article
by Damian
Call him whatever you will - the god-made-man, Dionysus, Osiris, Skanda-Murukan or Jesus, he comes to us delivered by the waters to be the herald of a new age and to proclaim the rising of the sun. We glimpse this mythological figure as he appears in the written and oral traditions of many different peoples in the Old World. Frequently, he is connected strongly to the sea.
We know that long before people settled into a life of domestication and agriculture, seafaring was common. Archaeologists have evidence in the trade of obsidian from the island of Melos, in the Mediterranean, from excavations of Francthi Cave in Greece. Records are preserved that refer to an ancient Egyptian trade empire that included the "Island of Meros," at a distance of 2000 miles from Egypt. The Egyptian gods and the pharaohs were said to traverse the sky in boats. In the days before the hoe and plow, we must assume that no common capital investment of resources or labor was greater than that of the boats, which sailed these ancient routes. These would have been small craft, oared or sailed vessels, which danced before the shores of Ilwyn (Cairo), or Eridu (in Mesopotamia). These basic designs would remain unchanged for thousands of years. These unchanging designs, coupled with the fact that most boats are lost at sea, make it difficult to recover and date ancient vessels, but we have evidence of their use. The boats were bringers of change, and strange ways, and the gods and goddesses who sailed in them were ambassadors of change.
This strange god seems to have come from the East, with the people who roamed the forests and seas from a very ancient time. Seafaring involving the island of Melos is known to have existed before 9000 years ago. This is a time very close to the beginning of settled communities, at the end of a period commonly referred to as the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and the beginning of the Neolithic (New Stone Age). In Egyptian mythology, the coming of the god Osiris (to the Greeks, demonstrably, Dionysus), the herald of the sun, is linked to the myth of the Phoenix or Bennu bird through his father and mother, earth (Seb) and sky (Nut). It seems fitting that this messenger would drop from the womb of his mother, the sky, to proclaim the coming of his father, the sun.
In the myth of the Bennu, from the great egg (born of Seb and Nut), sprang the sun. The egg, the container of the sun, has a specific identity. In ancient Egyptian ritual, the deceased spirit is Osiris, in the sense that the deceased re-enacts the mysteries of Osiris in the underworld. The deceased spirit, as Osiris, proclaims before Seb his father and others at the "weighing of the heart": "I am the egg which is in the Great Cackler, and I watch and guard that mighty thing which hath come into being wherewith the god Seb hath opened the earth. I germinate as it germinates; I live as it lives; and my breath is its breath." (Book of the Dead, Chapters liv., lvi, lix).
Egyptian myth holds that the morning sun rose in the form of a Bennu, the soul of Ra and the living symbol of Osiris. From the story the Egyptian priests at Heliopolis told Herodotus, we can fashion a rough calendar for the appearance of the Bennu, or Phoenix-Osiris. We can infer from Herodotus that the Egyptian solar procession (and thus, the ascent of particular solar deities like Horus, Ra and Set) lasted five "hundreds" of years. After that time passed, the death and rebirth of the sun occurred, with the new sun rising from the ashes of the old. The priests conveyed to Herodotus that this "five hundred years" lasted exactly 7006 calendar years from the time of the sunrise to sunset (sun-Set). We have known for nearly a hundred years, from the work of pioneers in Egyptology such as James Henry Breasted, that the ancient Egyptians used a Sothic year, based on stellar rather than solar motions. This Sothic year diverges from the sun-calendar year slowly, so that a full procession of the constellations lasts 1461 calendar years. We can deduce that the myth of the Phoenix is based on very real astronomical events, although a small mistake was made by either the Egyptian scribes or Herodotus, since the actual length of five Sothic cycles is 7305 years, rather than 7006. Each "hundred" years is thus one Sothic cycle, one procession of the constellations.
The concordance between physical reality (the astronomical cycles) and myth gives us reason to wonder about this "death of the old sun, birth of the new sun in consuming fire" myth again. Are the ancient Egyptians trying to pass on information about some real solar phenomenon that recurs at cyclical intervals?
The Egyptian solar procession can be symbolized in the form of the five-pointed star, a pentadactyl symbol, resembling among other things the hand as it spans the horizon. At each apex, casting its ray toward the center (earth), is a solar deity. The morning sun is Horus, the youth. We know that Horus dominated Egyptian religion from the very first days of the establishment of the Old Kingdom, and in fact for long before, in predynastic times. The Palermo Stone provides clear evidence of this Horus-dominance, and it is confirmed by the Turin Papyrus.
Horus ushered in the beginning of a new procession, perhaps 5000 years ago, near the end of the Neolithic. With Horus came bronze. With this ascent of the morning sun, great changes were made in the religious life of the Egyptians. One thing that reflects that change in Egypt was the transfer of the icon of vision (the eye) from the goddess Maat to the cult of Horus. Such changes probably accompanied the ascension of each of the five Egyptian solar deities.
Envision a five-pointed star, or perhaps a pentagon, resting upon a horizon or surface, like a straight line. Each of the apical points (there are five, of course), marks the transition to a new aspect of the solar deity, and ushers in a new social order with it. We know from the Legend of Isis and Ra, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that the first of these is Khepera and the last, Temu. Ra is at the pinnacle or top. Between the time of Khepera and Ra, comes Horus. Horus is in opposition to Set (both in myth and in the figure), because Set occupies the position between Ra and Temu (the sun at death).
In Mesopotamia, during the time of Horus, it was the solar deity Shamash who dominated the pantheon (a rose by another name). Cuneiform inscriptions from the First Dynasty of Babylon (circa 4400 years old) record seven times as many priestesses of Shamash as either priestesses or priests of any other god or goddess. It is also interesting to note that those same cuneiform inscriptions fail to mention any male priests for a male deity, or any female priestesses for a female deity. Shamash and Marduk, male gods, are served by priestesses only. Likewise, Inanna, a female deity, is served by male priests only. Did the male gods in some grand revolution in prehistory capture not only the symbols, but the temples and servants of once preeminent goddesses as well?
Hermann Ranke, in his presentation of translations of legal and business documents, comments that women in the First Dynasty "apparently" had equal rights. Of course, Ranke was writing in 1906, and the concept was astonishing to him. There probably was no way that Ranke could have conceived of a dominantly female aristocracy, regardless of the records of a litigation process and religious hierarchy dominated by women that appeared on his cuneiform tablets. Yet, this was the social atmosphere at the time of the rebirth of the sun, of Horus in the procession of the Sothic calendar. It lasted 1461 years, until the youth became a warrior with the coming of iron. It was a time of the ascent of the man-child, but still a magickal time, of long shadows. It would not be the time of Ra, the mid-day sun, which burns all night and shadow before it, until the advent of patriarchal monotheism.
At the birth of Horus, the solar force was still young, and the cosmos was still dominated by Great Mother Nut. Many years later, Horus left the side of his mother to become a warrior, and woman lost her place in society as Iron Age cultures focused on warfare. With the waxing of the sun comes the waning of the moon, but the reverse holds true as well. Today, we watch as the moon grows fuller.
It is rewarding and instructive to meditate and muse upon this dance of stars, the procession of the constellations, as it intertwines with climatic and social change and the evolution of myth through global cultures. Is the Bennu bird trying to tell us something about our world and the sun that the ancient Egyptians knew, long before it was realized that the world was not flat? Do the myths of Egypt, Greece and more recent cultures tell us anything at all about the dynamics of social power played in the theater of gender as the son becomes empowered or emasculated? How could these things be tied to the movement of stars? Can we be no more than puppets dangling on strings of light?
Jesus was a messenger; Jesus was not the Christ but came to proclaim the father, and the "kingdom of heaven." Jesus was the Son of God, not the Sun of God. Christ, however, is the Sun of God, the Helios-Ra, omnipresent (and thus alone) in his unfaltering Ra-diance. There is, of course, a relationship between the mortal Jesus and his immortal father. This changing relationship is expressed in the Christian mythos as Jesus Christ, or Christ Jesus (different states), which reflects the movement of a mortal man (Jesus), into and from the divine Christ aspect.
The first requires death, the second, resurrection. When Osiris heralds the morning sun, he is cut into fourteen pieces and scattered throughout the land, yet he is resurrected. Dionysus is torn by Titans into seven pieces, yet lives again to have his coming heralded by fourteen priestesses before claiming the ritual queen of Athens as his bride. Jesus was crucified for proclaiming his father's reign, but was resurrected, and is honored by the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelations. The opening of seven seals, also mentioned in Revelations, will pass before a second coming. That's 7305 years after the last coming, or about 5300 years from now if you follow the Sothic procession. If the opening of each seal coincides with the conclusion of each "millennium," then the second seal would have to be opened within a few decades to keep us on the cosmic course.
But although another Jesus will not come to herald in a new age of father Ra until that time passes, Osiris has been here since the last birth of Christ, to announce the Age of Enlightenment and the founding of a new world order, about five hundred years ago.
Ask any Mayan if you doubt that.
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