Vincent Bridges

PART ONE

“One Law for the Ox and Lion is Oppression.”

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Imagine a hawk circling high above the edge of the desert, a dark speck against the faint blue of the pre-dawn sky. The hawk soars higher, striking the first rays of the rising sun, and its feathers flame suddenly — glint and flash, harbingers of the sun’s arrival — transforming the bird of prey into an omen or a message from Re-Harrakte, phoenix soul of the sun itself. Dawn becomes myth; and morning in Heliopolis, as the Greeks called it a thousand years into its decline, was the time of worship. The sun, in all its forms and effects, had always been the “one” god of the ancient Egyptian city of Anu, “The Place of the Pillar of the Sun.”

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I. Notes on the Great Myth

We see the religion of ancient Egypt through the filters of the royal cult and the theology of immortality. Consequently, much of the marginally related, but nonetheless significant, material has been lost or overlooked. The Great Myth, the mythological framework in which Egyptian Theology functions and gains expression, was unstated; perhaps because it was secret, jealously held by the temple initiates, or possibly because it was so well known as to be universal. Recovery of this lost Great Myth supplies a pattern in which the chaotic pieces of Egyptian mythology can be comfortably accommodated.
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In the theology of the priests of Heliopolis, we catch a glimpse of mankind’s earliest spiritual understanding of the nature of light. Those clever theologians managed to describe its relativistic quality — nothing with any matter at all can go faster than light — in terms of a mythological unity of great depth and philosophical complexity, the “operative and creative power” imagined by the Egyptians as the great god RA.

This powerful archetypal image was crafted by the rehket-sa, or “assembly of sages,” of Heliopolis, with the help of a group of beings known as the Henmemet, or “The Shining Ones.” From earliest times, (the spelling of the name of the city itself, Annu — a finned spear-head, a jar and the symbol for city — suggests the place where the space-ships land their cargo). Heliopolis seems to have been a very cosmopolitan place, one where several races and a few interplanetary species mingled freely. The spelling of the name Henmemet suggests a group of physical beings, definitely not spirits, who are “filled with light.” This phrase re-occurs as the priests of RA try to describe life for the departed believer in the Boat of a Million Years; in a sense, the followers of RA would become like the Henmemet and travel the stars fed and clothed with light. Perhaps it is these celestial voyagers who educated the sages of Annu in the arts of mathematics, geometry, physics, astronomy, and so on through the familiar list of the early dynasties’ unexpected sophistication. Wherever they learned or discovered the information, the priests of Annu were the first humans to code these physical constants, clues to the structure of the universe, into a mythical theology that is descriptive of the actual nature of both physical and psychological reality.

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By Vincent Bridges

Far up the Nile in Upper Egypt, sometime during the fourth millennium BCE, three great confederations, formed around the cult centers of what our earliest references call “the living gods,” unified to create the first great Egyptian kingdom. Eventually, this federation would spread north and south to conquer the Two Lands of the Nile and become the 1st Dynasty. In the south, a cult of Horus the Elder formed around Edfu and Neken and grew into its own state. Just north of Neken, in the bend of the great river, the living god was a goddess, Hathor, the consort of Horus. Since time immemorial, far back into the mists of Egyptian prehistory, the Lady of the House of Heru sailed down the river each year to meet her mate, Horus the Elder, at the ancient mound of Behdet at Edfu and celebrate the sacred marriage.

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Nestled neatly within the Luxor Temple complex is the Sufi Mosque of Abu ‘l-Haggag.

To understand the significance of the Abu ‘l-Haggag, it is essential to understand the lineage of the founder’s Alexandrian teachers. At the time Yusuf Abu ‘l-Hagggag, travelled to Alexandria to learn the mysteries, the city was a meeting place for all the foremost Sufi masters from the eastern and western lands of Islam. Among his many Sufi contacts was al-Jazuli, the leader of the Madyani brotherhood who became his teacher. When Abu ‘l-Haggag returned to Luxor, he created a zawiyah (school) within a mosque which had as its very foundation, the Temple of Luxor. He died in 1243 and is considered to be one of the greatest shaykhs of Southern Egypt.

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By DARLENE, PRIESTESS OF SEKHMET

“As the mighty bones creek and the ancient One stirs, let the Djedi return. This is the historical moment of our awakening and our call. The impulse and the need for us to ritualize these events in global celebration arise, naturally, in resonance with the mythic awakening of the archetype and because it is now alive in each of us.” MoiRA Timms

Let’s face it, what we are about to do is very unusual. This adventure is not for everyone. For some, it’s the culmination of a lifetime of experiences as if life prepared them just for this moment. Others may participate differently, as witnesses or chroniclers of this unique event. But whatever meaning this expedition may hold, each participant has an honored place. We are all guided by an inner knowing. To activate an ancient bridge between Orion (the Hunab Ku) and the Giza Pyramids to aid the Mayan Solar Initiation Journey towards reawakening the Cosmic Human is no easy task. We must make preparations.
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Re-membering the Center
by MoiRa Timms © 1994

Centering

The two universal forces that most concerned ancient peoples seem to have been those of cosmos (harmony, and the organized, known order) and chaos (the forces of entropy, confusion, and the unknown). Preserving cosmos and repelling chaos have kept us busy and preoccupied since time immemorial. When the magnetic Center that controls the periphery fails to hold, things fall apart and the chaos that was in the beginning begins to return. Chaos, of course, has always been the most feared of all the primal powers. Beyond the known order–the light of the campfire, the walls of the city, the edge of the forest or horizon–loomed the unknown, the domain of darkness, danger, and demons.

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THE DJED AND THE TREE OF LIFE

The Djed seems to be a pre-dynastic “fetish” which somehow was absorbed into the Egyptian language as the ideograph for stability. The best we can say is that in its original connotations, the djed was connected with fertility, the supernatural life energy of the grain itself. When the First Dynasty priests began their grand synthesis of Egyptian theology, the djed became one of the fourteen power or “kaw” of the Great God RA. Each power was given to one of the Memphis triad, and so Ptah ended up with the djed. (more…)