Opening of the Mouth

Definition

The Opening of the Mouth (Egyptian wpt-r) is the Egyptian funeral ritual that 'reanimates' the dead — restoring the senses to the mummy or to a statue of the deceased so it can breathe, speak, and take in the food offerings left for it. A priest touched the figure's mouth, eyes, and ears with ritual tools, chief among them an adze (a small woodworking blade set crosswise on a handle) and a chisel. Egyptians shaped the ceremonial adze after the constellation they called the Foreleg — the Bull's Foreleg, our Big Dipper — tying the rite to the northern, never-setting stars.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the Opening of the Mouth as the central rite that made a mummy or statue a fit home for the dead person's spirit. The Book of the Dead preserves its spell-form in BD 23, where the act is credited to the god Ptah: the mouth is parted 'with that chisel of sky-metal with which the mouth(s) of the gods were parted.' That 'sky-metal' was meteoric iron — metal fallen from the heavens — tying the rite to the sky.

In Practice

A sem-priest (the funerary officiant) carried out the rite at the burial and then repeated it in the daily temple cult that maintained the dead. Working on the upright mummy or a statue, he applied the pss-kf, a forked flint blade, to part the lips, then the adze and iron chisel to the mouth, eyes, and ears, while the BD 23 spell was recited. Once 'opened', the deceased could receive offerings and could speak the words that secured a place in the afterlife — in the same passage the dead person claims the stellar identity of Orion, 'the great one dwelling among the souls of Heliopolis'. The adze itself echoes the sky: its blade was modelled on the Foreleg constellation (the Big Dipper), the same circumpolar figure the Egyptians sighted in temple-founding rites, so the tool that gave the dead their senses back was shaped after the stars that never set.

Historical Origin

The ritual is attested from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts and runs through to the Ptolemaic period. Its Book of the Dead spell-form is BD 23, in the Saite Recension translated by Thomas George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (OIP LXXXII, 1960), pp. 107-108. The adze's link to the Foreleg constellation (the Big Dipper) and to circumpolar-star observation is set out in Belmonte and Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2018).

Further Reading

• Thomas George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum
• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt