Egypt

Our early ancestors, after the end of the last ice age roughly 14,000 BC, had a very important question to answer viz., how are we going to survive? In a world with very little structure the primary concern was that of nature. Nature, like fire, has two sides — the benevolent and the malevolent. There is the benevolent side of nature. We all know her. She is the sea that calms us and gives us fish to eat and she is the breeze that cools us on a hot day. She is the tree which provides fruit and shade and she is the vista we look out onto with awe. The benevolent form of nature is truly wonderful. But that is not her only side.

The other side of nature, its malevolent side, is deadly. Even in our modern world a serious thunder storm is able to scare people who are safe and sheltered with plenty of food and modern convinces. Can you imagine what it must have been like on The Levant some ten thousand years ago? The sun is able to sear the skin off your body, at least half of the wildlife you encounter is likely to kill you and any number of natural catastrophes can lay you low in ways that modern people in first world countries can scarcely imagine.

It is no wonder that the ancient people saw the personification of nature as a dragon. The dragon is the low resolution predation category which includes all specific instances of things that will kill a human including fire but is also guarding the treasure of the most value.

In order to stave off the ravages of nature families stuck together. As they grew they became tribes and tribes would war over resources with each other meaning nature was only one of the hazards which now needed to be contended with. The very deeply embedded concept of the distrust of the stranger is something we will deal in length as the project progresses.

In order to bring more resources and safety to a family group, families came together and formed tribes. Some of those tribes grew to become nations and then eventually many of those nations and tribes came together under a Babylonian cultural hegemony to form the Mesopotamian Empire. The Empire was the ultimate answer to what is to be done about the dangers of nature and the cosmogony on display in their religious text, the Enuma Elish, is representative of this. Keep in mind that much of what exists in the world exists primarily as an answer to some question.

Apsu, the god of culture, does not play much of a role in the story other than to be killed by his ungrateful children only to release the dragon, pure chaotic potential, on the world angry and unshackled to eventually be defeated by Marduk. It would be nice if this was the end of the story, but that just isn’t how it goes for human beings. The enemy for the Mesopotamians and their constituent tribes was nature. However, what the world would find out once kingdoms started protecting them from the ravages of nature, is that the city walls may keep the outside dragons out, but now there were inside dragons.

With the complexity of larger kingdoms now making itself manifest, the cosmogonies of the people became reflective of new concerns. The Egyptian gods were not merely challenged by nature and the need to bravely confront it, they now had political intrigue, corruption and as  the tendency for states to become tyrannical to deal with. Their gods had power struggles with each other in a way which was representative of the struggles of the people who made up our earliest empires.

With that in mind, I want to go over the Egyptian story to show how the myths of the people have changed with the trials and tribulations that those people faced. The slow co-evolution of man and god is on full display at this point. One word of caution, the Egyptian Kingdom went through a lot of consolidation and change over a tremendous period of time so there isn’t really just one story. For the sake of expediency, I’ve combined the stories of Horus the Elder and Horus the younger because the point I am trying to get at is the evolution of theology and philosophy with the continuing evolution of man and society.

The Egyptian creation story begins in a way similar to that of the Mesopotamian one. At the begging there was only Nun. Nun is the primordial chaotic waters of nothingness — neither good nor evil, neither this nor that, just pure potential. We see echoes of Tiamat here. From Nun, through creatio ex nihilo, the creator god Atum is born. Atum creates the first divine couple, Shu (the god of air) and Tefnut (the goddess of moisture). Shu and Tefnut gave birth to Geb (The earth god) and Nut (the sky goddess) They were in a tight embrace, but she separated the sky from the earth.

Geb and Nut had four children: Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys and this is where our story gets more complicated. Osiris, the son of Geb and Nut, was the first King of Egypt. He was a wise and benevolent king who brought civilization, agriculture and law to mankind. In his old age, the heroic Osiris becomes willfully blind. In his blindness, his brother Seth (a precursor to our modern notion of Satan) tricks Osiris into entering a beautifully crafted chest during a feast. Once inside, Seth seals the chest and pours molten lead over it and shoves it into the nile where Osiris drowned.

Seth had been jealous of the authority that Osiris wielded. This is a story for the times. Osiris’ authority is based on his benevolence and greatness. Seth wanted the authority, but not the work that it took to earn it while Osiris, having had this authority for so long, has become blind to the threats around him. Osiris’ wife/sister, devastated by Osiris’ death, searches for and finds then hides the body of Osiris — all but one part, his phallus. She crafted him a new one in the shape of a bird and with him conceives and then births Horus.

Horus is a falcon headed god. This is reminiscent of Marduk in that the Eye of Horus, the falcon’s eye, shows that Horus is also a god whose power is in his attention. When Horus comes of age he challenges Seth to a series of games. I won’t both going into the often very disturbing details of the challenges for the kingship of Egypt as they are out of our current scope, but I will say that in each of them, as in the Mesopotamian stories, things like strength are no match for honest and attentive articulation. For those interested. merely searching ‘the trials of Horus’ should be enough to get your fill of ancient insane god stories.

Horus eventually takes his rightful throne, the throne of his father, and becomes king of Egypt and unites the upper and lower kingdoms and establishes a divine kingship. The divine kingship established by Horus is what gave credence to the authority of the Pharaoh. What Horus’ victory does is allow for a triumph of Ma’at (truth, justice, order, balance and harmony) over chaos. This is, of course, similar to Marduk’s attentive powers making order out of chaos through his trials with and victory over Tiamat.

Once again we see order and chaos as a theme, but this time it is more sophisticated. In the Mesopotamian stories the order which is created is about the safety from the chaotic habits of nature and the uncertainty of life in a world where tribal blood feuds, natural disasters, starvation or vicious predators reign supreme. But here, the chaos is not just the ravages of the preliterate plainsmen but also the chaos which occurs when a civilization becomes corrupt.

A once noble king grows old and blind allowing for chaos to seize his power and, through the new king, the son, that chaos is brought to heel with the powers of attention and articulation.

What we are seeing here is a lower resolution cosmogony becoming higher resolution while maintaining the same underpinning fundamental pattern. While it is still the story about how attention and truthful articulation will defeat chaos and bring about order, the chaos and the order are now far more complicated.

The pattern is set. The negative aspect of nature is dealt with by an empire. The empire protects people from the dragon of nature. But when the walls are built it turns out that there is a dragon inside as well . Culture, like nature, also has a negative aspect — the tyrant.

The Egyptian answer to this is through a divine lineage of kings whose primary job it is to keep ma’at and drive out the chaos — both the chaos from without and the chaos from within. As we learn to protect ourselves from the ravages of nature with a civilization and protect from the ravages of civilization with balance the story that is unfolding in the ancient near east, along with the peoples telling those stories, grows increasingly more complex.

This will set the stage for the new serpent. Not the one that is the negative aspect of what is outside the walls or the one that is the negative aspect of what is inside the walls, but this one is closer — it is the serpent we find in our hearts.