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DEFINING TRADITION - PART III

5/14/2019

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THE HERMOPOLITAN OR OSIRIAN PATH
The Osirian legend is the most well-known of the Egyptian myths despite the fact that the only detailed narrative is that of Plutarch’s Greek version.  The authentic Egyptian references are ‘dispersed over several different periods and offer only a nebulous of disjointed facts’ (Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods) while one ‘curious and poorly documented legend’ Geb is forced to slay his own son (Osiris) in self-defence.   The Osirian cult forms the bridge between the nine deities of the Great Ennead of Heliopolis and the more modern, devotional approach of the Hermopolitan Path.
 
Osiris [E=Aser]
As Hamlyn points out in Egyptian Mythology, ‘perhaps more than in the case of any other god, the legend of Osiris underwent great changes through the course of history’.   And  as  all  students  of mythology are aware, the mysteries of the ‘dying god’ tradition were a focal point of religious belief in the Tigres-Euphrates and Nile valleys, i.e Osiris (Egypt), Attis (Phrygia) and Adonis (Greece).  Osiris was originally a god of the vegetation which died, re-seeded and flowered again following the inundation of the Nile, thereby symbolising the Egyptian concept of re-birth.  As Gardiner points out the Osirian myth had ‘never been deeply spiritual but it had recounted the triumph of good over evil and had told of widely devotion and filial piety’.  It was also accessible to the common people in terms of understanding and identification.
 
The dying god concept had to be credible to the simple man. To have a divine being dying each year by accident would have eventually  led  to  a  total  lack  of  ‘street-cred’;  death by disease or decay was also out since who in their right mind would identify with a weak and sickly god?  The only alternative was for Osiris to be killed and as the image of Set was still creating a problem for the priesthood, he could be disposed of once and for all by being named as the murderer of his brother. 
     
​Magically speaking, the death and resurrection of Osiris are comparable  to  the  later  mystery  traditions  of  Ishtar/Tammuz, Cybel/Attis, Demeter/Persephone, Mithra and Christianity rather than the more sanitised version with which he is so frequently aligned. In view of later ‘dying god/king’ cults (including the killing of the pagan king William Rufus by Walter Tyrrel in English folk-lore when the king’s blood ‘watered the earth’ all the way to Winchester) it also endorses the theory that Set’s involvement was originally that of ‘divine slayer’ rather than the murderer of Osiris [Tyrrel has never been reviled as a murderer]. The fact that the mortal remains of the dead god should come into contact with the earth indicates that this was a custom belonging to the age of agriculture; life had been taken out of the ground by the crops, so life had to be put back in again.

 
Praise be to Osiris!
Adorations be given to him!
Smelling of the earth to Un-Nefer!
Prostrations to the ground to the
Everlasting Self-Created Sun God!
 
It would be unwise, however, to look upon the Osirian Path with sweetness and light since the knowledge drawn upon to resurrect the god were magical powers that the uninformed would be quick to label ‘black’.  One of the best sources of information for students of the Osirian Tradition is the two volume Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection by Sir Wallis Budge which provide sufficient working material to satisfy even the most avid of scholarly magi.  For the modern magician, the Set/Osiris Mysteries have been more fully explored in The Setian by Billie Walker-John, where the relationship between the so-called rivals can be seen in its proper perspective of balancing opposites.
    
Represented  by  corn  and  vine,  Osiris’s other most familiar emblem is the djet.  From the beginning of the New Kingdom this was considered to be a portion of the backbone of the god and venerated as one of the his relics.  Because of its symbolic value, the hieroglyph appears often in scenes and texts associated with the knot or buckle [tjet] of Isis.  Located in the centre of the Pillar of Equilibrium, Tiphareth is the sphere of the dying god - the Tarot symbolised by Death and The Hanged Man.  Osiris is petitioned for strength during suffering and adversity and a belief in what is to come. His image is one of fertility and growth and it would be a mistake to look upon him as a death-god.
 
Isis [E=Aset]
Attributed with all the qualities of the perfect wife, mother and goddess - the mother of all things, both spiritual and temporal.  She is almost inter-changeable with Hathor and Bast on the more earthly levels but it is as the goddess of magic that Isis comes into her own. To enable her to posthumously bear her son, conceived by the union with her husband’s dead body, Isis resorted to the skills of the necromancer. “For she was a potent magician and even the gods were not immune from her sorcery.”   
    
Isis represents the rich plains of Egypt, made fruitful by the annual Inundation of the Nile.  She is represented as a woman who bears the hieroglyph of a throne as her head-dress, or a solar disk between cow’s horns which identifies her with Hathor.  By the time of the Greek occupation of Egypt, Isis had adopted virtually all the attributes of the female pantheon — and some of the male ones as well.  Netzach is her sphere on the Tree of Life and her image is The High Priestess of the Tarot.  Her colours are blue and silver.  Because she became the embodiment of every other goddess in the Egyptian  pantheon, this  collective power  makes her a very powerful focus for female energies in magical terms.
 
Nephthys [E=Nebthet]
The fourth sibling in the Osirian group represents the flooding or high water mark of the Nile.  She represents hidden lunar depths and can be invoked as a protector; she was supposed to possess great magical powers like her sister, Isis but she is the personification of darkness and of all that belongs to it, her attributes being of a passive rather than active nature.  This idea stems from the legend that having taken a fancy to her brother-in-law Osiris she slipped into his bed under the cover of darkness.  As a result him of mistaking her for Isis, Anubis was the result of this adulterous union.  She is therefore the mistress of illusion.  Nevertheless  the  two  goddesses  are  inseparable, Isis representing  the  part of  the world that is visible, with Nephthys representing that which is invisible.  Nephthys is always represented by the head-dress of a house and basket but never appears to have been the object of an independent cult since no temples or shrines have yet been discovered that are dedicated to her alone.
 
Horus the Younger [E=Hor]
The son of Isis and Osiris (there are some 20 of this name in the Egyptian pantheon) who was born posthumously and later avenged the death of his father by doing battle with Set.  During the fighting, Horus lost an eye, the symbol of which has become a powerful tool in magical working although it is often confused with the more ancient ‘eye of Re’. Like Horus the Elder, he is depicted as falcon-headed and holds in his right hand the ankh. 
    
Despite the happy-family picture, Horus and Isis were often at logger-heads, the son even decapitating his mother after particularly violent argument.  Later Pharaohs associated themselves with the younger Horus and thus became identified the son of Osiris - which added another layer of confusion to the earlier texts where Pharaoh was descended from the sun-god.  He could aptly use The Aeon as a point of focus in the Tarot, with many of the attributes normally associated with Horus the Elder.
 
Tauret [E=Twrt]
She  grew  to  prominence  as  the  popular  goddess  of childbirth, maternity and suckling during the New Kingdom.  She is represented as a pregnant hippopotamus with pendulous breasts, standing upright and holding the hieroglyphic sign of protection, ka, a plait of rolled papyrus.  Enjoying great popularity at Thebes amongst the middle classes, who gave her name to their children and decorated their homes with her image, she could also be called upon as an avenging deity when she would appear with the head of a lioness brandishing a dagger.
 
Bes [E=Bs]
Also a popular household deity from the New Kingdom who presided over all aspects of the home from marriage and child-birth to protection against evil spirits.  He was a grotesque dwarfish figure, jovial and belligerent, fond of dancing and fighting.  The middle classes  kept  statues  of  him  in  their  homes and named children after him.
 
There are, of course, hundreds more deities in the Egyptian pantheon than those featured above and the Adept choosing to follow either  the  Primitive,  Heliopolitan  or  Hermopolitan  Paths can expand   his  or  her  knowledge  of   those  appertaining  to  the appropriate Path by studying academic text books for the period.  The Pyramid  and  Coffin  Texts  and  The  Book of the Dead are important historical guides to the deities of ancient Egypt and some later versions of The Book of the Dead list up to 500 separate identities.
    
The later Triad system, a group of three gods usually consisting of a divine family of parents and child who were worshipped at a particular cult centre set the precedent for the trinity-concept in other religions emerging outside Egypt.  As the Dictionary defines, the Triad was often a convenient method of linking together three formerly independent deities of an area to form an easily identifiable religious context for worshipping or political purposes.  Among the most important were Amun-Mut-Khons at Thebes;Ptah-Sekhmet/Bast-Nefertem at Memphis; the Winged Horus-Hathor-Horus the child at Edfu; Khnum-Satet-Anuket at Elephantine  and  Osiris-Isis-Horus  who  were  not  associated  with  any specific cult-centre.  The Dictionary suggests that this appears to have been ‘primarily a theological development of the New Kingdom’ but it was a convenient method of bringing several different attributes of the deities under one temple roof.
 
 
The Otherworld
The regions to which the dead departed were called the dwat or Amenti (Osiris is sometimes referred to as Khenti-Amenti in earlier texts); the latter a dark gloomy place, containing pits of fire and dreadful monsters, flanked by a river and lofty mountains.  In the later Osirian cult the souls of the dead had to pass through to the dwat, an equivalent of the Elysian Fields [sekhet hetepet] where Osiris and his company could be found among the 15 regions in the Field of Reeds [sekhet aaru].  The dwat was situated in the heavens, at the furthest reaches of the Eastern Desert where the mummified body of the sun-god waited while the scarab beetle, Khepri, deity of the rising run, pushed the solar disc out of the dwat into the new day. Amenti is the darkness into which the sun descends over the mountains of the Western Desert.
 
Like most things connected to Egyptian religious thought, the dwat had an equivocal meaning insomuch that the texts sometimes refer to the negative aspects of Osiris as a malevolent deity.  In this guise  the  petitioner  could  invoke  the  protection  of  Re,  so  the deceased could make the journey in the light rather than the darkness. Initially, in the Pyramid Texts, the dwat was represented by a star within a circle; the place in the sky where the sun and the stars re-appeared after having been invisible; in later times it began to represent the Otherworld whether celestial or subterranean (the latter being more recent in Egyptian culture).
    
The Egyptian fondness for obscure mythological allusions make it extremely difficult to discover any specific details about Otherworld since most spells are for the life in the hereafter rather than about it (JEA - Vol 58).  “As a rule, the magical incantations that make up the bulk do not specify the exact circumstances under which they are to be used, nor can these be easily deducted from their contents.”  According to Dieter Muller early copies of The Book of the Dead display ‘great variability in the choice and order of their chapters’.  The Pyramid Texts at the other end of the spectrum show a certain degree of consistency, while the Coffin Texts pose a particularly complicated problem.  Having preserved much valuable information on the purpose of the spells and their application they nevertheless exhibit certain conflicting preferences for the location and order of the text.
    
The Texts consist of a heading followed by a section in which the deceased has to pass an unspecified number of gates.  At each gate a conversation ensues, in which he reveals his familiarity with the name and character of the door-keeper and receives permission to advance: “You who have come spiritualised, my brother: proceed to the place about which you are informed’.  The same pattern is followed to placate the ferryman who will take him across the river separating these gates from the Field of Reeds.  The text concludes with an invocation and a docket promising freedom of movement and arable land in the Field of Reads to anyone who knows this spell [Reference JEA - Vol 58].
    
The Egyptians often referred to the desert [E=deshret] the ‘red land’ as a place of death; the Western Desert was regarded as the entrance to Amenti.  Set was considered the ‘red god’ and lord of the desert wilderness, while other deities such as Min and Hathor were patrons of travellers in the desert regions.
    
Like all mythologies, there are strange creatures inhabiting the Otherworld such as Ammut who consumes the hearts of those whose evil deeds made them unfit to proceed into the afterlife.  She is usually shown waiting beside the scales in the Hall of Judgement, with the head of a crocodile, the foreparts of a lion and the rear of a hippopotamus.  Apophis, the snake-god of the underworld, who symbolises the forces of chaos and evil; it is Set who defeats  this  adversary  of  Re  but  at  a  later  period  Set  himself became identified with Apophis. 
    
The realms of the Otherworld were inhabited by a ‘fantastic array of beings’ but the most feared were the ‘messengers of Sekhmet’ which appear to be irritating and deadly spirits thought to be prevalent at the end of the year and very much part of the ‘real’ world.   They caused sickness, sleeplessness and general discontentment and can be dealt with by invoking Sekhmet herself to get rid of them.  The demons of the netherworld are the creatures of the darkness, probably similar to those encountered on the astral, who hound and harry the dead as they make their way through Amenti.
    
Magically, Amenti is the darkness of the Otherworld - the place to which the Adept can descend in the process of exploring the astral since this is where all things that are hidden are finally revealed.  The dwat is the ‘starry place’ - the darkness behind the sky.  It doesn’t matter which deity the Adept chooses providing she or he  maintains a strict adherence to the cosmic, natural or universal law - the law  of opposites that governs all areas of magical working - ‘As  Above, So Below’ - which takes into account this world and the next, whether it be the physical world, Amenti or the dwat.

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DEFINING THE TRADITION – Part II

5/1/2019

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Heliopolitan Path and the Theban Triad - Part II
 
Generally speaking, the Egyptians could be classed as religious but never  mystical  simply  because  their  belief  system  was  strictly utilitarian - a reverence for those two natural forces that made their existence possible: the Sun and the Nile. In fact, according to F. Gladstone Bratton (A History of Egyptian Archaeology) their entire religious and cultural history was determined by these two forces.  “They have left us little or no abstract thought.  Their belief was defined by the dualism of light and darkness, aridity and fertility, night and day, life and death.  Just as there was no twi-light in Egypt, neither was there any middle ground of thought.”
    
This observation, however, is refuted by T G H James (BM - Collections) who finds that between the simple religious beliefs of humble Egyptians and the elaborate theological doctrines of the great state-cults, there is a further level of religious thinking which can occasionally be glimpsed through rare personal tomb inscriptions and literary compositions.  James believes that these examples, which appear in Old Kingdom tombs  at Saqqara, offer an insight  into the most ‘profound religious thinking manifested in ancient Egypt’, particularly those discovered in tombs of certain high officials of Dynasty VI.   These ‘new’ ideas of responsibility and retribution appear as Egypt was facing its first major social and political upheaval; the unnamed Great God, invoked as part of the funerary rites, illustrates that the Egyptians could think about divinity ‘without investing it with concrete form’.  
    
In the years since Bratton’s book was published in the late 60s, however, the cults of Ptah and Amun have been found to show a distinctly more mystical approach to religious thought.  Both were originally regional gods whose worship remained constant until the great surge of popularity towards the end of the pharaonic dynasties.  These are the deities to appeal to the intellect since they offer intellectual concepts rather than religious personification but for the ordinary ancient Egyptian who preferred more clearly defined expressions there was nothing to write home about.   James also identifies  the  First  Intermediate Period  as  the  time  when a new attitude to religious matters developed and the first ‘semi-philosophical texts were composed’.
 
Ptah [E=pth]
As Emery explains, although the cult of Ptah sought after a higher level of religious thinking and spirituality, originally he was widely regarded as the protector of artisans and artists, and inventor of the arts.  He was at the same time designer, smelter of metal and builder.  His high priest at Memphis bore a title analogous to the ‘Master Builder’ of the European medieval cathedrals.  It was Ptah who directed the architects and masons during the construction of a temple and appears to have retained the same characteristics from Dynasty II right down to later times.  He is usually represented as a bearded man with a blue skull cap, wrapped in a shroud-like garment carrying the symbol of stability.  As Ptah-Seker he represents the union of creative power with that of chaos or darkness.

After the extinction of the New Kingdom rulers, Ptah became the third most important deity in both stature and wealth.  His new-found glory elevated him to the position of ‘the Universal Demiurge who had with his own hands fashioned the world, the other gods being mere personifications of aspects of Ptah’.  He was said to have saved the city from attacking Assyrians by raising an army of rats, who forced the enemy to flee, having gnawed their bowstrings, quivers, and the leather thongs of their shields—a myth later found in the Old Testament.
 
His  more  human  attributes  give  him  the  appearance  of  a Buddha-like figure and his worship is more concerned with the building and perfection of the temple, i.e. the mind and body that earthly pursuits.  The Adept who leans towards the mystical rather than the magical may find an ideal focus in the concept of Ptah, the universal architect.  His name in the Tarot and the Tree of Life signifies ‘admirable or hidden intelligence’ - the four aces which represent the roots of the four elements.  He is The Hierophant or The Universe and Yesod (the Foundation).
 
Bast [E=Bastet]
The local goddess of Bubastis but she became the great national divinity when the city became capital of the kingdom in Dynasty XXII.  With Ptah and their son Nefertum they formed a triad.  She personified the fertilising warmth of the sun, represented by a cat, or cat-headed woman.  Like Hathor she was a goddess of pleasure, music and dance and was often shown with a sistrum. 
 
She also gave protection against contagious diseases and evil spirits.  Her devotees buried the carefully mummified bodies of cats which, during their life-times, had been venerated as animals sacred to Bast - see below.  Her festival took place in April and May and is celebrated with dancing, drinking and song.  Like Isis and Hathor she sits in the sphere of Netzach and can be represented by The High Priestess in the Tarot.
 
Ma’at
Depicted as a woman standing or sitting on her heels, wearing an ostrich feather on her head, which is the symbol of her name - truth order and justice.   In reality, Ma’at was a ‘pure abstraction deified’ but in the Book of the Dead she becomes a beautiful woman presiding over the weighing of the heart in the Hall of Judgement.  Her name means ‘that which is straight’ and among the Egyptians it implied anything that was true, genuine or real. In the Old Kingdom the name referred to national order under the dominance of the sun-god; in later times it meant moral order, the realm of universal values. 
 
She can be attributed to Adjustment or Temperence in the Tarot and her name can be used in an oath or promise that can never be broken.  In later times she was named as wife to Thoth, or as the female embodiment of his attributes.
 
Seker
Probably another localised vegetation god before he became the god of the dead in the Memphis necropolis.  Usually depicted in the form of a greenish hawk-headed mummy, he was worshipped in the sanctuary called ro stau - ‘the doors of the corridors’ which communicated directly with the Underworld.  His worship was quickly submerged within the Osirian cult although he continued to be worshiped at Memphis as Seker-Osiris.  In later times he became the great funerary divinity as Ptah-Seker-Osiris despite the fact that he belongs very firmly within the Memphian cosmogony.
 
Amun [E=imn]
One of the most important but enigmatic gods in the Egyptian pantheon; his worship having a close alignment with the higher spirituality of the Heliopolitan Path than the purely devotional Hermopolitan Path.  Originally, he was the principle god of Thebes and a member of the Ogdoad, the group of eight primeval deities worshipped at Hermopolis. 
    
His name, means ‘what is hidden’ and although classed as one of the primeval  gods of Egypt it wasn’t  until much later that his votaries began to exercise the enormous power, which they finally wielded throughout the land.   He was first mentioned Dynasty II Pyramid Texts and later Dynasty XI texts imply that Amun is a god who cannot be viewed by mortal eyes, invisible and inscrutable.  It is worth noting that the Cairo Calendar makes no mention of Amun and the Theban triad since these gods only came to prominence during the New Kingdom.  
    
In Dynasty XII, in the process of re-organising the kingdom and solidifying its control of the entire country, Amun was transformed from an obscure god into a national and dynastic divinity; calling on the powerful solar theology of the Memphian dynasty of ancient Egypt as an obligatory step’ (Hierogylphics).  Lewis Spence suggests that it isn’t “difficult to see that the conception of such a deity would speedily win favour with a priestly and theological class, who might strain after a form of god-head less crude than the purely symbolic system that held sway in the country.” 
     
When the princes of Thebes rose to power, Amun rose with them and became the prominent god in Upper Egypt.  Osiris, as the popular god, could not be replaced but Amun as the more spiritual being fused with Ra; the high-priest of Amun-Ra was raised to royal power instituting Dynasty XXII, or the dynasty of priest-kings, the influences spreading far and wide into neighbouring countries.  His temple at Karnak is the best surviving religious complex of the New Kingdom.  He is represented in human form wearing a high double crown, or either as a ram or a goose.  The Romans  later  worshipped  him  as  Jupiter-Amon  and  consulted oracles at his temple.  An apt Tarot symbol could be The Hanged Man or The Wheel of Fortune, signifying all the various changes and sufferings undertaken before emerging triumphant.  
 
Mut [E=mwt]
The female counterpart in this amalgam was the ‘world-mother, lady of heaven and queen of the gods’ who was attributed with all the female attributes of the mother oriented goddesses in Egypt and represented by a vulture. With their son Khons, they comprised the Theban Triad.  Khons is a moon-god usually depicted holding a sceptre and flail and wearing the Sidelock of Youth with a lunar head-dress.  The triadic structure (or structural element) was used in Egypt to answer the problem of divine plurality and unity (Journal of Egyptian Archaeology - Vol 57). 
According to H. Re Velde in Egypt the triad was an extremely suitable structure for connecting plurality and unity, “because the number three was not only a numeral, but signified the indefinite plural.  Thus the triad was a structure capable of transforming polytheism into tritheism or differentiated monotheism”. The third card in the Tarot, The Empress would be an ideal focus for Mut.
 
The Triad was often a convenient means of linking together three formerly independent gods of an area, and seems to have been a primarily a theological development of the New Kingdom. Although the Osiris-Isis-Horus family grouping fits into the triad principle at first glance, the Theban Triad is a much more exalted form of worship, best suited to mysticism and the Mysteries than the religion of the common man.  Of all the gods in the Egyptian pantheon, the concept of Amen-Ra is probably best suited to 20th century since it does not require an acceptance of all the trappings of legend and mythology to produce a precise identification on god-head.

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