by Harvey Kraft
The Moon was the astral father. The Sun and Stars were his progeny. Accordingly, the Moon God, Nannar (Akk. Sin), appeared first from the union of the Lord of the Sky (Enlil) and the Lady of the Air and Wind (Goddess Ninlil). He provided the first light in the dark Universe when the world emerged. Then, the Moon God and the Great Lady Goddess of the Delta (Ningal) begot a son, the Sun God, Utu (Akk. Shamash), and a daughter, the Goddess Innana, derived from the Sumerian Nin-Anna “Queen of the Stars” (Akk. Ishtar).
The city-state of Ur worshipped the Moon (Nannar), wise father of the celestial gods, at the Great Ziggurat of Ur (2600–2400 BCE). They practiced astronomical observations in conjunction with priestess-led rituals in praise of the waning and waxing phases of the Moon. Nannar, his long lapis lazuli beard a symbol of the starry night sky, was depicted riding a winged bull portraying the moon’s ability to fly and to cause fertility. From full to crescent to full again, the monthly rhythm of the moon aligned with the female cycle of fertility, which the “Bull of Heaven“ (Enlil) would use to know the right time for conception. With this power of regeneration Nannar regulated the seasons and the timing cycles, from seed to harvest.
The city-state of Sippar dedicated itself to the rising sun (Utu). Their Sun-God religion celebrated the open “channel” between Heaven and Earth through the sun’s rising from and receding into the Cosmic Mountain. According to Babylonian writings of the pre-Great Flood era, the lifetime of Sippar’s patriarch king and chief priest Enmen-durana had reached 365 years of age, a number equal to the days the sun traversed in one year.
The city-state Uruk bowed to the stars in the form of its patron goddess Innana. She was associated with the planet Venus16 in its aspect as evening and morning star. The planet was deemed to be the ruler of the stars. Personified as an independent female, her bright, dominant station in the sky led to her distinction as the Queen of the Stars. Because innumerable stars crossed her path in the heavenly dome she was depicted as having many star-consorts. Linked both to love and war, in mythic terms, she represented ambivalence. Regarded as a universal seductress (i.e., goddess of love) and jealous vixen (i.e., goddess of war), in the evening she could be a loose woman with numerous casual partners, but, in the morning, she might awaken in a nasty mood. Her popularity was due primarily to the intensity of her passion. People admired in her nature the intense desire for growth, abundance, harvest, and the healing power of love.
Whereas earlier seers used only their internal telescopes to observe the works and intentions of the gods, stargazing priests began to study the movements of celestial bodies in determining how the divine powers would dispense destinies. Combining visionary trances with celestial observations they made a critical decision about what they were looking at. They assumed that the sky was like a clay tablet for the gods to write on and that the patterns they observed were a form of writing containing divinely inscribed messages. Secondly, they concluded that by repeatedly studying and recording the outcomes of social events in relation to celestial positions and alignments, they would be able to decipher and predict the intentions of the gods. Sumerian kings employed them to interpret omens written in the stars and foresee favorable or unfavorable outcomes, align with divine timing, and anticipate downturns or upturns.
By collecting data about historical events and matching them to astral charts they arrived at the Doctrine of Cycles. From the cyclical phases of the moon to the repeated patterns of human behavior, the identification of cycles became the basis for divination readings. But, in actuality, the astrological oracles whispering in the ears of kings, still relied substantially on the ancient arts of clairvoyance and intuition to interpret the meanings, intentions, and destinies written in the stars.
READINGS
Divination priests were in high demand for readings. It fell upon them to advise kings on political matters and military decisions, as well as social, religious and economic considerations, such as the appropriate time to go to war, build a temple, hold a ceremony, trade with a neighbor, or order plantings.
If they divined that the king would be in danger, they would send a substitute to take his place, usually a prisoner. After the switch, if an attempt was made on a king’s life, the imposter would be the victim, and the ruler would be safe. Both the ability to anticipate events and the duty to protect kings belonged exclusively to the stargazing priests. This responsibility had been handed down among royal advisors in Mesopotamia for more than a millennium.
The public also relied on priests for divinations. Most people were pious worshippers. They offered supplicant prayers, displays of reverence, and submissive prostrations before their idols. They worshipped with the understanding that blessings would come as a result of harmoniously synchronizing life with the intentions of the gods.
Fearing injury or poor health, they called on neighborhood priests to chant incantations that would ward off demons, hired them for healing rituals or sought to fix chaos-producing misalignments with the divine. Ceremonies of repentance designed to expiate the consequences of regrettable actions were offered as the means for surviving the wrath of Heaven.
For personal readings, priests might apply the skills of divination to the inspection of a sacrificial sheep or goat’s liver. This spot, believed to be the housing for the soul, would be the gate where a god may enter. Markings on the liver combined with celestial clues would be diagnosed and used to decipher messages from the divine. Less expensive forms of divinations were offered as well, including interpretations of smoke rising from incense or readings of oil patterns in water.
Priest healers had developed an understanding of internal organs working with human cadavers and sacrificial animals. Consequently, they ably conducted physical examinations with an understanding of internal factors.
Therapeutic diagnosis and prognosis were based on a combination of past knowledge about the patient, the person’s present symptoms, and divine conjecture as to his or her future. In conducting health evaluations they connected a person’s symptoms, appearance, body temperature, skin marks, hues, and colorations to various internal organs and parts of the body, including neurological and gynecological ailments.
Prescriptions17 in the form of elixirs, bandages, creams, and pills, would be mixed to assist recovery, but the most important feature of medical care was to align the person with the cosmos. Healers sought to stimulate divine energy channels by harmonizing a person’s physical system with the patterns of the cosmos.
THE SOUL OF EGYPT
The seers of the earliest Nile Delta civilizations divined a view of universal creation similar to that of Sumer. The Universe began with the union of Heaven and the liquid Primordial Cosmos giving birth to Air, Fresh Waters, Earth, and the other forces of nature. For Egypt the forward motion of existence started during the Eon at the Beginning of Time (Egy. Zp Tpj). The gods emerged from the universal womb of the Primordial Goddess, Nu (her name echoing the Sumerian Nammu), she, a dark, boundless liquid space with the consistency and qualities of silt mud. Egyptian seers envisioned creation in this way:
At the Beginning of Time, the primordial dark, muddy liquid of Nu, awoke from a lifeless stationary state, and began moving and churning. From this primeval chaos, the first God emerged, Atum,18 the self-created divine source and Creator of Existence. He fathered two sons: Ptah, the cosmic designer and God of Universal Order, and Amun, the transcendent Supreme God of All Gods. The Creator next initiated the generation of a host of Egyptian deities each fulfilling various roles of nature, representing various territories, here and beyond.19 Then, from the “Cosmic Swamp“ emerged the terrestrial mound of Earth (Egy. Benben) and above it loomed a galactic-size pyramid-shaped mountain, the Cosmic Mountain whose height reached to the stars.20
The Creator fathered two other children: the Goddess of Rain (Tefunt) and the Air God (Shu).21 Then this brother and sister copulated and gave birth to the Land and Sky. The Air standing on the back of the Land (Geb) held up the Sky (Nut). Then the Land and Sky b
ore Isis, mother of the Underworld, protector of souls. Then the Sky let go of the Rain so her water may descend to Earth, and held up the Sun (Rae) so that sunlight would shine upon the world, thus the Goddess of Life (Hathor) was awakened. Life arose again and again as the sun was reborn each day, crossing the sky from east to west, disappearing and reappearing. Rae and Tefunt made an abundance of sunlight and rainwater to bless the world with joy, stability and compassion.
Competing visions prompted Egypt’s priestly centers to debate the creation of the world. Using symbolic language and mythic expression they embellished on or edited the roles of gods. Over a period of some 2,000 years, they produced a number of different editions of the Egyptian pantheon, not a single view. For example, the birth of the sun was related in these three myths:
A giant, waddling Blue Goose, representing the meandering Nile, made a nest upon the newly created Earth and laid a Golden Cosmic Egg. When the egg hatched, the sun arose from it and began its procession. In another version the bird laying the Golden Cosmic Egg was an ibis, representing the moon,22 thereby proposing that the moon brought forth the sun (same as Sumerian). Yet another clergy saw the birthing of the sun as an arising out of the unfolding petals of a colossal Cosmic White Lotus (Egy. Sesen).
As the lotus flower grew near the muddy edge of the Nile’s riverbank, on a cosmic level the Giant White Lotus was deemed to be the first plant in Creation itself arising from the Primordial Waters, Nu. Therefore, it represented the first organism—the origin of all.living things. In addition, the lotus blossom possessed a unique quality being the only self-cleaning flower in nature; therefore it denoted the purest form of life. And as it was also the most beautiful blossom on the river, it also represented the gift of beauty from the gods. The Egyptian priests regarded the lotus as the mother of the sun and the symbol of renewal. At night its petals would close and sink underwater until dawn, when in response to the sun, they would rise above the water and again open wide to receive the light.
While the calculus for the origin of the sun’s appearance received a great deal of attention from the Egyptian clergy, the creation of human life seemed to be an afterthought. As was the case in Mesopotamia, they believed that the gods had made humans out of clay, but contrary to their neighbor’s scenario in Egyptian lore human creation was not a one-time event but an ongoing creation.
Human infants were formed from Nile clay on the potter’s wheel of the ram-headed god, Khnum, who held up the figurines to the Sun to transform them into flesh and blood and then inserted them into their mothers’ womb. At the instant of birth another god “blew” the soul into the infant’s body causing the Ka to initiate the spark of life. Each soul was made of five parts: the heart (lb), shadow (Sheut), name (Ren), persona (Ba), and life essence (Ka).
The Ka, the vital life essence of the soul, animated the body at birth and was liberated in death whereupon it acted as a vessel to carry the deceased and his treasures to the Underworld realm. Upon the death of a pharaoh, Isis, the protector of souls, would assist the soul, like a wife would her husband. Her son Horus, the falcon-headed symbol of kingship was charged with affirming that the soul was of royal stature, and his four sons would protect the four canopic jars containing the pharaoh’s organs for reconstitution in the afterlife beyond.
The departed one’s primary “soul-treasure,” the Heart (Egy. Ib) contained emotional, mental, and physical information. It would be examined by a tribunal of gods at the court of the chief magistrate, the jackal-headed Gatekeeper of Heaven, Anubis (originally conceived as the son of the sun). The Heart of the Soul would be weighed on the balance scale of Justice against the counterweight of a feather representing Universal Truth, Harmony, and Order (aka Maat). Should the soul prove to be heavier, a crocodile-headed she-demon called Ammut23 would devour it—an end to that individual. But this would never be the case for a pharaoh. When the two weights balanced well, the soul would be granted passageway on a voyage forward. A priest-guide would appear to help the soul find its way to the gate of immortality in the stars.
Even the sun had to survive the crossing of the lower Duat, the cosmic space on the underside of the world. According to funerary texts,24 when Rae, the Sun God, set below the horizon in the west he turned into Kepri, brave sojourner god of the underworld. Suddenly, he would be attacked. Apep, the Serpent of Darkness, the cosmic counterforce to light, was always attempting to prevent the sun from rising again in the east.
A soul could face three possible afterlife destinies: annihilation, rebirth, or reconstitution. Those guilty of chaos or shame would have their Soul-Hearts devoured. For good people the best outcome they could hope for was rebirth. For the pharaohs, the objective was to reach immortality. To do so it was essential that the soul’s vital essence (Ka) and its persona (Ba) be kept together like a pair of wings carrying the other parts. It was imperative for a pharaoh’s soul to reach the Sun God who would guide it to its final destination.
If the tomb of a deceased had been disturbed during the soul’s long cosmic journey, the “essence” and the “spirit” portions of the soul could slip apart, causing it to become confused about past memories. This might result in the soul losing its way forcing it to fall back into a lower state. Rebirth was feared as a cursed fate, although not the worse. Because each Egyptian soul had a name and body, or, in other words, a singular identity, if the soul’s parts separated the resulting memory loss would cause the loss of one’s identity. The reincarnation of an amnesiac soul could result in a body without physical form, like that of a ghost. Without memory of self, any connection with the deceased’s consciousness would end. The ghostly soul would be doomed to wallow in unfulfilled appetites in the underworld. Egyptians came to believe in a subterranean “Entombed City” populated by hungry “lost souls”—shadows of broken-hearted people who lost their minds.
The underworld was located in the underbelly of the earth. Below it was the Duat, the space surrounding the world. Its topside was the star-studded space. As long as the Ka and Ba remained linked, the “traveling” spirit of a king could cross the maze of stars until it found its way to a gateway star. The soul would then enter through it into the heavenly dimension. Once the whole soul of a royal person arrived in the divine realm, it would “reconstitute” its human identity in an eternal divine form. All its keepsakes, treasures and comforts would likewise reconstitute to provide the reincarnated with the opulence deserving of a deity.
The Egyptians developed an elaborate process and a dangerous journey to the stars across the vast layers of the Duat in order to keep immortality difficult for anyone to reach other than those born to royalty. They regarded the stars to be intricately involved in the origin of human life, and, as such, returning to them in the afterlife was a natural course.
In observing comets or shooting stars plunging to earth, the Egyptians welcomed the arrival of “stardust” sent from the stars. They believed that the gods sent Stardust to seed life on Earth. It then turned into a kind of “clay” material that the gods used to make human beings. In the afterlife either the human stardust-body would return to the stars above or fall below into an underworld of dust.
Egyptian priest-astronomers were charged with mapping the pathways for souls to move in and out of this world. To do so they had to adjust for the movements of the celestial bodies and align the soul’s timing and destination relative to the positions of the stars and constellations, as well as the solstice, equinox, and ecliptic transits of the sun and moon. Their complex targeting and harmonic navigation process required mathematical measurements derived from sacred geometry and the power of unseen “force fields” to propel the soul, reflecting their discovery of magnetic minerals at key locations.
Based on the Mondial Cosmology’s global alignments and astral gateways, Egypt’s religious establishments developed the concept of mummified star migrations, wherein the axial-aligned portals would be used to return the soul’s star-made essence to its original home. For proper trajectory
Khufu’s Great Pyramid was configured for vertical articulation along the north-south axis. Its base was aligned with the four cardinal points (NEWS) to achieve pinpoint true north accuracy.
The priest-architect Imhotep built the first funerary step-pyramid for the Pharaoh Djoser (2667–2648 BCE) at Saqqara. This initial design echoed the Sumerian ziggurat, but its construction materials were made of solid carved blocks to stand the test of time. Concerned about the potential disturbance of the soul, Egypt continued to experiment with the shape and location of the structure. The Red Pyramid of Pharaoh Snofru (2613–2589 BCE) successfully eliminated the steps preventing the possibility of climbers scaling it. It also perfected the pyramid’s ideal axial measurements. His flat-faced pyramid was surpassed in grandeur only by his descendants, Khufu and his sons, who pursued their afterlife path to the sun and beyond in the Giza Necropolis complex (approx. 2560–2460 BCE).
The Egyptian pyramid emulated the Cosmic Mountain wherefrom the sunbeams of the rising sun would light the way for the soul as it traversed space to the stargate of Heaven. Khufu’s travel advisers designed his mega pyramid to act like a “compass” in order to provide an accurate directional track to the stargate.
However, they were concerned about the first leg of his journey through the underworld toward the rising sun. The soul needed the sun’s help to escort it to the stars. After his death they appeared to have had some second thoughts about how well they prepared for this earlier part of his journey. The priesthood influenced Khufu’s son Djedefre, “son of the Sun God,“ that his father needed additional modes of transportation to get across the underworld.
