in funerary texts. Why?

In today’s world, anyone with the inclination and focus can embark on the path of the Mysteries. However in Ancient Egypt, that role was pretty much the focus of the monarch, and occasionally some other outstanding individual, usually one close to the monarch. Such things do not need writing down, as they are passed on from mouth to ear, and taught practically rather than written down explicitly.

The Justification-in-Life process is tested and confirmed in death, and as such, advice was placed on the walls to remind the dead of what was before them. The fact that it was only used for a brief time in Egyptian history fascinates me, and we will probably never discover the details of exactly how and why it appeared, then disappeared. What we do know, as adepts, is that so far the Book of Gates is the earliest in-depth presentation of the Path of Gold.

Justification?

Justification is an alchemical process by which the magician is slowly transformed from the heavy state of mundane ‘lead’ into Divine ‘gold’—the root of Hermetic alchemy. This theme has survived for millennia, flowing out of Egypt through the Greeks, then carried in texts from the Near East into Europe. It is a theme that appears in both mystical Christian and Greek Hermetic texts; fragments of it also appear in Jewish Kabbalistic texts.

When the Justified magician dies, the process of Justification is revisited in stages by a journey through the Gates, where the adept is tested, judged, and challenged to confirm their in-life Justification. In Egyptian texts, those who have undergone the process are pronounced True of Voice, and groups of Justified individuals are known as the Ma’ati—which Michael translates as the Righteous. (See the Glossary for details.)

The True of Voice title, like all things magical, gradually became debased currency, and by the twentieth dynasty and beyond, into the Late Period, it was not much more than a ‘status in death’ title for high-ranking officials and rich nobles. (Today’s version of that degeneration is experienced by people who pay a small fortune to go on a weekend magical retreat and come out with a certificate that says they are an adept.)

Workers of Truth: When they are on Earth, They are striving for their godhoods. They are those who are summoned to a post of the Earth, To the enclosure (called) Living In Truth. Scrutinized for them is their Truth, Before the Great God who causes the destruction of sin.

—from the Seventh Hour, Scene 43.

The Book of Gates for magicians

Many of the most profound aspects of the magical Mysteries can be found in ancient and classical texts, and they all serve in their own way as pointers, reminders, and breadcrumbs to the deeper side of magic and the Mysteries. Many of the keys of the Mysteries were embedded in various texts, often hidden in layers for magicians and mystics to find in the future, and to ensure their survival and continual working.

Often these texts are obscure, and their secrets are hidden under layers of allegory and image, their authors having been confident that future magicians, priests, priestesses, and mystics would have the knowledge and skill to decipher the hidden meanings and put them to work. Such texts ensured the survival of their lines of knowledge, and placed the keys to the Mysteries in the path of the future so that when the time was right and there was great need in the world, they would be rediscovered, understood again, and worked with.

This method of sending wisdom into the future by preserving and hiding keys is also known in the Tibetan Buddhist culture in the form of Terma or ‘treasures’: hidden scrolls meant to be found in times of great need, which would be discovered by a seeker and would trigger an awakening of the Mysteries.

However, besides turning the deceased’s tomb or coffin into a miniature universe of the Mysteries to help them partake of the pattern as they traverse death, The Book of Gates has another deeper, more profound purpose. That purpose is to be a complete magical-mystical pattern externalized in text and images that can act as a living machine of the Mysteries.

A complete copy of Gates in a sealed tomb, or on the walls of a mortuary temple, ticks away as a living universe that affects everything and everyone around it. It keeps the inner knowledge alive and working. Stepping into a tomb or temple that contains the Gates pattern is like stepping into a continuously working ritual that is constantly renewing itself, thousands of years after its creation. And this is the most profound aspect of the Gates, which often passes unnoticed with these sorts of texts: more than preserved knowledge or a book of guidance, it is a living, working magical pattern travelling down through time.

The complexity, detail, and brilliant magical accuracy in The Book of Gates makes it a fascinating text for magicians to study; but more importantly its many hidden layers hold a wealth of knowledge for magicians, knowledge that reaches deep into the Underworld, high up to the stars, and, in its hidden aspect, educates the magician about the different steps and phases of magical and mystical development. Unlike other funerary texts of the time, it reaches far beyond the magic of the dead and their passage through the Underworld; it also speaks to the magical aspirant seeking to reach far beyond dabbling in spells, who wishes to climb the Ladder of the Mysteries. It teaches and advises, reflects and demonstrates; and its living magical pattern triggers the magician, pushing them along the Path of Hercules.

How to work with this book

In his English translation of The Book of Gates, Michael has tried to stay very close to the literal meaning of the text while still exposing its underlying, hidden, and obscure connotations. Where he could not do this in the translation itself, he has written explanatory footnotes.

Alongside his translation is my commentary. This peels back some of the text’s more hidden and obscure magical meanings. It is a careful look through adept eyes, and relies on a knowledge of the timeless Mysteries that emerge again and again in adept Western magic.

I also used a specific method of reading the Gates to unlock its Mysteries. This method, detailed below, is particularly useful for studying mystical and esoteric texts, and is quite similar to how the Ancient Egyptians themselves approached their texts—particularly those designed to hide special meanings from mundane eyes.

In today’s world, where many have been educated in the undergraduate university system, we are used to everything being straightforward, footnoted, and indexed. B comes after A, and everything is quantifiable. The Mysteries have never worked like that. They are not simple experiments that can be reproduced and verified; nor can information be simply and clearly stated in bullet points.

This makes it difficult for modern readers lacking a classical education to navigate the complexities of more ancient texts. In a classical education, the reader is taught to spot the puns, allegories, hidden meanings, and different layers woven into a story. Without such an understanding, the reader can often end up utterly perplexed as they try to penetrate a seemingly incomprehensible text. Which is exactly the point: the text’s complexity protects it from profane eyes.

This is demonstrated beautifully in this delightful quote from Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, the eighth-century Islamic alchemist also known as Geber:

The purpose is to baffle and lead into error everyone except those whom God loves and provides for.

—from Kitab Al-Ahjar, The Book of Stones, by Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.

The method I used to read this text is known in Jewish Kabbalah as PaRDeS. (In the Quareia system of magical training, the student magician is taught in detail how to read ancient, classical, and historical texts using this method.) PaRDeS stands for:

Peshat

The most superficial, literal interpretation, the first layer, the most mundane meaning.

Remez

The allegorical or symbolic meaning hiding just beneath the mundane layer.

Derash

The layer of the seeker, where comparative meaning can be drawn from a similar situation or presentation, i.e. this is like…

Sod

The hidden esoteric meaning that comes to light through inspiration or mystical revelation.

As you can imagine, this method is extremely troublesome for someone who has been taught to pay attention only to facts and bullet points. It is also wide open to abuse: it is very difficult to challenge or analyse a person’s ‘inspiration’ or ‘revelation’…

Nevertheless, when a profound, ancient, magical-mystical text like The