Death watch

Although I stopped watching TV some years ago, films are a continuing solace and pleasure. Among the Christmas treats was a previously unseen Jack Nicholson movie, entitled The Bucket List. The plot revolves around two very different Americans, Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, both of whom are suffering from cancer and are given a mere matter of months to live. The Bucket List is their wish list of things to do before they die, some of the more exotic of which the wealthy Nicholson enables them to achieve. The excellent Freeman, a poorer man but the greater philosopher, reminds Nicholson of a more important consideration: the two questions asked of Ancient Egyptians at the gates of Paradise. Have you found joy in your life? And, has your life brought joy to others? The relevance of this self-interrogation is enacted during the remainder of the film’s narrative. It can also serve as a useful key to the current blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum.

I suspect that many of the visitors to the Book of the Dead show will emerge from its stygian gloom with little more understanding of Egyptian culture than when they entered. This is an immensely complex and utterly foreign subject, and I don’t think it can be easily elucidated by a display of papyrus fragments, mummy cases and grave goods, however much ‘state-of-the-art visualisation technology’ accompanies it. (In fact, the digital projections seemed pretty feeble and uninformative to me.)

This is an exhibition about the afterlife, about crossing the bar, and mankind’s urgent desire not simply to disappear at death. The Egyptians believed that the journey into the afterlife could be assisted by any number of objects and spells. The Book of the Dead is not a single book as we know it, but a collection of funerary texts and illustrated spells, embodying the magical power of word and image.