Klaus Baer's Critique of Hugh Nibley

I got images of the following letter of Klaus Baer from a friend named Noel Hausler, who got them from Wesley P. Walters. Walters had written Baer to solicit his opinion of Hugh Nibley's argument that the Book of Breathings is an "Egyptian endowment" text. In the letter, Baer critiques a number of Nibley's arguments and classes him with "a large penumbra of semi-scholarly types (and crackpots) that hang around the fringes of Egyptology."

I should say, as a disclaimer, that Baer requested that Walters check with him before publishing or quoting from the letter. Since all the persons involved in this exchange are deceased, I hope I can be forgiven for disrespecting his wishes in this regard.

There have been only a few published critiques of Nibley's "Egyptian endowment" apologetic, so I think Baer's specific criticisms of that apologetic are important. The letter also illustrates that although Baer was Nibley's mentor and quite irenic toward the Church, this should not be construed as support for or acquiescence to Nibley's views.

Note: Brackets have been used in the transcription in place of angle brackets, because angle brackets confuse Blogger.

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28 February 1972

Rev. Wesley P. Walters
Marissa United Presbyterian Church
Marissa, Illinois 62257

Dear Reverend Walters:

A quick answer to your letter of February 24, which just arrived. I must admit that I haven't been keeping up with the flood of LDS publication on the topic of the so-called "Book of Breathings" that has appeared since my article in DIALOGUE. Much of it seems to be ofuscatory in the extreme, tending to pick on asides, quotes out of context, and opinions emitted by the large penumbra of semi-scholarly types (and crackpots) that hang around the fringes of Egyptology -- and are, of course, much attracted by such things as the Book of the Dead.

Among the latter, I would include those that want to see in the Book of the Dead a manual of initiation. That the Book of the Dead has ritual significance in connection with funeral services -- and that a great deal more can be pulled out of it than has been in regard to ancient Egyptian cosmological and theological views -- has, of course, nothing to do with the point under consideration.

Just to go over the references in the two pages of Nibley's articles that you sent me:

{a} Thausing in Melanges Mapero and elsewhere: Prof. Thausing is the professor of Egyptology at Vienna, but her views on Egyptian religion are not exactly in the mainstream of Egyptian thought. If you are interested, may I suggest, e.g., checking the passage in Mel. Masp. I, 40 and seeing whether the texts there cited sound to someone who comes to the question without preconceptions as though they had anything to do with the initiation of a hierophant. They don't to me.
{b} Bleeker, Initiation is not handy at the moment.
{c} Bleeker, Egyptian Festivals, p. 45 discusses the Osiris Mystery plays (i.e, in the medieval Christian sense). How about this quote from the page: "there never was a secret doctrine in Ancient Egypt; there were no closed societies of priests and initiates who possessed esoteric knowledge. In popular writings this view is sometimes advanced with much display of pseudo-scholarship ..."
{d} The Brandon quote on this page (p. 168): ["]It is not a self-evident leap from the fact that the dead had to go through tests to be admitted to the life in the Netherworld to the existence of initiation in the here and now.["] Brandon doesn't make the leap, though Nibley implies [that he does].
{e} My copy of Bergman, Ich bin Isis, hasn't arrived yet, but the book in general deals with the Greek Isis cult.
{f} ZAS 57, p. 11: The passage in question (I am quoting from the more recent edition of the Egyptian text, de Buck, Coffin Texts II, pp. 226 ff): "TO KNOW THE SPIRITS OF HELIOPOLIS. TO KNOW WHAT THOTH KNOWS AND KEEPS TO HIMSELF FOREVER. TO KNOW EVERY TEMPLE. TO BE EFFECTIVE ON EARTH AND IN THE NECROPOLIS. TO ENTER AMONG THE LORDS OF HELIOPOLIS. TO GO FORTH TO HEAVEN AND TO PENETRATE THE NETHERWORLD BY A LIVING OR DEAD SPIRIT." This is the title; most copies only have the first phrase. The text continues: "I know the spirits of Heliopolis. I have becom great among the great ones; I have come into being among those who have come into being, who see clearly in regard to his one eye (i.e. the injured eye of Horus). Open (the way) for me that I may restore the damaged eyes, for I am one of them. I KNOW THE ENNEAD OF HELIOPOLIS, INTO WHICH EVEN THE GREAT OF SEERS (the high priest of Heliopolis) HAS NOT BEEN INITIATED ..." The point here is that the deceased claims to have secret knowledge that only the gods have and in shared not even by the high priest -- which points to anything but initiations of living persons into secret knowledge on earth.
{g} The references in Munro etc. in n. 150 deal with the need for intensive study of the ordinary rituals -- say nothing about mystic initiations.

This should, I believe make my point clear. The article in question is an exercise in LDS apologetics, which has to be judged, like all apologetics, in the light of faith.

To come back to the question in your second paragraph: I see no need for major changes in my treatment of the st n snsn text. How you want to mention it in your own paper is another question. Perhaps I am not the best person to ask whether "my article still presents generally accepted conclusions" or not, though obviously I think it does.

At the moment, I wouldn't even want to propose minor changes. I've been working on other things in recent years and don't have the material at my fingertips at the moment.

One minor matter: I would appreciate your checking with me before quoting me in your article. Far too many of my letters (including some to you) have appeared in print without any sort of advance warning. Not all were written under the assumption that they would be published; and I think that you will understand that you will find it difficult to get cooperation if people feel that they have to send you publishable manuscripts instead of letters.

Hope that this is of some help.

Sincerely yours,
Klaus Baer
Professor of Egyptology

James Cone's Martin & Malcolm & America

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X have often been portrayed as polar opposites: King as the wise, pacifist civil rights leader and Malcolm as the angry, violent, black supremacist revolutionary. James Cone's book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare challenges that portrayal, arguing that although there were significant differences between the two men, they should not be placed in opposition to each other (316). Cone sees their visions as complementary, argues that they served as correctives for one another, and suggests that Malcolm’s radical rhetoric was probably a major factor in causing white Americans to be accepting of King, who they saw as the less dangerous alternative (246, 64). Before Malcolm rose to national prominence, King had been dismissed by many whites as too radical, especially because he was mixing religion and politics (136-142). But as Malcolm got more media coverage, whites began to see King as a sober moderate. Malcolm himself recognized this near the end of his life, and willingly played the role of the fiery revolutionary in order to help King’s agenda even though he was moving away from such rhetoric in his heart (267). And that’s the final reason that Cone wants to see these two men as complementary: because their ideologies moved toward each other as they got older, and when they died they seem to have had more in common than separated them (253-59).

Early in their careers, however, they were indeed quite different. These differences sprang to a large degree from their different backgrounds. King was the son of a southern black Baptist minister. His father was a prominent, prosperous, self-made man: a businessman and an activist who was optimistic about blacks’ self-worth and ability to better their circumstances, and who passed that optimism onto his son. Although King Sr. was a proud man who stood up for himself against white prejudice, he also taught his son to love whites rather than hating them (20-23). When King Jr. pursued his studies in the North, he met many whites who were perfectly accepting of him, which reinforced his father’s message. He came to see racism as primarily legal and structural rather than personal (26-32). King’s happy youth thus gave him good reason for dreamy optimism. He came to believe that racism was caused by simple ignorance and fear, and that the antidote was communication (36). All he had to do was prick the conscience of whites and remind them of Christian and American principles, and the problem would be solved (67).

Malcolm was the son of a black Baptist minister too, but that is where the similarity to King ends. Malcolm grew up in the North, where there were no Jim Crow laws but racism and racial disparity were still endemic. His father was a follower of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, famous for the slogan “Back to Africa”. Malcolm was raised to be proud to be black. Unlike King, Malcolm’s youth was troubled, to say the least. His family was driven out of Omaha and their home burned down. His family was rent by domestic violence. His father seems to have been murdered. His family became so poor that they had to eat dandelion leaves, and Malcolm turned to theft to survive. His mother went insane, and white welfare agents divided the children and fostered them out to different homes (41-45). Because he lived in a white family and an integrated society, he was surrounded constantly by racism and racial epithets. He absorbed it all and began to despise himself (48). Eventually he found his way to the ghetto, where he became a hustler, dope-pusher, a pimp, and a thief. Only when he went to prison did he convert to the Nation of Islam, a “black” religion that gave him self-respect and taught him to see whites as devils. Only through the ideology of the Nation was he able to pull himself out of his misery and depravity and to make something of himself. He became a total devotee, and took the ideology entirely to heart. It described his experience. Whites had always acted like devils to him, and the results had been devastating (47-53). In a life so torn by violence, non-violence and love of enemies sounded absurd. But the doctrine that blacks had as much right to stand up and fight for their freedom as whites did was empowering (54-57). Malcolm was not an American—America was the enemy, and he wanted no part of it—but he appealed to Patrick Henry and George Washington as examples of men who fought and killed for freedom, and he felt that blacks would remain enslaved until they were willing to do the same (158-59, 261).

King’s optimism about white America led him to articulate a dream of interracial unity in which all would participate equally as humans and as Americans regardless of skin color (64-67, 72, 83-85). And in the pursuit of that dream he used nonviolent direct action: protests and boycotts designed to challenge the overtly racist legislation of the South (76-79). King’s dream and methods worked well in his context, but Malcolm’s context was very different. In the urban North there was no overtly racist legislation. Racism was structural and economic, deeply embedded in the fabric of society. Whites acted non-racist and said non-racist things, but blacks still formed a miserable underclass that was de facto segregated into ghettos and slums whose conditions were simply unlivable (221-24). Here non-violent direct action was not really practical, and the “dream” that whites’ consciences could be pricked was unrealistic (233). Blacks were effectively ignored by the white population, which happily thought of racism as a purely southern problem. If northern blacks wanted dignity and a better life, Malcolm believed they would have to stop depending on whites, and take matters into their own hands. Integration could only create dependence; blacks needed to separate so they could create their own dignity and identity without interference from the white devils (108-10).

Malcolm’s harsh language about whites raises the difficult question of whether he was a black supremacist who hated all whites. Malcolm himself of course vigorously denied this. He insisted that he was not anti-white but anti-evil, and that history showed that whites had acted in consistently evil ways. Nearly all of his rhetoric was framed in these historical terms. It was not individual white people who were devils, but the collective historical record of the white man. Collectively, the white man was responsible for the plight of blacks. On a personal level, he insisted, whites are not important enough to hate (100-104). For all his protesting, however, there does seem to have been something of a hateful undercurrent in Malcolm’s early thinking about whites. Although his vicious racial slurs may have indeed been designed to let whites know “how we feel,” as he claimed, it’s very likely that he really meant the things he said (96-97). The things he said, unfortunately, included a laughing statement that a train crash that killed 130 whites was “good news”, and a call for a new Mau Mau revolution in the United States (261-62, 302). His early hatred of whites, however, is a somewhat different question from that of “black supremacy”. Malcolm was a black separatist, not a black supremacist. He wanted independence from whites, not black dominance over them (108-10). Besides which, to a large degree his reversal of the color hierarchy was a theological statement. It was a statement that God is on the side of the poor and oppressed. And insofar as this is what Malcolm meant, his view was quite defensible (160).

The "Katumin" Notebooks

In a small 1835 notebook with Joseph Smith's signature on the cover, we find the following:


A parallel notebook has the name of F. G. Williams on the cover. It has a two page spread which is combined into a composite image below. The left hand page bears the title "A Translation of the next page," with the words "in part" scribbled next to it in graphite. (The graphite isn't visible in these crappy microfilm images I'm posting.) The right-hand page contains various Egyptian characters. Notice that the character sets above and below the canopic jar on the far right are very similar to the character sets aligned with the English translation in the Joseph Smith notebook, above.


This is one of the only places in Joseph Smith's entire corpus where we have ancient symbols and an English translation juxtaposed in explicit translation relationship to each other. The characters, of course, don't actually say what Smith claimed they said.

Joseph Smith seems to have understood the "Katumin" passage in the notebooks to have been an "epitaph" of the mummies he purchased from Michael Chandler. It was to this passage that William I. Appleby referred in his Autobiography:

A Genealogy of the Mummies, and Epitaphs on their deaths &c &c, are also distinctly. represented on the Papyrus. Which is called the “Book of Abraham”
The Male mummy was one of the Ancient Pharaoh's of Egypt, and a Priest, as he is embalmed with his tongue extended, representing a speaker: The females were his wife and two daughters, as a part of the writing has been translated, and informs us, who they were, also whose writings it is, and when those mummies were embalmed, which is nearly four thousand years ago.

The name "On-i-tos" given to the Pharaoh in the notebooks is the same that Lucy Smith assigned to the male mummy during the visit of Charlotte Haven in 1843:

On one side were standing half a dozen mummies, to whom she introduced us, King Onitus and his royal household, -- one she did not know.

Lucy was not entirely consistent in naming the mummies, and gave other names on other occasions. The Mormons were quite consistent in identifying them as a Pharaoh and his family, however, and in this case at least Lucy does seem to confirm the identification made in the Katumin notebooks.