RA: The Master Universe
I. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
"I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,
and I have the power to be born a second time," says the speaker of a
spell in the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
in E. A. Wallis Budge's translation of 1895; "I am the divine hidden Soul
who createth the gods." The voice belongs to the dead person who hopes to
rise like the sun, and the boast is borrowed from the sun himself, from Ra, the
god who died every evening and was born again every dawn.
Ra stood near the center of Egyptian
religion for something close to three thousand years, from the Old Kingdom,
when the kings of the Fourth Dynasty began to call themselves "Son of
Ra" and those of the Fifth built sun temples to him, down to the Roman
period, when his priests at Heliopolis still kept his rites. He was more than
the visible sun. He was the power behind life, the king of the gods, and the
keeper of maat, the order of truth
and justice that held the world together. In the usual image he is a man with
the head of a falcon, crowned with the sun disk and the coiled cobra, the
uraeus, but his forms were many: a scarab, a ram, a cat that fights a serpent,
the benu bird that the Greeks
associated with the phoenix.
His day was a voyage. He crossed the sky in
the morning boat, the Mandjet, and
passed through the underworld at night in the evening boat, the Mesektet. At dawn he was Khepri, the
scarab beetle rolling the sun up out of the earth the way the beetle rolls its
ball of dung, a homely image of creation that I have always loved; at midday he
was Ra in his full strength, and in the evening he was Atum, the old one,
sinking toward the western horizon. He was joined with Horus as Ra-Horakhty,
"Ra who is Horus of the Two Horizons," a form tied especially to the
rising sun. In the Middle Kingdom and still more in the New Kingdom, the Theban
god Amun, "the hidden one," was fused with him as Amun-Ra, king of
the gods, and the great temples of Karnak were built to that combined deity.
II. The Self-Created
The Egyptians told more than one story of
creation, and Ra appears in several of them under different names. In the
theology of Heliopolis, before anything existed there was only Nun, the dark
and motionless water, and out of it rose a mound of earth, the first land, on
which the creator Atum came into being by himself. The pyramid-shaped benben stone kept in the temple at
Heliopolis was thought to embody that primeval mound, and the pyramids and
obelisks of Egypt may echo its form. In the tradition of Hermopolis, the sun
was born from a lotus that opened on the primeval waters, and a lovely image
from the tomb of Tutankhamun shows the boy king's head rising from a lotus
flower as the young sun.
Atum, already identified with Ra as
Atum-Ra, then produced the first pair of gods, Shu the air and Tefnut the
moisture, by sneezing and spitting them out, or in a blunter version of the
text by his own hand. From Shu and Tefnut came Geb the earth and Nut the sky,
and from them Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, the nine gods of the
Heliopolitan Ennead. Human beings came from tears. One papyrus tells how the
creator's eye went out to search for Shu and Tefnut when they were lost in the
dark waters, and when it returned with them and found that another eye had
taken its place, it wept, and from its tears came humankind. The story rests on
a pun, since in Egyptian the word for tears, remyt, sounds like the word for people, remetj, and I find something moving in a theology that makes us the
weeping of God.
Ra was also remembered as the first king of
Egypt, who ruled gods and humans together on earth in a golden age. The text
known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow,
inscribed in the tombs of several New Kingdom kings, tells how Ra grew old, his
bones turned to silver, his flesh to gold, and his hair to lapis lazuli, and
how humans began to plot against him. The story of what he did then belongs to
the Eye, and to the next section. The pharaohs who came after him held office
as his sons and successors, built his temples, and offered him the daily rites
that kept the sun rising and the order of the world intact.
III. The Eye
The Eye of Ra is one of the strangest ideas
in Egyptian religion, because it is at once a part of the god and a goddess in
her own right, his daughter, sometimes his consort or mother, and the fiery
agent of his will. Sekhmet, Hathor, Bastet, Wadjet, Mut, and Tefnut could each
be called the Eye of Ra, and the cobra on his brow, the uraeus that spits fire
at his enemies, was the Eye in its protective form.
Two stories show her character. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, when the aging
Ra learns that humans are plotting against him, he sends his Eye down to punish
them, and she goes as Hathor and becomes Sekhmet, the lioness, slaughtering
people and wading in their blood. Ra relents before humanity is destroyed, and
to stop her he has seven thousand jars of beer brewed and dyed red with ochre
from Elephantine, and pours it over the fields at night. In the morning Sekhmet
sees what she takes for blood, drinks it, becomes drunk, and returns pacified,
a story the Egyptians remembered at festivals of drunkenness in Hathor's honor.
In the other story, the Distant Goddess, the Eye quarrels with Ra and flees
south into Nubia as a raging lioness, and Thoth or Shu must travel there to
coax her home with soothing words; her return, transformed into a gentle cat or
a beautiful woman, was celebrated as the return of the inundation and the
renewal of the year.
A popular account of the Eye of Ra
sometimes tells a story in which Set steals or destroys Ra's eye and Ra gives
the restored eye to his father Osiris, and that story belongs to a different
god. It is the myth of the Eye of Horus. In the long struggle between Horus and
his uncle Set, Set tore out Horus's eye, and Thoth, or in another version
Hathor with gazelle's milk, healed it, and Horus then offered his restored eye
to his murdered father Osiris to give him life in the underworld, an offering
that the Pyramid Texts repeat again and again. The healed eye, the wedjat, "the sound one,"
became the commonest protective amulet in Egypt, and the pairs of eyes painted
on the sides of Middle Kingdom coffins, so that the dead could look out toward
the rising sun, are wedjat eyes.
The usual way to tell the two apart is to
say that the Eye of Ra is the sun, fierce and destructive, while the Eye of
Horus is the moon, wounded and healed, and that the first belongs to the great
creator while the second belongs to his descendant Horus, who in the
Heliopolitan genealogy is the great-great-grandson of Atum-Ra through Shu, Geb,
and Osiris. The distinction is useful, and it should not be pressed too hard,
since the Egyptians themselves blurred it constantly. The Eye of Ra protects as
well as destroys, the wedjat could be called the Eye of Ra in some texts, and
Horus and Ra merge as Ra-Horakhty. The claim, sometimes repeated, that the two
eyes are distinguished by the color of the iris has no basis I can find in
Egyptian evidence. What can be said with confidence is that the Eye, whatever
its owner, always comes back: stolen, wounded, sent away, or enraged, it
returns, and its return is the return of order to the world.
IV. The First Name
The earliest king whose name contains the
sun's is Nebra, the second ruler of the Second Dynasty, who reigned around 2800
BC, though the dates of this early period are uncertain by a century or more.
His Horus name is usually read Nebra,
"lord of the sun," or, in an older reading now less favored, Raneb, "Ra is my lord."
Egyptologists debate whether the sign ra
in his name already refers to the sun as a god or simply to the sun as the
sky's great light, so the name marks the beginning of royal interest in the sun
more securely than the beginning of Ra's cult; still, it is the first time a
king set the sun inside the frame of his royal name, and the kings who came
after took that step much further.
Modern estimates give Nebra a reign of
perhaps ten to fourteen years. The historian Manetho, a priest of Heliopolis
who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek in the third century BC, assigns
thirty-nine years to a king he calls Kaiechos, and he credits that king with
establishing the worship of the sacred bulls Apis at Memphis and Mnevis at
Heliopolis and of the sacred goat of Mendes. Kaiechos corresponds to the name
Kakau, which appears in later king lists in the place where Nebra should stand,
and many scholars identify the two, though the match is not certain.
Nebra's name survives on stone vessels and
on clay seal impressions, and it often appears beside the names of his
predecessor Hotepsekhemwy or his successor Nynetjer, partly because later kings
reused his vessels and recut them with their own names. His tomb has not been
identified with confidence. A large underground gallery tomb at Saqqara,
beneath the causeway of the later pyramid of Unas, contained seal impressions
of both Hotepsekhemwy and Nebra and may have belonged to one of them. A granite
stela bearing Nebra's name, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
is one of the few monuments of his reign, though where exactly it was found is
not recorded.
V. The Long Night
Every evening Ra passed through the akhet, the horizon, into the Duat, the
underworld, and the New Kingdom books written on the walls of royal tombs, the Amduat and the Book of Gates, map his journey through its twelve hours. His great
enemy there was Apophis, a serpent of chaos so vast that he could drink the
waters on which the night boat sailed, and every night the crew of the boat
fought him. Set, the god of storms and violence who was Osiris's murderer in
another story, stood in the prow of the sun boat and speared the serpent, Isis
used her magic against him, and the coiled serpent-god Mehen wrapped himself
protectively around Ra's shrine. Egyptian priests performed rituals for the
overthrowing of Apophis, burning wax figures of the serpent, and the struggle
never ended in a final victory. It ended each night in a victory that had to be
won again the next night, which strikes me as one of the wisest accounts of
evil that any ancient religion gave.
Ra's worship spread wherever Egyptian power
went. In Nubia, the temples at Gebel Barkal and Soleb were dedicated to
Amun-Ra, the fused form of the god, and the Kushite kings who later ruled Egypt
as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty were his devoted servants. The great challenge to
Ra came, strangely, from a king who loved the sun more than anyone. In the
fourteenth century BC, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV renamed himself Akhenaten,
"effective for the Aten," closed the temples of the other gods, and
declared the Aten, the visible disk of the sun, the only god. His Great Hymn to the Aten, found in the
tomb of the official Ay at Amarna, praises the sun that rises to give life to
every creature, and the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted pointed out
in 1909 how closely parts of it resemble Psalm 104. After Akhenaten's death his
revolution was undone, the old gods and their priesthoods returned, and his
name was hacked out of the monuments.
The long night of Ra came with the end of
paganism in the Roman Empire. The emperor Theodosius I closed the pagan temples
by decree in the early 390s, and in the following centuries the temples of
Heliopolis were stripped for building stone, much of which went into the walls
of medieval Cairo. Today a single obelisk of King Senusret I still stands where
the city once was, in the Cairo suburb of al-Matariya. Many of its other
obelisks travelled far. Augustus carried one of Seti I and Ramesses II to Rome,
where it now stands in the Piazza del Popolo, and two obelisks of Thutmose III,
moved by the Romans to Alexandria and later nicknamed Cleopatra's Needles, were
shipped in the nineteenth century to London, where one has stood on the
Victoria Embankment since 1878, and to New York, where the other has stood in
Central Park since 1881. The sun god's monuments, in other words, are scattered
across the cities that replaced his.
VI. Ra Returns
Gods have a way of surviving their temples.
In the twentieth century Ra came back in forms his priests could never have
imagined. Between 1981 and 1984, in Kentucky, the researcher Don Elkins, the
channel Carla Rueckert, and the scribe Jim McCarty recorded 106 sessions with
an intelligence that called itself Ra, published as The Law of One, and often called the Ra Material. The entity
described itself as a "social memory complex" of the sixth density of
consciousness, a collective that had once tried to help the Egyptians, first
through the pyramids and later through Akhenaten, only to see its teaching of
the unity of all things distorted into priestcraft and the worship of itself as
a god. The material divides spiritual evolution into two paths, "service
to others" and "service to self," and it has gathered a large
and devoted readership, while skeptics regard it as the product of the
channel's own mind. I have no way to judge its source, and I note only that it
is a striking reversal, an ancient god returning to say that he was never a god
at all.
Popular culture took a darker view of him.
In Roland Emmerich's film Stargate
(1994), Ra is an alien parasite who has taken a human body, posed as a god, and
enslaved a people on a distant planet, and the film's heroes free them by
exposing the fraud. Between the channeled Ra who regrets being worshipped and
the cinematic Ra who demands worship, the modern imagination seems to have
decided that the gods of Egypt were really visitors from elsewhere, which says
at least as much about our age as about theirs.
Others have sought to revive his worship on
its own terms. Kemetic Orthodoxy, founded in the United States in 1988, and
other Kemetic groups attempt to reconstruct the religion of ancient Egypt from
the surviving texts, with daily offerings and festivals, and some eclectic
pagans include Ra among the powers they honor at the solstices. The heliacal
rising of Sirius, which the Egyptians watched each summer as the herald of the
Nile's flood and the new year, still marks the beginning of the year for many of
them, though in Egypt that star belonged to Isis-Sopdet more than to Ra.
The question underneath all this is why we
still look for him in the sky. The answer, I suspect, is the one the Egyptians
gave when they made the sun die every evening and rise every morning: we need
the assurance that the light comes back. The psalmist who sang that God
"maketh the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice" (Psalm
65:8, KJV), the Egyptian scribe who copied the hymn to the Aten, and the reader
of the Book of the Dead who hoped to
say, at the last, "I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," were all
speaking of the same hope, that the darkness each of us must pass through is a
night journey and not a final one, and that something in us, like the sun in
its evening boat, will fight its way through the twelve hours and rise.
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THE MASTER UNIVERSE
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