The Esoteric 'Shipwrecked Sailor'

One thing that fascinates me about ancient literature is how sophisticated it is from the very beginning. The earliest story from a culture is often one of its most interesting, not its most primitive.

Take the oldest surviving tale from ancient Egypt. This story, about a sailor stranded on a desert island, invents a genre that became one of the most enduring in history. But that's not why I think you should read it.

The truly intriguing part is that like with later castaway stories, whether it's Lord of the Flies or the show Lost, this is a complex narrative that gets weird, fast.

I'm talking about the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a story that after 4,000 years, we're finally starting to unravel.

THE ISLAND OF THE KA

The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor comes off as a standard adventure story, or fairy tale, meant to teach simple moral lessons. But there are some truly puzzling elements, as scholars have long recognized.

One interpretation, which I think best explains those aspects, views the Shipwrecked Sailor as an allegory for the esoteric religious ideas of Egypt.

The setup for the tale is what you'd expect. A sailor's ship is hit by a sudden storm. He is the lone survivor. He washes up on an island.

On the upside, there's lots of food on the island. And loneliness is no concern either-because the island already has a resident, a benevolent fifty-foot serpent covered in gold. This place is called the Island of the Ka, a word often translated as life-force. This is a place filled with everything needed for life.

Still, the island has a dark history. The serpent relates that his siblings and children also used to live here, making 75 serpents in all.

Tragically, while the serpent was away one day, a star fell from the sky, set the island on fire, killing everyone but him. The serpent wraps up his story by assuring the sailor will not suffer a similar fate. Rescue is on its way.

But the serpent also warns the sailor that if he's ever tempted to return to the island, don't bother: "Once it happens that you have left this place, you will never see this island again, which will have become water." If that haunting line reminds you of Plato's Atlantis story, you wouldn't be alone.

The sailor returns to Egypt and retells his tale, casting himself as a hero that overcame great ordeals. But the reality is that throughout the story, he barely does anything. He gets by through sheer good fortune.

He's just not the hero that you'd expect if this were a simple adventure tale.

There's something bigger going on here, and it has to do with the end of the world-and the beginning.

THE APOCALYPSE

Creation, according to many Egyptian accounts, began when the first landmass rose from the primeval waters. The stable earth gave the creator a place to stand while he set the universe into motion. The end of the world, meanwhile, was often imagined as creation in reverse, where the universe descends back into the watery chaos.

The famous Book of the Dead includes one such apocalyptic account, and the parallels to the Shipwrecked Sailor are impossible to miss. In Chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead, the creator deity reveals that, in the end, "The earth shall return to the abyss, to the surging flood, as in the original state." He then adds that, during this process, "I will transform myself into something else, namely a serpent."

See where I'm going here? In the Book of the Dead, the events of the apocalypse are foretold. But the Shipwrecked Sailor gives us a glimpse into the events themselves. The creator has already undergone his serpentine transformation, and the island, the last vestige of life, is soon to vanish. The name of the place, the Island of the Ka, aka life-force, now makes more sense.

This place is a metaphor for both the creation of life and also its final destruction.

It should be clear that The Shipwrecked Sailor is more than just the first castaway story. As an allegory for the end of the world, it's also an early example of apocalyptic fiction-and maybe even a time travel story, since the events take place in the future.

But it gets even stranger.

75 FORMS

Many ancient readers wouldn't have grasped the apocalyptic core of the story, just like most people don't today. But that's not the only thing that gets missed.

Remember how, before the fireball, there were 75 serpents on the island? Well, in Egyptian religious thought, 75 had a very specific and important meaning. It was the exact number of the manifestations of the solar creator god, Re.

Now, as we established earlier, the serpent is a metaphor for the creator in the form he will take at the end of the world. So putting it all together, this can only mean one thing: All of the serpents were meant to represent different images of the creator. He had been living on the island with 74 other versions of himself.

This fits with the Egyptian idea of creation as the One, becoming the many. Except in the story set in the endtimes, the focus is on the many, returning back to being One. The thing is, the ancient text listing the seventy-five forms of the sun god, known as the Litany of Re, was tightly restricted knowledge.

Only the pharaohs and the highest-level priests would have had access. So we see that woven within what seems like a simple tale, there are allusions to some of the most esoteric doctrines of Egypt, hidden in plain sight.

One can only speculate on the author's reasons for doing this. Perhaps the story was used to test the knowledge and interpretive abilities of an aspiring priest. Still, I don't believe the deeper allegorical meaning is just the author being clever.

Listen to the emotion in how the serpent grieves the loss of his metaphorical family: "Then I died for them when I found them as a single heap of corpses."

As strange as this story is, there's a poignancy in that line that really gets me.

What we have here is the creator himself, who knew what was coming, still devastated, still grieving, the way anyone else would.

It's both touching and deeply weird to think about.

Perhaps part of his grief is that he's back to being alone. Or is he?

In the serpent's account, there was one other survivor of the falling star, his little daughter, who the serpent had hidden away in advance.

This can only refer to one figure-Maat, the goddess of cosmic order and the traditional daughter of Re. The Egyptian universe revolved around Maat, so it's no wonder she, of all deities, would be spared, because eventually the creator would need her to restart the universe.

As with the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor itself, the Egyptian apocalypse may not be quite what it seems. The obliteration may not be final. The island can rise back out of the waters. The deity can set foot on that island and once again create his beloved family. He knows it's just going to come to an end someday. There's no stopping that.

But until that happens, he's going to delight in what he has created.

Key sources

• Derchain-Urtel, Maria Theresia. Die Schlange des "Schiffbrüchigen." Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, Bd. 1 (1974), pp. 83-104
• Faulkner, Raymond. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day: The Papyrus of Ani. (2015)
• Parkinson, R.B. The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C. (2009), pp. 89-101
• Piankoff, Alexandre. The Litany of Re. Texts Translated with Commentary. (1964)