June 4, 2010
Friday findings: Rock God
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.)
December 7, 2009
After the snowfall
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!
June 29, 2009
Review: Horus: Royal God of Egypt
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.)]