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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Horus

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Imset (Imseti, Imsety) is one of the four sons of Horus the Elder whose heads topped the canopic jars after the 18th Dynasty.  From the First Intermediate Period through the 18th Dynasty, the stoppers were shaped in the likeness of the deceased.  These jars typically contained various organs of a mummified body.  This group of divinities was considered protectors of these organs which were necessary in the afterlife. Imset is another divinity wrongly placed the graveyard of the atheists.

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[I was asked recently to develop a talk which could be delivered as a sermon, using ancient Egyptian sacred texts and ideas.  Here is Part 2 of that talk. Read Part 1 here]

b2ap3_thumbnail_Osiris-2.JPGSo, what is all this about Osiris?  I don’t know about you, but there are some times when I have felt very beat up by life, even broken in pieces the way Set did Osiris.  I have felt lost, scattered all over like Osiris’ body parts all over Egypt.  I have felt swept by the flood downstream and out to sea, completely overwhelmed.  Like Isis, I have wandered from place to place and through the desert, trying to find all the missing pieces of myself and trying to figure out how to put them back together again.  Anyone else felt that too?  It feels dark, doesn’t it?  Everything out there begins to look like a crocodile, or a singing snake, maybe.  We wish we had a handbook for getting through the dark. 

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

b2ap3_thumbnail_khepertut.jpgWe are stardust, we are golden . . . Even though it’s ten days past the solstice, I’m still in a dreaming frame of mind.  An old friend appeared to me in a dream before I woke this morning.  She said, “I have a gift for you,” and placed in my hand a glowing blue scarab.  Delighted, I exclaimed, “Oh, a khepera!” Kheper (or Khepri or Khepera) is the Egyptian deity represented by the beetle which rolls its egg case from east to west, just like the sun.  I took this as a reminder from my very artistic friend that I should continue to create my life, keep on moving forward, keep my path on that of the dawn. 

The medium we all work with is the stuff of dreams – manu, primordial waters, or atum, original life force.  A pop song that my husband and I associate with our falling in love has a line that seems apropos, “I think I dreamed you into life.”  Seth (Jane Roberts, not the Egyptian Set) teaches us that everything must be dreamed of in the nonphysical inner world before we can bring it forth in this existence.  “Now, other planes and systems are as real and as unreal as your own.  They are all formed from inner vitality . . .” (The Early Sessions: Book 7 of The Seth Material by Jane Roberts, 1966-1967) Making my own life is a lot of responsibility, so I’ve spent the past decade or two trying to be more intentional, more conscious, of what I am creating.  

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

b2ap3_thumbnail_isis_horus_20141129-225317_1.jpgWhen I was about nine, my grandfather took a welding torch and created for my church a tall stand on which to set the Advent wreath in the sanctuary.  We had magnificent holly bushes in our yard, so my mother and I each year cut piles of dark, prickly leaves and red berries, then built the wreath ourselves.  None of my friends seemed to have ever heard of Advent, so I thought it was just for Lutherans.  The sermon each of the four weeks before Christmas kept our minds trained on the spiritual significance of the season, and a paper Advent calendar at home with little doors to open each day made me think maybe I should pay attention to it all. 

Nowadays I ponder the iconic maternal images of Mary and Isis, seasonally superimposed one on the other.  Each of them experienced difficult transitions to motherhood. Each struggled to hide her son away from those who would snuff out his life.  Each had enough protective magic to earn them the titles Queen of Heaven and Mother of God. 

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

b2ap3_thumbnail_isis_horus.jpgCome, the darkest night

Come, new light at dawn

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs

Only weeks after I began studying hieroglyphs last year I started to notice that my mind was working differently.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Something about reading words and sentences which can go backwards or forwards, in circles, or hopscotch around the space inside an oval or square will do that to you. 

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The medu neter (words of the gods) of the Egyptians took an iconographic form, rather than alphabetic.  The standard Gardiner list gives 750 signs, but there are far more than that.  Some of these represent ideas (ideograms), some actual things (pictograph), and some of them are phonetic (phonogram).  Mastering navigation of this lush subtropical written jungle took ancient scribes a fair number of years.  The journey is even more daunting for the modern student since we do not live with most of the items that were common visual parlance for the Egyptians.

Yet, the more I learn of these medu neter, the more I see.  It’s that whole-brain b2ap3_thumbnail_hathorglyph.jpgthing kicking in.  A daily life hawk becomes the glyph (hor) for a ruler, and next thing you know, the ruler is a hawk, a god soaring high in the sky in golden noonday brilliance.  After that, the hawk denotes strength, authority, power and protection.  Then the glyph itself becomes powerful, especially as an amulet, perhaps a bit of turquoise or carnelian set in electrum.  This one (at right) is actually a glyph for Hathor.  The hawk is inside the glyph for house or temple.  Thus, the goddess' name means, "house of Horus."

A step further and we easily realize that a human with the head of a snake is not a biological fantasy, but the symbol of a person or entity with the ferocious protective impulse of a deadly cobra.  A segmented pillar with arms (djed) is not just a cartoonish rendering of Osiris, but a statement about the integrity of someone represented by a backbone.  Everywhere you look in Egyptian art, the glyphs turn up, from the positioning of dancers’ arms to a temple roof which is actually the glyph for the sky.

b2ap3_thumbnail_sedgebee.jpgGoose, garment fringe, body parts, jars, stars, water ripples, feathers, mountains, burning lamps, even a stylized placenta – all of these pictograms are meaning extracted from daily life.  When used as hieroglyphs the process has spiraled around to impose still more layers of meaning onto the life that we experience.  It is in the interstices between these layers, achieved in meditative, altered and reflective states, where we discover the divine. 

You don’t have to read hieroglyphs to find inspiration.  Notice your own sacred symbols. Get down your personal medu neter in colored pastels, stones, musical notes, or movement.  Bypassing the left brain temporarily can stir your soul to as-yet undiscovered joys.  Your life will begin to look more like art, art with beautiful deeper meaning.

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