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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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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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…)