In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon.

[kiya]

So one of my current projects -- inspired in part by Temple of the Cosmos: the Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred -- is writing an essay about souls, drawing heavily on ancient Egyptian and Feri concepts and seeing where the similarities are and where the differences are; I'll probably be submitting it to Witch Eye somewhere along the line.

This has led me to a lot of faffing about and just thinking about structures and free associating around them and such.

One of the things suggested in Temple of the Cosmos is that the ancients did not consider the body of itself to be animate. (The only word I know for "body" is better translated as "corpse'; there may be others, though.) The members, the parts of the body, they have living existence, living essence -- the personifications of eyes and heart are an example of same. There's stuff in there about funereal texts of people claiming possession of all their parts, people assembling all those parts into a coherent entity.

There are also associations of parts with gods; there's the myth in which the netjerw are associated with the teeth and tongue and lips of the Creator Who speaks all into existence, there's this:

My hair is Nun;
my face is Ra;
my eyes are Het-hert;
my ears are Wepwawet;
my nose is She who presides over Her lotus-leaf;
my lips are Yinepu;
my molars are Serqet;
my incisors are Aset the goddess;
my arms are the Ram, the Lord of Mendes;
my breast is Nit, Lady of Sais;
my back is Set;
my phallus is Wesir;
my muscles are the Lords of Kheraha;
my chest is He Who is Greatly Majestic;
my belly and my spine are Sekhmet;
my buttocks are the Eye of Heru;
my thighs and my calves are Nut;
my feet are Ptah;
my fingers are Orion; [associated with Wesir]
my toes are living uraei;
there is no member of mine devoid of a god,
and Djehwty is the protection of all my flesh.

(Papyrus of Ani, Chapter 42.)

Which brings me around to the notion that the human body is a microcosm to the macrocosm of the netjerw as the members of the Creator; that this is one and many again, in a different sort of way.

...the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we can all walk together in a single public universe that we can all share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia.

Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. ...but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!

(The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.)



On the SDMB, there's a thread talking about faith in which someone suggested something about the sincerity of Fred Phelps, as if his belief in his god is something that should matter to me because I'm theistic in my basic attitude.

My basic feeling is that the people who really have a justification for arguing with Phelps about his god are the ones who feel he's nicked the Name of theirs. I'm entirely willing to believe he has a god or godlike thingy that motivates him; this doesn't mean anything to me in the grand scheme of things. The atheist I was talking things over with said something to the effect of "require him to prove his god exists, which of course he can't do."

Dude. Of course it exists. Even if it only exists in the form of "Fred Phelps's delusion of grandeur", it exists; even if it doesn't rove beyond the narrow limits of his murder-counting hole, it's still in his head. Arguing that the stuff in his head doesn't exist isn't gonna get anywhere. Keeping the guy from hurting more people and helping out the people he does hurt is gonna get somewhere. What's in his head, pfft. Scrape it out and use the skull as a mug.


In other news, I walked down to the doctor today, got a new prescription, and had it filled on the way home. Order is restored to the universe. I called for the appointment this morning, even; I got lucky, I guess.

Also, "It's damn cold out there" clearly transcends language barriers.

Further, I should add Illuminatus! to the read-list.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Illuminatus was funny back when I was a teenager, but after coming back to it after 15 years my appreciation for Douglas Adams has grown immensely.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Which brings me around to the notion that the human body is a microcosm to the macrocosm of the netjerw as the members of the Creator;

This kind of reminds me of St. Augustine saying in De Trinitate that we need to study the Trinity because it is the only way of understanding ourselves. We are the Trinity in microcosm.

I also note that the Trinity has made more sense to me since my own experimentation with multiplicity.