Egyptian Gods

I'll tell you a story Candace this is one of the great stories of mankind and it's not this isn't the only variant of this story there's many variants of it but but this variant is useful for for our purposes that's a story I stumbled across a long time ago I'm going to tell you the second story first because I don't have the energy to tell you the first story so isn't a story that the ancient Egyptians predicated their society on and to understand this story the first thing you have to know is what the characters were and these characters were gods there's four of them although the Egyptians had far more than four gods you might think of these as the central gods and you might think what is a central God and then you might think while imagine that the gods compete for dominance across time in people's imaginations and some gods win and they occupy the primary position of dominance in the hierarchy in the dominance hierarchy of gods and those are ideals and ideals compete across time for dominance and their embodied and so when diverse tribal people come together they throw all their gods into the ring and they fight across time and something emerges as a victor and that's the emergence of monotheism out of polytheism and it parallels the development of a unified morality in within each of us as we develop across time and the the god that emerges as dominant across time bears a substantial represent substantial resemblance imagine you have a set of gods in this locale that are competing across time and something emerges as dominant and then over here you have another set of gods that compete across time for dominance and something emerges you'll see major commonalities across the two things that emerge and the reason for that is because the emergent the process of emergence that gives rise to both of them is similar in both situations and that's part of what accounts for the cross-cultural similarity of high order religious ideas alright anyways you need to know the characters Osiris Osiris is the old king he's Dumbledore for all intents and purposes he's the old king he's the he's the spirit that established the Egyptian state when he was young he was a great hero but now he's old and he's will archaic and he's willfully blind that's Osiris he has a brother Seth Seth is set and set is Satan because the word Satan comes from the word set and set via the Coptic Christians so so so he's a precursor to the Western idea of Satan you have Isis Isis is queen of the underworld and Isis was the goddess of a religious structure that prevailed across thousands and thousands of years Isis and you have Horus Horus is a Falken and the Egyptian AI everyone knows that I right die with the open pupil that's Horus and Horus is a falcon because Falcons can see way better they can see better than us they can see better than anything else except for perhaps Eagles and they fly above everything Zazu in Lion King is Horus right and Mufasa is Osiris and scar is Seth and there's no specific representation of Isis but the closest there is in that story is probably the queen of the hyenas that's played by who's the actress hmm yes what the Goldberg that's right that's right because she they inhabit she's like the queen of the underworld right she's the queen of the hyenas that live out among the death but okay anyways Seth Osiris Seth Isis and Horus here's how the story goes so Sirius is a great king he established the Egyptian state you could think about him as the embodiment of the Egyptian custom and tradition you could think about a man the thing that the pyramid represents all right but he was great when he was young but he's not young anymore he's old and he's willfully blind and what that means is that he doesn't see what he could see he refuses to see what he could see why is so serous old and willfully blind because that's what culture is it's a paternal spirit that's old and willfully blind and it's always that way always that way and the reason for that is because it's a construction of the dead the dead aren't alive they can't so they're out of date and they can't update themselves anymore and you inhabit their corpse and that's actually what happens in an earlier story that I'll tell you next week the early Mesopotamian gods inhabited the corpse of their father roughly speaking anyway so Osiris was great and and when he was young but he hasn't young anymore he's old and he's willfully blind he won't look where he knows he should look he doesn't have the energy or maybe he doesn't have the spirit his brother Seth is not a good guy and Osiris knows it but he underestimates his malevolence and power and so Seth wants to rule the kingdom so what does that mean it's easy every stable society is is threatened by willful blindness and malevolence always every bureaucracy has that proclivity to stagnate and to become blind that's why corporations die all the time that's why a fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years it's why we have to have elections it's to stop the dead from staying in control for too long Seth Osiris turns a blind eye to Seth Seth is happy about that the same thing happens in the Lion King roughly speaking Seth one day waits for Osiris to make a mistake and to be weak and he attacks him and he chops him up into pieces and he distributes the pieces across the entire Egyptian state in fact the Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris body okay so now you can kill Oh a Cyrus because he's a god and why is he god a god because he represents the spirit of structure and there's always structure it can't be destroyed it always reconstitutes itself it can be hurt and broken into pieces which is exactly what happens to a Cyrus things fall apart why because they get old and because malevolence undermines them that's what the Egyptians were trying to sort out okay so set distributes is Osiris all over Egypt so he can't get himself back together right things fall apart and they can't be brought back together but the spirit of Osiris still lives in the pieces so what happens order is demolished what would you expect chaos emerges that's Isis Isis is queen of the underworld she's Osiris's wife order and chaos just like the yin and the yang order collapses up comes the queen of the underworld she's looking for order chaos cries out for order she's looking for order she goes all around Egypt trying to put ISOs iris back together it's a state of chaos she finds his phallus she makes herself pregnant with it and what does that mean well it means it's like it's like Geppetto in the belly of the whale that thing has the potential to reimburse the thing that collapses into its pieces is still alive it can unite with the chaos and produce something new that's the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and its revisitation Isis makes herself pregnant she goes back down to the underworld she gives birth to Horus Horus is the Egyptian eyes he's the son of the great father and the great mother he's a he's a messianic figure and in fact much of the mythology that described Horus was extracted without much modification and then attributed to Christ very much maybe and you can read about the parallels you can read about it online if you want there's any number of parallels and of course there is a mythology that the Jews came out of Egypt and of course the Christians emerged from the Jews and so there was a tremendous influence of Egyptian thinking on the development of these later ideas and you see pictures of Isis with Horus on her lap that are virtually identical in content and form to the later pictures of Mary with the infant Christ and that's the Holy Mother of God in the hero it's not a Christian motif it's far deeper than a Christian motif it's a human motif so Isis queen underworld gives birth to Horus and Horus grows up outside the kingdom why in underworld because that's what human beings do you're alienated from your culture always why it's old and dead and corrupt and so that leaves you growing up in chaos what would you call alienated from your fundamental culture that's the story of adolescence Horus grows up he can see that's what differentiates them from Osiris that's why he's a Falken he goes and has a fight with Seth and now the difference between Osiris and Horus is that Horus does not underestimate Seth he knows exactly what he's up against he goes and has a terrible battle with him trying to get his kingdom back something else that's echoed in the Lion King story and well horison and oh sorry are Seth are fighting Seth tears out one of his eyes now why because Seth is the embodiment of destruction and malevolence and no matter how conscious you are if you encounter that even voluntarily the probability that it's going to damage your consciousness is extraordinarily high that's why people don't do it so the eye is torn out but Seth is defeated and Horus banishes them to the nether regions of the kingdom you can't kill them why because the malevolent destructive force the threatened States never dies it's always there you can only remove it temporarily now Horus is King Pharaoh king god he's got his eye and so you think well he's going to just pop that back in his head and then he's going to be able to lead he's going to be able to take his place at the uppermost pantheon a pantheon of gods properly but that isn't what he does takes his eye and he goes back to the underworld just like Pinocchio going into the depths to rescue Geppetto and down there is the spirit of Osiris who's whose extent as a kind of half-dead ghost it gives Osiris is I now Osiris can see so what does that mean you go down into the chaotic wind threatened by malevolence even to the point of damage to your consciousness you go down into the chaos and you find the dead spirit of your tradition and you give it vision and so provided with vision Osiris regenerates and then Osiris and Horus go back up to - to the world linked together and rule jointly and the Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh who had an immortal spirit was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horace and Osiris and that's what gave him sovereignty and so you think about how brilliant that is the Egyptians are trying to puzzle out who should lead who should be feral and what do you have to be if you're going to be Pharaoh in order for things to work you have to be awake to malevolence and chaos and you have to embody your tradition and that puts you at the highest pinnacle of the dominant structure it's and that's the same as it's the same thing it's the same thing as the battle between the gods across centuries or eons and the emergence of the highest possible moral virtue as a consequence of that competition it's the I on the top of the pyramid right it's you know in the Washington Monument there's a cap on the Washington Monument the Potala the Washington Monument is a pyramid at the top of the pyramid is a cap it's made out of aluminum and the reason it's made out of aluminum is because when they made the Washington Monument it was the most valuable metal known and so what does it mean it means there's a pyramid and there's something at the top of it but the thing that's at the top of the pyramid isn't the same as the rest of the pyramid that's the thing the pyramid exists there's a dominance hierarchy something climbs up to the top but it's not just at the top of one pyramid it's at the top of all of them the thing that rises to the top of any given pyramid is the same thing that can dominate all pyramids it isn't good enough to be the best at a dominance hierarchy what you want to be is the best at the set of all possible dominance hierarchies right and that's the thing that's gold at the top of the pyramid and that's the I that's what the Egyptians figured out and what does that mean it means the thing that puts you at the top is attention pay attention keep your eyes open it's not the same as thinking it's not the same thing it's like watching and the thing about human beings is we can see we can see better than any other creature except birds of prey and so our capacity to see is in fact what we use in the world our brains are actually organized around vision unlike most animals their brains are organized around smell not us we can see we stand upright so we can see in a long distance and in our ability to see is what saves us and what saves our communities and that's what these stories are trying to portray you might say well why didn't people just say so an answer to that is because they didn't know it took a long time to figure it out forever it's taken forever to figure it out it's it's part of what I hoped when I wrote this book and and part of the reason that I'm teaching it is because it seems to me that it would be useful for everyone to actually understand this instead of just having it told as a story it's like that's great man yes you need the story but why not also just understand it so well so that's what we're trying to do we're trying to understand this so that's good enough for today

Channel: Whanhee

Views: 631,894

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Id: _uIv7elByXY

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017