The Book of :
The Hidden Chamber
ca. 1426 BCE
or :
the Twelve Hours of the Night
and
the Midnight Mystery

Section 1
History of the Midnight Mystery

Book of the Hidden Chamber - Sixth Hour
The five-headed serpent "Tail-in-Mouth" :
"the mysterious image of the Duat, unknown and unseen"
Tomb of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (ca.1479 - 1426 BCE)

by Wim van den Dungen

---

Section 2
Pataphysics of Creation

Section 3
The Summary of the Amduat
The Twelve Hours : A Commentary

---

Introduction : Ars Obscura and sacred timelessness

1 Ancient Egyptian Royal Funerary Ideas.

• 1.1 From Early Dynastic tombs to the Pyramid Texts.
  
        1.1.1 Predynastic graves & mounds.
        1.1.2 The advent of the dual kingship.
        1.1.3 The royal tombs.
        1.1.4 Osiris & the stellar function of the pyramid.
        1.1.5 Major changes : the religion of Re.
        1.1.6 Major changes : the titulary.
        1.1.7 The pyramid of Unis and the Pyramid Texts.
   

• 1.2 Funerary logic of the tomb of Unis.
  
        1.2.1 Spatial semantics.
        1.2.2 Reading a tomb ?
        1.2.3 Pharaoh's great speech.
        1.2.4 The Egyptian psyche and funerary rituals.
   

• 1.3 The Coffin Texts & the Book of the Dead.
  
        1.3.1 Political & economical players.
        1.3.2 A radical change of perspective.
        1.3.3 The "democratization" of the hereafter.
        1.3.4 The Coffin Texts.
        1.3.5 The Book of the Two Ways.
        1.3.6 The Book of the Dead.
   

• 1.4 The royal New Kingdom Books of the Netherworld.
  
        1.4.1 The archetypal forms of renewal.
        1.4.2 A new royal prerogative.
        1.4.3 The New Solar Theology.
   

• 1.5 The Pharaohs of the Book of the Hidden Chamber.
  
        1.5.1 The textual basis.
        1.5.2 The Midnight Pharaohs.

2 The Midnight Mystery or Ars Obscura ...

Introduction

Ars Obscura
and sacred timelessness ...

Cirque de Gavarnie - Pyrenees

Palaeolithic cave mysteries

Why did prehistoric humanity, bewildered by pristine natural environments, at once terrible and fascinating, put in the effort to paint the shapes of real and fabulous animals in deep, dark underground caves (cf. the Palaeolithic caves in France) or carve mysterious images on remote, shaded rocks (cf. the Neolithic petroglyps of the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt) ?

The Palaeolithic Age comprises a huge time interval. The Lower Palaeolithic Age (Old Stone Age, ca. 1.5 million - 100.000 BCE) begins with the appearance of the first stone tools. At first, these are simple implements, like flaked cobbles (found in Africa). The latter are associated with fossils of the oldest human species known, Homo habilis, a predecessor of Homo erectus, the first hominid to enter the Eurasian continent. Stone tools dated to more than 1.5 million years ago are on record in Portugal. During this epoch, cold and warm climatic conditions alternated.

The Middle Palaeolithic, Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age (ca. 100.000 - 40.000 BCE) is defined by its flake tools. Their production frequently involved extracting blanks from raw-material cobbles. This technique made it possible to obtain flakes with pre-determined shapes (ovoid, triangular or rectangular), retouched into tools. The Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis is associated with this period.

In the Upper Palaeolithic (ca. 40.000 - 10.000 BCE), a whole range of novelties appear : projectile points made from materials like bone, ivory or deer antler, the use of personal adornments (animal teeth and shells pierced to be used as pendants), art and its mythical symbolism. These evidence a cognitive jump, a crucial advance in problem-solving capacities and symbolization (the association of a set of phenomena to a fixed glyph). Important social changes are on record. We witness the formation of society. Primitive communities appear and try to adapt to the hard life during glaciation.

Their new cognitive symbolizations of nature (albeit mythical and archaic), stimulate the belief in "higher" powers, the spirit-world and the afterlife. This is the era of the cave mysteries : the secret of life and death symbolized as the mythical pattern of the vanishing, mystification and reappearance of light. The mystery play of the cave as a way to touch the higher powers of nature and harvest their blessings.

The "human" brain is able to compute the spiritual potential of consciousness since the time of Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis (ca. 500.000 - 29.000 BCE). The neuronal wiring needed to do so was probably absent in Homo erectus (ca. 1.6 million - 27.000 BCE), especially in the Lower Palaeolithic.

The "fourth" state next to waking, dreaming and the dreamless sleep, lies outside the cycles of "nominal" spacetime and involves the emancipation of the brain (cf. "turîya"- the "fourth" in Hinduism). This consciousness escapes the tragi-comic, quaternio of elemental conditions of the natural order.

The freedom gained by measuring with additional dimensions, entails cultural forms interacting with and transforming nature.

A complex neurological circuit is necessary to compute and process spiritual experiences. An upgraded version of the neuronal equipment to do this was at work in the Cro-Magnon brain, namely the ability to symbolize these experiences (cf. angular gyrus). But at first, the original software had been uploaded in the cortical hardware of the Neanderthals (cf. the right amygdala, the "God"-spot in the brain).

Although scholars still debate whether the latter had religious sense from the start (ca. 500.000 BCE), it is clear the late Neanderthals performed funerary rituals (awareness of mortality presupposing immortality and vice versa).

Pech Merle - ca. 16000 BCE

Before reaching the gigantic underground rock cathedral within the holy mound, the Cro-Magnon, or Homo sapiens sapiens (from 100.000 till ca. 10.000 BCE), crawls a considerable distance through a twisting, narrrowing, pitch black tunnel underneath tones of solid rock. The heart of the mountain is one or several caves lit with fires, with a variety of known, unknown and phantastic animals painted on high walls and maybe animated by the resounding echoes of the fierce rhythms of beated stalactites ... Are strange men running around in unseen outfits, shouting, dancing or otherwise occupied ? The Dancing Sorcerer of Trois Frères perhaps, directing, in this grand natural galleries within the sacred mound, the secret dance of the powers that be, i.e. the supernatural spirits of the ancestors and the deities. Why do these Palaeolithic ritualists seek the same darkness of deep, dreamless sleep and death as the stage for their activities ?

Lascaux - the Great Hall of the Bulls

The underlying purpose of this drama of darkness is religious and magical. The former reconnects the archaic, mythical layer of consciousness, predominant in Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic humanity, with the primordial, archetypal powers or differentials of nature, the types representing the Nature of the natural order. The latter protects against the dark, dangerous side of the natural order, and aims at its successful manipulation by means of the Nature of natures. Prehistoric consciousness projects this outwards, and perceives it as the living, animated existence of ceaseless repetitions and constant types. The latter are only "typical coordinations" within its psychomorphy perceptions of the natural environment, particularly the "psychophysics" of water (food) and light (darkness). Over time, mythical notions of these psychomorph experiences take form. These eventually become natural "stereotypes", the gods and goddesses of archaic polytheism. These deities represent the unchanging in the constantly changing, the stability of change in the life of wanderers and farmers alike.

Upper Palaeolithic humanity had no local horizon. Unable to plot the natural cycle of the Sun, this slowly emerging intelligent consciousness has only the Moon to rely on, for only this swift Light presents its ever-changing face always the same to the entire Earth, no matter where one wanders. The horns of the consort of this great goddess, the "Great Moon Bull", are the two crescents of the Moon. Fertility, sexuality and the mystery of the uterus rule supreme. The great fertility goddess and her consort remain crucial and dominant archetypal representations until the end of the Neolithic. But as soon as village life commences, a local horizon is established, and the annual cycle of the Sun paired with the Lunar month.

the Lunar Phases : astronomical

The Moon was and is used to measure time. The unchanging Lunar phases were charted on deer antlers and tigh-bones because of the vital information they represent. A purely nomadic lifestyle obscures the daily and annual cycles of the Sun (apparent and seasonal). So the nearest fixed point of orientation is the everchanging face of the Moon. The Lunar cycle of 29.5 days starts when the Moon is "invisible", standing between the Earth and the Sun, on the Sun side of the Earth (i.e. New Moon or Sun - Moon = 0°). During the period of increased light that follows (its face forming a "p"), the Half Moon midpoint is reached at the end of the First Quater (Sun - Moon = 90°). Before this First Quater Moon, the Moon is crescent, after it, her movement is gibbous (approaching Full Moon) or waxing. A Full Moon rises in the East at about the same time as the Sun sets in the West. After the Full Moon, the face of the satellite forms a "d". The Waning Moon. After the Last Quater Moon, the Old Moon is visible. These fixed temporal intervals of the Lunar cycle, and their corelative dual phenomenology of light versus darkness, were symbolized in myths. This stable calendar of the wanderers assured fertility, but offered no seasonal plan.

Are there, besides the mystical quest for the radical altered state of consciousness, other religious and magical purposes for entering the Palaeolithic "cave of darkness" ? In order to steer his environment and himself, the wanderer, caught in the Lunar cycle of light and darkness, of plenty and want, seeks, in a mythical mode of cognition and by sympathetic imitation (by magical mirroring), to unite with the projected "types" of nature. The mountain is the ultimate natural type, representing stability, strength and the will of the deities. Likewise, the heart of the mountain is its secret, and becomes the sanctum or sacred uterus of the great goddess. This holy space protects and feeds spiritual growth.

Three stages characterize the Upper Palaeolithic cave mysteries :

1. "the entry" : the tunnel : the process of differentiation from light to darkness ;

2. "the sanctum" : the cathedral : the secluded place of the mystery of the hidden light ;

3. "the exit" : the return : the process of integration from darkness to light.

Light and darkness are the physical underpinning of the cave mysteries. The cave is a protected mediating area were the human and the archetypes of nature touch. Its heart is an uterus, a place of new birth. The tunnel is a crawl or passage-way between stages & stations of life and the otherworld (the beforelife and the afterlife), the path of the seed to the ovary. In the natural darkness of the sanctum, events such as the death of a hunter could be relived and the causes combatted in a symbolical, allegorical way. Initiations could happen. The womb was the temple of the great goddess, she who enfolds nature as a whole.

Lascaux - the Shaft of the Dead Man

The Cro-Magnon were the first to use grand rock cathedrals and their difficult entrances to invoke the experience of symbolical death and the subsequent initiation into a new, more powerful, rejuvenated state of consciousness, enabling one to move to a higher, stronger mode of being and awareness of being. Perhaps a better hunter, healer and leader of others. These superior hominids were able to artistically symbolize their religious and magical experiences, and thus shape spiritual traditions and eventually develop notions like heaven, hell, god and goddess, as well as shamanism (the conscious control of trance) and later priesthood (the specialization of magico-religious activities in more centralized village societies). Their common experiences shaped the earliest myths.

Les Trois Frères - Dancing Sorcerer - ca.10.000 BCE.

This 30-inch tall figure of a shaman is carved into a ceiling chamber of Trois Frères, a Palaeolithic hunter's initiation cave in southern France (Pyrenees). His is an image of sympathetic magic, with the ears and horns of a stag, the eyes and beak of an owl, the bearded face of an old man, the tail of a wolf, the paws of a bear and the legs of a dancing shaman. Near him are painted hunting murals. The assumption of these animal forms allowed the shaman to enter his trance and "understand" the animals in a symbolical way. He could transfer this "knowledge" or commune with these powers and serve his group, reducing fear and opening up the barrier between the natural and its Nature, the feminine powers of the "Great Mother" and the steady run of the energy of her "Bull", the Moon.

Egypt in prehistory

"All the data at our disposal suggest that the process of Nilotic adaptation favoured partial sedentism and encouraged food storage. It was therefore part of the beginning of a long evolutionary process through which the people of the Nile valley embarked on the Neolithic period."
Midant-Reynes, 2000, p.59.

On the basis of the evidence to date, the majority of scholars subdivide Egypt's unwritten history (ca. 5000 - 3000 BCE) in three major phases :

1. the pre-Neolithic Period (ca. 7000 and earlier) : early settlers in the Nile Valley and in the western desert contributing to the historic Egyptian reality - the "process of Neolithicization" (Midant-Reynes, 2002) ;

2. the Neolithic Period (ca. 5000 - 4000 BCE) : the first traces of village settlement on the banks of the Nile. The crucial myths of these Nilotic cultures are dominated by Lunar ideational features. However, because of the fixed horizon, awareness of the Solar cycle, and the seasonal changes brought about by it, rose ;

3. the Predynastic Period (ca. 4000 BCE - 3000 BCE) : incipient stages of the centralization of power go hand in hand with the "Solarization" of the old Lunar myths. This new, fixed reference point, allows psychomorph projections of stability, authority and continuity. The enduring order of the sedentary farmer is guaranteed by sacred kingship, and the latter is engendered by the great goddess herself. The period comes to a close when the male king assimilates the sacred power of the great goddess and initiates Solar ideation.

Upper Palaeolithic rock art and its magico-religious sense reflect the spirituality of the free wanderers, the gatherer-hunters who roam a large territory, identifying (sanctifying) important landmarks, such as mountains and rivers (during the day), as well as the phases of the Moon (at night). These sacred waymarks represent the great goddess and her consort. She is the spacetime continuum embedding the powerful, ongoing drive of the lifeforce of her consort, the Bull, at maximum strength when the Moon is Full (Sun - Moon = 180°, with a brightness of magnitude -12.7).

"But while the true tendency of scientific, analytical-critical thinking is toward liberation from this substantial approach, it is characteristic of myth that despite all the 'spirituality' of its objects and contents, its 'logic' -the form of its contents- clings to bodies."
Cassirer, E. : The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press - Yale, 1955, vol.2., p.59.

the Solar cycle : seasonal
and daily magico-religious sense

When the Neolithic dawned, this picture could be slowly completed. Farmers work out change within a local horizon, and so identify the overarching, all-encompassing natural, primordial type of life : the annual cycle of the Sun. The changes marked by this cycle are seasonal and horizon-related relationships between the Earth and the stars. The horizon of the nomad travels beside him unfixed, with no reference to a stable element of the environment. Wherever he stops, there the Sun sets, and the moving celestial vault remains un-measurable. The synodic movement is detected, the sidereal remains unknown. Neolithic semi-nomads and farmers experienced the annual cycle of events in a fixed number of places. Small changes could be observed and logged. Finding an efficient balance between both approaches (the dominant Lunar and the emerging Solar) preoccupied humanity during the Neolithic as a whole.

The study of Predynastic Egypt started with Petrie in 1895 (sequence dating by ordering ceramics with respect to decoration & manifacture at the sites at Naqada, Abydos and Hu). In 1923, the Badarian culture was discovered (cf. Badari in Upper Egypt). The first major synthesis was by Kantor in 1944 and 1952. In 1960, Butlzer initiated the study of Nile floods and other elements of the palaeo-environmental record of Egypt. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, studies by Hassan focused on enviromental reconstruction, subsistence, settlement & demographic investigations. He also investigated the cognitive schema of Predynastic peoples through their rock art and the mythogenesis of the early Egyptian state. A general synthesis was formulated by Midant-Reynes (1992).

"The broad scope of Egyptian religion grew out of the most ancient surviving roots of our world and time. They were among the few surving inheritors of humanity's oldest religious philosophies, and represent a continuity of thought and religious training that goes back to the days of the great cathedrals of cave art. The earliest images of their philosophy are more intensely sky-related, demonstrating the widespread geography which was the natural environment out of which the images grew. These images are the iconography of the Divine evolved by the nomadic plains peoples of Neolithic Africa."
Wheeler, 2002, p.20.

The earliest examples of stone monuments are found at Nabta, a site in the western desert dating ca. 7000 BCE. There is evidence that these inhabitants aligned their stone constructions to the cardinal points and to the solstice (the equinox points of the Sun). Near these "calendar circles" as they have been called, burials of cattle have been found. The first pottery-making in Egypt is also very old, dating to the ninth millennium ! At Tushka, North of Abu Simbel, two humans were found buried, their graves surmounted by the bucrania of wild bulls (Wendorf & Schild, 1980). These elements indicate that these communities were already

"... moving towards an ordered social structure, perhaps with some form of hierarchy and evidently with individuals who practiced special occupations and others who directed the communal efforts in respect of them. It might be said that the whole fabric of later historical Egypt might be seen by the evidence from these remote settlements."
Rice, 2003, p.23.

The following chronology of Egyptian prehistory prevails :

• Neolithic period : the interval between the emergence of farming villages on the banks of the Nile and the initiation of the Egyptian nation-state. The earliest evidence of Neolithic village communities in the Nile Valley dates between 5000 and 4100 BCE (cf. Merimda Beni Salama). These communities were not more at best than a few hundred. They settled on little hillocks or raised land, most likely to avoid the flood.
  
  The Badarians (cf. el-Badari, Upper Egypt on the East bank) were a farming and herding community. These settlers raised cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. They cultivated barley and wheat and agriculture was supplemented by fishing and fowling. Pottery, glass, copper and glazed staetite were found at some sites. The walls of early Badarian vessels are fired to a hardness which approaches that of metal although often eggshell-thin. Exceptional crafsmanship already present.

  

  fine Badarian black-topped red ware
  Badarian culture - ca. 4200 BCE - Metropolitan

  The Badarians provided their dead with food and placed female figurines in the graves. They had established religious cults, in which the great goddess placed an important role. Social status evidences in funerary cults. Religious activity around female deities such as Hathor. Graven images in tombs, head of deceased pointing South, looking West ;

• Middle Predynastic period (ca. 4000 - 3600 BCE) : with Amratian culture (cf. site of el-Amra, Sohag - Naqada I) agriculture inceased, hunting deceased and a marked technological change took place. However, their culture may be seen as an advanced phase of the Badarian. Pottery, mostly in red fabric scored with designs and filled with a white finish, not yet diffused from Mesopotamia was created with geometrical and naturalistic designs, yet unstructured in layout. Draughtmanship appeared. Decorated textiles in vivid naturalistic style.

  

  painted bowl of a man harpooning a hippopotamus
  Amratian culture - ca. 3800 BCE - Metropolitan

  Concentration and centralization of power in its incipient stages with the formation of a managerial class. Transportation of goods along the Nile ;

• Late Predynastic period (ca. 3600 - 3300 BCE) :  in Gerzean culture (cf. site of el-Gerza, Fayum - Naqada II), fundamantal changes, techniques were improved. Contacts with Mesopotamia. Cult centers and urban centers emerged, associated with chiefdoms, principalities, provincial states and village corporations united into regional kingdoms. Trade continued to flourish and wealth distinctions became more salient. Whole burial treasures. Cow goddess Hathor is still revered.

  

  decorated ivory comb
  Gerzean culture - ca. 3500 BCE - Metropolitan

  "In fact, the Naqada II or Gerzean phase presents a natural succession from its immediate predecessor, with the important difference that it was responsive to a much more powerful and, it would appear, more sustained alien influence then either of those which it followed."
  Rice, 2003, p.23.
  The influence of Mesopotamia on this crucial and sensitive phase is unmistaken, but did not change the Egyptian way of life, already very much in evidence. The differences between the cultural form of both cultures (political and religious) existed already for some time now and it is fair to assume the foreign influence only helped the native Egyptian cultural form to become historical. The role of Sumerian city-building and writing on Gerzean culture prevails in technology, scope and vision, but the Egyptians readapted and found ways of their own.
  "Considered in another way, the Naqada II phase is an intermission (though an intensely creative one) between the late Neolithic stages of the Valley society's development and the coming of the great dynasts who were to unite the Two Lands into the Dual Kingdom and thus create the historic Egyptian state."
  Rice, 2003, p.35.

• Terminal Predynastic period (ca. 3300 - 3000 BCE - Naqada III) : The rise of the Egyptian state was the result of wars and alliances hand in hand with the rising importance of the archetype of the "great individual", the male king. At first, he is the consort of the Upper Pelaeolithic and Neolithic great goddess, but slowly the Predynastic king assimilates her powers, and thereby justifies his own male divinity (independent of her - Hassan, 1992). In the first 250 years of this phase, fragmentation and reunification occurred (perhaps several times). In Upper Egypt, the kings of Naqada and Hierakonpolis ruled, and in the Delta, the petty kingdoms of Buto, Sais, Tell el-Balamoun, etc. divided Lower Egypt. The first major power emerged when the two southern kingdoms of Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) and Naqada united because the kings from Hierakonpolis, later known as the "Followers of Horus", conquered and annexed the kingdom of Naqada (Seth), and later those of the northern Delta.

A few important Predynastic realizations should be noted. These were completed before the grand Dynastic Period (ca. 3000 - 30 BCE) started !

• a spoken language ;

• administrative organization of provinces, groups of nomes ;

• chieftains accumulating power and prestige and founding the myth of kingship leading to the unification of Upper Egypt ;

• commercial and artistic activities ;

• the wish to unity the Nile valley into one state (conquering Middle Egypt and the Delta) ;

• a traditional notion of the sacred, which is rooted in the worship of the great goddess ;

• oral tradition of mythologies, stories, legends, charms, songs, hymns & funerary rituals assuring the afterlife of the deceased ;

• artistic works in clay and ivory - stone increasingly becoming the preferred material to eternalize the afterlife ;

• Gerzean ware design schemata reveal the lessening importance of the feminine in religion and the concomittant increase in masculine religious principles ;

• the first "mnemonic" symbols and semi-cursive hieroglyphs appear on labels of recipient, palettes, etc. The first hieratic (the cursive form of hieroglyphic writing) is Terminal Predynastic and already then in everyday use (cf. Palette of Narmer, Dynasty 0, ca. 3050 BCE).

There is no room for doubt : Dynastic Egypt did not emerge "ex nihilo", but the decisive features of the Egyptian way of life (the own-form of the cultural form) we have on record are already established a millennium earlier, whereas the emergence of regional kingship (ca. 3600 BCE) builds on the managerial approach of the Badarians (ca. 4000 BCE). The great change at the beginning of history is the theo-political notion of divine kingship : Two Lands united by the incarnation of a single, re-incarnating sky-god, descending in a male body, forming a dynasty of divine kings, ruling a united state of divisions.

"The kings who crafted the Egyptian state from the competing powers of the Predynastic period succeeded in formulating a concept of rule which guaranteed an absolutely pivotal role for the monarchy. The institution of kingship was projected as the sole force which held the country together, and the dual nature of the monarchy was expressed in the king's regalia, in his titulary, and in royal rituals and festivals. This concept -the harmony of opposites, a totality embracing paired contrasts- chimes so effectively with the Egyptian world-view that the institution of kingship acquired what has been called 'transcendental significance' (Frankfort, 1948)."
Wilkinson, 2001, p.185.

The Predynastic kings of Nekhen identified with Horus, "the distant one" (did he originate in Arabia ?), the overseer with the horizon of horizons. The kings of the first dynasties (Early Dynastic Period) consolidated this major change. It also implied the cognitive leap from mythical to pre-rational organizations, from notions to pre-concepts. Aided by writing, the cultural form developed rapidly and exteriorized its "canon". This Old Kingdom canon would dominate Egyptian thought until the end. Qua contents, this multi-layered texture returned to common Predynastic themes and another, new layer, was put on the mythical foundation.

the great Moon goddess of prehistory

In the Neolithic & Predynastic mind, at work in the mythical mode of cognition, natural cycles like the Lunar, were very entrenched. Its phases represented the divine feminine as the truly enduring part of nature outside man, and psychomorph projections on the Lunar stations were common. Cycles related to birth, growth, death & rebirth (healing), as well as plants, domestic animals and hunting were associated with this great goddess of the sacred. In Ancient Egypt, we see her appear ca. 4000 BCE.

the Lunar Phases : magico-religious

Her important and enduring role of the sacred feminine is confirmed by the frequent representations of female figures in late Naqada II iconography. The complex, composite nature of some of the Predynastic female deities (like Hathor, both Cow- and Sky-goddess) is a manifestation of the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic great goddess, who combined many of the functions later assigned to other deities. The crucial role of the sacred feminine persisted though, but when history dawned, the great goddess had lost her dominant position. She did not disappear. This is demonstrated by the prominent role played by goddesses in the later pantheon, by the equal status women enjoyed in Early Dynastic society and by the link between women and the sacred domains of existence (birth, fertility, creation, death, healing, rebirth).

Indeed, in the Old Kingdom, the mother of the royal heir was his official consort and on the Palermo Stone, the name of the divine king was directly followed by that of his mother. Women played a crucial role in dynastic changes, and man had his "heart" from his mother. Neither were the tombs of some of the early queens essentially different from those of the king. During his life, the latter was permanently protected by the "Two Ladies", the goddess Nekhbet -a vulture- and Wadjet -a cobra-, representing Upper and Lower Egypt respectively. In the tomb of Pepi I (ca. 2316 - 2284 BCE), we read :

"You are a son of the Great Wild Cow. She conceives you, she bears you, she puts you within her wing."
Pyramid Texts, utterance 554 (§ 1370).

So in Egypt, the unorganized, Lunar religious culture of the Neolithic hunters (5th millenium and earlier), Predynastic semi-nomads and settlers (4th millenium) had remained dominant until the end of prehistory (ca. 3000 BCE). During the Late and Terminal Predynastic Period, i.e. between ca. 3600 and 3000 BCE, the archetypal representation of male power and kingship steadily became more important and heralded the emergence of history.

Indeed, although Neolithic agriculture was the decisive economical factor responsible for the rise of Egyptian civilization, other, mytho-ideological elements played their role. According to Hassan (1992), mythogenetic changes were an essential ingredient in the rise of the theocreatic state and they were not merely a consequence of economic or political developments. Indeed, the surplus created assisted the refinement of culture, both religious and political. The Egyptians proved to foster a highly intelligent canon of meaningful relationships, and eternalized it in art, literature, religion, ritual and the persuit of wisdom.

"Ritual and myth provided individuals with a matrix of sacred meaning in which economic, social, and political developments were grounded and reinforced. Similarly, economic and political developments provided a framework for the transformation of ritual and myth along a co-evolutionary course."
Hassan, 1992, p.307.

For this author, ideation calls for the incomplete assimilation by the king of the sacred power of the great goddess and her deities. The control he had over others was legitimated by sacred myths, linking him with secret natural forces, in particular those of the great goddess.

With the unification of the country and the start of history, all power was centralized in the divine king, a "Follower of Horus". The sky-god Horus, represented by a falcon, incarnated again and again. The king was his earthly embodiment. The "Followers of Horus" present the notion of royal ancestor worship as a legitimization of male power, for all kings were so many incarnations of the same male sky-god. Each ruler became part of this upon his death.

Long intervals of time (consecutive years) become fixed by filling them up with mythical images, names and sacred events. This forms the apex of the Neolithic approach of the Solar cycle  : mark the past with the symbols of the present, and oversee annual intervals along a fixed but local horizon. Palaeolithic nomads never keep records and have no surplus. Each is his own horizon (cf. solipsism). Predynastic Egyptians were aware of two and more local horizons at the same time (cf. Upper and Lower Egypt plus the nomes), and succeed in uniting the Two Lands. At the start of the Dynastic Period, the "objective" perspective of the annual cycle of the Sun and his everlasting (fixed) horizon dominates the "subjective" vision granted by the monthly (eternal) cycle of the Moon and her fugal wanderings. The king manifests the unity of the Two Lands. His embodiment and residence is the "horizon of horizons", i.e. the horizon of the great witness, the sky-god Horus, the "I am" or identity of consciousness.

The king is witness of the exclusive point of view, the horizon of the divine on Earth. Divine kingship emerged when this legitimate descent was coupled with the image (myth) of divine power, and the acquisition of such power was achieved by partly assimilating pre-existent goddess cults and their sacred domains, i.e. the sacred feminine of the great goddess.  

The divine king became the son, brother and husband of the sky-goddess (Hathor). As such, he is divine. This assimilation was incomplete, and so goddesses continued to play their part as mothers, sisters and wives. Marriage with a sister was considered a sacred marriage, reaffirming the divinity of Pharaoh.

"The Ennead and the Osirian myths proved to be durable schemata (organizing formats) for the cosmogony of divine kingship. The myths conserve the power of female deities, but at the same time provide a cosmic rationale for the rule of a male king and hereditary succession. The struggle between Seth and Horus and the triumph of Horus, as well as the judgement of the gods in favor of Horus, established the rule of Law (Ma'at) and resolves the potential conflicts between clans over kingship and succession."
Hassan, 1992, p.319.

With the emergence of a unified Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE), the process by which the Neolithic and Predynastic cults of the great goddess of the Moon (ca. 5000 - 3000 BCE) had been slowly assimilated by the cult of the king, incarnating the male dominance of the overseeing "eye" of the Horus-falcon and the brilliant light of the Sun, culminated. The two main cycles of nature had been successfully coupled, and the dominant role of the Lunar type relinquished. Only the king, the "Bull of his Mother", the male incarnation of the male sky-god Horus, guaranteed the unity of the Dual Kingdom, being the ultimate Witness of the royal horizon.

The light of the Sun, grasped as the ultimate symbol of vitality, plenty and divinity, may be associated with the awareness made free by the surplus of food and a stable economy (or household) enabling the development of an inner life (consciousness perceiving its proper mode of being) and the blossoming of culture. This "Solarization" of the Lunar fertility myths goes hand in hand with a stronger centralized control.

the advent of history : writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt

Historians distinguish prehistory from history by the presence of written sources. The moment people solidify their thoughts in logograms and keep the record for posterity, a historical link between the past and the present can be intersubjectively established and a continuity of culture (as well as its development) is made possible. The rise of religion, science and philosophy is assisted by this difference between "la langue" (the linguistic system) and "la parole" (the use of "la langue" - cf. De Saussure), between the spoken language and the logocentric presence of written sentences (cf. Derrida). Writing fixates the fluid stream of consciousness. The glyphs of "la langue", i.e. the unity of acoustic image ("signifiant") and concept ("signifié"), reveal the complexity of the convential attributions (of image to concept), and the latter tell something about the mode of cognition at hand as well as the texture of thought. This is related to the level of cultural sophistication.

"Whether we are probing into the civilization of the Maya, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Chinese, or the Indians, we encounter a worldview and ethos that is suffused with a deep symbolism in which Heaven and Earth are connected through multiple correlations."
Feuerstein, Kak & Frawley, 1995, p.11.

Written language is the product of an agrarian society, for to make the economy work, records are necessary. Two early civilization stand out : the Mesopotamian (ca. 3100 - 539 BCE) and the Egyptian (ca. 3000 - 30 BCE).

The earliest Sumerian writing predates the first hieroglyphs by a century and more. During the Terminal Predynastic Period (ca. 3300 - 3000 BCE - Naqada III), there were contacts between Egypt and Mesopotamia. A pictographic system, similar in appearance and structure to the hieroglyphic script, was used to write the earliest Sumerian and proto-Elamite languages (cf. Proto-Elamite Tablet, Louvre). The Egyptian signary was from indigenous sources. The form of various artistic designs and motifs (for example the felines on the reverse of the "Palette of Narmer") indeed evidence the cultural transmissions between both cultures.

Unmistaken differences refute the thesis of a direct borrowing by the Egyptians of this early Sumerian script :

• in the earliest form of Sumerian, logography  predominates (a word is directly represented by its picture) and phonography (a word is represented by a series of signs for the spoken sounds) is limited. The latter took several centuries to fully develop ;

• in the earliest Egyptian, a substantial (if not complete) phonography is present ;

• the earliest Sumerian is syllabic and defines the vowel (each sign is a syllable consisting of either a vowel or a consonant + a vowel) ;

• the earliest Egyptian is consonantal with unstable vowels which are not recorded ;

• Sumerian has no determinatives and no developed pictoral ideography (a variety of signs representing idea, context, category, modality or nuance) ;

• the earliest Sumerian quickly became cuneiform, whereas Egyptian hieroglyphs remained pictoral until the last inscription (Temple of Philæ - 394 CE).

Indirect borrowing of the Sumerian is likely (cf. "stimulus diffusion"). But the differences indicate that the strong Sumerian example was adapted to the culture of Predynastic Egypt, its iconography and the grammar of its artistic styles. It is possible that in Late Predynastic times, the population of the Delta was in contact with south-western Asia, and settlers may have entered the region and mingled with the local population, but this was (against Derry and the theory of the "Dynastic Race") incidental to the cultural development of Egypt.

"... it is the Sumerian legend of the Paradise Land and not the Egyptian which has underlain this universal myth. Sumerian myths are the first to describe that place of primeval innocence and joy, which has informed the beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which to a substantial extent are the inheritors of the Sumerian mythologues and those of their successors, the Akkadians and Babylonians. The Egyptiand did not look back to times past as ideal, for they knew that their existence, the perpetual 'now' of the Valley, could not be bettered."
Rice, 2003, p.6.

In historical times, borrowings from some Semitic languages are well attested. But in Ancient Egyptian, there is no evidence for an "African substratum" (an indentifiable, specifically African language). In fact, scholars conjecture that many of these similarities are not borrowings at all, but prove that both the Egyptian and the Semitic languages were derived from a common ancestor, the Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic language family ...

In only six centuries (between ca. 3000 & 2400 BCE), the Egyptians developed their writing system as well as a series of literary forms (like the testament, the offering list, the autobiography, but also spells, prayers, hymns & wisdom instructions). They already possessed a rich mythical treasure-house of images, the latest being that of the divine king. When the flood was good, abundance was theirs and so sufficient leisure time was available to the elite to write down religious and funerary thoughts, and to develop theologies (of Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan & Osirian inspiration). Around 1938 BCE (the beginning of the XIIth Dynasty), the Classical Period started and new forms emerged, entailing a first person singular, deep interiorizations and the initiation of royal Theban theology (Amun-Re as the "king of the gods"). The record shows how much the Egyptians loved talking, inventing stories, doing art and write. Thanks to this outstanding verbal inclination of this remarkable people, the effort and precedent of Pharaoh Unis (ca. 2378 - 2348 BCE) and the climate of Egypt, we possess the Pyramid Texts, the oldest corpus of religious literature on the planet.

"And it is important to note that, in spite of the vast quantity of Sumerian inscriptional material excavated to date, only some three thousand tablets and fragments, no more than one percent, are inscribed with Sumerian literary compositions."
Kramer, 1972, p.11, dating them ca. 1750 BCE.

On a cognitive level, remarkable changes took place. On top of mythical thought, a new layer formed. The pre-concept had a stability enabling the articulation of thought, as well as its fixation in the Old Egyptian "record style". Pre-rational interiorization is at work in the literature of the Old Kingdom, with its consolidation of divine kingship and the advent of the theologies of Re & Osiris.

Let us briefly compare this situation with the history of Chinese writing. The earliest examples of Chinese writing are from the Shang period (ca. 1500 - 1027 BCE). These are the so-called "Oracle Inscriptions" found at the site near present-day Anyang, in Henan province. They are inscribed on tortoise shells and shoulder blades. Digs made at the site brought to light a total of more than 100.000 pieces of bones and shells carved with words. About 4.500 different characters have been counted, and 1.700 of them deciphered (one needs 3.000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper). Such a complex script certainly has a history, but so far no traces of its predecessor(s) have been found, and no wisdom-literature is available.

the Sothic rhythm of the Nile and the unpredictable life of Hapy

"The Nile is a huge, perpetually moving road, the supreme conveyor of historical experience : it is also a stupendous theatre. Not only was the longest of all recorded histories played out along its banks, with actors and settings of colossal proportions, it was ever capable of remarkable coups de theatre, of wonderful effects of light and drama : such effects it can still produce, with the splendid prodigality of an Edwardian actor-manager."
Rice, 2003, p.11.

Studies of rock and sediments in North Africa uncovered a surprising fact : in the last 10.000 to 20.000 years, the Sahara desert has alternated between wetter and drier phases (Butzler, 2001). Between 6000 and 3500 BCE, the current desert received enough rainfall to support animal and human life on a seasonal basis and was a savannah. Only with the beginning of the shift of the rainbelt southwards, around 3500 BCE, did the grassland to the West and East of the Nile Valley slowly start to dry out. The dry phase we witness today became apparent 4.500 years ago. It may have contributed to the downfall of the Old Kingdom. The "cosmic order" of things had been scattered and a new concept of overall equilibrium had to be found ...

the river Nile near Luxor

So three thousand years before the dawn of the Pharaonic Age (ca. 6000 BCE), Egypt looked rather different from what we see today. What is now desert bordering the Nile Valley on both sides, would have been grassland resembling the great planes of East Africa. To the West of the Nile, the high plateau as well as the broad eastern wadis would have supported large, roaming herds of game animals. For Middle Predynastic semi-nomads wandering through these savannah lands between 4000 and 3500 BCE, elephants, giraffes, gazelles, ostriches, zebras and rhinoceros would have been familiar.

The Egyptian rhythm of life, in both Predynastic and Pharaonic Periods, largely depended on climato-Nilotic circumstances. In the summer, after the rains, the dry grassland to the East was transformed into lush grazing land, attracting semi-nomadic herders from the Nile Valley with their cattle. This grassland was abundant but dangerous, for snakes and scorpions lurked. Why they moved away ? After the summer rains came the inundation of the Nile, a surge of water starting beyond the southern horizon and gradually swelling over a period of days until the Nile banks were flooded, as well as the low-lying land on either side of the river, making it unusable for agriculture and pasturage. This prompted the Egyptians to leave the Nile Valley and move to the eastern savannah. This pattern was probably already part of the culture of the Neolithic peoples.

"Flint arrowheads are common in the Badarian settlements that have been excavated, both Nile Valley villages and the savannah settlement at Laqeita. In other words, the pattern of life that so characterized the following Naqada I period was already established a thousand years earlier by the Badarians. (...) In its essential characteristics, the Nagada I period shows a great deal of continuity from the preceding phase. There is no sudden break, either in the way of life or in the products which have survived in the archeological record. People still combined cattle-herding with limited agriculture, dividing their time between the valley and the savannah."
Wilkinson, 2003, pp.184-185.

Before the inundation, the Predynastic Egyptians, practicing agriculture on a small scale, dug channels to distribute the floodwater over a larger area, assuring irrigation channels and dykes, serving as flood defences, were ready for the flood. Too little and too much water were catastrophic and cause of famine. The flood began around mid-July, covered the Nile Valley and the Delta for about three months. The ideal height was about 20 cubits (10m) at Aswan, 12 cubits (6m) near Memphis and about 7 cubits (3.5m) in the Delta.

Nilotic (Sothic) cycle

When the waters recede, a layer of silt is deposited over the land, giving new fertility to the soil. Then, it is time to sow in this newly watered and fertilized land. During the winter and spring, crops grew until they were ready to be harvested in early summer, and, after the coming of the summer rains, the cycle started again ...

Thanks to the Dog Star, the Nilotic cycle could be timed. By its annual appearance at dawn, i.e. together with the Sun, hence "heliacal rising", Sirius, associated with Isis, heralded the inundation of the Nile. Did the Egyptians of prehistory already notice that the heliacal rising of Sirius, after a period of seventy days of invisibility, always came a few days before the start of the annual inundation ? The godess Sopdet was depicted as a sacred cow bearing the symbol of the year (a young plant) between her horns.  As the agricultural calendar began with the rise of the Nile, Sirius was also called "bringer of the New Year". Sirius was known to the Greeks as "Sothis", derived from the Egyptian "Sopdet" ("spdt").

A link was forged between the diurnal movement of the Sun, the appearance of the bright Sirius and the beginning of the civil calendar. The latter was designed to meet the administrative demands of the nation. It had three seasons of four months, related to three important agricultural events : inundation, recession (of the water) and dehydration (of the land). The civil year had 12 months of 30 days, three seasons of four months and was inaccurate. It was revised by adding 5 days at the end of the year. So in this calendar, Sirius arrived around the 19th of July (the end of modern, Gregorian August). The first month was called "Akhet" or "inundation". It is the season when the Nile was in flood (mid July to mid November). "Proyet" or "springing forth" was the time in which land emerged to be planted (mid November to mid March), and during "Shomu" ("deficiency") the land dried up and harvest was necessary (mid March to mid July).

The Sothic year is nearly 6 hours shorter than the equinoxal Solar year (about a day every four years, or nearly a month every century). As the years went by and became centuries, the civil calendar moved out of alignment with agricultural & cultic events. To return to its beginning, the Sothic cycle needs 1460 years. The Egyptians invented two more calendars to correct this, but kept records of the Sothic year anyway.

Danger (crocodiles, water serpents, hippo's) and prosperity (fish and the annual silt brought in by the inundation, cause of rich harvests) lurk beneath the dark surface of the Nile. It depth is suggestive of the primordial waters of precreation. Fish, both of the sea and the Nile, was forbidden to the priests (as was swine), though generally eaten by the rest. The Apis Bull was not allowed to drink the water of the Nile, for the god Hapy had a fattening property. The Hymns to the Nile, composed and chanted by the priests of the god, express -in tune with the overall dualistic approach of life- the double nature of the Nile, for Hapy "the good Nile" is praised for the plenty he gives (represented by the Lotus and the Ankh), while feared for his caprices. Both were of crucial influence on the Egyptian state. The reproaches were in conformity with the chaotic nature of the Nile floods, to wit : Hapy could "plunder" (too much flooding) or be "sluggish" and "heavy" (insufficient water).

"Hail to You, Hapy ! Sprung from Earth ! Come to nourish Egypt ! Of secret ways, a darkness by day, to whom his followers sing ! Who floods the fields that Re has made, to nourish all who thirst, lets drink the waterless desert ; his dew descending from the sky. (...) When he plunders, the whole land rages, great and small roar, people change according to his coming. (...) Entering the cavern, coming out above, he wants his coming secret. If he is heavy, the people dwindle, a year's food supply is lost. The rich man looks concerned, everyone is seen with weapons, friend does not attend to friend, cloth is wanting for one's clothes, noble children lack their finery, there is no eye-paint to be had, no one is anointed."
Great Hymn to the Nile, Lichtheim, 1975, vol.1., pp.205-207.

Hapy's extreme moods had a decisive influence on the wellfare of the Egyptian state. Too much water destroyed the channels and the dykes. Not enough water reduced crop. Without reserves, the outcome was famine. Despite Nilometers and centuries of observation, the Egyptians remained unable to predict the date of the inundation and/or the quantity of water displaced. In general, extreme Nile-floods parallel periods of cultural disruption. So close is this relationship, that one may see Ancient Egyptian civilization as the child of the Nile.

The tomb of Nianchchnoem - Vth Dynasty - ca. 2380 BCE.
the men pull long nets to catch various kinds of fish

The reasons for their inability to predict this vital variable were mathematical. The inundation of the Nile is chaotical (caused by more than three independent variables). The function can be plotted (in phase-space), but an individual prediction cannot be made. A "strange attractor" may drive the outcome of the function into certain probable pathways, but at no point in time can a solution be derived. This determination of Egypt's vital resources by Hapy's chaotic process, may have contributed to the conception of order (creation) surrounded by chaos (precreation). The presence of self-creation within this chaos (namely "Atum") compares with the "higher order" exit provided by the strange attractor in chaotic phase-space (cf. my Chaos, 1996). This is nothing less than the return of order after chaos, the dawn of a new Sun after darkness, and the preexistent, precreational potential to rejuvenate.

the Nile, the primordial waters, the chaos-god Nun ...

To the eyes of the Horus falcon, floating in the sky high above the striking contrast between rich cultivation and parched aridity, the "Beloved Land" ("ta meri"), as Egypt was called by the Egyptians (the word "Egypt" comes from "Hikuptah", the native name of the temple of Ptah), is a stretch of fertile land along the Nile, surrounded by deserts. The riverbanks and fields are the "Black Land" ("kemmet"), bordered by the "Red Land" or "deshert", a sandstone desolation called "desert" to this day. This situation also offered unseen protection and isolation.
 
The Nile is the main artery of this geography, and the two banks the result of the divide : the domain of the living (East bank) versus the land of the dead (West bank). During the day, the Nile is the god Hapy, and at night, the Milky Way of the starlit sky. During life, boats were the essence of Egypt's cultural exchange and civil unity. When deceased, they bring one "to the other shore" of the Nile, the afterlife. Arriving in the netherworld, one hopes to exist in the Field of Reeds of Osiris. Travelling to the sky on the netherwordly Nile in the Solar Bark of Re, one enters the Field of Offering.

The "Four Pillars" of creation reflect the sacred geography of the land itself : on the one hand, Upper (upstream) versus Lower (downstream) Egypt (South/North) and, on the other hand, dawn versus dusk, life versus afterlife (East/West).

"The Nile is the first and greatest of all rivers. To the Egyptians it was, simply, The River ; all other rivers were counterfeit, pretenders never wholly to be trusted. (...) The Nile is the most paradoxical of rivers for it flows imperturbably through a great desert, its waters rich with life rushing through a landscape that is mostly barren and scoured, typical desert terrain."
Rice, 2003, p.9.

Wadi Barramiya - Boat and human figure - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

The deep, black darkness underneath the surface of the Nile is the great hidden secret upon which the boat navigated. This deep represented the best one could receive from the river : abundant gifts of life, prosperity and the luxury of time, the foundation of all grand cultures. However, nobody could look the Nile "in the face", for the gods never reveal the name "unknown to those below", namely the secret of the "All-Lord who sustains the shores !".

Again, as had been the case in the Upper Palaeolithic cave mysteries and the remote Neolithic petroglyphs, the undifferentiated nature of darkness, the pitch-black deep of the river Nile, is invoked to step outside the natural cycle, as it were transporting consciousness into a realm before and after creation, outside the created universe, in a mythical place-of-no-place, ruled by a time-of-no-time. The Egyptians identify the deep of the Nile with the primordial, endless and undifferentiated "waters" of precreation. This is a "time before time" written down as a virtual adverb clause, meaning "before he has (had)" ("n SDmt.f"). In the Old Kingdom, this preexistent realm was spatiotemporally defined ("without" and "before"), but in the Late New Kingdom (Amenism), it will also be understood as an ontological segragation, a realm dwelling everywhere in creation "behind" the screen of an infinite number of forms. This precreational transcendence is thus spatiotemporal and sacred.

  Nun lifts the Bark of the Rising Sun
after the Papyrus of Anhai - Late New Kingdom

"Noun a été consideré comme le père d'Atoum à Hermopolis. Sur les sarcophages, une vignette rappele la renaissance du soleil, émergeant du Noun, destin que le mort espère pour lui-même. Mourir était plonger dans le Noun et même le sommeil était assimilé à cette étape vers la régénerescence, laquelle rappelle la vie prénatale, l'existence protégée dans l'univers aquatique du sein maternal, d'où émerge le nouveau-né comme le soleil 'entre les cuisses de Nout', le déesse du ciel. Cette force universelle se diffuse partout, aussi le dieu-soleil a-t-il été appelé le Ba de Noun."
Rossini & Schumann-Antelme, 1992, p.143.

The Egyptians personified the undifferentiated, primordial realm of "water" as the god "Nun", the "father of the gods", passive in everlastingness. Hidden in this undifferentiated matrix, lay the virtual, primordial "egg", the sheer possibility of autogenesis (Atum as Ba of Nun is "xpr Ds.f" : "who came into being of himself", the Greek "autogennetos" - cf. Hermes and Hermetism). Hatching at the "first time" of creation ("zep tepi"), the dynamical autogenetor called "Atum" ("tm", "be complete") and represented by a sledge, initiates the mythical era. "In the beginning", the binary deities and creation spring out of this primordial, self-created Atum (the atom of being), the truly, sole, unique and "Great God" of creation ("nTr aA" and "nTr wr"), suggestive of totality and completeness. He is the "father of the gods", active as eternity-in-everlastingness.

If Nun is the Nile, then Atum is the "first bark", the condition of light itself, the container allowing the fire of the Sun to be separated from the waters of precreation, making creation come into being. Atum is the soul ("bA") of Nun. On the sledge of Atum, creation moves in eternal, sacred cycles. The cyles of life, birth, death and resurrection, befalling the gods, humanity and all living, sentient beings alike, occur, because of the primordial autogenesis hidden in the deepest darkness. The bark is the uterus in which creation unfolds. The Nile is the eternal cycle of the preexistent chaos ... A deity travelling in a bark, is the image of a type, an ante-rational conceptualization of a natural differential part within a local context of interpretation.

The primordial state of precreation, the undifferentiated Nun out of which the creator-god Atum self-manifested, is like a preexistent ocean, a precreational Nile. Were it not for the powers of the deities, in the first place Atum, all of creation would return to these chaotic waters, eliminating all differences and equalizing every division (reducting the energy-potential, i.e. the differentials between existing points, or disproportions between higher and lower levels of being, to zero). Simultaneously, these waters, indicative of the collective unconscious, are the source of all disruption, dispersion and annihilation, as well as the origin of regeneration, rejuvenation and (re)creation. They hold the mystery of autogenesis, the power of the autogenetor, the completion of the All itself.

remote Neolithic petroglyphs in Egypt

The Neolithic Egyptians of the early fourth millenium BCE had no caves, but, using the mythical mode of cognition, carved remote petroglyphs, thus making a selected number of meaningful, sacred forms permanent and ensuring the survival of the ancestral record of particular differential types of nature and their co-relative mythical states of mind.

Wadi Abu Wasil - Hunters and a Dog trapping an Ibex - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

"The scenes which appear on the Egyptian rock surfaces reveal many elements of continuity between the late Neolithic period, to which the early works belong and the long sequence of royal rule which was to follow them. Although Egyptian rock art shares traditions with both the Sahara and Arabia even at its earliest it is recognizably Egyptian, powerful and assured in technique and content."
Rice, 2003, p.41.

These petroglyphs were inscribed to eternalize and control a series of important natural stereotypes related to herding, Nilotic life and the phases of the Moon. Much later, the same intention would trigger divine, Solar kingship, hieroglyphic writing, tomb-building and the familiar scenes on the walls of Egyptian temples. A double aim is at work : on the one hand, religious eternalization (the fixation of one's relationship with nature and its "Natur"), on the other hand, magical initiation (the beginning of a new, more protected and rejuvenated conscious awareness).

In the functional aspect of the process, darkness and remoteness again came to the fore ... These were required because, like in the Upper Palaeolithic cave mysteries, the same spiritual process involving the secret of darkness is at work. Differentiation, mystery and integration being expressed in terms of light-to-darkness, hidden light and darkness-to-light. In the bright Sun of Egypt, shade offers a stark contrast ...

"In is no coincidence that some of the greatest concentrations of rock art in the Eastern Desert occur in shaded and partially hidden places : cliffs overhangs, rock-shelters, and the like. Not only do these places afoord some protection from the heat of the sun, which must have been intense during the middle of the day, even in prehistoric times ; they also, and perhaps more importantly, offer seclusion. They are places where people would withdraw, at least partially, from the natural world, to commune with the supernatural. In other words, they are places were a spiritually charged atmosphere was more easily invoked. While we shall never know exactely who made the petroglyphs in the Eastern Desert, nor in what circumstances, it seems very likely that they were made during the course of magical or religious ceremonies. They may even have been created by shamans in a state of trance, or at least by elders of the community with some degree of spiritual authority. (...) They express an idealized view of the cosmos, where supernatural forces assisted humans in overcoming natural forces."
Wilkinson, 2003, pp.138-139.

Among the petroglyphs, we find a considerable number of boats. Among these are high-prowed boats, including standing figures of superhuman scale, nude or wearing short tunics or long caftan-like robes, with plumes or feathers in their hair. In one petroglyph at Wadi Mineh, a falcon stands in the prow of the vessel. In other glyphs, part of the royal regalia are shown (crown, crook, flail).

Wadi Qash - Upper Egyptian ruler with Red Crown ? - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

"The parallels between the rock art of 4000 BC and the tomb scenes of 1500 BC are indeed striking. The discovery of the boat petroglyphs faces us with two astonishing revelations. First, the familiar ancient Egyptian concept of the afterlife originated at the very dawn of civilization in the Nile Valley, among the semi-nomadic cattle-herders whose domain encompassed both valley and savannah. Second, this concept was so powerful and so resonant that it remained unchanged throughout the succeeding thirty centuries. The longevity of Egyptian culture is as ramarkable as its antiquity."
Wilkinson, 2003, p.189.

the bark : ancestral concept of balance, momentum and limitation

"The archers complete the aim,
as one who holds the rudder untill (it) touches land."
Ptahhotep, maxim 25 - Late Old Kingdom - ca. 2200 BCE.

For crocodiles and hippos, a boat is a lengthy floating piece of wood. Egyptian fishermen use it as a means of transport on the Nile and to catch its riches in nets. For Pharaoh, the flotilla was the best mobile way to tour Egypt and propagate his glory. For deities, barks are the vehicle of their mystical journey to and from the beyond. For the deceased, an anticipated place, side by side with the soul of Re, the creator-god.

"The Naqada II people seem to have been much impressed by boats. Whether this implies that they were originally from a region where water transport was even more important than it was in Egypt, is not certain ; it may simply have been a sensible reponse to their proximity to the river. But an extraordinary number of their productions, painted on pottery and carved in or on slate and schist, represent boats. Clearly these are often sacred vessels and as such were the ancestors of the sacred barques in which Egyptian divinities, like their Sumerian counterparts, were accustomed to travel."
Rice, 2003, p.33.

As in a womb or cradle, the boat, bark or ship enables all to travel safely, steering life in a balanced way. But capsized, it brings death. Can our phenomenology exceed the notion of the boat as a solid concept transmitted from generation to generation, as recently suggested ?

"Psychologically, the ship can be understood as a symbol for a solid mental concept based on the knowledge and experience of the ancestors."
Abt & Hornung, 2003, p.25.

In the Early Predynastic Period, the petroglyphs of the Eastern Desert profile the boat as already of considerable importance. The assimilation of the crescent Moon with the image of the bark was to be expected. Both were crucial instruments of navigation. In the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, the bark protected against the deep of the waters in the same way as the Moon lits up the darkness of the night and transforms it into a kingdom of shades.

Wadi Barramiya - Flotilla of boats - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

With their glyphs of barks, flotilla of barges, or procession of boats, the Predynastic Egyptians expressed the enduring quality of their mythical mindset, able to distinguish between the undifferentiated waters (or primordial origin of consciousness) and creation, while actively identifying "divine powers" (i.e. natural differentials) to move along the arrow of time and encompass the "Two Lands" by means of the river. A company of boats is hence a family of successful evolutionary histories, a metaphor of cooperation and mutual respect between the Egyptians themselves, and between their way of life and their natural environments ruled by natural differentials. This is the image of a triumph over chaos shared with all. This naturalistic and typological view on the deities was also quite original.

"There is little similarity, equally, between the way the Egyptians and the Sumerians visualized and personified their gods. Sumerian divinities were essentially human in appearance, and their attributes and their behaviour were merely the characteristics of humankind written large. The Egyptian gods were a great deal more complex and diverse. It appears that the earliest divinities were abstractions, represented by objects which had acquired a special sanctity. The most ancient sign for 'god', netjer, is abstract ; it is thought that it represents 'a staff bound with cloth'".
Rice, 2003, p.50.

In the Old Kingdom, the spirits or "Akhu" (of the noble ancestors and the deities) were believed to live in the light of the circumpolar stars. These so-called "indestructibles" never disappear from eye-sight and were deemed to be the ultimate destination of the deceased Pharaoh, who sails on the celestial Nile to the sky of Re.

Wadi Hammamat - Boat with Star above the prow - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

A tall being, with arms raised, steers a boat starwise. Another giant wears two plumes. In Egypt, deities travel by boat. Re and Osiris have barks. Ptah and Amun as well. Most barks are floating temples, fronted by miniature obelisks, flagstaffs and ordained cabins. On feast days, gods like Khonsu and Min sailed their own barks, with priests rowing the vessels on sacred lakes or directly on the Nile, visiting other deities ...

The deities, the best, most efficient part of the natural cycle symbolized by the Nile, must protect themselves from the Nun too. Their barks shield their fire from being extinguished by these waters. In this they succeed, ex hypothesi, by knowing how to harvest the secret of darkness, the autogenic potential of the undifferentiated, of Atum hidden in Nun. The metaphor of the "Two Lands" illustrates how within creation, division and duality are deemed common. Atum, the Nature of natures, transcends creation because he emerged before the spacetime continuum, whereas in the continuum the divine (on Earth) is Pharaoh, the great magician, who is able to simultaneously "exist" in precreation and creation. Within creation, nothing else really endures. All other gods & goddesses are born, die and resurrect, as Hornung (1986) has so brilliantly demonstrated. They are like differential quantum equations of probable states of nature. Only Atum is fugally transcendent. Of course, compared with the power of mortals, their divine life potential is enormous. Nevertheless, this collective energy of the divine remains finite (within creation) and contained by Nun, the infinite chaotic waters, everlastingly surrounding creation in all possible directions.

"Le monde émergea du Un, pour les Égyptians, car le non-existant est Un. Dans son œuvre de création, le dieu créateur différencia non seulement le monde mais encore lui-même. Du Un est issue la dualité de 'deux choses' et la diversité des 'millions' de formes créées. Dieu divisa, la création est division ; seul l'homme embrouille à nouveau tout. Les éléments divisés dont interdépendants, mais demeurent divisés tant qu'ils sont existant. Seul le retour à la non-existence fond ce qui est divisé et annule à nouveau la différenciation."
Hornung, 1986, p.232.

The permanent features of creation, i.e. a series of "laws" of nature, embodied by the divine life of the pantheon, cannot be rooted in these differentials themselves, for they too are caught in the eternal cycle initiated by Atum. The deities have their cause not in themselves, but in the "zep tepy" or "first time", the beginning of time not yet "in" time, mythically starting with the autogenesis of Atum.

• Atum within Nun : potential to autogenerate ;

• Atum as "ba" of Nun : autogeneration, first time, pantheon, creation ;

• Nun as Nun : undifferentiated, chaotic, passive, dark, empty.

In which way, beside the remoteness of the art, is the petroglyphic theme of the bark associated with the autogenetic secret of darkness and does it contribute to our understanding of the constructive role of the absence of light and the mysteries of the night ?

The funerary implications of these barks have recently been underlined again by Wilkinson, 1993 and Rice, 1993. Not only in Predynastic Egypt was the boat endowed with mystical significance transcending their purely functional role.

"Ships of the type portrayed on the Wadi Hammamat walls, on countless pots and other objects, are to be found in many early Mesopotamian and Elamite or Susian media. They are represented widely for example on late fourth/early third millennium cylinder seals found in large numbers on western Asiatic sites whose use persisted throughout most of the third millennium. They are represented, too, on the round stamp seals of the Arabian Gulf, which are dated to the end of the third millennium and the beginning of the second."
Rice, 2003, p.41.

The Egyptians reshaped the mystery faced in the deep, dark caves of France into the Nilotic spirituality of the netherworld, the "Beautiful West" of the "land of the dead" reached by means of a boat. In this inner world, the potential of autogenesis could be tapped. The deities and the noble dead alike, drink from this source and it is the "hidden light" sought.

Wadi Abu Wasil - fragment of an impressive rock art tableaux - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

In pointing to the West, the place were the Sun set, these petroglyphs support a funerary interpretation. In many scenes, there are human figures with upraised, curved arms. We find this feature in three dimensional clay figurines deposited in Predynastic graves. The posture figures on Nagada II pottery, and is rarer in settlements than in cemeteries. Although early egyptologists saw the gesture of curving the arms as mimicking cow horns (cf. Hathor and the cult of the great Moon goddess), Wilkinson rightly points out "that it may have represented an attitude of mourning" (2003, p.155). Indeed, often there is a central cabin, which, from later parallels, may represent a dead person, accompanied by a mourning crew and watched over by a presiding deity (represented by a tall figure with two plumes).

Wadi Barramiya & Funerary Boat near Kanais - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

The theme of a journey by boat remained central to the Egyptian concept of the afterlife, and returned in the Pharaonic Period. Not only did Pharaohs place these sacred boats near their tombs, either in miniature form or full-size, or near the "naos" in their temples, but the theme became fundamental in the New Kingdom Books of the Netherworld and their rich iconography. These vessels accentuated the nurturing role of the Nile, and point to the spiritualization of the river, which carried the dead to the various levels of the eternal afterlife. The spiritual Nile led the deceased out of the mortal world of time, if they were deemed worthy, into the timeless eternity of the afterlife and its paradise.

Wadi Abu Wasil - Boat being dragged - ca. 4.000 BCE, after Wilkinson, 2003.

In Predynastic Egypt, the image of the bark of a deity dragged by attendants was carved on rock. Three millenia later, the journey of the Solar Bark adorned the walls of most royal tombs. These continuities provide backing for the hypothesis that the founding elements of Dynastic Egypt are rooted in the cultures of the Predynastic Period. With the Gerzean (ca. 3600 BCE), a decisive turn was taken, culminating in the unification of Egypt and the start of history (ca. 3.000 BCE). The "canon" established in the Old Kingdom bears the traces of its Predynastic origin, as does the first religious corpus of humanity, the Pyramid Texts.

The Twelfth Hour - Middle Register
Tomb of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III - ca. 1426 BCE.

balancing eternal rhythms : the role of precreation

In the Late Predynastic Period (ca. 3600 BCE), the influence of the Solar cycle (recorded since the Neolithic) on the old Lunar faith (going back to the Upper Palaeolithic) becomes clearly traceable. The process of theo-political centralization of power in male rulership, whereby the sacred forces of the great goddess were assimilated by male chiefs, had already been at work ca. 4000 BCE and before (cf. the stone calendar circles of Nabta -ca. 7000 BCE- and, around 5000 BCE, the start of the Neolithic in Egypt, with the presence of small village communities with a local horizon).

Rhythms defined Ancient Egyptian culture. On a terrestrial, microcosmic level, there was the Nile with its annual inundation, bringing economical abundance or famine (the Sothic or agrarian rhythm). On a cosmic, macrocosmic level, there were the cycles of the Moon, the Sun and other stars, representing the fundamental divine powers of nature : Re (Sun) and Osiris (Moon). Both rhythms had to be balanced out. The plummet of this balance, offered by Pharaoh to his father, was set in motion by the "two scales" : the human (the heart, weighed in the Osirian mysteries) and the divine (the feather of Maat, daughter of Atum-Re, the celestial creator-god). Maat (also written as "Ma'at") being the true, just and real equilibrium, the proper, hierarchical (pyramidal) and natural order of things.

Scales - Amarna House U36.41 - XVIIIth Dynasty.

The dynamical, natural equilibrium represented by Maat is not easy to realize, for a constant struggle between, on the one hand, the created order (divine, in particular Re and Osiris, as well as human, in particular the king) and, on the other hand, destructive chaos (i.e. the untamed natural world, especially wild animals, unsettling Nile floods, the primordial Nun and Seth's "isefet") animates life as a whole and is fundamental to it. The notion of the "Dual Kingdom" reflects a fundamental dualistic approach of reality, at work in all parts of the cultural form. Creation has no inherent harmony and left to its own will return to a state of undifferentiated chaos.

"The idea of the Dual Kingdom always appealed greatly to the emerging Egyptian consciousness as giving evidence of the most exalted example of what constituted virtually a national obsession, the expression of all the most important characteristics of the society -divinity, beliefs, customs, the very order of the universe- as being bounded by a duality : for the one there was always the other, in king, gods, nature and the ways of men."
Rice, 2003, p.95.

The deities do sustain creation, but they get exhausted doing so. At dusk, even Re seeks rejuvenation. Creation is able to endure, because it, paradoxically, is rejuvenated by returning to the eternal moment of the beginning before creation, the autogenesis of Atum and the pantheon in a first moment happening outside creation, but within the abyss of Nun ! Creation endures, because the deepest darkness conceales the strongest light. The path to and from this hidden light, is the midnight mystery of Ancient Egyptian spirituality, the core of its teaching.

To eternally rejuvenate, the "netjeru", i.e. the superpowers, divine natures, primordial types or natural differentials of N*t*r (Nature), need to harvest the strongest power possible, envisaged as ultimately one, absolute and precreational, i.e. outside the natural cycle. Only Atum, the "undifferentiated one" may autogenerate himself and the deities anew. In the first time, Atum, as Ba of Nun, does precisely this for all of eternity. In this eternal moment, he simultaneously splits in Shu and Tefnut, and the Ennead comes into being and with it the completed power of the new creation, the new day.

the mystery of darkness : bark, temple and tomb

The darkness of the undifferentiated waters is inimical to life and order. A direct contact between order and chaos annihilates the former. Complexity, heterogeneity and the multiplicity operating the Two Lands point to a pyramidal hierarchy of divisions. To endure, these organizations need to remain separated from Nun. The deities guarantee the endurance of creation, but invest their power while doing so. They compensate this by retrieving the everlasting surplus of power available in the "zep tepy".

The Bark of Atum-Re protects the fire of the creator-god against the primordial waters. It is there to assure consciousness is not possessed by the collective unconscious. It protects against the powerful forces of the deep. In psychological terms, the bark is the border or edge of consciousness, defining the capacity of the cargo. Atum-Re is the light and brightness of consciousness, its ability to be aware of itself and its existence. The Solar Bark is the domain of Re's consciousness, able to transport millions of souls for millions of years. The image of Re in his Solar Bark travelling day and night, points to an optimized steering capacity, a Self fully individuated and in a balanced way in touch, after dusk, with the powerful, rejuvenating forces of the river. In the dark, they allow consciousness to rejuvenate itself and heal from the various attacks it suffers during the day ...

"... the path that follows the temple's straight central axis leads upward along a gradual incline of steps and ramps ; at the same time the ceiling becomes increasingly lower, the rooms darker and narrower. When the Nile overflowed its banks, it flooded the column rooms of many temples, and thereby reified the illusion of the primordial swamp."
Hornung, 1992, pp.123-124.

So the Egyptian temple served the secret procedure of reducing light, creating a narrowing darkness in order to approach the "holy of holies" and its shielded "naos". This sanctum sanctorum was withdrawn from the world of light and had to be approached by series of courts, halls and gates. Only in this remote place outside phenomenal time, could a hidden alchemy or mysterious conjunction take place, namely between, on the one hand, the cult-statue of the presiding deity who's spirit enjoyed the sublime, stellar life, joined with the followers of Atum-Re, and, on the other hand, the officiating high priest, representing Pharaoh. This crucial activity took place at dawn, and so the Egyptian Temple is a diurnal instrument of transformation (the tomb, by contrast, is a nocturnal ritual tool). But again, and despite the morning, darkness plays a central role.

The temple of Horus - Edfu - Ptolemaic Period (after Old Kingdom examples)
its central axis runs parallel to the Nile

"The conclusion may be drawn that temple building and religion in ancient Egypt shared a universally valid framework in which there were many individual variations, and which itself did not remain unchanged but was constantly expanded by developments within the religion."
Kurth, 2004, p.12.

Once a day, at dawn, the high priest entered the inner sanctum. The darkness there was deep. The candle lit the previous Morning Ritual had consumed until only darkness remained. In this sacred area, with carved and brightly painted walls, stood the sacred barque on its pedestal, in the back was the naos with its cult statue, an altar with offerings and a wooden coffer with ritual implements. The door of the naos was clay-sealed. At the very instant when the Sun rose on the horizon, with the first words of the Morning Song, the seal was broken and the two door-leaves were drawn towards the high priest, who faced the cult statue, saw it and identified with it.

"I was presented before the god, being an excellent young man while I was introduced into the horizon of heaven (...) I emerged from Nun, and I was purified of what ill had been in me ; I removed my clothing and ointments, as Horus and Seth were purified. I advanced before the god in the holy of holies, filled with fear before his power."
Sauneron, 2000, p.48 - statue - Cairo museum 42230.

This assumption of the godform, the singular climax of all temple ceremonies in Ancient Egypt, causes a conjunction between (Pharaoh's) consciousness and the archetypal representation of the deity, between the "son" of Re (or his representative) and Re (or one of his family members). It is a Morning Ritual, opposing dusk and the Beautiful West. Egyptian temples are always Morning Temples. They have a celebrational function, not a funerary. They do not exclude funerary themes (like the Osiris drama), but focus on the actual presence of the deity in the naos during the day. This sacral actuality is the numen præsens, the presence of its many "doubles" and "souls", i.e. outer and inner operational (and intermediate) states of divine consciousness. As the tomb allows the deceased to ascend and descend, so does the temple allow the deity to be effective on Earth or not. After dusk, together with Re as described in the Books of the Netherworld, the deities meet the midnight mystery of the Duat to be regenerated and return their souls and doubles to Egypt the next morning.

At the end of the elaborate Morning Ritual, the face of the deity was concealed again by shutting its double door, sliding the doorbolt slut and locking it with a clay seal to bar access until the following morning. For an unknown duration, a candle was left burning. In the Midday Ritual and the Evening Ritual, the sanctuary remained closed and the deities received no more food until dusk. The Evening Ritual was a repetition of the Morning Ritual, except that all rituals took place in the side chapels surrounding the inner sanctum. This daily cult took place simultaneously in almost exactely the same form, in every Egyptian temple. Of course, in smaller temples with only one or two priests, there would have been no pomp and certain adaptations necessary.

Naos of Pharaoh Nectanebo II (ca. 350 BCE) with altar for Sacred Bark.
Inner Sanctum of the Temple of Horus at Edfu

Because of the enduring offerings made to the statue during the day (the Midday Ritual and the Evening Ritual), the Ka or "double" of the deity was fed and energized. The Ba or "soul" of the deity would then be gratified and so bless the temple by its presence (while its Akh or "spirit" abided in the sky). The Akh was hidden, secret and remote, of name unknown, but the souls and doubles of the deities could come down by means of the proper sacrificial consecration. On Earth, the gods and goddesses had to be "nourished" by offerings and voice-offerings (cf. the noun "nTr" as "god" and the verb "s-nTr" meaning "to consecrate, to cense" - the latter being the causative derivation of the phonetic root "nTr"). The Egyptian concept of "god" is therefore more like a differential equation, a series of relationships describing the functional behaviour of a particular, well described natural phenomenon (whether material, psychic or spiritual). Ritualism is then like "solving" the equation, i.e. applying the formula (cf. "senetjer").

Miniature shrine - XVIIIth Dynasty - ca. 1325 BCE.
The darkness of the naos hiding the deity.

"Comme l'obscurité et le silence, le vide est une négation : elle exclut toute présence concrète de telle sorte que le 'tout autre'