What Did William S. Burroughs Know About the Seven Souls of Ancient Egypt?

In his 1987 novel The Western Lands, William S. Burroughs suddenly presents the reader with what sounds less like fiction than instructions recovered from a tomb.

He declares that the ancient Egyptians possessed seven souls, and then sends them out of the dying person one after another.

The first three leave almost immediately. The remaining four must accompany the individual into the Land of the Dead. By the time Burroughs reaches the seventh, almost everything recognisable as a human being has been stripped away.

What remains is matter.

Burroughs was writing a novel, not an Egyptological textbook. Yet the names he chose were not invented. Ancient Egyptian religion genuinely understood the human being through several different aspects rather than through one simple body-and-soul division. Modern Egyptology discusses concepts including the ren, ka, ba, shadow, heart, akh and sekhem, although there is no universally attested ancient Egyptian doctrine arranging them into Burroughs's exact seven-part sequence.

So what exactly was Burroughs doing with them?

Ren: The Secret Name

Burroughs begins with Ren, the Secret Name, which he calls the Director.

In his system, Ren stands above the rest. It directs the film of a person's life from conception until death, while the Secret Name becomes effectively the title of that film. When death arrives, Ren is the first soul to depart.

The Egyptian foundation beneath this is real.

The ren was the name and therefore part of identity itself. Preserving someone's name helped preserve that person's continued existence; removing a name from monuments could attack that continued identity.

Burroughs takes that concept considerably further. The name no longer merely preserves the self.

It becomes the level from which the self is directed.

Sekem: Energy and Light

Next comes Sekem: Energy and Light, the power realm.

Burroughs imagines Sekem as the mechanism that executes the Director's instructions. Ren determines what happens; Sekem supplies the force that makes it happen.

Ancient Egyptian sekhem is indeed associated with power, force and effectiveness, although its role in Egyptian conceptions of the person is much less clearly defined than Burroughs's machinery suggests.

His reinterpretation is almost technological.

Identity gives the command.

Power moves the system.

Khu: The Guardian Angel

Third is Khu, the Guardian Angel, the celestial realm.

Burroughs describes it as a luminous winged being capable of protecting the individual. More importantly, he places Khu with Ren and Sekem among the first three souls, which he considers eternal. They do not remain trapped with the dead person. They return to heaven and can eventually become associated with another vessel.

Here Burroughs is moving farther from standard Egyptian terminology.

What older transliterations sometimes call khu overlaps with territory more commonly discussed today as akh, the transformed or effective spirit. Egyptian belief certainly contained the idea of a transfigured spiritual state, but Burroughs's Guardian Angel, complete with celestial reassignment, belongs to his own cosmology.

And now the comfortable souls have left.

The remaining four have to travel with you.

Ba: The Heart

Burroughs calls the fourth soul Ba, the Heart, and gives it the emotional, treacherous realm.

He imagines it as a hawk-like body bearing the person's face, reduced to roughly the size of a fist, capable of betraying the person it belongs to.

The visual imagery has an Egyptian source: the ba was commonly represented as a human-headed bird and was associated with the individual's distinctive manifestation or personality. But the Egyptian heart was actually the ib, a separate component connected with memory, character and judgment.

Burroughs has therefore merged concepts.

His Ba is personality, emotion and dangerous inner witness rolled into one creature.

Perhaps deliberately.

The part of you that feels most like “you” is also the part he trusts least.

Ka: The Double

Fifth comes Ka, the Double, the companion realm.

This is the soul Burroughs trusts.

He describes the Ka as the aspect most closely connected with the individual and the only reliable guide capable of leading the dead through the Land of the Dead toward the Western Lands.

The Egyptian ka really was fundamental. It represented vital essence and continued after death, requiring offerings of food and drink. It could also be represented as a kind of double or counterpart of the individual.

Burroughs turns that double into a travelling companion.

You die.

Your higher powers have already departed.

What remains beside you is another version of yourself.

Khaibit: The Shadow

Then comes Khaibit, the Shadow, the memory realm.

Burroughs makes it the repository of conditioning and memory, not merely from the present life but from previous lives as well.

Egyptian religion genuinely treated the shadow as part of the person. It could appear in funerary imagery as a dark human form, and surviving texts allow the shadow to move beyond the tomb.

But Burroughs gives it psychological depth.

The Shadow carries everything that has happened to you.

Habits.

Fear.

Conditioning.

Memory.

Even histories you may no longer consciously possess.

If Ren is the Director, Khaibit is the archive.

Sekhu: The Remains

Finally comes Sekhu, the Remains, the physical, heavy realm.

Burroughs gives it almost no elaborate explanation.

It is simply what is left.

And perhaps that brevity is deliberate.

By this point the Secret Name has gone. Energy and Light have gone. The Guardian Angel has gone. Ba, Ka and Shadow belong to the dangerous territory beyond death.

The physical human being has been dismantled into layers.

The final layer is the corpse.

Seven Souls, or Seven Ways of Being Human?

Burroughs's sequence should not be mistaken for a recovered Egyptian creed. Egyptian ideas of personhood varied across thousands of years and contained more concepts than his seven. Even the British Museum's much simpler explanation concentrates on ka, ba and their transformation into the akh rather than presenting a fixed hierarchy of seven souls.

But Burroughs had noticed something genuinely unusual in Egyptian thought.

The Egyptians did not necessarily ask which single invisible object inside the body constituted the “real” person.

Identity could exist as name.

Life could exist as power.

Personality could move.

A shadow could belong to you.

The body continued to matter.

Transformation after death required these aspects to maintain or recover relationships with one another.

Burroughs took that ancient complexity and turned it into a journey.

First the Director leaves.

Then the power.

Then the celestial protector.

What remains must cross death accompanied by personality, double and memory until eventually only the physical remains are left behind.

He may not have reproduced ancient Egyptian theology faithfully.

But he found a remarkably Egyptian question hiding inside it.

If everything you call yourself can be separated into name, power, personality, memory, presence and body, which one of them would actually have to survive for you to survive?