What kind of soul is the Egyptian Ka?

Inspired by this old article by amateur linguist Glen Gordon (which may be deleted come this December due to Google's new inactive account policy), I thought I'd do my own.

The Nephilim game uses "Ka" as the term for magical energy. This is derived directly from Ancient Egyptian ka and "kha" from The Radix Tetrad (from whence also comes the game's use of "voor"). But what did it mean to the Ancient Egyptians?

We'll never know exactly from the records we have, but Glen Gordon's article posits that our modern interpretation is wrong and the three Egyptian souls (ka, ba and akh) are better thought of as layers or modes. (Gordon provides speculative pronunciation of the Egyptian words, but Wiktionary disagrees. His speculative pronunciation is *kuˀ, *baˀ and *ˀaḫ, whereas Wiktionary provides *kuʀ, *biʀ and *ʀiːχuw.)

In Gordon's proposed scheme, the ka is the outermost layer, the ba is the middle layer, and the akh is the innermost layer. The ka is a person's or deity's presence or incarnation (whether in a body, idol or temple), the ba is what we would think of as a soul, and the akh is... he calls it the "will" but I'm not sure how that differs from the ba. He himself notes that the akh is the most obscure and poorly understood part of the Egyptian soul.

However, I thought of a way to reconcile this last bit. In Egyptian and Etruscan belief, he notes that it was believed that the stars represented human souls in the afterlife. That's why the Etruscan psychopomp Charun is depicted holding a hammer instead of the scythe we associated with the Grim Reaper: he hammers the soul into the sky like a nail to become a star. So the akh is the modality that operates in the afterlife and is nailed into the sky, whereas the ba is the modality that partakes in funerary offerings on Earth.

Hope you enjoyed!

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