Apech

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yes the Ptolemys ruled Egypt in the late period and the most famous was Cleopatra. Also they were invaded by the Persians and Assyrians and of course the Romans. The idea of making god equivalences was Greek - they liked to do this so the Hermes=Thoth thing is theirs and not the Egyptians idea. However I don't suppose they had a problem with it. they did import some gods again int he late period but mostly it was export ... particularly Isis who became a universal mother goddess through the Roman world and together with Serapis was the last of a pagan gods before the onset of Christianity. During the first few centuries AD there was a kind of multi-cultural melting pot in Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great in northern Egypt. It had a famous library which was later bruned down by the Christian mob. here is where the Egyptian priest, Greek neo-platonists and jewish Kabbalists intermingled and this is where Hermeticism and the writings of Hermes Tresmegistus first appeared.

Oh so all these discussions are a game or competition to you ... is that right ... very interesting. I think you have to bear in mind that a lot of people come here to discuss and learn from each other and are interested in the subject matter. Give it a thought.

For a long time the knowledge of Egyptian gods was limited to the Greek writers like Plutarch who recorded their myths. This is where for instance Mozart got Isis and Osiris from for the Magic Flute (he was a Freemason). Then after Champollion decifered the hieroglyphs a lot was published and it opened up a lot of knowledge. One Egyptologist called Wallis Budge was curator of the British Museum and published a lot of texts ... his stuff is still available in books and on the internet as it is out of copyright. Occult groups picked up on this newly discovered knowledge and used his books to recreate rituals and so on. Unfortunately Budge was not a very good Egyptologist and made a lot of mistakes. If you mention his name to a modern Egyptologist they usually sneer or laugh .. but one of the reasons Egypt is so popular is because of him, something those others forget. You will, however still find a lot of his mistranslations in use ... for instance he called Atum - Tmu for some reason. More importantly there are certain groups of gods (called Enneads - which means group of nine - even though sometimes there are more than this number) the main one being the Heliopolitan Ennead. These are the gods feature in the creation myth focused round Atum-Ra. Shu, Nut and Geb and three of them. These together with certain key deities such as Horus, Anubis, Maat, Thoth and so on form perhaps the main gods. But you must remember Egyptian culture lasted intact for 3000 years and although the central themes remained the same the style and emphasis changed. Also each major centre had its own version of the creation and the Ennead or in the case of Hermopolis the Ogdoad (group of eight).

If that's against the 1st amendment then so is advertising and political publicity.

What?

Thanks so much for all your help.

that's a massive question to which the answer is all of them if properly understood. I know that sounds like dodging giving an answer but what I think I need to do is build up to those kinds of questions as we go so to speak ... perhaps if I talk about the various entities of a person and how they interact ... also the relation of parts of the body it might start to make sense.

You are a god among TaoBums ... but no it still makes my CPU go to max temp and fan whirr like a hairdryer ... what a shame

Thanks! memory Fox is nto available for Osx snow leopard ... I wonder if there's analternative ... but have got others and am trying Firefox again... thanks so much for the advice.

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.