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| In The Golden Bough, Professor Frazer shows that the pig was tabooed because it was at one time a sacred animal identified with Osiris. Once a year, according to Herodotus, pigs were sacrificed in Egypt to the moon and to Osiris. The moon pig was eaten, but the pigs offered to Osiris were slain in front of house doors and given back to the swineherds from whom they were purchased. | |||||||||||
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Joyful abandonment and
ecstatic revelry can be considered a proper reaction to an annual
celebration of the rhythms of nature and the succession of the
seasons. The rhythm of Egyptian life was the rhythm of the Nile where the royal lineage, the authority to govern, religion and science were intrinsically interwoven in Ancient Egypt during its eleven thousand years of existence. Each year there were three New Year’s Festival opening each season but the most important was in July, marked by the annual rising of the star Sirius at sunrise and took place during the 5 days outside of normal time and space completing the 360 day year. This five day festival of ritual pageantry was soon followed by the festival of drunkenness presided over by Bast the cat, creator, nurturer and destroyer or a triple goddess. The festivals of Ancient Egypt were intended to attune the celebrants with the cycles of nature and the universe through the symbology of myth and the sacred act of ritual. In doing so the participants became aware of their own connection with the divine and their place in the universe. Today we still commemorate the New year and the seasons with drunken revelry but we no longer know our myths. The Egyptian myths contained symbols which connected the tribe to the universe, a forward thinking concept even today as we try to think of ourselves as one earth family. For the Egytians, Egypt included the star constellations where Osirus body part were hidden. |
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1304-1273 BC, New Kingdom. |
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| The 5-day Egyptian Carnival | |
| The Dog Days of Summer officially begin. According to Hellenic traditions, the rising of the Dog Star heralded the hottest part of the year for the Northern Hemisphere. The Dog Days of Summer, as calculated by the Greater or Lesser Dog Star (Sirius or Procyon), may continue from 30 to 54 days. A generally accepted period is from July 3 to August 15. | |
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Egyptians referred to this as prt Spdt “the going up of (the
goddess) Sothis” and was called wpt-rnpt, “the opening of the
year” one of three “New Years” festivals of the Egyptians. This
was the third New Year’s festival of their 3 season year and
heralded the first day of the Sothic year.
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1st Epagomenal Day Birthday of
Osiris
2nd Epagomenal Day Birthday of
Horus
3rd Epagomenal Day Birthday of
Set
4th Epagomenal Day Birthday of
Isis
5th Epagomenal Day Birthday of
Nephthys Egyptian New Year |
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Anubis jackal masks were commonly worn by processional participants. Anubis is the jackal god of the Underworld, protector of the Pharaohs, and weigher of souls with a feather of truth. The role of masks in the pageantry as part of the reenactment of the myth is considered the earliest form of drama |
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| Ancient Egypt
was known to its people in antiquity, "Kemet". Egypt or "Aigyptos"
is a Greek word, and originally referred to Men-Nefer or
Memphis, the city of Ptah. Kemet was influenced in its twilight era by two classically polythetistic cultures: the Roman Empire which absorbed ancient Egypt completely after Cleopatra failed to bring Rome under her spell as the consort and wife to first Julius Cesar and then Mark Anthony and the Greeks whose integration flourished under the Macedonian Ptolemy family from Alexander the Great's death [305 BC]to Cleopatra's suicide [30 BC] During this time it was common for the rulers to modify deities, myths, and interpretations. |
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| Osirus | |
| Osiris was
not only the redeemer and merciful judge of the dead in the
afterlife, but also the
underworld agency that granted all life, including sprouting
vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River. The Kings
of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death such that as
Osiris rose from the dead so would they, in union with him,
inherit eternal life through a process of imitative magic. By
the
New Kingdom all people, not just pharaohs, were believed to
be associated with Osiris at death if they incurred the costs of
the assimilation rituals There was a tradition in Egypt, recorded by Plutarch, that "Osiris was black," which, in a land where the general complexion was dusky, must have implied something more than ordinary in its darkness. "O King,
you are this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses
the sky with Orion,
The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, translated by R.O. Faulkner, 1969, |
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| Plutarch's account of death & resurrection of Osirus | |
| Set (who was
called Typhon in this Greek accounting) is the evil brother of
the God King Osiris. Set contrived a plan to usurp his brother
whereby he tricked Osiris into stepping into a
heavily-ornamented box fitted exactly to his dimensions. No
sooner had Osiris entered the box then Typhon had it nailed-shut
and sealed with molten lead. He and his conspirators then threw
this casket into the river. The pans & satyrs learn of this
trick and inform Osiris's sister-wife, Isis. She searches all of
the lands for the Osiris's coffin and, upon finding it, tears
off the lid and carresses the dead face of Her beloved
brother-husband. Her caresses turn more urgent until she begins to copulate with the cold body of Osiris (reminiscent of some representations the Hindu Goddess Kali astride the prostate, lifeless body of Shiva) and conceives a child, Horus. When Set learns of 
the body's
discovery, he chops the body into tiny bits, casting them hither
and yon through the lands. Isis retrieves all of the parts,
except for Osiris's male-member (symbolizing his virility and
strength), which Set cast into the river to be eaten by
pikes (Egyptians traditionally avoided eating pike for this
reason). However, Isis made a replica phallus and consecrated
it--this event replicated in ceremonies performed by the ancient
Egyptians in a festival Later Horus, Osiris's truly
posthumous son, overthrows the cruel Set. |
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| The 3 Seasons of Egypt | |
| The Egyptian year was divided into three distinct seasons: Akhet meaning inundation, Peret meaning emergence or growth, and Shomu meaning low–water and harvest. The word Shomu may well be an ancient root for the English word "summer." While Akhet was the season in which the Nile was depositing soil, Peret became the time of planting, cultivating and maintaining the crops. Shomu then followed with the beginning of this being the time of harvest. However, as noted earlier, Shomu quickly moved on to be a very hot–dry period in the year. Each of these seasons lasted approximately four lunar months. | |
who navigates the
Netherworld with Osiris; you ascend from the east of the sky,
being renewed at your due season and rejuvenated at your due
time. The sky has born you with Orion, the year has put a fillet
on you with Osiris, hands have been given to you, the dance has
gone down to you, a food-offering is given to you, the Great
Mooring-post cries out to you as (to) Osiris in his suffering."
Osiris was the offspring of an
intrigue between the earth-god Seb and the sky-goddess Nut.
[The Greeks
identified his parents with their own deities Cronus and Rhea.] When the
sun-god Ra perceived that his wife Nut had been unfaithful to
him, he declared with a
curse that she should be delivered of the child
in no month and no year. But the goddess had another lover, the god
Thoth [or Hermes, as the Greeks called him,] and he playing at
draughts with the moon won from her a 1/72 part of every day, and having
compounded 5 whole days out of
these parts he added them to the Egyptian year of 360 days. This was the mythical origin of the
5 supplementary days
which the Egyptians annually inserted at the end of every year in order
to establish a harmony between the 355 day 13 moon lunar calendar and
365 day solar year.
On these five days, regarded as outside the year of twelve months and beyond normal time and space, the curse of the sun-god was removed, and accordingly Osiris was born on the first of them. At his nativity a voice rang out proclaiming that the Lord of All had come into the world, the eldest son of Nut was born.
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The second day was set
aside to be the birthday of Horus (the son of Isis and Osiris). On the
third day the second son of Nut was born, dark Set, the lord of evil. On
the fourth her daughter Isis first saw the light, and her second
daughter Nephthys on the fifth. In this way the curse of Ra was both
fulfilled and defeated: for the days on which the children of Nut were
born belonged to no year. Afterwards Set married his sister Nephthys,
and Osiris has wed his sister Isis.
while they were both still in the womb of their mother, Nut, the
universe or sky goddess.
The legend and cult of
Osiris indicate belief in the Incarnate God and the ritual practice of
killing of the king which is found in many other pagan Carnaval customs.
In the resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians saw the promise of
everlasting life for themselves beyond the grave. They believed that
every man would live eternally in the other world if only his surviving
friends did for his body what the gods had done for the body of Osiris.
A great feature of the festival was the
nocturnal illumination:
throughout the whole of Egypt, people fastened rows of oil lamps to the
outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all night long.
The new year’s festival was one of the
most powerful ceremonies of Ancient Egypt when the revitalizing light of
the star Sirius and the Sun were united with the earthly image of the
Neteru/Gods of each temple. On this one day the statues were taken from
their shrines and placed where they could bathe in the light of these
sacred
manifestations of the feminine and masculine forces of life;
Sirius, the stellar Goddess and the Sun, the living image of the God Ra.
The revenge of Horus the son of Osiris against his evil uncle Seth, is a powerful and universal struggle of good verses evil. It is said that this battle of good verses evil still rages, but some day, Horus will be victorious and on that day, Osiris will return to rule the world.
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Precession & the
Osirus myth
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| Set traps and murders his brother Osirus | ||||||||
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Only Osiris fit perfectly inside the coffin, and then when he was inside Set, along with 72 fellow conspirators, slammed the door of the chest shut and fastened it with nails and molten lead. They then carried the chest out and tossed it into the river, whereupon Osiris drowned and the chest was carried out to sea. |
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| The 5 days which Thoth won from the moon goddess | ||||||||
| The act of evil in drowning Osiris was said to have been the work of 72 unnamed conspirators. This is not the only time 72 appears in the central myth of Egypt. Legend has it that 1/72nd of the moon's light was said to have been won by Thoth for the birth of the five major gods - Set, Nepthys, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Each 1/72nd of the moon's light given for the 5 days signifying an individual piece of darkness left in its place during the 360. This legend is based upon the fact that 1/72 over 360 days, the length of the year in the older Egyptian calendar, produces 5 whole days, reflecting the duration of the newer 365 day Egyptian calendar. | ||||||||
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72 a canonical number
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= Precession of the Equinoxes |
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"Let us not forget that they
occur in a myth which is present at the very dawn of writing in
Egypt (indeed elements of the
Osiris
story are to be found in the Pyramid Texts dating back to around
2450 BC, in a context which suggests that they were exceedingly
old then). Hipparchus, the so-called discoverer of precession
lived in the second century BC. He proposed a value of
45
or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional motion.
These figures yield a one-degree shift along the ecliptic in 80
years (at 45
arc seconds per annum).
The true figure, as calculated by twentieth century science, is
71.6 years. If Sellers's theory is correct, therefore, the 'Osiris
numbers', which give a
value of 72
years, are significantly more accurate than those of
Hipparchus . 
Indeed, within the obvious confines imposed by narrative
structure, it is difficult to see how the number
72
could have been improved upon, even if the more precise
figure had been known to the ancient myth-makers. One can
hardly insert 71.6 conspirators into a story, but
72
will fit comfortably."
"Working from this rounded-up
figure, the Osiris
myth is capable of yielding a value of
2160
years for a precessional shift
through one complete house of the zodiac. The correct figure,
according to today's calculations, is 2148 years.
Hipparchus
[the alleged precession discoverer, Hipparchus
of Rhodes , (190-125 BC)]
figures are 2400 years and
2347.8 years respectively. Finally,
Osiris
enables us to calculate
25,920 as
the number of years required for the "Hipparchus gives us either
28,800
or 28,173.6 years.
The correct figure, by
today's estimates, is
25,776 years.
The
Hipparchus calculations
for the Great Return are therefore around 3000 years out of
kilter. |
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Nut: the creation
goddess of the Universe
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Nut was the goddess of the
daytime sky and later the goddess of the entire sky and was the
place where clouds formed. Her father and mother were Shu and
Tefnut. Her husband was the earth god Geb, with whom she had
four children,
Osiris,
Isis,
Seth, and
Nephthys. Nut’s children were born on the five (5)
epagomenal days of the Egyptian year as described inThe
Story of
Re.
Egyptians held celebrations each year on these five
days. The day of Osiris was unlucky, as were the days of
Nephthys and Seth. The day of
Horus the Elder was both lucky and unlucky.
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The day of Isis
was lucky. Given her position as the sky, Nut gave birth to the
sun every day. Through the day he passes under Nut’s arched
body, through her mouth and body and was reborn again the next
day. Alternatively, the sun takes the boat Atet up Nut’s legs,
changes boats at noon, and takes the boat Sektet over Nut’s body
until sunset.
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The lunar calendar was the original system used in Egypt that determined the timing of the majority of the religious festivals. Because each lunar cycle can vary in length the dates of the sacred holidays change from year to year. Just as today pre-Lenten Carnaval dates can vary by 6 weeks, so did the Egyptian festivals. The civil calendar was engineered to begin with the day of the appearance of Sirius/Sopdet at sunrise. Despite the fact that the Nile may have already begun to rise this date was considered to be the beginning of the season of Akhet. In the civil calendar each season is composed of four months, each month is made up of three weeks, and each week consisted of ten days. The total number of days in the civil year is 360. At the end of the last month of the civil year the five Carnaval days were added that were considered outside of time and of great spiritual nature since the chief gods were born on these days. These were termed "the Days Upon the Year;" however, Egyptologists refer to them as the epagomenal days. The Egyptians soon came to realize that each year an important celestial event occurred which symbolically and perhaps intuitively came to represent the spiritual cause for the inundation. This was the rising of the star Sirius on the eastern horizon at sunrise, a phenomenon which is referred to by Egyptologists and astronomers alike as a ‘heliacal’ rising. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was known as Sopdet—the "bright one"—to the Egyptians. Despite modern misconceptions there was no accurate way to predict with certainty when the Nile would actually begin to rise from year to year. Studies done in the late nineteenth century (well before the building of the High Dam at Aswan) show that in actuality this could begin anytime between April and June in our current calendar . For approximately seventy days this star would remain hidden from view, suddenly making its appearance at sunrise. This was seen as a very powerful, spiritual moment, so much so that it was commemorated with elaborate temple rituals by the priesthood and mass celebrations on the part of the public. It is for this reason that, ideally, this cosmic event came to be seen as the starting point of the year both for the stellar calendar, which evolved into the civil calendar, and the lunar calendar. The actual stellar year/solar year is 365 1/4 days. This
could be managed by the ancient Egyptians by resetting with the
rise of the great star Sirius. In 239 B.C. Ptolemy III Euergetes issued
the decree making
every fourth year a leap year with the addition of a sixth epagomenal day
to systematically match the natural Sirius cycle. |
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Scorpion
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"Last of all Osiris stepped into it
and lay down. On that the conspirators ran and slammed
the lid down on him, nailed it fast, soldered it with
molten lead, and flung the coffer into the Nile. This
happened on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr, when
the sun is in the sign of the Scorpion, and in the
eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or the life of
Osiris. When Isis heard of it she sheared off a lock of
her hair, put on a mourning attire, and wandered
disconsolately up and down, seeking the body. 4
By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in
the papyrus swamps of the
Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her flight.
One evening when she was weary she came to the house of
a woman, who, alarmed at the sight of the scorpions,
shut the door in her face. Then one of the scorpions
crept under the door and stung the child of the woman
that he died. But when Isis heard the mother’s
lamentation, her heart was touched, and she laid her
hands on the child and uttered her powerful spells; so
the poison was driven out of the child and he lived.
Afterwards Isis herself gave birth to a son in the
swamps. She had conceived him while she fluttered in the
form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband. The
infant was the younger Horus, who in his youth bore the
name of Harpocrates, that is, the child Horus. Him Buto,
the goddess of the north, hid from the wrath of his
wicked uncle Set. Yet she could not guard him from all
mishap; for one day when Isis came to her little son’s
hiding-place she found him stretched lifeless and rigid
on the ground: a scorpion had stung him. Then Isis
prayed to the sun-god Ra for help. The god hearkened to
her and staid his bark in the sky, and sent down Thoth
to teach her the spell by which she might restore her
son to life. She uttered the words of power, and
straightway the poison flowed from the body of Horus,
air passed into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended
up into the sky and took his place once more in the bark
of the sun, and the bright pomp passed onward jubilant." |
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The Great
Pageantry of the Osiris & Isis
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The
Greeks may have believed that they were the inventors of
theatre, but, the central creation story featuring the
murder of Osiris by Seth, his dismemberment and
resuscitation made for grand drama and was frequently
shown ancient records. These enactments were not held in
theatres but did employ professional actors. They were
mostly pageant-like, as their subject was religious and
the method was ritualistic. One of the texts accompanying temple reliefs at Edfu describes aspects of a New Kingdom religious drama performed during the Horus festival while the statue of Hathor was carried from her temple at Denderah to the festivities at Edfu.
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| Set also spelled Seth, Sutekh or Seteh & Typhon in Greek] |
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Set formed part
of the Ennead of Heliopolis, as a son of the earth (Geb)
and sky (Nut), husband to the fertile land around the
Nile (Nebt-het/Nephthys), and brother to death (Usir/Osiris),
and life (Aset/Isis), and father of Anubis. In art, Set
was mostly depicted as a mysterious and unknown
creature, referred to by Egyptologists as the Set animal
or Typhonic beast, with a curved snout, square ears,
forked tail, and canine body, or sometimes as a human
with only the head of the Set animal. It has no complete
resemblance to any
known creature, although it does resemble a composite of
an aardvark and a jackal, both of which are desert
creatures.Set the envious younger brother, killed and dismembered Osiris. The myth incorporated moral lessons for relationships between fathers and sons, older and younger brothers, and husbands and wives. Seth and Horus  were often shown together crowning the new pharaohs, as
a symbol of their power over both Lower and Upper Egypt.
If Set' ears are fins, as some have interpreted, the head of the Set-animal resembles the Oxyrhynchus fish, and so it was said that as a final precaution, an Oxyrhynchus fish ate Osiris' penis. He is a hunter by nature and well equipped to live off of the land. Set is said to be a god of drunkeness and war. Followers of Set can be assured that their enemies are his enemies and he will do everything in his power to destroy them.  The Greeks later linked Set with Typhon because both were evil forces, storm deities and sons of the Earth that attacked the main gods. Nevertheless, throughout this period, in some outlying regions of Egypt Set was still regarded as the heroic chief deity |
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Hermes
Trismegistus
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The Graeco- Roman mythology identified him with Hermes or Mercury. He was reputed to be the inventor of writing, the patron deity of learning, the scribe of the gods, in which capacity he is represented signing the sentences on the souls of the dead." Some recent writers have supposed that Hermes was the symbol of Divine Intelligence and the primitive type of Plato's " Logos." Manetho, the Egyptian priest, as quoted by Syncellus, distinguishes three beings who were callcd Hermes by the Egyptians. The first, or Hermes Trismegistus, had, before the deluge, inscribed the history of all the sciences on pillars; the second, the son of Agathodemon, translated the precepts of the first; and the third, who is supposed to be synonymous with Thoth, was the counsellor of Osiris and Isis. But these three were in later ages confounded and fused into one, known as Hermes Trismegistus. He was always understood by the philosophers to symbolize the birth, the progress, and the perfection of human sciences. He was thus considered as a type of the Supreme Being. Through him man was elevated and put into communication with the gods. The Alchemists adopted him as their patron which resulted in alchemy being called the Hermetic science, from which we get Hermetic Masonry and Hermetic Rites. |
It is thought that the ibis bird was associated
with the moon because of its crescent shaped
beak, and the baboon is nocturnal animal which
has the peculiar habit of chattering at the sun
every day before going to sleep.