12.29.09
Posted in Festivals, Netjeru, The Wild Sky at 2:14 pm by Shefyt
This morning, before getting in the car to go to work, I paused outside the garage to look up. Above the branches of the pine tree across the road, silhouetted against the gradually lightening sky — a pale swath of delicate cloud veil and a single star, golden and startlingly bright.
Later, during the drive, I looked up again, out the car’s window. The dawn sky was filled with clouds in serried ranks, as if marching from the east, advancing across the land. The Gods are in procession, I thought, on this day of festival, as the Divine Cow raises up the sun.
Today is a holy day, the day that Ra establishes His place in the heavens. Look up!
Dua Nut, Mother of the Gods! Dua Ra in Your rising! Nekhtet!
Permalink
12.08.09
Posted in Netjeru, Poetry and Prayers, Stalking Beauty at 11:15 am by Shefyt
After yesterday’s post on the gifts of Set’s storms, a thought occurred to me, although it’s actually rooted in a realization from the day of the snowfall itself: from standing in the shrine room, having just offered candle flame and rum-flavored iced tea to Set, gazing out the window at the darkening afternoon, and being struck with the sudden beauty of it, the gentle and relentless descent of the snow, the world beneath the clouds possessed of a profound stillness and yet also of a dynamic energy, a subtly electric tension.
There’s a danger in constructing a false dichotomy where Set is all wildness and chaotic upheaval and Heru is all beauty and transformed, purified order. Like the Taoist yin-yang symbol, even though They’re opposites, They also contain the seeds of each other. Heru has His wildness too, in the tearing claws, in the battering power of unfettered wings, in the unleashed might of the King as warrior, like a lion in the carnage of battle. And Set is beautiful in and of Himself, not merely for what He gives way to. “You are beautiful,” I told Him in the shrine room that afternoon, awed. It seemed to amuse Him. So here are a few more words on the beauty of Set.
Praising the Beauty of Set
O Set, I praise Your great and implacable beauty:
in the looming majesty of the thunderhead,
in the shivery hush of snow falling at twilight,
in the lightning-edged whorls of the fractal,
in the wind-carved austerity of the desert at high noon,
in the fierce and subtle glitter of its sands.
Your ecstasy is in the howl of passion, of exertion,
in the stretch of the body driven beyond all rational limits,
in the hot, animal confusion of desire and of war.
Your rage is in the cold, burning weight of the iron blade,
perfect in balance, the shuddering slip of the faultline,
the swift-swelling wave that rises, curling and smooth, to block out the sky.
In all of Your wonder and Your terror, You are beautiful:
You are all things exotic and rare and deeply strange.
Your hands are scented with myrrh, with frankincense,
with perfumes from far-off lands that have not yet been named.
Son of Nut, Your smile is the nuclear flare of an exploding star,
expending its light and heat without limit into the black void of space.
You are the crocodile-jawed storm of destruction,
You are the raw shout of defiance snatched away by the teeth of the gale,
and You are the defiance that remains sealed within the heart, silent and pure.
In Your two hands, You hold despair and hope.
In all things, O Set, You are beautiful.
Dua Set! Nekhtet!
Permalink
12.07.09
Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, Thoughts and Reflections at 9:12 am by Shefyt
In my last post I was talking about the darkness of winter — and then the day after that was dazzling, brilliant with sun on the half-melted, lacy snow crust and on the jewels of ice and wet snow clinging to the trees, the road shining white with salt and the sky a crystalline, piercing blue. Winter is the darkest time, but in some moments it can also be the brightest as Set, the Lord of Storms, passes through and then departs, trailing a glorious, transfigured beauty in His wake. Without the storm, we’d never see this radiant and transformed world; without His rivalry with Set, Heru would never be a true king, tested and tempered. So honor Set for His wild strength that shakes the sky; honor Heru Who arises in splendor.
Dua Set! Dua Heru! Nekhtet!
Permalink
10.07.09
Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, Thoughts and Reflections at 3:00 pm by Shefyt
I went out for a walk along the canal today — a perfect windy autumn day, leaves flying, the sunlight glittering from a thousand ripples on the riffling water, a day that was made for joy. And as I walked, I began to pray to Heru-hekenu: “May You lift me up. May You lift me above fear, above depression, above anxiety, above anger — may You lift me on Your shining wings as You soar toward the sky, singing the praises of Netjer, Your beautiful fragrance pouring down onto the world.”
Netjer praising Netjer? came the response, soft and subtle.
“Everything,” a pause as the thought unfolds, “…praises itself.”
And then an impression like a slow, quiet smile. True.
So praise yourself today, as the tree revels in the arch of its branches, as the drifting clouds sing the glory of water and air, as Netjer loves and honors Itself — praise yourself as a child of God, beautiful and beloved. Even if something within you refuses believe it, say the words anyway. Words have power — what you speak moves that much closer to reality.
I praise myself as a singer of songs for Netjer, as a dreamer, as a good friend, as a lover of cats, as one who serves with joy. I praise the legs that carry me, the hands that do Netjer’s work, the senses that perceive, and the mind that remembers, draws connections, and invents. I praise the lungs that breathe and the heart that beats, giving me life. I praise all my hopes and longings, all my strivings and surrenders, and all the possibilities hidden within me that are yet to be born.
Dua Heru of Praises! Nekhtet!
Permalink
10.05.09
Posted in Netjeru, Parks and Rivers at 8:04 am by Shefyt
Last week I walked up to Marquand Park one day at lunch, to visit its threadleaf Japanese maple tree. It’s my favorite tree in the park, decked in patches of moss and lichen fans, with its wriggling gray branches twisting and turning intricately upon themselves until they erupt into radiating domes of leaves as fine and soft as grass. Standing beneath it is like being inside a hill of air and branches, looking up through the shelter of a sheer, living veil to catch fragmentary glimpses of sky.
Maybe that’s why it’s the place I go to when I want to feel close to Geb. Beneath my feet, there’s the soil, rain-moist, black, and crumbled, and the lush yet delicate grasses that grow in that green shade; beneath my hands, the springy coils of the tree’s limbs catch and shift with the rising wind; above my head, the arch of the tree echoes and yearns for the arch of heaven. A verdant place at the heart of the cosmos, where earth and air and sky all meet in vibrant life, sometimes moving, sometimes still, always at peace.
And Father Earth smiles, wordless presence, unfathomable and comforting as the ground that supports me, that cradles me — and Bast my Mother twines Herself through the branches above and behind me, a flicker of stirring breeze through my hair, the warmth of Her regard like a silent purr.
In thanks, I give energy back to the tree, with a prayer for its old and fragile branches to survive the winter’s snow and ice:
May you be strong to endure the wind and the coming winter.
May you be flexible to dance with the storms.
May you live. May you live. May you live.
And as I open my eyes, a bright lance of sun dazzles me, great Ra reaching down through the trees, through the leaves to touch my face.
Dua Netjer! Dua Geb! Nekhtet!
Permalink
06.18.09
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!
Permalink
06.13.09
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!
Permalink
03.30.09
Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty at 3:47 pm by Shefyt
Starting a new effort to post daily, even if it’s just a few lines….
I finally got caught up at work, and it was a beautiful day, so I went hunting for flowers on my lunch break. And boy did I find them! Winter aconite and spring beauty, daffodils and periwinkle, magnolia and forsythia and some shrub with small, pale, drooping flowers that I couldn’t identify but that smelled amazing. And it’s still not quite April! Dua Netjer, nekhtet!
Offered blue hyacinths and white chocolate with vanilla to Bast in shrine last night, in the midst of the fierce thunderstorm that blew through at sunset. I guess this is our end of the Midwest snow storms. I didn’t realize it until this morning, but yesterday and today are a festival of Set, so I think I’ll make him an offering tonight as well.
Permalink
02.12.09
Posted in Creative Fire, Netjeru, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 10:37 am by Shefyt
A wild morning — high wind; heavy clouds parting to show glimpses of the perfect clarity of the sky beyond; a delicate veil of mist across the hilltops lit up shimmering by the rising amber flame of the sun; and something in the quality of the light catching in last fall’s leaves, on the tawny grass and the bare-branched trees, so that the world took on an orange cast beneath the dark gray, sculptured sky. A tigerish morning, grrr.
The last few days have felt magical, numinous. I don’t know why. The season? The fact that I’m gearing up to work seriously on my Sau studies again? Hormones from my period? For whatever reason, everything seems possible — and then I fall back into one or more of my sludgy bad habits, until I just want to bite myself for stupidity. Zep Tepi — put down the bad, pick up the good, and start again. So here we go.
One of today’s festivals is the Procession of Nesert, flame goddess, Eye of Ra.It brings me back to the idea of fire, tigers, burning. Good old William Blake. A tiger day, or possibly a lynx day — lynx-fierce, lynx-secretive. Way back before I had really discovered Bast or begun studying Kemet, my personal pantheon included a goddess Who I knew only as the Lady of the Secret Inner Flame. I think now that She was, in fact, Bast. And Bast, of late, has been giving me tiny reminders: Take time for yourself. Be more secret. Out of the hidden, out of the inward, out of the mysterious unseen, the soul is restored to life and creativity arises, like the Bennu bird, singing.
Blue sky now, faint sunlight, and the wind a crazed tea-kettle shrieking past my window. There’s a place I want to go to at lunchtime — the top of the wooded slope looking out over the lake, a place of water and trees and stone and wind and sky, as close as I can get to hilltop or mountaintop on a half-hour walk. The path there has been closed for some kind of construction for months; I’ll have to see if it’s open today, or at least accessible. And then — who knows?
Permalink
01.08.09
Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections at 8:15 am by Shefyt
So as you might be able to guess from the last two posts (if the name of the blog hasn’t already given it away), rivers are almost certainly going to feature prominently here. Part of it is that I tend to experience Bast in an extremely riparian aspect. She’s not only the Lady of Fire but Lady of the Waters — Huntress among the reeds, flash of sunlight dazzling from the ripples, the breath of cool, green life lifting a scattering of waterfowl toward the sky. Some of my earliest — and still most profoundly moving — conversations with Her took place at the mouth of the Long Slip Canal in Hoboken, gazing out over the Hudson as I waited for my train to arrive, watching the intermittent birds and the sunset’s reflection burning across the glass-windowed face of Manhattan and the slow wavelets lapping at the abandoned pilings, and asking, “Why Egypt?”
Because everywhere is Egypt, She said to me. Everywhere the ducks fly, everywhere the water flows, everywhere the sun’s light falls.
I’ve been trying to think of a word for what the river means to me. Metaphor isn’t quite it, although it does partake of metaphor. I’ve used the river before as an image to describe my conception of Netjer, the fluid, often arbitrarily demarcated boundaries that on another level blend into unity, not just tributaries flowing into a larger watercourse but the entirety of the river basin and all that it contains. (A shift in perception: Is the slow, weed-choked widening in the stream separate from the satin-slick surge of current where the channel suddenly narrows? Where does one state transition into the next? And would the river be the same without the shape of the hillsides that funnel runoff into it, or the species that live within and around it, or the wind patterns that bring the rain? And yet you can point at the river, naming it as a singular entity, and doing so is both informative and useful.) The river is connection, like the image of the world-and-heavens-spanning Tree that it’s branching structure reflects; it’s journey, and in that it’s also life in the sense of arising, passing through different states and environments, and merging at last into an unfathomable depth, or else evaporating into the sky. It’s life as well in that its waters sustain the life around it, life in that it cradles and contains life within it.
I live now — and have lived for nearly all of my life — in a watershed valley. The brook that cuts across my property flows into a stream that feeds the North Branch of the Raritan and thus the Raritan itself, and ultimately ends in Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, if it can be said to ever truly end. I grew up playing by streamsides, and so I guess the sound and movement of the water got into me early. And the colors — fierce green of the tender new grass around a tiny spring-fed trickle, early in the year before the fields have really come back; mellow amber of the sun’s light on the rounded, leaf-shrouded stones of the river bottom; slatey or silvery or midnight blue flashes where the water’s surface captures the sky. So to me the centrality of the river to the world of Kemet, the way that Egypt and the Nile define each other, is an important point of personal congruence, a resonance that makes me feel at home.
One of Bast’s more obscure epithets is Shet, She of the Pool, and that’s one of the many faces of Her joy: the coolness, the lightness, the vivid sensation, the liquid shiver of delight. And I could probably go on and on at great length about where and how this aspect merges into some of Her other ones — Eye of Ra, Lady of the Perfume Jar, nurse and protector of the King, Firstborn of Tem — but that’s probably better suited for a book (someday!) than for the blog.
What lifts me up? I echoed in my last post.
She does.
Permalink
