ANCIENT CONCEPTS

Many ancient cultures had elaborate burial rituals, with some of the concepts unclear to modern archaeologists.

In ancient Egypt, there were burial manuals, Book of the Dead, which were supposed to help the deceased in his or her passage through the underworld in order to have their souls reunite with their body in paradise.

The scarab beetle was a significant symbol in that culture. It is known to roll large balls of dung and depositing them in deep burrows. The female beetle would lay its eggs inside the ball. When hatched, the larvae would consume the ball as a food source. When consumed, the young beetles would emerge from the burrow. At that time, the ancients believed they were "born."

The ancient Egyptians worshipped the beetles as "Khepera," associated with the creator god, Atum. Khepera was thought to use its antenna to symbolically push the setting sun along the sky, which was directly related to the passage from night (the underworld) to the day (rebirth).

Scarab amulets were often placed over the heart of the mummified deceased. These heart scarabs were supposed to be weighed against "the feather of truth" during the underworld's final judgment ritual. Many were inscribed with magic spells. At that ritual, a person's heart, if heavy with sin, would be weighed against a feather. If one's heart weighed less than a feather, the soul could move on to paradise. If not, the soul was damned to eternal nothingness.

The Egyptians took things that they saw in nature, used them as symbols to connect with their gods, in order to bridge the gap between this world and their god's paradise after death.

The concept of mummification is another key aspect of the burial rites. Just as with the scarab beetle, a body is encased and then buried in the ground. It was that procedure that would lead to a metamorphosis from an Earthly body to change into a spiritual one that could move on in the after life. Again, the ancients saw in nature a caterpillar spin a cocoon to seemingly die in a airless pouch, only to later emerge as a "new" being, a butterfly. This is what the Egyptians thought was going to happen to them after death: that their body would be transformed into a new being - - - the five aspects of the human soul reuniting with a new body in heaven.

We dwell on Egyptian mythology because LOST itself dwelled on Egyptian mythology a lot. This was an intentional choice by the creators and writers of the series to have hieroglyphs in the temple which contained passages from the Book of the Dead. One has to assume that so much time and effort in the background words and symbols was important to understand the series as a whole.

Whether the Island's main characters were going through an underworld journey or symbolically going through a metamorphosis of their soul, mind or personality, it really does not matter in this discussion. What the Island was trying to accomplish was to give each person an opportunity to have an introspective ritual for which that person could realize a fundamental change so that they could be "reborn" and live a better life (now or in the future). For some, the future was death itself. Others, it was the opportunity to live a better, more meaningful life, off the island.

Whether the LOST writers pulled off this complex symbolism to actual character development is debatable because of the conflicting narratives used throughout the series. But seen through the eyes of an ancient Egyptian priest, LOST does contain many ancient life and death concepts.