Ka

If we could say that ancient Egypt had a psychology, we would then have to say that its fundamental notion is the ka, and the problem becomes what the ka is.

Jaynes proposes that the ka is the foundational psychological category of ancient Egypt and argues that its semantic instability across translation — spirit, ghost, double, vital force — is best resolved by reading it as a bicameral hallucination of absent or dead others.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis

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Later, Philemon became relativized by yet another figure, whom I called Ka. In ancient Egypt the ‘King’s Ka’ was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the ka-soul came from below, out of the earth as out of a deep shaft.

Jung identifies Ka as a personal autonomous figure — the earthly, chthonic, and Mephistophelian counterpart to Philemon — whose emergence from below represents the compensatory grounding of the psyche in instinct and matter.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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The third person appears in the form of Ka-mutef (‘the bull of his mother’), who is none other than the ka, the procreative power of the deity. In it and through it father and son are combined not in a triad but in a triunity.

Jung reads Ka-mutef as the Egyptian prefiguration of the Holy Spirit, arguing that the generative ka constitutes the connecting third term in a divine triunity of God, king, and procreative power — a typological precursor to the Christian Trinity.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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