June 30, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Thoughts and Reflections
at 3:18 pm
by Shefyt
A lot of yard work this weekend, since the weather was cooperating. Actually, the weather has been quite cooperative in general over the last week or so: rain when I need to be indoors working on a freelance assignment, sun when it’s time to work outside. (And rain again when I’ve worked more than enough and just don’t want to admit it.) Almost four hours of leaf-raking, weed-pulling, and mowing on Sunday might have been a little much, but I’m starting to feel as though order is being restored to the place, bit by bit. And I still had time enough to visit the farmers’ market, and also to stop at one of the local farms and self-pick a pint of raspberries — offering the joy of harvesting abundance on such a beautiful day to Bast, and offering the berries themselves to Her later, in shrine.
Time enough — that’s abundance too. For years, I’ve struggled under the anguish of never having enough time to accomplish everything that I want to do. I don’t suddenly have more time than I used to — more like the opposite! And in fact I didn’t get to everything on my to-do list last weekend. But I did…enough. I filled the days well, with solid work interspersed with moments of calm and rest, and had no regrets at the end of it. What I didn’t get to, I’ll get to eventually, if it’s truly important. It’s a shift in perception brings relief, at last, from anxiety: satisfaction as the focus, and with that satisfaction comes peace.
Time spent in shrine is an offering. And the way we spend our time in general — not merely what we spend it on, but how we spend it — is an offering too, one that reverts to us, just as the reversion of food and drink offerings returns their benefit to the ones who offered them. The Kemetic word hotep means “offering” — and it also means “rest,” “satisfaction,” and “peace.” The more I ran around looking for peace, the less I found it. So let peace become my offering, and my offering becomes peace in its turn.
Em hotep, Bast, em hotep.
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June 29, 2009
Posted in Administrivia, Books
at 12:34 pm
by Shefyt
One of the things I’ve been meaning to do with this weblog is periodically post reviews, primarily of Kemetic-interest books and articles, although other things may also creep in occasionally. I’ve just posted my first review as a test run. FYI, these won’t all be current books — I thought it would be helpful for people to know about older, more obscure resources as well. Plus it’ll help me to keep track of what I’ve read.
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Posted in Books, Reviews: Nonfiction
at 12:24 pm
by Shefyt
Horus: Royal God of Egypt
By Samuel A. B. Mercer. London: Luzac & Co., 1942. Hardcover, 252 pages, line illustrations. [out of print]
I hunted this down because I was looking for information about the relatively obscure gods Heryshef and Heru-hekenu. It does indeed include snippets of information about Them, along with other lesser-known aspects and syncretizations such as Heru-Khenty-Khety and Heru-Amun, in addition to the more prominent Herus, such as Heru-wer and Heru-sa-Aset. There are over a hundred little line drawings of Heru and other gods, and an exhaustive list of epithets of Heru, so there are plenty of interesting bits of knowledge in this book.
On the down side, it’s rather dated — the author relies heavily on Budge, so be warned, and there’s a great deal of speculative history about the “people of Horus” coming to Egypt from somewhere in the Middle East, probably Arabia, which has been rejected by more contemporary studies. I honestly found it rather tedious whenever he began trying to trace a historical trajectory for anything, and there are three chapters of background before he really delves into Heru Himself. I was most interested in the chapters on Heru and the Names identified with or associated with Him; on the Eye of Heru; on representations of Heru; and the worship half of the chapter on theology and worship of Heru. (The theology part attempted to trace the development of Heru’s character through various stages, but given the author’s questionable history and the fact that he keeps conflating Heru-wer and Heru-sa-Aset in ways that I’m just not sure are accurate, I couldn’t bring myself to trust that portion of the chapter.) The chapter on places where Heru was worshipped got a bit listy, so I mostly skimmed it, but it’s certainly comprehensive.
The book is out of print and as of now [June 2009] doesn’t seem to be available online. Used copies are very expensive, so your best bet is probably to check it out of your local university library, unless you’re a Heru devotee who’s trying to acquire all possible resources for your personal library. It’s a really good compilation of data from many older sources (including a lot that aren’t in English); just be sure to double check things, especially when the author starts straying into interpretation.
[If you have access to JSTOR, there's a review from 1943 here, which basically sums up to "facts good, historical interpretation interesting but unsupported, beware of taking literary/Hellenistic sources over actual papyri/inscriptions." I'm amused that the reviewer calls the index "adequate" — damning with faint praise? — as I personally found it kind of sketchy. (It failed to include Bast at all, and She was definitely in there.)]
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June 18, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:01 am
by Shefyt
Some time ago, in the throes of one of my periodic attacks of “What should I do with my life?!” I was sitting before Amun-Ra’s shrine. And I asked Him, “What is ma’at?” (i.e., what would be the right path for me to follow).
Go and ask your Mother, He said, adding, almost as an afterthought, Ma’at is to follow the heart.
Last weekend, I was reading from Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature: The Late Period, and I came across the following lines, in the statue inscription of Nebneteru:
Happy is he who spends his life
In following his heart with the blessings of Amun!
In the footnotes, Lichtheim comments:
This sentence sums up the Egyptian concept of the good and blessed life. “Following the heart” (shemsu-ib) is to make the best and fullest use of what life holds: it is being active, generous, and joyful.
And I realized that I had completely misunderstood what Amun-Ra had meant by following the heart. I had thought that I should listen to the aches and pangs, that I should take the prickings of anxiety as a message, a warning, a prod to get me moving toward some other, “better” life…when instead ma’at is to listen to and to dwell in the heart’s joy in each moment. To live, to give, to create, to be open to all the good that is.
And of course, my Mother, Bast, is the Mistress of Joy.
May Bast guide my heart in its dance; may She open my eyes to the beauty everywhere around me; may She bless all that I touch and every word I speak.
Dua Netjer! Dua Bast!
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June 13, 2009
Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:38 am
by Shefyt
Driving home from work last evening, I was looking at the cumulus clouds piling high in the western sky, and they made me think of Amun — not Amun as the clouds themselves, but as the invisible wind that sculpts them into forms of exquisite beauty, the same force that lifts the heart, that inspires us to create beauty of our own.
O beautiful of plumes — dua Amun!
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June 10, 2009
Posted in Tending the Shrine, Thoughts and Reflections
at 2:20 pm
by Shefyt
The temptation is very strong to delete the first line of the previous post, considering how embarrassingly I’ve failed to live up to that aim. But that would be sort of dishonest, so I’ll leave it. At any rate, I got lost again, which is always so confusing, because when I’m most lost it always seems as though there’s someplace else I ought to be, and it’s not here — it’s anywhere but here — and I go frantic trying to answer that call…but it’s only when I stop looking for the place where I “should” be that I stop feeling lost and instead begin to feel at peace. You’d think that I’d learn after the third or fourth or tenth time. And it all sounds so simple and obvious when I write it like this, but when I’m in the throes of that desperation all I can think of is escape.
I thought that I wanted a writer’s hermitage, spare and clean and far away, all twilight and simplicity. And when the dust settled, I looked around and realized how much I’ve been neglecting the home that I have now, the place of my shrine, that I dreamed of making beautiful for Bast. Those are the two poles that keep pulling at me — far flight into the abstract and remote, and settling into the specificity of honoring the place where I am. But it’s not really as simple as a straightforward polarity. I need to balance both, to thread them through each other, warp and weft.
Two weekends ago, finally in recovery after a long stretch of the crazy, I took on some very overdue yardwork, cutting back the multiflora roses and mowing the trails to the brush piles. As I worked, I pledged to Bast that I would reclaim the overgrown and weed-choked places, that I’d make this land her well-loved temple after all. And in the days following that — the songs! Suddenly the floodgates opened, new songs began to pour through, and old songs in progress leaped closer to being done. Clearly this was a step down a good path, or at the very least a creative one.
Dua Netjer, Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
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