August 22, 2010
Posted in The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:40 pm
by Shefyt
Rain all day today, drenching at times, so for the most part I did indoor things: dusting and vacuuming the shrine room, making my weekly offerings, catching up on the House boards and reorganizing my email accounts. A good day, a gentle day — not the most productive ever, but peaceful. Among other things, I finally set up my shrine to the God of the season, Ra, which was long overdue.
In the late afternoon, though the rain kept on unabated, the sun came out, a transfiguring golden light washing over everything, filtered through the watery air. The photo does no justice to it, that heart-stopping luminosity like a glimpse of another, transcendent world, although you can glimpse some of the mystery: the mist, the shimmering rain drops, the sun dazzling through the curtain of trees in the west.
The candles glow in the shrine room; born from the flood, Ra burns with a soft, numinous flame; and my year of beginnings is finally ready to begin.
Dua Ra! O Shining One, hail and praise to You!
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August 14, 2010
Posted in Stalking Beauty
at 9:13 pm
by Shefyt
So I was in shrine early this morning, planning out my day, recounting how I was going to do this, that, and the other thing.
…and dance, said the little voice in the back of my mind.
Mrrr, I thought, but I already have a lot to do, and it’s a long way to go to get a class, and I don’t feel like dancing by myself in my room…. As the resistance was kicking in, my eyes fell upon an object in my shrine, a six-sided die with a picture of a cat on the one-pip side, which had been given to me by one of my Bast-sisters at Retreat, along with the message “You need more Bast in your life.”
“Cats, I’ll dance,” I said, and rolled the die.
…cats.
Did I really expect any other answer?
So I went to the Saturday morning Nia class — which, it turns out, was actually just what I needed — and danced in celebration of balance to honor the Lady of Grace.
(And I’ve only just realized tonight, after the fact, that at the prayer chat on Tuesday I had prayed “that there be more dancing.”)
Dua Bast, You Who sometimes works in mysterious and whimsical ways! Nekhtet!
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August 12, 2010
Posted in Festivals, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:47 pm
by Shefyt
Today: the smell of rain on hot pavement, a blissful breath of cooler air, the hope that this long, sweltering summer might finally be drawing to a close. The House of Netjer’s New Year celebration was last week, so we’ve just entered the season of the Inundation, the rising of the great river, when a fresh surge of energy sweeps through the world and everything is washed clean and made new. Each year the House receives an oracle from Aset that provides a sort of theme for the upcoming year and also names the God or Gods Who is over that year and receives special offerings and prayers. This year is the year of Zep Tepi, the first time — the instant of creation — which belongs to all of the Gods and none of the Gods, but to make things easier for our poor human brains each season has been declared to be under the auspices of a single divinity: Ra for the first season, Mut for the second, and Mehet Weret, the cow-goddess Who embodies the primordial waters, for the third. And so the year goes from flood to flood, a perfect circle.
May it be a good year, this year of Zep Tepi, filled with prosperity and power and love. And may it bring renewal beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed of.
Di wep ronpet nofret! Nekhtet!
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June 16, 2010
Posted in Being Kemetic, Home and Temple
at 11:07 pm
by Shefyt
Yesterday morning, I heard my Mother’s voice for the first time.
Usually when I “hear” Bast, what comes through is an impulse or a knowing that immediately is translated into words inside my head by what I call the “Bast voice,” which is not unlike the inner voices that belong to my various fiction characters. While this translation certainly helps my understanding, it can also be deceptive — sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether something is really Bast or is instead some part of myself.
On Tuesday I finally took a genuine first step toward getting some major home repairs and maintenance issues taken care of. The impression I got in shrine that night was that Bast was extremely pleased by this; in fact, She wanted some sistrum shaking to celebrate it. Later I also had a very striking dream that featured some powerful household protection imagery.
Yesterday morning, I was reflecting again on tending my home as part of my service to my Mother — on the true significance of it, when the shrine itself is considered to be the house of God. And a voice rolled through my head that was emphatically not mine:
I am there.
I wish I could describe that voice to you, but the memory of it has already blurred. I only remember that it was beautiful and resonant, that it was nothing like I would have imagined Bast to sound like, but at the same time it was utterly perfect for Her.
It’s funny — I’m so drawn to the mystical, the mythical, the poetic, and what does Bast want from me? A bathroom remodel. Well, to be more serious, there are a number of potential health and environmental issues that we’ll also be addressing: critters in the attic, potential mold inside the walls, an aging underground oil tank. On a level of practicing purity and living in ma’at, Bast’s engagement in all of this makes total sense. I still never quite expect God to be so pragmatic, though. And it was just as unexpected to hear Her speak at last, a moment of astonishment and wonder that I think will linger with me for a long time.
Dua Netjer! Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
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June 11, 2010
Posted in Friday Findings
at 11:27 am
by Shefyt
When I saw this photo, all I could think was, I want to stand on those stones, I want to touch the water and the grass, I want to feel the wind on my face and know that I’m in the Delta, where my Mother’s worship was born, where the people once sailed in joyous procession for Her, the lady of the land, the waters, and the sun.
From the Das Digitale Schott-Archiv, an archive of photos by the German egyptologist Siegfried Schott (1897-1971).
Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
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June 8, 2010
Posted in Other Reviews: Movies
at 9:47 pm
by Shefyt
Agora
Directed by Alejandro Amenábar; written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Released in the United States in June 2010 by Newmarket Films. 126 min.
Note: Review contains spoilers
On Sunday I finally had the chance to see the long-awaited and much-anticipated movie Agora, now showing in limited release in the United States. Sad to say, while it was indeed a very good film, the experience proved to be something of a downer. I don’t know why this surprised me, considering that I knew going in that the story of Hypatia, the great female mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, would end in tragedy.
In the movie, Hypatia first appears as a teacher in the Serapeum of Alexandria, giving a lecture before her students. Although her class includes students of different ethnicities and religions, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of the city, outside the classroom Alexandria is wracked by religious conflict and street violence as pagans and Christians struggle for dominance. Echoes of the tensions appear among her students as well, particularly between the pagan Orestes (who happens to be in love with Hypatia and is rather famously rejected) and the Christian Synesius. Hypatia, however, asserts that they are more similar than different: that being like her (presumably in their desire for knowledge) they are also like each other, and thus they are all brothers together. This is a bitter irony for the slave Davos, who serves Hypatia’s family and is also desperately in love with her — though Hypatia treats him with great kindness, doctoring his wounds after he receives a whipping from her father and encouraging his own scholarly efforts, he will never be her equal. On the streets of Alexandria, Davos encounters the rabble-rousing Christian monk Ammonius, who introduces him to the message of the Gospel and the practice of charity for the poor and needy, opening his eyes to a different view of the world.
The city descends into an cycle of increasingly brutal retaliation: pagan leaders respond to Christian mockery of their gods with a bloody massacre in the marketplace, and the Christians in turn besiege the pagans in the Serapeum. Although the Roman emperor pardons the pagans, he orders that the Serapeum be turned over to the Christians. The scholars barely escape, clutching the few scrolls and treasures that they were able to save, before the crowd overruns the buildings and begins destroying them. Davos, torn between his unrequited love for Hypatia and the fierce injustice of being her slave, ultimately leaves her and joins the Christian side, taking out his anger and frustrations along with the rest of the mob.
Some years later, with the power of the pagans in Alexandria broken, the Christians under the leadership of the bishop Cyril engage in a similar struggle with the Jews and finally overcome them, driving them from the city. Hypatia, though now only permitted to teach children, continues her personal studies and her research into the movement of the heavenly bodies; she also speaks out publicly against the havoc caused by the Christians, urging her former student Orestes, now also a Christian and prefect of Alexandria, to take a stand against them. Cyril attempts to force Orestes to silence her, and as Orestes struggles to reconcile the demands of his religion with his enduring love and respect for Hypatia, Cyril’s monks seize her from the street, drag her to a church, and strip her naked, planning to stone her to death. Davos, coming too late to warn her, can do nothing for her but ease her passing.
I think that part what brought me down, beyond the atrocity of Hypatia’s murder, was that on some level I had gone into this movie hoping to see a vision of what was, or what might have been, a vision of pagan grandeur, of a way of living. But by the time the story of Agora begins, the social decay has already progressed too far. The pagans are a fading elite, clinging to ancient glory and painfully out of touch with the majority of the people who inhabit their city (one scholar, during the siege of the Serapeum, wonders in bewilderment, “When did there get to be so many Christians?”), while the Christians are primarily an uneducated mob fueled by poverty and need and a seething resentment born of past persecution, and are easily manipulated by their charismatic leader. The Jews, determined to fight back, fall into the same pattern of retribution and are unable to overcome the Christian ascendency. Amidst the chaos, Hypatia is a light of reason, but an isolated one, largely abstracted by her studies and without any real power, and further handicapped by her gender in what is all too obviously a man’s world.
I went in looking for an answer but walked out with only questions. Is it possible for one person, or even a small group of people, to stand against the current of the times, to check the tide of the masses? If Hypatia had turned the brilliant mind that could unravel the mysteries of the heavens toward resolving the conundrum of Alexandria’s religious turmoil, would it have made any difference in the end? Or if she had gone under cover, keeping the light of science and philosophy alive in secret somewhere, might she have survived? And in either case, would it have meant denying herself, her true work — and would it ultimately have been worth the cost to her? Late in the movie, Hypatia says sadly to her former student Synesius, now Bishop of Cyrene, who has offered her his protection if she will allow herself be baptised as a Christian, “You cannot question what you believe in. I…must.”
Agora is very powerful in its depiction of people caught in untenable circumstances. Orestes writhes against the requirements of the faith he originally chose for pragmatic purposes. Davos is a particularly striking and at times unnerving example, his conflicted feelings for Hypatia an unsettling mix of desire and violence, his hope in the Church drowning in the harsh reality of its actions. Hypatia herself, beautiful and brilliant, is wrenched between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of politics and bloodshed; and she is lost too in the divide between male and female. Unable to live circumscribed by traditional women’s roles and still pursue her work, she moves as a solitary woman among men. (It’s rather sad that a movie focusing on a feminist icon fails entirely to pass the Bechdel test — I don’t think Hypatia even exchanges words with another woman during the whole movie.) Yet at the same time she is never truly one of them, as is shown poignantly in a scene where she listens from another room, clutching Orestes’ futile love gift, while her father Theon and his friends discuss her. In her study of the orbits of the planets, she is a woman seeking completeness, seeking purity of form, seeking a center in a world where the center no longer holds. And the answer she eventually finds — the ellipse, with its twin focal points — is an astounding metaphor for balance, for duality held in dynamic relationship. Perhaps it brings her peace. At the end of the movie, when she leaves Orestes and walks out into the city alone, without her guards, there’s a quiet majesty to her, slim and upright in her red Greek dress among the blue robes and head wrappings of the crowd, as if she moves in her own orbit, serene and true to herself even in the midst of her contradictions. Though mere minutes later she is seized and carried off to her humiliation and death, in that moment, she is complete in herself.
The movie itself is visually interesting and lovely. The sets — particularly of the Serapeum — made this Kemetic very happy, and sad, too, seeing them ultimately destroyed, especially the hacked-up faces of the Hethert columns. (In one particularly subtle touch by the filmmakers, just after Bishop Cyril reads a passage from the scripture about how women should be subject to men’s rule and remain silent, the camera cuts to an exterior view of the temple, catching a column that depicts Hethert holding out her menat necklace to the king.) A close-up shot of some ants outside the besieged Serapeum foreshadows a later aerial view of the Christians overrunning the complex, the film speeded up to show them as small, frenetically moving black dots, like insects themselves. And shots of the globe seen from space intercut the movie, jarring at first in a historical film but actually surprisingly evocative of its themes. Showing unique perspectives of the earth — a vertical axis of east-west, rather than the usual north-south; or crossing the Mediterranean and looking south along the Nile — they challenge us to look beyond our preconceptions just as Hypatia looked beyond hers. To see the world as it is, in all its complexity, not a single static perfection but a wanderer like all the other planets — to look at things from a new angle, from one of the many different views that somehow reconcile into a whole.
In short, Agora is definitely worth seeing, not just for the historical spectacle, but for the searching questions it raises, and the personal process of coming to terms with them. And maybe, in the end, there are some answers hidden here after all.
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June 4, 2010
Posted in Friday Findings, Netjeru
at 11:22 am
by Shefyt
Speaking of various forms of Heru, I love this T-shirt. (It’s not actually a new find; I wore mine to Pantheacon earlier this year. But I thought it was worth sharing.)
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May 31, 2010
Posted in Festivals, Netjeru, Poetry and Prayers
at 11:27 am
by Shefyt
This morning I got up at the crack of dawn to do a small ritual for Memorial Day (as I’d mentioned previously). Out on the front lawn, I set up a little shrine with offerings and read the following prayer out loud at sunrise:
A Memorial Day Prayer for Heru-hekenu and the Akhu
Dua Heru-hekenu! O Son of Bast,
You Who travel with Ra through the Duat,
You Who journey on the night barque through the land of Wesir,
You Who preserve the body and protect the soul,
may You preserve and protect all those who have died in service:
our soldiers, our police and rescue workers, our heroes.
May You bring light for their eyes.
May You bring breath for their nostrils.
May You bring fragrant unguents for their bodies and their kas
and every good thing so that they might live.
Great solider, Master of Protection,
may You spread Your wings out above the living as well,
may You bless the ones who put themselves in danger,
fighting to protect all that they love.
May their bodies be strengthened,
may their hearts be pure,
and may they return home safely at the end of their service,
until the day when all the lands are forever at peace.
May there be rest and healing for all the veterans
and great glory for the courage that they have shown.
An offering which the King gives to Heru-hekenu, Son of Bast, at the shrine of Saut-sen Iryt Ra: a thousand of bread, a thousand of barbecue, incense, flame, and cool water for the honored dead of this nation, true of voice. Dua Akhu! May you give your protection and guidance to those who fight today and to all the veterans who have served in the past. May you be remembered for as long as the stars shine in the sky. And may you live.
Dua Heru-hekenu! Dua Akhu! Nekhtet!
Afterward I sang “Taps” and then sat in meditation until the incense had burned down.
It was unusual for me, because I don’t usually do anything to celebrate Memorial Day. But this year it seemed right and necessary, as a sort of follow-on to the celebrations of the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. And it was a lovely moment, sitting outside in the early morning, in the cool air touched by the scent of sandalwood incense, feeling a sense of things in harmony, of ma’at in this kind of remembrance.
Heru-hekenu may seem an odd (and obscure!) choice of deity to petition in a ritual like this. It was an intuitive jump at first, but upon further thought it made reasonable sense. As mentioned in the prayer, Heru-hekenu does sail on the night barque with Ra. (In the picture at the head of this page, Heru-hekenu is the hawk-headed figure standing directly behind the ram-headed Ra.) The journey of the sun into darkness and ultimately to regeneration and renewal is also the journey of the deceased; thus Heru-hekenu could be seen in the role of a funerary protector and assistant. According to the Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen, He lights the way for the ba of the dead, and He does actually receive offerings in a hotep di Nisut formula (although I’ve written my own here, not having tracked down the original yet). His name is also another indicator — Heru-hekenu can mean “Heru of the unguent” as well as “Heru of praises.” Just as oils and lotions were used to protect the living body against the ravages of a hot, harsh climate, so they were also used to protect the body of the deceased, preparing it for the tomb and its former inhabitant for the journey through the afterworld. Thus Heru-hekenu would be a protector of both the living and the dead.
So He seems to have a somewhat more liminal nature than some of the other forms of Heru. Yet he also has that warrior quality, as well as a very primal-seeming raptorial nature, which fits in well with one associated with battle and soldiers. It seemed appropriate, in the end, to call upon Him in remembrance of those who have fought and died for their country, and to ask Him to guard our living heroes as well.
A close-up of the statue I’m currently using for Heru-hekenu. The double crown is appropriate — He appears with it in reliefs from per-Bast — and the pots are about as close as one’s likely to find to perfume jars. The necklace draped around Him is one that I made for Him, and the red tissue-paper poppy came from a veterans’ organization.
Dua Heru-hekenu! Nekhtet!
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May 28, 2010
Posted in Friday Findings, Netjeru
at 6:45 pm
by Shefyt
In the vein of this morning’s post, here’s an interesting piece: a menat counterpoise crowned with the heads of two Gods, one a lion and the other a man wearing plumes. (A menat, for those who might not know, is a necklace of multiple strands of beads, which can either be worn normally or carried in the hands and shaken as a musical instrument. The counterpoise is attached to the back of the necklace, to help it lie properly on the wearer’s neck and shoulders, or to serve as a handle when it’s being played.) The two heads are unusual, in my experience; more typically you’ll see a single head in profile, usually either a lion Goddess or Hethert. Here, the two heads are probably Tefnut and Shu, or Mehyt and Anhur. The body of the counterpoise shows full figures of the two Gods facing each other and holding a single papyrus stalk between them — a beautifully symbolic image, as the papyrus represents the unfurling greenness of the world, here depicted either as the gift of the two deities or as the product of their union, or perhaps as both.
There are some other nice pieces on the site where I found this one, which is a review of a Sotheby auction of Egyptian antiquities (click on the picture to visit it). About halfway down the page there are several lion Goddesses, including a lion-headed Wadjet (more commonly depicted as a cobra), and a little unidentified Goddess seated in a pose typically used for the Goddess Ma’at. It’s only a guess on my part, but the latter might represent Tefnut, who sometimes is associated with Ma’at. There are some very fine Heru and Wesir statues as well.
Dua Tefnut! Dua Shu! Nekhtet!
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Posted in Netjeru, Poetry and Prayers, The Wild Sky
at 7:50 am
by Shefyt
Last night, driving home from the gym after work: the windows rolled down in the unexpected coolness of the evening, honeysuckle perfume like the scent of incense layering the air, the horizon ahead dark with stormclouds, like driving into a steadily deepening twilight — and suddenly, Tefnut, lynx-eyed and watchful, powerful, awesome in Her presence in the gathering storm. I’d never thought of Her in connection to storms before — typically that association belongs to Set — but there She was. Maybe it was something about the closeness of the storm: the very low, dark clouds, the cool, flower-scented breeze presaging a humidity-breaking change of weather, the looming shadow of the approaching rain.
And as the storm broke it made me think of the meeting of the Distant Goddess and the one Who seeks Her, of Tefnut and Shu (or Mehyt and Anhur). The wrathful, growling Goddess, the charged air finding its release in the flashes of lightning, like the flash of fiery claws, and then the slow quieting toward Her pacification as the rain falls — the thunderstorm as an encounter, as a love story, both intimate and glorious.
Dua Tefnut! O You Who roar, You are in the living breath of the wind, You are in the night-black shadows beneath the trees, You are in the burning river of gold, the lightning that splits the gray-green sky, turning it to amethyst and rose. Your feet are upon the earth while Your mighty voice resounds in heaven. O Tefnut, release Your waters! May You be at peace, may You come in peace for me — may Shu’s love pacify You, may the cool water and the bright flame pacify You, O Beautiful One Who lives in beauty, O Terrifying One Who is soothed by love.
Dua Tefnut! Nekhtet!
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Rain all day today, drenching at times, so for the most part I did indoor things: dusting and vacuuming the shrine room, making my weekly offerings, catching up on the House boards and reorganizing my email accounts. A good day, a gentle day — not the most productive ever, but peaceful. Among other things, I finally set up my shrine to the God of the season, Ra, which was long overdue. 