 | Ancient Egypt: Egyptian Divinity - Who's In Charge Here?By Ramona Louise Wheeler
There
is no one "head God" in the Egyptian pantheon, and this fact has
mystified, frustrated, confused, puzzled, amused and outraged monotheists
around the world for 2,500 years. Egyptian philosophy has been labeled with the
curious oxymoron of "spiritual materialism," and so dismissed as
primitive.
The
other "divine" forces of Nature are mysterious and seem miraculous,
yet are nevertheless bound by their own rules of logic and reality, and subject
to scientific comprehension. In the ancient view, that is their divine nature.
In our modern view, that is simply their physical nature. In our modern
theosophical training, we tend to equate divine and "magical," as
though God were some divine conjurer messing about with reality for whimsy
sake. But conscious will can change the laws of Nature. By all the laws of
divine reality, only winged beings can fly, but we have mastered the art in our
way, defying such divine law. Yet because of our religious training, we deny
ourselves the miracle of it since it is not levitation.
Egypt
was less concerned with magical tricks than achieving deeper understanding of
the miracle of existence. In our modern, monotheistic worldview, divinity is
separated out from everyday life, and concentrated in the single personality of
the anthropomorphized deity to whom we are related -- "Our Father" --
Zeus and family remote on Mt. Olympus, Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah in Their/His
celestial isolation. The physical space/time world in which we live is seen as
somehow "corrupted" in comparison to this celestial place. We are
supposedly here on Earth only to act as servants to this God on High.
To
see the path of the Egyptian in his/her lifetime, you must recognize how
different from this was their sense of the miracle of existence. Egyptians
preferred the divine nature of their own life-experience to contemplation of a
distant deity, and saw all reality as a manifestation of the Divine. The only
"corruption" was in intentions and act, those expressions of
"free will" for which only living souls have the capacity. The
Egyptian is ruled by his divine soul, not by a divine being separated and
remote from the world.
A
more modern example of the profound and profoundly subtle difference in
worldview between the Egyptian nature of the divine and monotheism rests in the
parable of Jesus and the episode of converting water into wine. In modern
terms, a "god" is one who can perform, as a divine conjuring trick, a
miracle such as turning water into wine. All divinity is concentrated in that
one being. We can be servants to that divinity, but we cannot be that divinity.
For
a man to do this is sleight of hand. Yet, the "miracle" of converting
water into wine is accomplished without ceasing by the humblest of creatures,
the simple yeast cells which "create wine out of water" as a natural
gesture of their existence. As monotheists, we are unimpressed by this natural
miracle. The yeast is supposed to create alcohol, so where's the miracle?
The
Egyptian considers the existence of the yeast cell creating wine, and sees in
that a manifestation of the divine presence enclosed in reality. They do not
"worship the yeast cell," but a universe that would accommodate both
such a creature as the yeast cell and a human to appreciate the wine. The
Egyptians related humans to the divinity of the entire universe, not just to a
remote, isolated deity of arbitrary will.
This
is also not an isolated nor indeed even an antiquated worldview. This sense of
the divinity of all reality is the underlying principle of Oriental religion
today. There is, however, a primary difference between the modern Orient and
the ancient Egyptian mind. The erasure of identity is the goal of Oriental
meditation, the complete dissolution of self into the bliss of undifferentiated
consciousness.
Egypt
saw the uniqueness of identity as the ground of divine nature, and identity was
the divinity of the soul. The purpose of life is to achieve and groom your own
identity, polishing yourself into the finest golden image of yourself of which
you are capable, your "Golden Horus name," and then carrying that
polished image into eternity, to shine there in the next life as illuminated as
the stars themselves.
The
difficulty with this philosophy for the peoples outside of Egypt was the
problem of the "spiritual democracy" implied in the Egyptian doctrine
of "I am divine as you are divine and we are divine together." The
difficulty with that arises when you have something that I want to take, like
desert tribes who want to take your crops to feed their children. If we are
spiritual equals, then I have to earn what I need from you. If we are both
servants of the One Divine Being, then that Master can direct one of his
servants to take the possessions of another servant, and the loser has to
declare it "the will of God." I can storm in, take what I want,
believing that "God instructed me." This is, alas, what the tribes of
the desert, swelled into nations of barbarian splendor, did to Egypt.
The
foremost Egyptologist of our time, John Romer, has made the observation that
everyone brings their own interpretation of ancient Egypt with them. He had
worked with archaeologists from three different nations, America, England, and
Germany, and each had a different Egypt. Like the elephant of the seven blind
men, ancient Egypt is too enormous for a single point of view. All
Egyptologists, however, have a single point of view in common: we are all
descendants of her conquerors, ancient and modern. The emotional need to reduce
the extent of the destruction has led to a general devaluation of her timeless
philosophy. That trend has been compensated in modern times by the need to see
that ancient world as a nation of supermen, in touch with the technology of the
stars.
No
civilization, modern or ancient, has successfully maintained as coherent or evenly
sustained cultural identity as the peoples of ancient Egypt. Even China is
three thousand years younger. This remarkable integrity has been attributed to
the stable environment of the Nile River valley, yet no modern nation has made
the Nile work for them as did The Children of the Sun. Khemm Ta, The Black
Land, does not yield forth her bounty for the Arab-based culture as she once
did for The Land of Love.
Her
ancient stability has been called stagnation. Her universality of image-based
communication is dismissed as primitive and one-dimensional. They did not build
lasers in ancient Egypt, but neither did they worship animals nor multiple
souls or gods. They were humanity's first true civilization and they,
themselves, want you to know that. The pride they felt for their nation, their
civilization, their lives, was deep and innocent, and beautifully expressed in
their art and writings. It is this pride and joy of living that has been
ignored and misinterpreted most often by scholars both ancient and modern.
The
primary, basic premise behind this author's assumption is that only a logical,
practically minded philosophy could hold together a nation with such total and
magically enduring coherency for so many millennia, through so many changes in
the world around them. If their images seem irrational, it must be in our
interpretation, not in their original intention and understanding. Seen with
this author's prejudice, the ancient imagery is as intact, coherent and logical
as Scientific American magazine -- all grounded, however, in their absolute
faith in the divine and eternal nature of the soul: Osiris. That is the only
improvable, illogical feature of their philosophy, transforming it with sudden,
transcendent light into a deeply profound spiritual teaching.
Ancient
Egyptians also utterly believed in the vital necessity of education, and this
was their undoing: the peoples who conquered them never quite got the story
right, and the resonance of their beliefs became the fragmented images of
genuinely primitive cultures, copies of copies of copies...
Wherever
possible, this author has drawn from direct sources from the artwork and words
of the ancient peoples themselves. What is most impressive about the stubborn
persistence of their words and images is that even now, thousands of years past
their prime, their message has survived despite how much time and the desert
have buried.
Even
this author's interpretation is corrupt; trust no one except the ancients' own
images to tell their story. But if you look at their world, their works and
their art using this guide, you will see their story more clearly, erasing the
years and distance between. Their images speak most directly. Whatever the
actual, absolute nature of the human soul, no one has ever pursued the language
and imagery of it with greater eloquence, art and style than The Children of
the Sun.
For more from and
about Ramona Louise Wheeler, please visit
http://members.aol.com/tokapu/Walkle01.htm.
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