Opening of the mouth ceremony

• 1. Introduction

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  The opening of the mouth ceremony was an ancient Egyptian ritual practiced from the Old Kingdom all the way to the Roman Period. A priest would crouch over a body and touch the lips, eyes, and other parts with instruments carved from obsidian, glass, or stone. Then he would recite spells. And the belief was this: without this ceremony, the dead could not see, hear, breathe, speak, or eat in the world beyond.

  The stakes, in Egyptian thinking, could not have been higher. The afterlife was not a peaceful rest. It was a gauntlet. To reach it meant navigating the duat, a realm full of dangerous creatures and traps. Without functioning senses, the deceased had no hope of surviving that crossing. The opening of the mouth was the solution. It was the act that prepared the dead to endure what came next.

  What made this ceremony so enduring across more than two thousand years of Egyptian history? Why did it center on the mouth in particular? And why were its instruments once used to cut the umbilical cords of newborn infants?

• 2. Death and the Duat

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  Ancient Egyptians understood the afterlife as a place of active trial, not passive rest. The duat demanded that the dead evade creatures, navigate traps, and ultimately stand before the gods to assert their own innocence. Coffin texts, spells and directions inscribed directly on the sarcophagus, were meant to help the deceased know what to avoid and what to say.

  But knowing the right words was not enough if you could not speak them. Hearing, seeing, and speaking were required to recite spells and to assert innocence before the gods after completing the journey. Breathing and eating mattered too. When the dead entered the underworld, they were thought to receive milk, saltwater, and water, mirroring the way infants receive milk as their first nourishment. Drinking was not symbolic. It was a practical necessity in Egyptian cosmological thinking.

  The ba, understood as the personality of an individual, needed to move freely after death. It would eventually merge with the ka, or life force, to form the akh. A calf's leg was one of the instruments used to extract the ba from the body so it could make this journey. The leg was touched to the mouth and other areas of the body, and also held up to the lips painted on the coffin itself.

• 3. Instruments and Their Origins

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  The peseshkef is one of the more revealing objects in the ceremony. Its name is believed to mean 'splitter of his ka-spirit'. These were forked blades made of obsidian, glass, or stone, created as burial goods. During the Old Kingdom, the peseshkef was used for something entirely different: severing the umbilical cords of newborn infants.

  That origin was not incidental. It gave the instrument its spiritual power in the funerary context. Cutting the cord of a newborn and restoring the senses of the dead were understood as versions of the same act. Both involved a threshold crossing. Both marked the beginning of a new life. The precise ritual role the peseshkef played during the Old Kingdom remains unclear from surviving texts, but its connection to birth was explicitly preserved in its later ceremonial use.

  Another key instrument was the ritual adze. Shaped like an arm, this censer was used to touch the eyes and mouth, the specific places where the restoration of sight and speech was believed to occur. Incense was burned during the ceremony as well, both to purify the air and to create a pleasing smell for the gods attending the ritual. Together these instruments formed a physical vocabulary, each object standing for a kind of revival that the ceremony was meant to enact.

• 4. The Ceremony Itself

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  A procession preceded the central rite. A Sem priest, described as an elderly man of esteemed religious rank responsible for embalming and mummifying the body, ceremonially fainted at the tomb's entrance. Fellow priests then revived him. This theatrical collapse and recovery was itself a performance of death and return.

  After this, the son of the deceased and/or the Sem priest declared: "I have witnessed my father in all his forms." In this framing, the dead person was identified with Osiris, and the Sem priest took on the role of Horus. The pyramid texts of Unas gave language to this relationship, with the passage: "Osiris's Uni's. accept Horus's eye, which you should embrace." Horus's eye had been taken by the god Set in myth and later restored, making it a symbol of recovery and rejuvenation.

  The body was first purified using natron, the same salt used in mummification. Perfumes and oils were then placed in the mouth and on other parts of the body. This was understood to symbolize the saliva of Horus, a god associated with resurrection. One priest wore a jackal mask to represent the god Anubis and was responsible for keeping the corpse upright throughout. The Sem priest, having changed clothes to signal a new phase, then used the adze and peseshkef to touch the deceased's eyes and mouth while reciting prayers and spells. The ceremony closed with offerings of grain, which were wrapped in linen and accompanied by further spells. Those who had known the deceased shared a funerary meal.

• 5. The Rekhmire Version

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  The tomb of Rekhmire provides one of the most detailed surviving records of how this ceremony was performed, and it differs from many other accounts in a key way: a statue stood in for the body. Evidence of 75 distinct acts survives from this version of the ceremony.

  Episodes two through eighteen of the Rekhmire account focus on the making of the statue itself. The creation of the object was not a prologue to the ceremony; it was part of the ceremony. Once complete, episodes twenty-three through twenty-five describe priests sacrificing a bull and presenting specific parts of it to the statue as offerings. Touching the statue's eyes and mouth with instruments like the ceremonial adze, and presenting tools including the peseshkef, occupied episodes twenty-six through forty-one. The statue was anointed and clothed in episode fifty, and offerings were brought in episodes fifty-nine and sixty-five.

  The use of a statue rather than a body was not unique to the Rekhmire account. If a body was destroyed or could not be retrieved, statues and ushabtis were recognized as legitimate substitutes. The ceremony had originally been performed on statues, ushabtis, and temples before gradually shifting, through the Middle and New Kingdoms, to be performed primarily on corpses. The Rekhmire version preserved the older form.

• 6. Language and Parallel Texts

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  The Egyptian terms for the ritual were wpt-r and um-r, both translating literally as "opening of the mouth." Scholar Ann Macy Roth noted that the verb wpi carried a specific meaning: an opening that splits, divides, or separates. She observed it could describe the separation of two combatants, the division of time, or even the analysis of truth.

  The pyramid texts of Unas contain some of the oldest surviving invocations tied to this ceremony. Utterance 34 addressed Unas directly: "smjn, smjn, open your mouth, O Unas! Natron of the South, 5 pellets of El Kab." Utterance 93 continued: "Wash yourself, Unas, open your mouth with the Eye of Horus! Call your Ka, like Osiris, that he may protect you against every kind of wrath of the dead!"

  The Book of the Dead also included a spell for the ceremony, notable because it was written for the deceased to use on themselves rather than to be performed by priests. An inscription from the tomb of Petosiris preserved another version: "The perfume, the perfume opens thy mouth. It is the saliva of Horus, the perfume." Scholars have also noted parallels between the opening of the mouth and Psalm 51, including mentions of ritual washing with special herbs in verses 2 and 7, the restoration of broken bones in verse 8, the petition "O Lord, open thou my lips" in verse 15, and sacrificial acts in verses 16, 17, and 19.