Apech

Yes a fetish as in a cult object of Anubis. In the funerary cult they used deities and symbols in a special way - all relating to the immortality project (you might call it) (as we mentioned in the Stele thread.). So here I believe it has a specific meaning - while elsewhere it might be used as a general cult object relating to Anubis and so on. When we get to the goddesses Isis and Nephthys you might see this clearly - that while say Isis has a whole form of worship of her own and all sorts of attributes etc. here she is used specifically for a 'technical' reason as part of the funerary process of transformation into an akh and/or 'living after death'.

I think it was more than to remind us of mummification. I think it was a meditative symbol for a certain state of being.

Yes it is called Imy-wt which can be translated as 'he who is in his wrappings' or 'one who is in his skin' - although the literal translation which I prefer is just 'in the skin' (imy means 'in, between' and wt means skin or wrappings.) It is also a title of Anubis and a symbol for mummification. It is a pole from which hangs an animal skin which has been stuffed. In my view it is the most important thing in the whole scene as it depicts how we are to view the body.

Ok. I'm going to talk through this and the next two stages (from the papyrus of Khonshu-mes). Sorry about the title I couldn't think of anything better. It's from a papyrus written in the 21st Dyn. in Thebes for the priest Khonshu-mes. It is one of the so-called mythological papyri which were produced in this late period which consist of almost entirely illustrations with little or no text. We are starting in the West which means the body. With death and mummification. Sorry the pic is a bit blurred but I probs with the image capture and getting it big enough. I'll go through what it shows and try to explain what it means in subsequent posts. Questions welcome (but please try to stay on topic if at all possible).

Yes that an interesting thought that God leads us to temptation and yet we ask that same deity to deliver us from evil. For it is his kingdom.

There’s a lot of wisdom in the body if only we learn to ‘listen’ to it.

you wait for an hour then three cigarettes come by at once!!!

Nuance and sarcasm rule the world!

Hi and welcome. Hope you find some answers here.

Bem vindo, Isso parece muito interessante e estou ansioso para ouvir o que você tem a dizer. (sorry for my crap Portuguese) A.

Sounds like progress to me.

Easy on the bottle old3bob 😀

The Ancient Egyptians saw everything I terms of time and didn’t even have a word for space as such.

I guess there must be people working on the foundational questions - which I guess is helpful. By the way I’m with Eric Weinstein that string theory is one of the major blocks to progress. But I spend very little time thinking about science these days so I’m out of touch with the latest stuff.

Thanks @steve that was interesting. Just goes to show that the questions that physics has 'stumbled upon' are very ancient. For instance as in the idea that the wave function of the experimenter interacts with the experiment to give the outcome. The Samkhyas asked a similar question - what is the observer and what is the observed ... and came up with Purusha and Prakriti as the answer. I guess Buddhists would say various things depending on the schools, it's dharmas, its 'mind' = citta or even Madhyamaka - there is no observer or an observed. So I think physics is asking important questions and more importantly showing that it's not just theory it's real. But they are still stuck in the paradigm of 'the external objective physical world is fundamentally real' ... while I would say that unless they break this assumption their theories will not develop. For instance they talk about the qualities of particles without ever asking what exactly is a particle (if indeed such a thing exists in the first place). I don't think fundamentally that reality can be broken down into bits. Or at least if you do ... then each 'bit' somehow contains the whole. As in each instance of consciousness (dharma) includes all consciousness (like a hologram). But to think like this would fundamentally tear up the very idea of an objective world as a real thing. We have tried, in a bid to be truly objective, to exclude ourselves from the equation, only to fail. But the successes we have had in manipulating 'matter' and so on keep us locked in this view.