Ammit

That was, like, the rest of your eternity.

But if your heart was heavy with wrongdoing and malfeasance and evil, and it was heavier than a feather, then it got tossed to Ammit.

This is the devourer.

This is a monster that's, like, part crocodile, part lion, part hippo, the most ferocious thing you could ever imagine if you were like an ancient Egyptian living on like a Nile River.

And if the heart weighed less or equal to the feather, the dead person was worthy of an afterlife.

If the person failed the judgment, the monstrous Ammit, part crocodile, lion, and hippo, could devour the heart, denying the deceased a continued existence.

But Anubis was actually the god who weighed and supervised the heart of the scales, while Osiris presided over the judgment of the ruler of the dead.

But apparently the killer wasn't interested in technicalities.

The deceased heart was weighed against the feather of Ma'at, representing truth, justice, and balance to determine whether they were worthy of entering the afterlife.

And those who passed could meet Osiris and enter the Field of Reeds, while those who failed faced Ammit, the terrifying creature who devoured the heart.

It's kind of funny that his name is Amit, you know? God damn it! Damn, I didn't know that.

Wow.

Ammit would literally eat your heart if your shit was heavier than a feather.

So Egypt gives us another version of this same archetype that we're talking about with the river Styx.

So you have the death, the journey, the dangerous boundaries, supernatural guardians, special knowledge, judgment, and paradise, making the entire Duat essentially one enormous passage between states of existence.

Research into the owl takes me down two paths.

One to ancient Egypt, where the owl is a symbol of wisdom and knowledge, and also a symbol of the goddess Ammit, whose role within the Egyptian underworld was to consume the hearts of sinners.

Ammit has a crocodile head, with front feet like a lion and back feet like a hippopotamus.

The second path is Babylon.

The heart is weighed against the feather representing Ma'at, the principle of truth, justice, and the proper order of the universe.

Anubis attends the balance, Thoth records the outcome, and the creature Ammit waits to consume the heart of anyone whose conduct has made them unworthy of continued existence.

The British Museum preserves important versions of this material in the Book of the Dead of Ani, dating to the 19th Dynasty, while University College London's Digital Egypt project provides translations of the declarations associated with Chapter 125.

But why did the Egyptians believe the heart could reveal whether a person had lived a good or bad life? This is one of the most fascinating aspects of their religious thought, because the heart wasn't regarded simply as the organ responsible for sustaining physical life.

And we'll save the other two, if this takes the rest of the time, for another bracket episode unless you never want us to do this again, and then we will never do it again.

Ammit from Moon Knight, that is a sexy crocodile I guess.

Oh, shit.

Up against Lego Spider-Man.

From Spider-Verse 2.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going A- Ammit.

You know who he's played by?

Who?

And Theresa May running freely.

But if your heart is heavier than the feather, sorry, it's bad news, because then your heart would be devoured by a monstrous crocodile-hippo-lion hybrid called Ammit, and you, well, you would totally cease to exist.

There are some accounts of people receiving a little torture first as well, burning in a pit of fire or being hacked away at by demons, but even then, it was only a prelude to total elimination, not eternal suffering.

The Babylonians refined this idea slightly.

Okay, 17.

So what you know is that the symbols that you see represented, um, the one of the crocodile represents Ammit, who is an Egyptian god, and you also see, um, the wild dog symbol, which is Anput, um, who was the wife of Anubis.

Hmm.

So I'm gonna ponder some of that information for a second.

S- s- perfect.

Okay, then what I would like to do is try to [laughs] appeal to the other crocodile [laughs] and try to lead him out of the room and back into the last room.

Um, I bow to him and go, um, "Oh, mighty aspect of, uh, Ammit, uh, if you will follow me, [laughs] there is an offering in your name in the, in the previous room, and we would like to, uh, give you thanks for all your gifts."

So-

Field of Reeds and all that.

But you end up with these funny little, funny little ways of getting around this sort of, like, ironclad idea of what it means to, say, have your heart weighed against a feather, where it's like, oh, here's the list of all the things you can't have done if you want to have your heart weighed against a feather and not be found heavier, 'cause if it is, y- it gets thrown to the Ammit and your-

Hmm

... soul is obliterated.