Pearls of Wisdom
![]() I'm still on my ancient Egypt obsession, and today we will explore the Opening of the Mouth Ritual which was dominant during that time all the way to the Roman period. You may shake your head and be thinking how is this related to psychotherapy, how is this psychological, bear with me for a paragraph or two and hopefully you will be able to connect the dots. This ritual or ceremony was performed on deceased individuals and prepared them for their journey into the netherworld, it essentially opened the mouth on the corpse, back then even the dead needed to breathe and speak, but more importantly this relates to the soul or Ba as they called it long, long ago. After the vessel or the body was inanimate, they believed there was still a soul that was contained within it and it is here that we must look to this ancient ritual to correlate it to our present life. The soul needed nourishment, even though the body was dead the soul lived on and needed sustenance, this was the function of the opening of the mouth ritual, sustenance is gained though the mouth, so they believed that the soul gained sustenance there as well. The Ba, or soul is also called the Psyche, that of which we are made and that which any therapist juggles in their hands. This ritual was a way to provide sustenance to the soul or as we call it today the Psyche, when we think about this ritual there is ancient wisdom there that we can use today, and we can ask this question, We need sustenance for our psyche or our soul, how do we provide that sustenance which is needed in the living phase of our life as well as the death phase of our life. So many times in therapy I see people who are not providing any sustenance to their deep sense of self, they seem lost, wandering around as if without a home, it is here when we are in the consulting room, face to face with them, where we need to remember these ancient rituals that can guide us in our work with our clients, The Opening of the Mouth Ritual........to Nourish that which is within. Nuggets of Dirt
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AuthorCory Ian Shafer Archives
February 2020
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