The central concern is the king's survival and his passage upward. The utterances repeatedly deny that he is dead, insist he has gone away living, and describe his ascent by ladder, by ramp, on the smoke of incense, on the wings of a bird, or carried by the sunbeams. He arrives among the imperishable circumpolar stars, joins the sun god in his barque, or takes possession of the Field of Reeds, a cultivated afterlife landscape that later texts develop at length.
Running alongside this solar and stellar material is the identification of the dead king with Osiris and of his successor with Horus, which supplies both a resurrection model and a theory of legitimate succession. The two strands, ascend to the sky, and become Osiris, are not obviously compatible and are not reconciled. Egyptian religious texts habitually hold several accounts of the same thing at once, and the Pyramid Texts are the earliest large demonstration of that habit.
The most notorious passage is the so-called Cannibal Hymn, utterances 273-274, in which the king hunts, cooks and eats the gods in order to absorb their powers and become the greatest of them. It appears in Unas and again in the pyramid of Teti and then disappears from the royal corpus, though versions resurface much later in the Coffin Texts. Whether it preserves a genuinely archaic ritual memory or is a piece of extravagant metaphor about acquiring divine attributes is disputed and cannot be settled from the text alone; what is certain is that it was dropped, which suggests later Egyptians found it as startling as modern readers do.