Pantheon - The Egyptians

By Robin Herne

Pantheon - The Egyptians is aimed at the person who has an interest in the beliefs and rituals of Ancient Egypt but has yet to put ideas into practice. With enough detail to also appeal to the more experienced practitioner, Robin Herne's new book interweaves history with theology, philosophy, ethics, and mysticism, with some practical advice on how to engage with the deities and spirits of the ancient land. Part of a new Pantheon series from Moon Books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: May 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785355059

Robin Herne

Robin Herne is an educator, poet, storyteller, poet, artist, dog-owner and Druid. He has written numerous articles for Pagan magazines, has appeared in television documentaries and is the author of Old Gods, New Druids, Bard Song and A Dangerous Place. He lives in Suffolk, UK.

Book preview

subjects.

Chapter One

Ancient Egyptian History

In dividing Egyptian history from mythology, we are perpetuating a rather modern conception that these are two quite distinct categories – actual events in the real world and imagined events in a symbolic world. The further back in human history we go, and with Egypt that is a remarkably long stretch, the more closely intertwined these two strands become. However, for the sake of convention let us first consider those events mostly involving mortals and later move on to those involving immortal beings. In laying out the history of Egypt it would be easy to become lost in the convoluted corridors of over five thousand years’ worth of events. The intention is to avoid bogging the reader down with an excess of political turmoil, artistic innovations, and scientific discoveries but rather to give sufficient background to the changing cultural milieu to help place the mythology in a wider context.

The geographical region we now know as Egypt was once referred to by its native inhabitants as Kemet, which means the Black Land. Some advocates of African spirituality, such as Molefi Asante (2015), see this as an early reference to the colour of its populations’ skin. Whilst there were certainly a lot of black Africans living in that land, the same is true of every other country in Africa which mostly take their names from all sorts of things other than the skin tone of their populations. In the ancient world skin colour was not considered an issue or the bedrock of identity in the way it is in the West these days. Western (predominantly white) historians tend to opt for the explanation that the blackness refers to the colour of the fertile soil deposits left in the aftermath of the Nile inundation. The Egyptians themselves may have had an entirely different explanation from either of the modern ones.

The mythos tells that the chief goddess Aset (called Isis by the Romans and Greeks) was left widowed by her own murderous brother. When declaring her intention to find her husband’s corpse, the other deities sent her seven magical scorpions to accompany and assist her. Archaeologists unearthing early Egyptian history found evidence for two monarchs whose actual names are unknown, but who are referred to as King Scorpion I and II respectively due to the hieroglyph of an arachnid on their seals. Scorpion II (who may have been King Nar-Mer or possibly Menes) may well be the man responsible for uniting upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt. Was he one of the magical scorpions that served the will of the wandering goddess? Maybe, or perhaps that is just too whimsical for words!

The unification of the two kingdoms under the first dynasty of pharaohs took place somewhere around 3100BCE, which is also approximately the same period in which the hieroglyphic script began to develop. This pictographic means of communication comes under the aegis of the ibis-headed deity Tehuti and his consort Seshet, goddess of the library. That a religion should recognise the sanctity of libraries and reverence a guardian spirit of them is a thing of wonder in itself. What must she make of the contempt for libraries expressed by recent waves of British politicians, who regard the funding of such resources as a necessary loss during times of so-called austerity? Speaking of lost glories, the marvel that was the Library of Alexandria could trace its roots back to the Egyptian devotion to Seshet and her collection of papyri. Tutelary spirit of architecture, mathematics, astronomy and literacy, she is also the divine precursor to that other famed child of Alexandria, the philosopher and academic Hypatia. A lecturer in the University of the city, her brutal murder in the March of 415CE has been marked as a martyr’s day by people seeing her as an icon of feminism, rationalism, and paganism alike.

Geography played a significant role in shaping the spirituality of Kemet. The cycles of the Nile formed the basis of the festival calendar, with a number of deities directly connected to the mighty waters. Hapi is the chief deity of the Nile, an androgynous entity depicted with blue skin, who was the embodiment of the annual inundation of flood waters that usually occurred around late June or early July. Whilst a lot of modern texts refer to Hapi as male, ancient artistic depictions combine both sexual characteristics so this section of the book will utilise the gender-neutral pronouns they and theirs when talking of Hapi or other deities who do not fit into a male-female dyad. This is not done to please Hapi, who has expressed no concern one way or another over issues of pronouns to this author at least. Rather it is in recognition that this pronoun issue has become a highly contentious one in the last few years and that some readers might feel uncomfortable if male gender is imposed on a being that is not, per se, male. That said, it is debatable to what extent any deity is male or female in the same way that a human is perceived to be.

The division of the land into two kingdoms was also reflected in the mythical dimension. The fertile delta of Lower Egypt was under the guardianship of both hawk-headed Heru and the cobra goddess Wadjet. The long stretch of Upper Egypt fell beneath the shadow of the vulture wings of Nekhbet, who ensured that the dark soil forming strips along the river banks remained fertile. The much larger reaches of the blazing desert, itself an Egyptian word derived from the red colour of the parched earth, was the unenviable dominion of the ginger deity Setekh, uncle to Heru.

The land of Kemet was formed of forty-two tribal areas called sepatu. There were twenty-two located in Upper Egypt and twenty in the Lower kingdom, each with their own hieroglyphic standard and local deities. For example, the 13th sepat of Upper Egypt was Atef-Khent (called Lycopolis by the Greeks) was the protectorate of the wolf-headed Wepwawet. Some people interpret Wepwawet as jackal-headed, but he comes to me as a desert wolf, an issue we will return to in the chapter on deities. This structure echoes into the afterlife, where the soul of the recently deceased arrives in the hall of judgement to stand before the forty-two Assessors who each ask a question concerning the individual’s moral behaviour in life. Each of the sepatu had a governor, akin to a mayor, called a heri-tep a’a some of whom inherited their positions and some of whom were appointed. Democratic election does not appear to be a phenomenon of old Kemet. The 42 Assessors might have been the first governors of each sepatu, raised to a new position post-mortem.

Egyptian history is divided into dynastic periods. Manetho, a priest from the third century BCE, recorded the passage of 31 dynasties of pharaohs. These royal families did not rule consecutively but, just to complicate the picture, some ruled different regions of Egypt simultaneously. The first and second dynasties compose the Archaic Period and are charted from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, appearing roughly 3200 years before the start of the Common Era, which is marked as the theoretical birth of Jesus. The close of the second dynasty in the year 2686BCE ushers in the start of the Old Kingdom dynasties, consisting of four families reigning in turn until the year 2181BCE. During this period the supreme ruler was referred to as a king rather than a pharaoh, though the practice of viewing the ruler as a living incarnation of deity begun during this time. We know this through priestly records, which act to a large extent as the formal voice of the court. What we don’t know is the view of the ordinary Egyptian worker – recording the views of the working classes is an extremely recent practice in the keeping of human history. The king may have wanted to be regarded as a god, but whether all of his citizens saw him as such is a separate and currently unanswerable question.

For many modern people the question of the divinity of kings is purely academic. However, for those 21st century people with a faith in the ancient deities and the teachings preserved by their early scribes, it is one that needs considering. Do deities incarnate in fleshly form or produce children with humans (such as Alexander the Great was commonly believed to be), or is this simply a delusion of egomaniacal tyrants? Without straying too far into another culture, it may be worth contemplating the Roman attitude to this issue. In the Latin-speaking world all humans were regarded as having a divine spark, which for men was referred to as a genius and women as a juno. This spark for many people may have been quite dim, but the prayers and offerings of others could help fan it to a brighter state. During those phases of Roman history when emperors demanded worship and had temples built to themselves, part of the rationale was that vast numbers of people engaging in the legally required acts of worship would swell the genius of the emperor and thus aid his spirit in guiding his mortal mind to sagacious and judicious acts that would strengthen the empire. Given what we now know of some god-emperors, it is hard to credit that all this worship did much more than swell already gargantuan and delusional egos into taking ever more unhinged actions. Exactly the same could be seen throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries with our more demented world leaders who clearly want to be worshipped by their populaces. The Egyptians subscribed to the notion of a multi-aspected human entity (an idea further discussed in Chapters Two and Six), some parts of which could benefit from the reverence of the living.

What actually is worship, or dua to use the Egyptian term? Worship comes from the Anglo-Saxon word weorth-scope, which means to give value or worth to something or someone. The act of giving value can be done in a variety of ways – we can tell other people that we love them, praise them as intelligent or brave or kind; we value objects or services by the amount of money we are prepared to part with to obtain them; we can indicate how much we value a person or a pet simply by the amount of time we want to spend in their company, or how much we value an activity by the duration of time spent engaging in it.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term habitus, which we will return to later in the book, but in brief it is a set of ingrained habits that not only structures life but also shapes identity. To an extent someone’s personality drives the kinds of habits they develop, but those habits in turn start to change and develop the personality. The significance of this idea at this juncture is that worth-scope could well be considered a form of habitus. To give a secular example of how the process of giving worth shapes life (and how the end of giving worth can alter life, often for the worse) please imagine an elderly man, Bob Jones, who has an old dog, Patch. Bob loves Patch, dotes on him and has lived with him for fifteen years. This devotion between man and dog shapes Mr Jones’ life, gives it pattern or habitus – he walks Patch every morning and evening and hurries home when out shopping to ensure that Patch is not alone for too long; once a fortnight he goes to the pet shop to buy dog food and every Christmas gets Patch a new chew toy; he puts aside money not only for the pet food but for visits to the veterinary clinic. One day Patch dies. Overnight Bob no longer needs to get up early to go walkies and has no evening walks to rush home for either, and gets less exercise as a result. He no longer chats to the fellow dog walkers he used to pass each day nor to the cashier at the pet shop, becoming a little lonelier and more isolated in the process. Bob lives alone and Patch was the only living being he regularly spoke to in the evenings, now most days he is virtually silent. With Patch gone Bob no longer has any physical contact with another living being – stroking his dog, holding his paw and so on were little joys each day in an old man’s life which he now no longer has. The lack of tactile presence can be one of the most crippling losses a human can experience. He will, of course, save a fair amount of money now he is no longer buying dog chow, paying vet bills and so forth, but this spare cash may seem scant comfort to him.

That Jones had valued his dog had transformed the shape of his life, just as the departure of Patch has changed it again. If we can accept that one little old dog has such a significant effect on someone’s life, how much greater a change comes into a person’s life with the birth of a beloved child, or finding the love of their life, or being bowled over by the presence of a Divine being who chooses them? To truly value another being, of whatever sort, is change not only the pattern of our life but also our very sense of self and identity.

In our cynical modern age religious worship has taken on shades of servile bowing and scraping, which it need not possess at all. In which context did ancient peoples worship their kings, emperors, or pharaohs? For some it may have been largely a box ticking exercise that had to be gone through for fear of repercussions if they opted out, for others it may have been a genuine reverence of a living deity, whilst yet others may have adopted a practical approach that anything which might have made a ruler wiser and more generous was worth a try.

A more vital question is how this translates into the 21st century – there are no longer pharaohs in Egypt (though some individuals in other parts of the world lay claim to that title), but should devotees of the old deities make efforts to reverence the spirit of whoever leads the country in which they live? The prospect of having to worship any of the recent Prime Ministers makes this British author mildly nauseous, but maybe by not directly addressing the spirits of the individuals important to us (be that at a personal level, or a governmental one) we are missing a significant aspect of the culture we draw from? We live in a more democratic age in the West and many parts of the East, and this author cannot imagine many people wishing to return to the days of serried ranks bowing their knees before a super-rich few (though undoubtedly many of our current super-rich elite would quite enjoy that, and I shall judiciously avoid any mention of celebrity culture and populist wealthy politicians and media magnates who snap their fingers and have legions bowing before them), however more people might be willing to make offerings for the soul-growth of their various loved ones irrespective of social class.

The first king of the Old Kingdom was Djoser, who had the first step pyramid built at Saqqara. Subsequent rulers of this time went on to build many of the other amazing pyramids, temples, and monuments that stand to this very day. Science, architecture, metallurgy, medicine, and many other complex skills flourished during this period. The end of the Old Kingdom led to the emergence of the First Intermediate Period, though there is some historical ambiguity over whether there were four dynasties during this period or they are better understood as an overspill of the previous phase. The Egyptians themselves did not break their own history down into these phases; rather they are an historical structure used by modern academics to more readily arrange confusing episodes of ancient history.

The Middle Kingdom commenced with the eleventh dynasty and lasted for over 140 years; a period marked by an element of internal strife with battles between rival royal families. This period is also known for having the first verifiable female pharaoh, Sobekneferu (there is an earlier contender for this role, but she may be apocryphal).

When Queen Sobekneferu died in 1802BCE, seemingly without heirs, the Middle Kingdom started to dwindle down and eventually entered the Second Intermediate Period in 1650BCE with the dominance of the Hyksos, a group of uncertain nationality whose influence on Egypt will be discussed shortly. The period ended with the expulsion of the much-resented Hyksos and the restoration of native rulers in the guise of the seventeenth dynasty. We will return to the question of the Hyksos further into the book given that they had a significant impact on theology and mythology.

The New Kingdom was, in effect, a return to the old rule and an advance in the power and status of Egypt. Just as the Middle Kingdom had Sobekneferu, so the New Kingdom had Queen Hatshepsut to demonstrate the level of power that a woman could wield. This era also introduced a new force to Egyptian religion, maybe even to world religion although that’s open to contention, in the form of Akhenaten’s introduction of monotheism. A deeply divisive character, he came to the throne under the name of Amenhotep IV but declared a spiritual conversion which led him to see the Aten sun disc as the one and only deity. In a move that foreshadowed the world to come, his devotion was so intense that he wished to impose it on everyone else. During his reign in the mid-1300sBCE Akhenaten closed down the other temples and broke up the priesthoods. This can be seen as at least partly a political move to countermand an overly powerful theocratic hierarchy, as well as an act of religious zeal. After seventeen years on the throne, Akhenaten went to whatever the afterlife had in store for him and the Aten cult rapidly began to wane in popularity as the old ways quickly re-established. By 1332BCE Tutankhamun, a minor figure in the grand list of rulers, had dropped the Aten-element of his initial name and embraced the old gods by adopting the Amun-element. The choice of Amun may have been