Jeudi: Great Spirits

Known to his worshipers as both "he who makes green" and "raging one", the Ancient Egyptian crocodile god Sobek remains somewhat of a mystery.

His name, in direct translation, means simply crocodile and he was never represented in art without at least the head of that fearsome beast. He was a god of water and in particular the life-giving River Nile. The thing he "made green" was the land through the growth of plants and Sobek doubtless had some role in the annual flooding of the river. In fact, according to Richard H. Wilkinson in his book The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, the river was said to be made of Sobek's sweat.

It probably goes without saying that his sacred places were sandbars, marshes and any other locations where crocodiles might reside. Wilkinson tells us the Sobek was also known as the "Lord of Bakhu". Bakhu was a kind of Shanghai-La at the far edge of the world. It was conceived as an insurmountable mountain and it was near its crest that Sobek was thought to have a vast palace made entirely of carnelian. It may be for this reason that carnelian amulets in the shape of crocodiles were carried - by those who could afford them - to gain Sobek's favor and protection. Less expensive crocodiles made of pottery have also been found and jewelry, particularly necklaces, featuring crocodiles seem to have been worn by many Ancient Egyptians.

In the New Kingdom era, Sobek was thought to be a protector of the Pharaoh and his family. In this permutation he was often attached to other "royal" gods such as Amen, Osiris and the sun god Re in particular. This led to the personification Sobek-Re and probably also led to the Greeks syncratizing Sobek with their minor sun god, Helios.

Sobek was thought to be the son of the most warlike of Ancient Egyptian goddesses, Neith and his personal ferocity did not end with the association with crocodiles. He was said to "take women from their husbands whenever he wishes according to his desire." Some historians see this as a sign of Sobek ruling over virility and male fertility. It may be, however, that he is also - or alternatively - a god of the rapine and pillage that accompanies war.

Temples of Sobek were built throughout Egypt and, of course, most often located on the river. At Kom Ombo, where his consort was designated as the cow-shaped love goddess Hathor, sacred pools held crocodiles who were treated like kings in life and mummified with all ceremony after their deaths. By the New Kingdom, almost all of Sobek's temples had sacred crocodiles.

The worship of Sobek seems to have continued into the Greek era and the Ptolemy dynasty. After Egypt became a Roman possession, however, Sobek - like so many of his brother and sister deities - fell from favor. How fortunate we are that, through the work of archaeologists and historians, we can know Sobek and all those other gods once again.

Header: Sobek Protecting Amenhotep III from the Luxor Museum via Wikipedia

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

In a recent post, we discussed the eight forms of Satan as listed in Johan Weyer's Pseudographica Demoniaca. While all of them or curious to the student of historical demonology, there can be no arguing that the big dog among them must be the one known as Satan-el: Lucifer.

Lucifer is a far more ancient spirit than the Big Three patriarchal religions would have us believe. He seems to be part and parcel of almost all the first religions to emerge from the area now known as the Middle East and in almost all of these myths, he is the son/lover - by any other name - of a very powerful goddess.

Lucifer's name means Light Bearer and in this form he is syncratized with the Earth's sun.This makes sense when we look much further back into history than the Bible will generally allow. And certainly much earlier than any Hebrew writings on Lucifer can attest. In fact, we should be looking to his other, more populist, moniker: Son of the Morning Star.

In this, early Semitic peoples were not calling Lucifer the sun itself, but the son of She who escorts the sun. Thus Lucifer would be the offspring of the Sumerian Inanna who becomes the Babylonian and Persian Ishtar. She is personafied as both the morning and evening star. In the morning she is the warrior, ready for battle. In the evening, she is the temptress, perfumed and prepared for love, perhaps even with her son.

This pattern of a goddess represented by the morning and evening star continued in Ancient Egypt. There both Neith, the warrior and Isis (Au-Set), the mother, were linked to the star. Most notably, however, the dual goddess Hathor/Sekhmet took on the celestial persona. Sekhmet, the lion-headed warrior claimed the morning while Hathor, the gentle cow goddess, took over in the evening.

Other goddesses such as the Phrygian Cybele and the Arab Al-Uzza would be similarly personified in the star. Eventually in Hellenistic Greece the star was linked to Aphrodite and so to Venus in Rome. This is the name she still bears in modern times.

It was during Hellenistic times that Lucifer - or the spirit that would become Lucifer - was first written about by the Hebrew nations in exile. It was after the Maccabean revolt of 168 BCE, as Peter Stanford points out in The Devil: A Biography, that the apocrypha began to be written. In these books, Jewish philosophers tried to work out the idea of a good God allowing horrible things happening to his chosen people. In books like Wisdom, which made it into the modern Bible, and even more so in books like Enoch, which did not, the problem became identified as an "adversary" to God. Enter the newly made but already ancient Lucifer.

This is where Weyer's interpretation of Lucifer/Satan-el takes its sustenance. Lucifer, the Light Bearer, is the favorite of God's Archangels. When God determines to make man in his own image, Lucifer refuses to bow down before him. Angels take sides and a war ensues resulting in the casting out of the rebel angels. Lucifer and his band fall into hell where they will reside, working their mischief against God's creation until the End of Days. When he takes charge of Hell, Lucifer becomes Satan-el, the Adversary.

Curiously, another story exists in the Gnostic versions of the Gospels. This one is fed not only by the apocrypha but also by the teachings of Zoroaster. There is light and dark, good and evil and in the perception of the Gnostics, Lucifer was the twin brother of Christ and marched before him in defying the old - and Evil - God. This is a confusing scenario for modern Christians in particular. Having been taught from the get-go that Lucifer is the Devil and the Devil is bad, they pick and chose which of Christ's words to pay attention to. When Christ accuses the Jews of worshiping the "wrong God" in Yahweh, no one pays attention. No one, that is, but the Gnostics who, in teaching pure duality, embrace Lucifer and Christ while rejecting Yahweh who made the most evil of all things: the physical world.

Thus Lucifer is more than the sum of his parts. And certainly more than any of the almost geeky eight Satans. Weyer's depiction of Satan-el as a malevolent, angry monster who plots the destruction of God's most perfect creation, Man (and I mean Man to be gender-specific here), seems puny by comparison. Lucifer, the Son of the Morning Star, is a shining god by any comparison.

Header: Lucifer, Bearer of Light by William Blake via Public Domain Images

Jeudi: Great Spirits

Yesterday, December 8th, was equivalent to the date set aside in the Ancient Egyptian calendar for one of the many festivals of their goddess Neith. As with most of the pantheon of Ancient Egypt, Neith’s attributes built up over time, layer by layer, until by the New Kingdom she was recognizable to the Greeks as a distant cousin of their own Athena.

Originally, Neith was probably a foreign goddess brought to Egypt through trade or war. Patricia Monaghan, who literally wrote the book on the world’s goddesses, says in her Book of Goddesses and Heroines that Neith was the ancient “… essence of the tribal community perceived in its totems, two crossed arrows and a mottled animal skin.” These symbols, with the skin in the shape of a shield, almost always appeared in depictions of Neith up until the Amarna period.

Neith was worshipped as a creator of crafts and protector of property. She is a warlike goddess who will stand up to her worshipper’s enemies with shield and spear, but she is also the inventor of weaving who strung her loom and wove the world. By the late Middle Kingdom, Neith is called the mother of Ra and in this guise is given the form of a cow. Her priests and priestesses were doctors and wise women that Egyptians looked to for treatment in time of illness and help in childbirth.

At the height of her power, she was depicted wearing the combined red and white crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt and hailed as the Lady of the Throne. Her festival city was Sais, where bonfires and oil lamps were kept burning night and day to please the Lady of Light, a name that was probably related to her motherhood of Ra.

When the famous Greek historian Plutarch made his tour of Egypt, he wrote of the inscription on Neith’s temple which read:

I am all that has been, that is, that will be, and no mortal will be able to lift my veil.
Isis would assume a similar mantra as her worship spread around the Mediterranean and from there it would pass on to male deities of modern acquaintance. I bet you can think of some of them right now.

So today, before the sunset, raise a belated glass of your chosen beverage to Neith, the warrior mother who wove the world, then pour a little on the ground as an offering. Because all our ancestors are sacred.

Header: Sculpture of Neith c 600 BCE, currently in the Louvre, Paris