Apech

Well I'm with you there. I had a quite good education but all that I value now I taught myself by reading and so on. I think your idea is ok in an ideal world but in reality people need education. Having said that where I live a lot of the older generation left school at 11 or 12 cos they had to work ... and they are all fantastic people ... so I've just changed my mind ... you are right after all

Yes there were local cult centres and temples to certain gods. It depends which Egyptians you mean ... the I suppose as to how they actually viewed the gods - different for the priests and kings to the general pop. the gods had an image, usually a statue but sometimes an object which was kept in the holy of holies in the temple ... it would be brought out on feast days and also for divination. More Ain Soph Aur than Kether I would say.

When we went mono-theist. Basically for most of us with Christianity ... which (and I don't want to rant but) basically destroyed our classical pagan heritage by burning down the libraries and sacking the temples ... introducing the Dark Ages ...

If the people own everything then they have to run it. Education is optional ... don't agree with that ... enough stupid people already ....

No I was replying to White Wolf who was posting links about health risk from gay lifestyle. My point is that any life style has health risks ... so the links are redundant in terms of the lifestyle itself. I would go along with the idea that being gay is not a choice ... people are born gay and its in nature too in the animal world ... so gay people should have equal rights in every sense.

you've got summer sausage ... don't be greedy.

My point is that you could take any group in society and identify health risk in relation to it. For instance motorcycle accidents often fatal .. so bikers should not be allowed. Do you get my point now?

I'm not going to actually do it ... I was making a point.

Yum ... I'm on Topic.

One day we will go off off topic ... is that the same as on topic?

That is communism.

If I post some links to levels of domestic violence, depression and heart attacks in married heterosexual people will you support me in trying to make marriage illegal? You condemn gay people for high levels of STDs and so on ... and then are against gay marriage or civil partnerships which would allow more long term settled relationships. So basically all this crap is about condemning people who are different to you. Spin and propaganda by the far right. Yuk.

Well, yes, Apep is hindering the boat. But as with all things Egyptian there is a subte double relationship. If you have done energy work you will know that blockages occur to energy circulation. They obstruct the flow and cause bad heat or cold or feelings of sickness or disturbance ... physical, mental, emotional. So there is a need to deal with these obstructions. Sometimes you can push through them. Other times they have to be burnt or washed out. The main blockages are tricky because effort makes them worse. Like a fish caught in a net ... the more you struggle the more you are caught. So you need different strategies for dealing with the obstructions. The Egyptians identifies these strategies with Isis, Set, Serket and Thoth. So its not a simple matter dealing with them. One thing you come to realise is that they (the obstructions) are actually laid down by power in the first place. The nature of the blockage is nothing other than energy. In some ways they were created as necessary protection at some time in the past but have now become habitual. Recognising their energy nature is a key to moving past them. In this way the sand banks put down by Apep to obstruct the sun's progress can be used as fuel, since the energy in the obstruction can be released. Hope this makes sense.

The Nun while being non-being is not empty like a vacuum. Its the plenum or full void. It is formless and yet holds within it all potential forms of being. Dissolved if you like in its waters. They do not exist exactly but kind of hover in a potential state ... compare the idea of the quantum field. Things and anti-things are co-present and thus cancel each other. The Egyptians saw it as a source of fertility and renewal just as compost made from the breakdown of plants is fertile. For them it related to the Nile flood which covered the fields but when it subsided left behind a fertile mud from which life sprang forth. Life comes from death. So the potential beings within the Nun were called the 'inert ones' or niniyew. Because they neither existed or didn't exist. they just floated in the waters of the Nun .. like people in a giant floatation tank ... doing nothing but not without residual awareness of a kind. There's a nice story which form part of the temple creation myth from Edfu. The beginning of creation (in line with the flood imagery) is seen as the emergence in the Nun of a mound. A kind of muddy mound which becomes the site of creation. Its a transition stage between voidity and the known world, a kind of half known. Its a potential earth before there is earth. A clumping of energies in the Nun if you like. On to this mound crawl the ancestor spirits who are the emerging inert ones. They crawl up out of water and call out to summon their creator from out of the waters who appears as a great hawk hovering over the mound. So the ancestors summon their own creator! This introduces the idea of reciprocity between humans and gods. Its a two way relationship ... what would be called co-creation today ... not a new idea at all. beings summon that which creates them and thus come fully into existence. This reciprocal relationship between humans and gods is key to Egyptian religion. It's a two way relationship. Khepera. The name means to transform, evolve or become. It is symbolised by the scarab beetle. Scarab beetles push balls of dung around in which they lay their eggs. So this is like pushing the sun disk. When mummification was carried out while other organs were removed and preserved the heart was usually left in the body. On the chest of the mummy it was usual to place a scarab amulet over the heart cente. On the back of this would be inscribed spell 30b of the Book of the Dead, ...this is a version of it: ... the heart was viewed as the centre of mind, volition and character. It was a kind of command and control centre which controlled and sent instructions to all your limbs. So it was the heart that was weighed in the Judgement Hall to see if the person was right and true of voice. So the heart in the person was seen as your version of khepera - the transformative power which makes you who you are ... a kind fo storehouse of intent if you like.

I think you mean Apep not Apech ... Apech is me LOL. Apep is a serpent who opposes the sun's passage through the Duat. The sun boats journey depends on the presence of water (logical since he's in a boat). The serpent Apep is said to swallow this water and that his coils are sandbanks in the river ... i.e. things for the boat to get stuck on. In the Old Kingdom they did not use this term Apep but spoke of a collection of inimical forces represented by serpents, scorpions and so on. These were termed Rerek. Spells against Rerek and later Apep were always grouped in sevens ... if you look at the seventh hour of night you will see the fettering of Apep, if you look at Chapter 7 of the Book of the Dead you will see a spell for passing oer the dangerous coils of Apep. In fact the very reason that the Sun has to go down int he west in the evening is attributed int he Book of the Dead to a battle between Apep and Ra in which Ra gets injured in the mouth and has to retire to rest - hence set in the west. Serpents always mean power in various forms. And there are two ways to understand this Apep serpent. 1) When the world is created in the beginning it is pristine and pure and everything is perfect. this is called the 'First Time'. the sun begins it cycles of renewal and the world operates almost like a perfect machine .... in harmony with itself. But as it is surrounded and permeated by the waters of Nun ... the non-being which actually contains all possible states and froms of being, slowly small perturbations occur in the perfect cycle of nature. Little disruptions which slowly wear away the perfection. Over time then the perfect order which is called Ma'at (=truth, order) gets distorted and the world goes out of kilter. This is said to be the action of Apep on the world. 2) the other and equally valid way of looking at Apep is that when power creates it has to set a limit. Set down boundaries between things. So inorder to create our universe it has to exclude all other universes. We have already seen that for Shu to create he has to separate the sky from the earth. So to make things you make divisions ... which is ok at first ... but then if you place yourself in that system you find that your own boundaries are your limitations. You come up against limits which you feel you cannot pass. In this sense Apep is a limit set down by power to create which then become an obstacle to ist own progress. There's more if you want more.

So the issue remains as to how we are supposed to regard these gods. One problem being that the same term Neter was applied to everything from a creator god who gave rise to whole cosmos and a squinty eyed demon who bites your leg as you pass in the underworld. So for the Egyptians calling something a Neter did not necessarily mean something august though often it did. There are also god who represent particular functions ... they would not have a temple or cult of their own ... for instance there is a god called Sia who is 'Perception' and another called 'Hu' which means 'command'. They are used what I call technically to illustrate the powers they represent. To make it more confusing some major gods are used in this way to. For instance Isis when paired with Nephthys specifically means upward growth towards light (half of a cycle) ... but on her own she may take on a much broader significance. Some gods and goddesses rise to such significance that they may almost be regarded as the sole creator. Among these could be Ra, Atum, Amen, Neith. So we also have to get our heads around the idea that more than one god can be the sole creator. This is an example of Egyptian pluralist thought and is termed today 'henotheism', 'monolatry' and sometimes polycentric polytheism. But all these rather grand terms cannot hide the fact that the Egyptians thought very differently from us about the divine. The key stone of all Egyptian religion is the resolution or union of opposites. Even the country itself was the 'Two Lands' of Upper and Lower Egypt ... they were in short non-dualists to the very core. In the religious and funerary texts the gods are mostly used in this technical way to describe movements or functions of energy. So it is possible to compare some of the texts with works of Taoist internal alchemy. So that is one way to understand the gods as functions of energy or one could say one's mind or being. But also since the Egyptians regarded the gods as the very fabric of their world, the gods are entities in their own right, although quite different to us as entities for instance. The gods 'lived' in the sky, where the subtle energy of pure form exists. But they also power the world and become manifest in objects (like statues) animals and indeed people. One of the titles of priests was hm-neter which is often translated as god's servant but actually means god's incarnation or avatar. the king of course was conceived of as a god.

This is what I bought http://www.amazon.co.uk/Packard-Bell-EasyNote-15-6-inch-Laptop/dp/B009R1537S but only cos I can't afford a MacBook pro which is what i really want .. but I resent the fact that it is 3 or even 4 times the price ...

Sorry I don't understand the question.

Nice using it now ... thanks I may use this as default if it works out ... !!!!!

Does it work ok - forum indicates probs with mac version.

Well anyway ... just to prove to everyone how thick I am ... I researched dual booting Ubuntu 12.4/12.10 and Windows very carefully ... including Windows 8. Didn't seem difficult so I boldly went forth and bought the cheapest Laptop I could find ... I wanted one with Windoze 7 (didn't like the look of those tiles) but more or less every model in the shop had pre-installed Windows 8 so ... I bought one. Got home to find that pre-installed Windows * has a different BIOS ... forgotten what its called and the dual boot which seemed semi automatic easy wouldn't work. Googled around and found that people were having same problem ... there was a solution but it seemed hellishly complicated for the likes of me ... so I gave up and just been using Win 8 but just in the desktop and to back up files into hard drive, openoffice and vlc media player. Now thinking of buying a mac mini ... cos my original back up hard-drive using time machine cannot be read by the Windows machine. damn. tried really hard but ... well damn those Microsofties they got me again ....

I would go back to Firefox is they sorted that memory thing ... I don't want to be a google robot but what choice ... I don't like Safari much either ... I tried Opera but Chrome is just better right now ... see you made me feel guilty ... *sulk*

OK. So in the first two images I have counted about 15 gods and goddesses so I don't think any prizes would be awarded for guessing that the Egyptians were not mono-theists. In fact they have several hundred gods. the word for god in Egyptian is Neter (sometimes Netcher or Netjer). Some think it was pronounced more like Natur ... making it sound a bit like our word Nature ... which is actually quite useful when we think about this word. This is how the word 'god' might be written. The first sign is the neter sign and the second is a sign called a determinative which just indicates what the thing is and has no phonetic value. The first sign was wrongly identified by some Egyptologists including Wallis Budge as an axe. It isn't. There is a separate sign for an axe and detailed versions of this sign show that the bit at the top is a cloth and so the sign is rather like a flag. In fact the Egyptians used to put flags outside the temple gateways. When asked what it meant by a Greek writer an Egyptian priest said it means 'wrapped'. Which apart, from having connections to mummification, seems a bit odd for a word meaning god. However if understood properly it does make sense. The image is a pole or staff wrapped in cloth for its whole length with the top bit hanging free. The pole or staff means power or energy and the cloth means form. So a god is power wrapped or cloaked in form. The end hanging free has this significance ... it is like a flag. So the presence of power or energy is advertised, or made apparent by the form which cloaks it. So for instance we know that it is windy ... not because we can see wind directly ... but because we see its effects ... things being blown about ...flags waving ... in the same way we know power or energy is there because we see the form in which it cloaks itself but we don't see the power itself. To the Egyptians the whole manifest world was composed of divine powers hidden in form. Everything, trees, mountains, birds, animals, people were all this. The world was made of divine powers.

That deserves a special TBs star ... if only there were such a thing. Very well said.

The 19th and 20th centuries 'experimented' with various kinds of governmental regimes. Communism actually stems from an economic theory of collective ownership of land and means of production. Soviet style socialism was not actually full communism but intended as a means to achieve that. It involved central control of the economy and the Soviet assembly which set economic and social programs. This style of socialism is almost defunct unless you count Cuba and North Korea (which is actually more like a god-king oligarchy). Fascism is also central control but by the 'few' ... that is the elite who hold the society and economy together hence the fascist symbol which is an axe with a bundle of wood around it. The axe is the elite and the wood the people. In an ideal fascist state (if such a thing were possible) the few, the elite would through their greater intelligence and far sightedness act for the benefit of the many. However this is actually given human nature an impossible ideal as the elite will always act in their own interest. The experiments failed. The soviet union collapsed, Fascism through the excesses of the Nazis became unacceptable and recognisably flawed. So that left the liberal democracies. Liberal because of the focus on individual rights and democracy because of the election of the government ... different models exist of course because of the historical differences in various countries and cultures ... the main three being American style Presidential democracy, British Parliamentary democracy and the republics of Europe. It is one of these models which we export into iraq and other countries - a mistake in my view because democracy and the exact model used has to be grown from the base up and not imposed from above to work properly. Nothing that you will see in the US is or will ever be anything approaching communism since collective ownership is an impossible idea. However because of the Cold War the word communism is sued as a kind of insult/monster in the dark to scare people and this only works if they have no idea what it really is. Fascism of a kind probably does exist because those who hold all the cash and power exert massive influence and try to control everyone's lives. However even this is not real fascism as a principle because the elite are hidden behind and rely on the front of the elected officials.