Amateur Thealogy

To find the postings where these books and journal articles have been referenced, check the authors' names in the tags.

( Partial bibliography for this LJ )

An annotated list of journal articles, and scholarly and popular books, compiled from my own reading. (Last update: 10 February 2007.)

( Inanna/Ishtar Bibliography )

The beginnings of a bibliography, from my own reading.

( Sekhmet and related goddesses bibliography )

"All the great gods and goddesses, as well as some of their less well-known divine colleagues, appear as amulets. Thus among lion-headed figures are found not only Sekhmet, Bastet and Wadjyt but Pakhet and Mehyt and the fierce god Mahes." (p 12)

"The problem is that the Egyptians believed most of their gods were able to manifest themselves in animal form, but there were not enough types of animal to suffice. Thus any one species might represent a number of different gods... Sekhmet, Tefnut, Mehyt, Pakhet and Bastet, even Wadjyt, might all appear as an amulet of a lion-headed woman." (p 14)

Cat-shaped amulets, representing Bastet, were most popular in the Third Intermediate Period. (p 12)

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Andrews, Carol. Amulets of Ancient Egypt. British Museum Press, London, 1994.

Hathor was a sky goddess - hence her name, "House of Horus". Watterson writes, "The Egyptians thought of her as a gigantic cow which straddled the earth, her legs marking the four cardinal points. Between her horns she carried the sun's disk; her belly was the sky, her hide and udders were the stars and planets." (p 113)

The Narmer Palette is the earliest known representation of Hathor, and was probably an offering for Hathor's shrine. Watterson suggests the part-human, part-bovine face, uniquely shown from the front, was originally the goddess' fetish, and becamne stylised as her Bat symbol - the sistrum, Hathor's sacred rattle, could take this shape. Her son Ihy holds one.

The Greeks equated Hathor with Aphrodite. She "was especially reversed by women." Wine and beer, and music and dance, were important in her rituals; "the king himself sang and danced before the goddess". (p 118) Along with Bes and Ta-weret, she was concerned with childbirth, and also suckled the king. The Seven Hathors, who foretold the fates of newborn children, appear in The Tale of the Two Brothers and The Doomed Prince.

In the afterlife, Hathor, "Lady of the Sycamore", lived in a sycamore tree, which provided protection, food, and drink to the deceased. During the 18th Dynasty, she was merged with another cow goddess, Mehet-weret, becoming the patroness of the Theban necropolis. She was the goddess of foreign lands, and was worshipped at a mine in Sinai as "The Lady of Turquoise".

Denderah, site of Hathor's most important temple, takes its name from the Egyptian Ta-neteret, "the goddess". Her statue went in procession each year for a sacred marriage to Horus of Edfu. She was identified with local goddess in many towns, for example with Mut at Thebes, and with Wadjet at Buto; she was so often identified with Isis that they'd basically fused by the Late Period.

Shafer discusses the earliest development of Egyptian religion. It's not clear when Egyptian gods took on human attributes - whether there was a stage in which the gods were objects and animals. "Yet what appears significant," he argues, "is not the form the concept of the divine took but the fact that the concept could be manifest in an image. For even when the power/force was representaed as an animal, it was possible that the believer also attributed to it human behaviours and traits." For example, Predynastic gods are often shown as animals, but acting like human beings. Later, human and animal seem to fuse - literally in the case of the familiar animal-headed human figures. (p 13-15)

The importance of sacred animals greatly increased in the Late Period. As Shafer points out, animals were more accessible than statues hidden away in temples. "For worshippers, the animals' relation to deities was comparable to that of living and deceased human intermediaries." (p 196-7)

"In Egypt, the notion of evil overlapped to a great extent with that of disorder." (p 163) This makes sense to me, considering the violence, starvation, and general chaos of the Intermediate Periods. But of course, as Shafer points out, the pharaoh had a vested interest in paralleling his or her own rule with cosmic order.

In a Coffin Text of the Middle Kingdom, the creator god assigns the blame for evil on human beings and not on the gods: "I made every man like his fellow. I did not ordain that they do wrong." Literally: that they engage in izfet (itft?), disorder), the chaos outside creation, which is where unworthy souls are thrown after judgment. (p 128-9, 163)

Where does "natural evil" come from, then? Elswhere Shafer discusses the Instruction of Amenemope from the New Kingdom, which emphasises that everything happens because the gods ordained it. "… although the gods created order and uphold it, they are free to act by their own lights and may appear to be capricious… The morality of these instruction texts focusses as much on accepting and enduring events as on making them happen." (p 194-5) Shafer argues that in polytheism, evil has two possible sources, human wrongdoing and the "tension and disorder" within the pantheon - hence "the existence of evil is not deeply problematic because nothing is truly perfect (p 186-7).

One sharp difference between Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion is that, in Egypt, personal devotion to a particular god was rare (p 174), while in Mesopotamia everyone had a "personal god". OTOH, "Thousands of votive offerings have been found at shrines of the goddess Hathor, the patroness of women." Some of these were probably prayers for fertility (p 180-1).
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Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2001.

This book's available at Google Books!
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=kK1iuqphAKoC

Shafer opens by describing the Egyptian's complicated and sophisticated concept of the divine, including the "identifications and interrelations" between the various gods. "It is not possible simply to label one deity a god of one thing and another the god of something else." (p 7) Egyptian religious ideas were "fluid", always evolving, with no single "sacred book" (p 12). (Having grown up with kid's books which always gave the Heliopolitan cosmogony - that is, Osiris' family tree - I've been surprised to learn how many different creation stories they Egyptians had.)

Similarly, their gods were more fluid in their roles than the gods of Greece and Rome (p 23). For example, Set was a fratricide, Re's ally against Apophis, Horus's enemy, and then Horus's former enemy; he was esteemed in the Early Dynastic Period, and again in Ramesside Period (p 40-1), representing "the brute force and destructiveness that exist within creation", rather than the uncreated chaos outside it; but in the first millenium BCE Seth began to be seen as an enemy (p 124).

The interrelationships between gods were also complex. Shafer mentions familiar triads like Amun, Mut, and Khonsu at Thebes, but also notes that Hathor of Denderah was the consort of Horus of Edfu, even though each god "inhabited" their own temple (p 41).

A few quick notes. Seshat was Thoth's consort, and they were portrayed together in coronation scenes (p 42). Ma'at, unlike any of the gods other than the Aten, was "tolerated" thoughout the Amarna period (p 82). There are two records from the New Kingdom in which Hathor appeared to people in their dreams (p 172), one of which inspired the location of a man's tomb (p 185).

More notes to come, on sacred animals, personal piety, and theodicy.
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Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2001.

Neith was one of the four goddesses who protected the canopic jars, along with Isis, Nephthys, and Serqet. She was also a protector of the royal house.

The click beetle (family Elateridae) has a body which resembles an Egyptian shield, which Neith is often depicted wearing as a headdress. A First Dynasty relief shows the heads and abdomens of two click beetles "incorporated into the symbol of the goddess Neith". Another First Dynasty relief shows one of these beetles holding the was sceptre. Elaterid beetles are brilliantly metallic in colour, and some are bioluminescent, reflecting Neith's association with the rising sun and as the "opener of the way" for souls in the underworld.

Neith was also associated with the fly, perhaps because of its association with the military.

ETA: Neith's recognition and influence dwindled over time, perhaps for politcal reasons; at first known throughout Egypt, later her importance was mostly limited to Sais. She was Khnum's consort at Esna.

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Kritsy, Gene and Ron Cherry. Insect Mythology. Writers Club Press, 2000.
Motte-Florac, Elisabeth and Jacqueline M.C. Thomas. Les "Insectes" Dans La Tradition Orale. Peeters Publishers, Belgium, 2003.
Shafer, Byron E. (ed) Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Pratice. Cornell UP, Ithaca, 1991.

"Though bizarre at first sight, these deities sporting the heads of falcons or lionesses on human shoulders lent physical form, in a strikingly succint fashion, both to the divine power of which the animal was the visible symbol and to its potential influence - through human agency - on earthly affairs." (p 122)

Germond ponders representations such as the goose and ram for Amun-Re: "Are they gods or sacred animals?" He refers to a stela at Deir el-Medina which shows two geese, one captioned "the beautiful goose of Amun-Re", the other "Amun-Re, the beautiful goose". "... to the layman, [the animal] was often identified with the god himself, while for the priest and holy man it was understood more as one of the possible manifestations of the god." An animal may be the "repository of the divine soul" plus "a god in its own right." (p 122) For example, the Apis bull was "the living ba of Ptah"; the sacred falcons at Edfu and Philae were the ba of Re-Horakhte; the sacred crocodile at Kom Ombo was the ba of Sobek. (p 149)

Germond notes the lack of male lion-gods, with only one example in Mahes; by contrast, there were thirty snake gods. He notes that Wadjet was associated with the Eye of the Sun, perhaps because of the burning feeling of a snakebite, and cites a myth in which Re's temporary eye is insulted when his original Eye returns, so is compensated by a place on his forehead. (p177-8)
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Germond, Philippe. An Egyptian Bestiary: Animals in Life and Religion in the Land of the Pharoahs. Thames and Hudson, London, 2001.

The California Museum of Ancient Art has numerous lectures available on CD. I've listened to several and they're terrific - talks given to a general audience by major experts.

Buy, beg, borrow or steal the 2003 Channel 4 series Ancient Egyptians, which brings real events from the hieroglyphic record to life, complete with actors speaking in reconstructed Ancient Egyptian language. It's gripping, full of murder and drama and amazing things.

Westenholz, Joan G. King by Love of Inanna - an Image of Female Empowerment?. Nin 1, 2000, pp 75-89. (I've been looking for this journal for ages!)

"Dig Diary" of years of work at the Temple of Mut at Karnak.

Day of the Vulture - a 2003 Mother Jones article about archaeological looting in Iraq.

Here's that cat / lioness dichotomy again, in a pair of proverbs from The Teaching of Ankhsheshonq:

"When a man smells of myrrh his wife is a cat before him."
"When a man is suffering his wife is a lioness before him."

I need to do some reading on Hathor this year, because of her close association with Sekhmet in the Destruction of Mankind, and also because she's associated with Tefnut in the Myth of the Eye of the Sun - there's that slippery interchangability between Egyptian deities, so several of them are "the Eye of Ra". (Hathor also flashes Ra in The Contendings of Horus and Seth and makes him laugh! Spot the parallel with Baubo in the story of Demeter's search for Persephone.)
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Houlihan, Patrick F. Wit and Humour in Ancient Egypt. Rubicon, London, 2001.

I borrowed the above DVD from the library - it's available for purchase in the US from Insight Media. The filmmaker was permitted to video a number of commmunity Vodun ceremonies, and her narration explains the complex action.

What struck me was that if you don't know what's taking place, it looks like chaos: a large group of people dancing strangely, singing incomprehensibly, and waving objects around, apparently entirely at random. This is the popular view of a "voodoo" ceremony - basically, a wild, primitive orgy. But with the narrator's help, you realise that it's all actually extremely organised. A trained and respected leader (or leaders) is running the ritual, everyone knows their role, every dance move and song has a specific purpose and is part of a long-standing, well-known tradition. As an event rich with cultural tradition that involves the whole community, it is in fact the height of civilisation.

Check out my slowly growing Google Books library - lots of interesting stuff available there for free.

A new year, and a new name for this journal! But why?

When I first created this journal, as a sort of workbook for my lay study of goddesses (especially Ancient Near Eastern ones), I borrowed an Egyptian personal name I saw in Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt. The name, dating from early dynastic times and meaning "property of (the) god", is Jht-ntr. (To be properly transliterated, that h needs to have a little curved line underneath it - haven't worked out how to do that in HTML yet :-). While we can't know exactly how an Ancient Egyptian pronounced the word, since most vowels aren't written, for convenience an Egyptologist would add some es and say it roughly "Ikhet-Netjer". But I misunderstood that the Hornung was using the J to indicate the I sound, not the consonant D. So I called the journal "jekhet_sekhmet" - "property of Sekhmet".

I'm doing the Macquarie University Ancient Languages School summer course in hieroglyphs right now (I'm making a few notes at wedge_strategy). When a check of various dictionaries failed to turn up the word "jekhet", our helpful tutor was able to puzzle out what the original word must have been: iht or ht, "thing".

I'll see if I can put up a picture of the hieroglyphs themselves!

Paul Radin's The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology is overdue! Another quote before I take it back.

On the tricker's destruction of the warbundle, "the most sacred of all Winnebago possessions":

"What we really have here is something equivalent to certain semi-religious mediaeval performances where the participants feel that no harm can come to them and where they can pretend to themselves that they cannot be accused of sacrilege or of ridiculing the traditionally accepted order. After all, they can contend that it is about Wakdjunkaga they are speaking and about things that happened in a distant age that will never return. We have here, in short, an outlet for voicing a protest against the many, often onerous, obligations connected with the Winnebago social order and their religion and ritual." (p 152)

A couple of notes from Sacred Possessions.

I'm really interested by the apparent anarchy of the Vodoun gods - there's a huge number of them, they don't have ranks, they can appear in "many emanations", they have many names, they're constantly being added or forgotten. (p 21) Similarly, one author describes Santería as "a chaotic and unstoppable amalgam" (p 97). This is apparently also true of the religion's African sources. (p 80)

In the Yoruba religion, an oricha is created "in a moment of passion preserved as legend" - a great emotional crisis which caused a "metamorphosis", bestowing on them their aché or power. For example, Oggún became an oricha when he realised he'd killed everyone in the city he'd founded in a moment of wrath. "What was material in them disappeared, burned by that passion, and only the aché remained - power in a state of pure energy." (p 82)

In Santería it's thought that although the one God of Christianity created the world, he then distributed His powers throughout the orichas so He wouldn't have to interfere in human affairs. (p 87)

The personalities of the Vodoun and Santería gods are so distinct, rich, and powerful!

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Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds). Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean. Rutgers, New Jersey, 1997.

I broke and bought Dover's Egyptian Designs book. This will allow me to scatter a few illustrations about this LJ.



What an amazing image! She's Renenutet, 'the snake who nourishes', goddess of the harvest, divine nurse, protector of pharoah during the Old Kingdom, 'lady of the fertile land', 'lady of the threshing floor, 'lady of the granaries'. She was also shown as a cobra wearing Hathor's sun-disc-and-horns and the plumes you see above, as a cobra with a woman's head.The snake's image as a protector presumably comes from its killing of the rodents who attacked the crops in the field and in the granary. In the Late Period she decreed peoples' fates. The Greeks adopted her as Thermouthis and paired her with Isis.

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Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames and Hudson, London, 2003.

Sculpture as old as civilisation tops $65m



Man! I am so lucky I got to see this at the Brooklyn Museum a couple of years ago. (I've got a journal article around here somewhere about the sculpture which I'll try to dig up.)

"There is much trickery at large in the world, all sorts of sly and cunning tricks among human beings, animals and even plants, which could no more remain hidden from a story-teller whose inner life was as much bound up with the world as his outer one, than they could from an observer at a distance."

"Archaic social hierarchies are exceedingly strict. To be archaic does not mean to be chaotic. Quite the contrary: nothing demonstrates the meaning of the all-controlling social order more impressively than the religious recognition of that which evades this order, in a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, for ever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experienced of what is not permitted."

"I must confess that I have not been able to discover... any such thing as the 'inner development' of the hero. Gods and primitive beings have no inner dimension, and neither have heroes, who inhabit the same sphere."

- Karl Kerényi, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology". In Radin, Paul. The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology. Greenwood, New York, 1956.

What does it mean when God doesn't look like you? A bazillion people across the planet must wonder this. For me there's a twist on the question: my God is a young woman of Middle Eastern appearance. Is this why I'm so keen on claiming Mesopotamia as a part of Western heritage, the forerunners of the Greeks et al?