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.