I come back to time again.

[kiya]

(Pardon incoherence. Bad headache.)

Djet and neheh return to me in their interweavings, and I contemplate time. I wrote this to the Cauldron the other day:

That which is established resides in neheh, the time of cycles: it loops, it cycles, it repeats. This is the time of days, of the passage of the moon, of tides, of seasons, of the changes in environment, the shifts of the sky. This is safe time and known time.

That which comes to be resides in djet, linear time, in which events follow after each other in uniqueness. Djet is an awesome, challenging thing; it is huge, it is outside the normal patterns. It causes difference, it causes change, it moves beyond the established.

Most of life is a combination. Birth and death reside in neheh -- these are things that have long happened, will continue to happen, outside of specific instances. But each birth, each death, is the beginning or end of something that has never been before. Out of the interplay between the two is living made.

I have no intrinsic objections to consciously going forth into djet and making change -- but I do think that to do so without a proper sense for how awesome that form of time is is irresponsible. That space is awesome and terrible and speaks to that which can not be recalled; I fear it, even as I use it to motivate my own growth and accomplishment. Things that pass by in djet are gone forever; things that pass by in neheh will come around again in their time.

I use djet. I look at deadlines and say, "I need to get this done by the deadline." Even things that have nothing to do with the deadline in a real sense, I do that way. In neheh alone I stagnate -- there will be tomorrow to deal with it, so it need not be done now. It frightens me, but it's a necessary tool, it keeps me from living too much in the cycle of day to day to day. Djet is the means by which the things I will do when I get around to them come around.

Rituals tend to be stable, consistent things; they don't change much. And this is because rituals lie where djet and neheh cross. There is much that is unique in each individual's experience, stuff that each person has to go through alone, and the weight of linearity is massive. Ritualising some of those experiences is bringing them into the cycle -- this may be the first time I have done this thing, this may be a life-transforming initiation experience for me, but I am not alone in it; others have had this ritual before me, others will have it after me, perhaps even others are sharing it with me now, as we take our steps into the unknown admittedly alone but all together. It's a means of making infinity bearable, bringing it into a human scale.

This is one of the reasons I am comfortable rooting in recon practice; I can feel the neheh in these rituals, even as I adapt them to myself somewhat. Neheh is a place I can live, and where I'm comfortable. I have to face djet and understand it and learn to incorporate it into my life, but I have to do so from within neheh, where I know where things go. Djet is too large for me to face alone.

Comments

[rainfallsautumn.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this essay. Yet again you helped me put my finger on something elusive. Do you think most Americans are more comfortable in Neheh or in Djet? Because I have the exact opposite reaction-- I am comfortable in djet. Anything can happen, the creative spark of the day itself is enough to go on. Neheh, though, feels like a weight. All that pressure of how things have been done before, how *I've* done them before, drags on my ability to create. The deeper rooted its grooves, the harder it is to unmake it and start again from scratch, memory prevents reinvention. Tradition and anniversary-marking creates enormous pressure in my head, and I end up resenting them mightily. Considering certain things about my spiritual connections, this probably makes a tremendous amount of sense. But there's a degree to which it feels like a proper Kemetic *should* be more comfortable with neheh than this, though.

[zeborah]

This paragraph may not be perfectly coherent, it's a glomph of an association of ideas in my head: There's a thing in my life, a particular cycle which may not really be a cycle; I'm going to call it false-neheh because logically I know it's *not* a cycle though it sometimes feels darn like one. "Life isn't one thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over again." Humans do pattern-making: if something happens a few times then it must happen every time. Neheh can be comfortable, but can also be constraining.

Um, so. I think it's been stressful and bad for me to be stuck thinking that this thing is a cycle (though also useful: even though I'm/havebeen perpetually scared of the cycle starting again, once I'm in the cycle I can know that it will come out right because it always has before). And since things have settled down more I've been trying to convince myself that the cycle is stopped and gone now; maybe having the words/concepts to distinguish between the two types of time will help me with that. So thank you for words: words are good.

[kiya]

Do you think most Americans are more comfortable in Neheh or in Djet?

Oh, gods, I have no fucking clue. "Most Americans" and "most people" are incomprehensible to me, I have to ask teinedreugan to explain them. (*fishes out the Martian anthropologist upic*)

teinedreugan actually had an interesting thought about the Egyptians and djet/neheh. We know their society changed, we can track that stuff down; we also know that as it changed it was always reconceptualised as "this is how it always has been". He pointed out that some people probably recognised that actual change was happening and framed it either as genuine difference or as advanced understandings of known ancient truths. It's just the social mythology that demands continuity.

It occurs to me that American social mythology strikes me as reflecting djet -- land of opportunity, self-made man, advancement and innovation. Yes?

I think that the djet/neheh interlacing is important to modernist reconstruction work, by the way. One of the weak points in reconstruction is going back purely in neheh without taking account of the difference in djet and finding those different understandings of ancient truths.

(Hm. Will send private note re: certain things about spiritual connections.)

[kiya]

I had one of those pseudo-cycles with relationships once. V. messy.

If you want to know the provenance of the words, they're Egyptian -- things translated from pyramids and papyri as "forever and ever" tend to be "for djet and neheh".