Egyptian cosmology

The Egyptian cosmology was mostly mythological, and partially inspired by the Assyro-Babylonian cosmology, partially determined by the natural processes which were experienced by the ancient Egyptians, some of them being specific to their country, as the yearly cycles of Nile, some of them being universal for any human observer, as the motion in the sky of the sun and of the planets. Since the ancient Egyptians were polytheists and they deified the celestial bodies, it was extremely important for them to compute accurately the moments of emergence of their gods and goddesses. This was one of the most significant causes of the development of astronomy and of cosmogonic myths by the Egyptian civilization. The movement on the sky of the brightest stars was useful for navigation on the seas, while the astronomical objects of our own solar system played a religious and cosmological function.

A logical consequence of the immortality of the immanent central gods of the Egyptian pantheon was the eternity of the Universe. The bodies of the gods composed the physical world. The gods were immortal, hence the world was also eternal. On the other hand, the multi-layered structure of reality, influenced by the Babylonian mythology, depicted the world, with its earths and heavens, as being spatially finite. Still, the Universe before its creation was a spatially infinite chaos, that meaning that only the places inhabited by humans, spirits of the deceased and gods were spatially finite. The god of creation, Atum or Ra, was the ontological and cosmological result of an imbalance between the primordial pairs of deities, which composed so-called Ogdoad. The first god himself, Atum, was a creation of Nu, the initial void, and hence any comparison with Christian cosmogonic myths would be meaningless. Nu was the deification of the primordial watery abyss. The ancient Egyptians envisaged the oceanic abyss of Nu as surrounding a bubble in which the sphere of life is encapsulated. Nu is the source of all that appears in a differentiated world, encompassing all aspects of divine and earthly existence. Of course, a modern scientist can draw a parallel between the emergence of a new creative personified power from the primordial disequilibrium, Atum, and the hypothesized quantum level imbalances of the Planck era, when the matter existed under the form of strings generated by the primordial black holes of the super-string theory. The strings constituted the seeds for the structure formation that took place after the inflation.

The primeval waters may be compared with the spacetime foam of the Planck era, while the ripples formed on the ancestral waters may be paralleled with the strings from super-string theory or with thermal fluctuations from the inflationary cosmologies. The male gods which composed the primary Ogdoad were represented as frogs, while the female deities were represented as snakes. The Egyptian cosmogonies varied by city within the ancient kingdom of Khem, and, consequently, the myths slightly differed one to another in places like Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Memphis, Thebes. If somebody will really want to make a comparison between Egyptian mythological cosmologies and modern quantum physics, he or she would need to associate the snake-shaped goddesses with the waves, and the frog-shaped gods with the particles. But I think that this would be too much even for a time when cosmologies are more literary than the science fiction books.

Atum, the god of creation, conceived the pair of deities Shu, the god of air or atmosphere, and Tefnut, the goddess of humidity or water:

'Shu is the atmosphere, his creation produced a dry, empty space in the midst of the universal ocean, within which all life exist '(Allen, P. James - Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hyerogliphs, p. 176, Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

An analogy between the water-surrounded Earth and the bubble Universes of the inflationary theory is not hard to be realized, although would be quite unlikely to sustain that Egyptians made scientific assumptions about the beginning of the world. And since the newly established Universe needed material items where they did not existed before, Shu and Tefnut gave birth to further deities:

 'These are Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. [...] Together they define the physical structure and the limits of the created world.' (Ibidem, p. 176.). 

The descendants of Geb and Nut are the primary forces of life: Osiris and Isis, Seth and Nephtys. The process of creation is completed with the birth of sun, Horus, the offspring of Osiris and Isis.

Though the Egyptian cosmology appeals to mythological names and trivial metaphors for explaining creation, as many commentators noticed, the Egyptian myths of genesis are not as far from reality as is the solar disc far from earth:

'Although is explained in generational terms, the Heliopolitan view of the creation is therefore less a step-by-step account than a kind of Egyptian Big Bang, in which all creation happened at once, in the moment when Atum evolved in the world, and time itself began.' (Ibidem - pp. 177-178.).

Bibliography:

James, Allen, P. - Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hyerogliphs, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

The method of logogriff

The method of logogriph, which I had learned at faculty from one of my teachers, consists in seeking inside of one word in the purpose of finding there another word (or words). This method is quite simple and could be a very good way to find hidden words, with strong meanings, within another words. In a daily dialogue or if we would try to apply this method to an ordinary word the logogriph could appear to us as a method of little importance. Instead, when we choose to apply our method to meaningful literary constructions as are the proper names which belong to gods and goddesses or denote powerful and 'heavy of meaning' concepts, we would see that this method will become more interesting than we would have been tented to consider it in the first place.

C. G. Jung said that our mind is divided between conscience and unconscious, the first one taking or having the same gender as our physical body, while the second one being always by a contrary sexual value. More exactly, for a man the gender of his conscience will be, in most of the cases, the same with his sexual or physical gender, in which case his unconscious will be female. In the case of the women the things will stay exactly in an opposite way. Embodied in his theory of archetypes, this inversion could be understood as follows: our unconscious has a gender identity and this gender identity will be always countersexual versus our conscience. Jung integrated this empiric proof into his larger theory of archetypes saying that this kind of unconscious mental level could be named animus for women, and anima for men. Therefore, our unconscious will take a counter-sexual value, and this fact will be true not only on a lexical level, but will be true indeed, searching the proofs right in our minds. More exactly, our personal unconscious will be personified counter-sexually, fact which explains the names chosen by Jung to denote it, animus - a male name for women's unconscious and anima - a female name for men's unconscious.

This belongs to Jungian theory of archetypes, theory which is based on the main distinction between conscience and uncounscious. In this theory Jung asserted that only our socially avalaible and desirable mind's contents - as thoughts, emotions, and so on - will be kept in conscience, shaping the so called persona: the social archetype. 'Persona' means 'mask' in Latin. In most of the cases, every human individual has at least two personae, therefore, each human must own at least two pictures about himself or herself which are made in synergistically social tension between citizens of the society. Quite often one from these two social masks are used in social frames as jobs, social life, circle of friends, while the another one is used at home, with our relatives. But our personae are compatible one with another one - below a certain level, of course - making together our conscious attitude, but there still are cases when it's possible that an individual to owns just one persona. In opposition, every human, man or woman, has an uncounscious, where our counter-socially mind contents are kept, hidden by the eyes of society. To this category belong ours counter-sexually features.

In the first place, when Jung had conceived his theory of archetypes, he had prefered the aforementioned names of persona and personae in matters concerning our conscience, and the word 'shadow' or 'slave' when he spoke about our personified uncounscious. He used this words thinking about its psychogenesis - because uncounscious is populated with mental contents after the psychological process of repression, that meaning that not only counter-sexually thoughts and emotions could be placed there. But, after a proper view, we should see that, normally, our counter-sexual features would be introduced in the process of repression, fact which explains this shade of meaning of these functional concepts.

If we would like to apply this theory to the whole world or Universe - and that inference is true in accordance with the Jungian statement about the unique substantial nature of the whole Universe (theory which says that the entire world is composed from a single type of substance, and this one has a mental nature, that meaning that the entire Universe would be psychoid) - then we could apply this kind of distinctions to an universal scale or to gods of various cultures. That means that we should be able to use Jungian concepts personifying the whole Universe and, as Jung himself told us in his wonderful intellectual legacy, if we would think that God himself is the conscience of the world, then would be very likely that God-world does have his own universal uncounscious. From a sexual point of view this universal uncounscious could be called "the bride of God" - something as Sophia - which had been the name of the wife of God in early Christianity. Instead, in accordance with a more general and more vague point of view, this universal uncounscious would be named "Devil".

Beginning from here we can see the analogy between the theory of archetypes conceived by Jung and the literary method of logogriph. More exactly, when we would apply the logogriph to certain names of deities we would find interesting similitudes. Such similitudes does exist if you analyze the literal structure of a group of four words, words which denote four main deities of Egyptian pantheon. These gods and goddesses make together two divine couples, one of them - belonging to 'the right side' - being composed from divinities of light, while the another one belongs to 'the left side'. These gods are Osiris and Isis, respectively, Seth and Nephtys. If you'd try to see the literal structure of these proper names, then would be very easy for you to find that the name of the positive god, Osiris, contains in itself the entire name which stays for his wife and sister, Isis. Instead, in the case of the other couple, the things are exactly in the opposite way, that means that the proper name of Nephtys contains in itself the whole name of his husband and brother, Seth. This assymetrical symmetry should have to be more interesting because it respects the psycho-dynamic conditions held and asserted by Jung in his theory of archetypes: Osiris would stay for human conscience and Isis for his uncounscious, and if this sentence would be elevated to a macrocosmic level, then we would speak about God and his anima. Instead, Seth, as an expression of human/man unconscious, is entirely contained in his wife name. That would be as though through this pair of deities we'd have a representation of the case that resides in a human conscience which is dominated by his unconscious. Knowing that these holy names, transliterated from ancient Egyptian language to a Latin alphabetic form, respect their original phonetic form we'll be bind to recognize the validity of this method of logogriph, whose application became successful at least in this example, with the only amendment that though the logogriph must be used together with the method of anagram.

'Logogriff ' is composed from two Greek words, logos, which here signifies 'word' and 'griffe', which means 'claw'. In conclusion, 'logogriff' means 'to scratch the matter, the literal matter of a word'. 

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