Reality is Messy

Okay, crawling out of my horrible state of incoherent illness or whatever the hell is wrong with me for at least one more pagan values month blog post. This will wind it up for the month, hope you've enjoyed the trip.

I've done a whole bunch of these things, and I haven't talked much at all about gods. Which may be a bit odd for a sequence of posts about religious values. So here's a goddy post for all of you god fans.

I've found that a lot of people steeped in a monotheistic background of whatever flavor have a really hard time parsing their way through polytheism. Enough so that in a lot of discussions, when I point out that monotheistic assumptions don't apply to my religion, I just get ... ignored, passed over, as if someone turned on the Somebody Else's Problem field, and people keep going on arguing about religion as if they were actually talking about religion and not some subset thereof. And when people actually respond, it's often ... I pointed out the flaws in a monotheism-assuming argument to an angry atheist once, and got the fascinating response of, "Well, why would anyone want to worship a god who isn't omnipotent in the first place?"

What an alien world that is to me, though that's unsurprising with my little postcards-from-Gehenna schtick.

For context, I gotta tell you what I think about gods. Gods are elemental. I don't mean this in the sense of that earth-air-fire-water shit, I mean elemental, I mean like the periodic table, only with a lot more little boxes and squiggly abbreviations that require context and opaque numbers. Gods are exactly and precisely what they are, a coiled knot of consequences around a pure idea.

This doesn't mean that gods aren't complicated. You can't take a pure idea and fractal* it out to encompass all its consequences without getting complicated. The stories we tell about gods aren't the shard at the center of the god, they're all the stuff out on the edges that we can relate to and understand. Getting at that elemental core requires figuring out in what way all the stories are the same -- finding the part that iterates.

If I talk to you about Neb.y, sometimes I'll talk about transgression, sometimes I'll talk about sex and power, sometimes I'll talk about the initiator, sometimes I'll talk about the twinning of the desert and the fertile land, or the king and his twin the usurper, or deviancy and the foreign, or the strength borne of the individual, or the difference between destruction and annihilation, or the force of the storm, or the dread of the dark and the things that may go bump there. All these and more are part of His mythology, after all. But nestled into the centre of all of those is the Other. Edge of the map stuff, here be dragons - and will you be a dragonfriend, or will you be lunch?

Set as god as storms is the same thing as Set as god of redheads is the same thing as Set Who (in one set of myths) killed His brother is the same thing as Set in the prow of the solar boat as the one strong enough to break Apep's neck every night is the same thing as Set on the stolen throne waiting for Heru-sa-Aset to kick Him off is the same thing as sexually insatiable, pervy, queer Set with His foreign wives is the same thing as Set clasped hands with Heru and crowning the king. Dig into this and one can learn the mysteries of this god. It's all of a piece, the same thing, just requiring the right understanding to find the elemental equation that is the god.

Now, obviously, within this sort of system, this conceptualisation, one can't have just one god. If we got nothing but hydrogen, the universe looks a hella lot different than it does now.

Reality can be seen as being made up of this complicated tangle of all of these fractalised deities, twined through each other, rubbing up against each other, this glorious profusion of blended iterations. Just about everything we run into is composite, a sticky fornication of thousands of different raw principles: is the mask on my wall the Other? Is it Transformation? Is it Creation? And that's just a superficial getting into it being a mask, without considering what face it contains.

And this reality, this twined-together mass of composite being, answers things like the "Problem of Evil" quite simply - in a world where the millions of different pure fractal being-concepts are all tugging in their own particular directions, the composite is not in for an easy time, simply because there are too many flows. And that's without getting into the fact that being-concepts can include things like Strife For Glory or perhaps Appease The Abyss. And some systems want to suggest that all these arguing-combining-twining fractals, that entire fecund pile of conceptual DNA with its frantic combinations and recombinations, is sort of an intercessory layer between the composite and the ultimate, but even if true, that's a long way off into actual practical irrelevance.

Why worship a god that is not omnipotent?

Why not ask, have you ever fallen in love?

This is not a flip question, this is the core question. To be in love with the messy tangle of reality, to maybe find in the twisting apparently-contradictory convolutions something that speaks to what one loves in the manifest universe, something that makes up a little of one's own compositeness, or maybe something that answers a part of that, meets the valence number of some loose end and energises a system -- to be in love with this and to accept that that means all of the things which are not tidy, friendly, which are not matters of perfect benevolence.

And if the gods are flawed in their incompleteness, their lack of encompassing all of everything and thus having unquestioned power over it, then They are flawed, but They have the virtues of Their flaws.

And the virtues of our flaws is something that we, finite, composite humans can aspire to.




* Verbing weirds language.

Living the Mystery

Another Pagan Values Month post, now, which may be a wee bit more coherent than the last one.

I'm going to talk about mystery religion.

This is a matter of particular relevance to initiatory religions such as traditional Craft lines, but it's not unimportant to the reconstructionist lines either. A value most often explored in mystery work is the experiential exposure to the ineffable, and this is something that a lot of modern pagans value highly - as I mentioned yesterday, the whole concept of no intercessor is one of the things that a lot of pagans feel strongly about at some level.

First, a little terminology definition.

A mystery is, at its most straightforward, something which cannot be explained accurately; it can only be experienced, and afterwards offered explanations can actually make sense. Mysteries are not limited to the mystical or spiritual, though the ones that aren't are rarely described as mysteries, and the ones that are common human experience (sex, say) are often spiritualised by at least some people. The Greeks - who coined the term and set the stage for how we think of it - recognised two classes of mystery, the greater and the lesser. Lesser mysteries can be fucked up with spoilers, like a movie with a twist ending. Greater mysteries are immune to that sort of thing, because whatever experience is being evoked cannot be broken with partial preknowledge.

"Greater" and "lesser" may be misleading; I consider learning to turn while skiing a greater mystery. It's also my standard explanation for what a mystery is, so I will tell the story in brief: the one time I went downhill skiing, my parents sat me down and talked about their ski experiences, and explained to me how to turn. The explanation they gave was, "You go down, then up, then down." And they told me I would not understand this until I did it. I thanked them for their useless advice, went skiing, fell over a few times, and then I went down, and then up, and then down. And, as the koan ends, hearing this, the man was enlightened.

And those of you who have done downhill skiing will probably nod and understand this story entirely, because you have partaken of the Mystery; those of you who haven't will nod and smile and, perhaps, thank me for my useless advice.

We, obviously, know very little about ancient mysteries, because we haven't been down that hill. Some mysteries, such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, had huge populations of initiates, all of whom were earnestly sworn to utter secrecy about the content of the ritual. In other cases, though, we know a great deal about what was going on at the point that the mystery happened - but not necessarily enough to be sure we can reconstruct the mystery and have it happen again. We can try, but we can't be sure it will work.

(This actually came up in a conversation with a Canaanite reconstructionist a few years ago, who had done one portion of a well-recorded ancient ritual, and had a fellow practitioner say, "That was great, let's do the whole mystery next year!" In the end, my advice, which she wound up agreeing with, was to try adding factors from the historical record into what they actually did, and if the mystery happened, well, now they'd know the secret and could honestly say the time after that that this was a mystery initiation. If it didn't happen, they'd know they were missing something.)

Again, historically speaking, the mysteries were often presented as gifts from the gods, sacred treasures to enlighten, instruct, or transform the initiates - who might be the local citizenry, who might be devotees of the god who gave the mystery to the people, who might fit some other, more complicated criteria of citizenship, heritage, affiliation, role within the community. Initiates might be aware of each other as a sort of semi-secret society, or might have no further connection to each other than the shared experiential knowledge.

Now let us transfer to the modern day.

Many modern pagans are interested in experiential knowledge in various forms. I submit that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of modern Craft religion, as many of the principles thereof are rooted in the manifest world rather than the commonly interpreted as transcendent values of Christianity. (It is, of course, not this simple, and the treatment of Christianity as purely transcendent is erroneous. But that's off to the side, a bit.) I wrote, elsewhere, at one point, about Neb.y, that while He is not the storm, if one cannot encounter Him within the storm, He's not likely to be terribly findable, because the storm is an expression and manifestation of what Neb.y is. This is experiential knowledge; most pagan gods have similar manifestations that can be touched, felt, or known (and what Egyptian woman is not honoring Hetharu when she does her makeup?).

An interest in experiential knowledge almost inevitably leads to the Mysteries.

In many reconstructionist circles, people who claim to be performing the Mysteries are considered pretty fringe. The studious religion-with-homework attitudes of reconstruction tends to be very logic-brained, unlike the intuitive experience of the Mystery -- and, of course, we don't know how the Mysteries were conducted, for the most part. Someone who claims to be able to initiate you into the Eleusinian Mysteries is probably talking through their hat or their nether regions, because we have no data.

This doesn't stop the interest, it just treats some forms of it with contempt, causing unfortunate fractures within the community. There have always been and likely always will be people with a mystical bent, who will be interested in some form of mystery work; if that pursuit is made incompatible with reconstruction, these people will be driven out of reconstructionist work. And I think that's a major loss, because the sorts of stuff people can pull out of mystery work is the stuff that keeps a religion alive and engaged with the experiential world. Those people who take a reconstructionist-leaning attitude towards the Mysteries - that the gods will reveal whatever mysteries they think appropriate when the time is right - barely manage to stay within the fold, at times. Coloring within the lines becomes almost de rigeur for reconstructionists, unless they have sufficient clout within a community that people will take their inventions and revelations as just as good as historical information. Needless to say, I think that's unfortunate.

Of course, the initiatory mystery religions have the opposite problem. Instead of losing people who are trying to find an authentic mystery experience, they are accumulating people who don't think their mysteries are important. The historical and sociological reasons for this are fiddly to track down, but a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of articulating what a mystery is. In a culture where things written down are highly significant, this experiential process is denigrated. Further, in a culture where people think they should have access to anything they want (heard anyone say "Information wants to be free!" recently?), there are a lot of people who are deeply hurt when they're not accepted as candidates to experience a particular mystery. Religion is for everyone, right? It's universal! Only ... not so much.

Mystery paths, historically speaking, were mostly offshoots and side paths, away from the mainstream religion, something that the particularly interested would seek out. For those who didn't want the mystery investment, there was the mainline stuff they could do. For Craft religions, well, there was no mainline for a good long time. And now the Craft community is bewildered by all of the people out there claiming to be a part of their traditions who haven't actually encountered the mysteries - because they're inventing the mainline stuff, partially out of dribs and drabs of what people have let slip, partly out of whole cloth. When one's rooted in the assumption that the mystery is fundamental, this winds up looking tremendously messy - as well as unrooted in not only the actual meaning of the traditions thus transformed, but, potentially, reality. (And some of the more fascinating neo-Wiccan groups have some fascinating notions about reality ....)

I would not be surprised, in the long run, if the pagan world winds up with more people like me, with one foot in the reconstructionist camp, and one foot somewhere in mystery religion of some sort (whether Craft or not) -- looking to bring the possibility of repeatable ecstatic experience back into that book-crusted treatment of religion on the one hand, and matching modern religious expressions with ancient roots on the other. I'm not thinking in terms of the sort of "[Culture in the blank] Wicca" or whatever else might come to mind here, where a loosely Wiccish structure is meshed with a selection of gods from a particular culture (though I consider Ellen Cannon Reed's Circle of Isis an excellent book, even if alien - in part because she passes the god sniff test in her descriptions, rather than doing the common bastardisations of myths to fit an alien structure) but an actual syncretistic form that is really neither reconstruction nor straight-up mystery based religion.

And now I am up far too late, and Neb.y is storming gloriously at last, so I am posting and appreciating my experiential world.

They Have A Word For It

Okay, let's shift some gears a little; I've been doing ancient history for a wee bit, and that's not going to be relevant to all the pagan values month folks. (This is still Egyptian theology, just applied. Heh.)

I was discussing with someone the other day names and roles for "the woo" (for general reference, a lot of 'the woo' is tagged 'madness in motion' in here); at other times I've discussed things like the meanings of the words "priest" and "witch". I wrote a while back about reconstructionist sensibilities and clergy roles, which is one of the reasons I'm not redoing it right now; go read that one if you want it. And I'm a student (currently on maternity leave) of a teacher in an initiatory Craft tradition, too, whole different sets of meanings in there - but my teacher loves words in a nicely Egyptian-theology-compatible way.)

And among the things that we need to do is figure out what the roles are for these words, what they mean, what shape they have in the world. There are assumptions about what people with titles will be doing in religion, defined in reaction to the surrounding culture and its hegemonial Christianity - that a clergy type, whatever title they have, whatever role, will conduct public services, provide pastoral counselling, do marriages, and so on. Even in religions where the clergy-types don't have that role officially, they often do it just because it's easier than arguing for cultural space to do it properly (I believe many of things that rabbis can do can, strictly speaking, be done by any adult Jewish male, for example).

So take a word like "priest". A lot of modern pagans accuse Christianity of requiring some sort of intermediary between the devotee and the divine, and thus talk about everyone being their own priest -- where "priest" means "someone who's able to talk to the divine without requiring an intermediary". (Never mind that "priesthood of all believers" is, y'know, a Protestant term and many of these people are coming from a Protestant background.) Which means there are a fuckton of pagan priest/esses running around, many of whom don't know their asses from their elbows.

I am reluctant to speak too much about the practices in religious witchcraft traditions, as I am not an initiate, and I am entirely too aware of the differences wrought by initiation and the understandings thereof. However, my understanding is that (in coven-based Craft traditions) the appropriate analogy is of a monastic order, in which a group of ordained people (and trainees) gather for the purpose of honoring and serving the divine in a shared context. (I am even more reluctant to speak about my own non-coven-based Craft tradition, because it is much more weirdly touchy to get that wrong. My teacher appreciates my quoting Terry Pratchett on witches, with comments such as "the natural size of a coven is one", though.) In any case, 'priest' here means someone who is dedicated to a particular mode of interaction with the divine, according to the strictures of the tradition.

"Priest" in Egyptian context means a servant of the god in the house of the god (the temple). The temple is the god's private estate, not open to generalised exploration. There are no services; there is no pastoral counselling. The rituals are for the benefit of the god and, more obliquely, the community, because the community is well-served when the god is pleased. It was, further, historically speaking a part-time job, and also often a sort of sinecure. I've done a godawful amount of religious work, and fought off the priest label because damnit, I am not the servant of any god in Their house. (The madness in motion sideways exception of that between myself and Neb.y is weirdly complicated, and I don't actually talk about it much even though there are times I'd kind of like to, but, y'know, a lot of people think that shit's crazy.)

Which means that I was left short of words for what it is that I do. Because what I do is in many ways more rabbinic than anything else: I'm a scholar, though self-taught, of the relevant texts, I make interpretations, and - perhaps most importantly - I expect people to argue with me, disagree with me, and go off and form their own fucking schools of thought because damnit, we need more thinking. One of these days I'll find a good Kemetic word for that, and then I'll have a title for my public work.

For now, I'm stuck with a sort of uncredentialed ministerial jobbie, which I whimsically refer to as being jackaled (this is like being hounded, only with more Anpu (Anubis)). (Though it's primarily Wepwawet (Ophois) that I deal with, people have at least heard of Anpu.) And a lot of that is what I'm doing here with my pagan values month series of posts: putting forth structure and underlying thought and giving people chewy things to take away and gnaw on, at least in theory, because that's what that particular job is all about. My pastoral counselling is interestingly nondenominational, not because I step out of my religious structure to do it, but because what gods - if any - the person who needs help deals with are completely irrelevant to the question. Wepwawet is the opener of the way; Anpu is the guide to the lost. If someone comes unstuck and finds their way, that's a win on the 'doing god's work' front for me.

Other things that people lose words for are devotional. One can see a lot of pagans looking for "their patron god/dess", without any sort of clarity on what that means to them. Some are seeking a personal relationship with some deity, which may or may not be in the offing. Others pull back to a more historically accurate sense that a patron is the god who looks over one's profession - and I will note that I consider Khnum mine, for all that I have not properly had my hands in clay for years. (Man, I want my studio set up.) Some would find Djehwty a more reasonable patron for a writer (inventor of writing, after all), but my writing is very much about creating worlds in many ways, and thus the maker of souls (Father of fathers, Mother of mothers) looks over my work.

I don't even have a word for how I'd characterise my devotion to Hetharu. In many ways, it's very much in keeping with the ancient structures of worship: the idea of attempting to embody the values of the deity in question. (A Greek travelling in Egypt commented that there was not a woman in Egypt who was not giving her due to Hethert by putting on her makeup, and wasn't that a remarkably devoted population! ... not that I'm femme enough to do makeup most of the time, but that's beside the point.) I do not fear service (obviously), and I can say I pledged myself to Her service some fifteen years ago at this point; I can point at the curve of my belly and talk about the goddess who governs motherhood right now, hell. But this is a subtle and personal thing, not clergy, not something that most people will ever meet clear and in the open, even. I do not fear the word "worship" as many pagans do, nor do I equate it with abasement and grovelling. I sort of hover around "devotee" a lot of the time, as "follower" is not strong enough.

I have no tidy segue for "witch", which is one of those words that rattles around and causes controversy. I was actually sort of peripherally discussing that with a friend recently, who commented that she doesn't care for the word because she thinks that it's used too much for historical shock value, that it's not a reclaimable concept. (I seem to recall that my liege feels similarly, though we haven't talked about it recently.) And it's a word I've been ambivalent about for a long time; for a while I would only self-describe with it using a modifier - specifically "kitchen witch", which describes my style pretty appropriately, as my magical remedies for burns include live aloe plants. (And similar such approaches.) I'm not actually sure what started to shift me on that front, away from the 'this is not me' thing, aside from my deeper Craft studies and perhaps reading too much Terry Pratchett. I don't use it often, and I still often use it modified -- but it's not an entirely alien space anymore.

As posts go, this is not a terribly coherent arc of one, but whatever. I'm allowed to blither on a bit every so often. I think I hit my high points, someone else can fix the transitions. Summary: words mean things. Think about what they damn well mean. Use nuance. Build the world true.

With All This Bathwater, There Has To Be A Baby In Here Somewhere

For this round of pagan values month, I'm going to spend some time gnawing at the differences between ancient and modern worldviews and explore a bit about what that requires of the modern practitioner, on the thinky thoughts dimension. Obviously, I'll be drawing primarily on my own religious background here, but a lot of this is applicable to others, and thus a lot of it will be written generically.

First of all, and perhaps most subtle in its effects: we are, for the most part, not living in communities of co-religionists, let alone tribes or nations. Most pagans were raised in other religions, or none at all; many of us are at a loss for how - or if - to raise our children with our own traditions, if we even have formulated traditions that might be appropriate for children. We can have no city-wide festivals as were done in the ancient Mediterranean, let alone the sort of city festivals that drew celebrants from all over the country as was the case at times in Egypt.

We are not surrounded by people who believe and practice as we believe and practice; in fact, many of us feel the need to hide ourselves for fear of repercussions. Even when we can gather in groups of other pagans, that does not mean that we can gather with co-religionists, and public festivals frequently take on a neo-Wiccan or similarly flavored tone because that is one of the few things that most participants might be aware of. (In some cases, the only thing that some of the participants know.) Our families and communities are for the most part not of our religion - though in some cases, they may be different pagan religions - and in fact many of the places that put an emphasis on primarily having relationships with co-religionists have alarming, cult-like tendencies towards insularity and isolation.

The difference this wreaks on the practice of reconstructed religion is both huge and subtle. Much of the information we have, when we have information, is dependent on the large-scale, the cultural assumptions being in line, the public festival in which entire communities participate, and we do not have these things. We have to find and adapt these things to the scale on which we live - an individual, a family, maybe a small working group - often in the absence of any significant knowledge of how an individual might have thought of the gods, might have constructed religious duty, might have acted in their home. We can guess, we can extrapolate, but this is new construction inspired by the old, not the way they did it in the olden days.

Related to this: the philosophy of the individual is far more thoroughly developed than it was in the past. Most people likely to read this are not typically thinking in terms of where they fit into their tribe, or their heirarchy, or the complicated social dynamics that come of living in more or less the same place among more or less the same people for a lifetime. Yes, the ancients thought in terms of individual needs, individual prowess, and so on, but they were also members of coherent peoples with complex layers of family, clan, ethnic, social ties. When we read an ancient text that mentions deferring to superiors and being gracious to inferiors, we do not read it as they did; we have different ego-boundaries and senses of place. We do not necessarily live within a short walk of our closest kin, and thus do not think of one of our souls as the same as our family. Many decisions are based on individual need and desire, rather than social patterns - and while many people think there is a 'cult of the individual' that has gone too far, that is, again, an individual's opinion. The very nature of conversion would probably be utterly alien to most ancients, and most modern pagans are converts.

Ancestor veneration, reverence for that family soul? What does it mean to people who have limited family ties due to mobility, due to feeling that past generations were unethical or unworthy, due to simply not knowing where they came from? What does it mean to mongrelised people, with ethnic ties sweeping across huge swaths of continents? What does it mean to people whose more immediate ancestors would likely not approve of such veneration in the first place? What place do honored elders who are not of our kin and clan have, if any, on our western shrines?

If the worldviews we wish to touch are born of particular lands, climates, and situations, how can we properly know them in a completely different context? I do not live in Egypt; I don't even live in a landscape dominated by a river, nor one with the stark twinned dualism of its landscape. For all that I resonate spiritually with these ideas, I do not have them engraved onto my understanding of the world the way someone who lived in that land would do.

And, to conclude, because it's totally late and I should have been asleep hours ago: we have the wrong information. It doesn't even matter what information we have, whether drawn out of old texts, extrapolated from art, recorded by historians or monks or whatever; it's not the information we need. We don't know what the information we need is, because it's about how to bridge between the old and the new. We may know a lot about how a divine king can rule over a unified, heirarchical, and ritualised society geared towards a particular envisioning of how to honor and serve a particular set of gods; we don't know jack about how a diasporic scattering of converts in a society of entangled and separated loyalties can build a functional model that is true to that original world without recapitulating it, because attempting to recapitulate it as it was is dumb.

No Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom

The children of the literate classes in Egypt were taught reading and writing by rote repetition. Many of the texts that they copied over and over again were instructions on proper behaviour, and thus literacy came with pedantic instruction in local values. So, for this Pagan Values Month post, I will explore one of these texts with an eye to general overview. I have chosen The Wisdom of Amenopet for this purpose, rather than selecting from multiple texts; link provided for those who want to see a translation. (For those who want to know what specific translation I'm working with, I'm using Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology with translations by John L. Foster because it happens to be my book of Egyptian writings near the computer at the moment.) Traditionally speaking, these wisdom texts were supposed to have been written by ancient sages for the proper instruction of their sons.

(A value of reconstruction: citing sources.)

One can see in Amenopet's writing that he lived in, and valued, a society that was ordered, heirarchical, polite, and prudent. He treats the gods as a given, declaring that truth is a matter of the God's love (the offering most commonly presented to the gods in wall decoration is a figurine of Ma'at, representing truth and justice, among other things), and expects his son to appreciate each day as the gift of the gods, as such is far wiser than sinking into mundane expectation that one day is just like another.

He has a great deal of advice on how to deal with people in a civil manner. He disapproves of snarky messages (either sending them or appreciating them), which probably has me in trouble. He suggests the generally prudent values of not arguing with hotheads, leaving the quarrelsome's generalised bitchiness in the hands of the gods, being generally polite with opponents, and not giving enemies an excuse to go overt with hostilities. He disapproves of negative gossip and suggests that his son should speak the good he knows of others, not the ill; in fact, he suggests avoiding abrasiveness in conversation altogether (there's another rough one). He disapproves of eavesdropping on judges and government officials.

Simple politeness expands to a certain generosity of spirit in Amenopet's eyes. He suggests taking time out of a workday to speak to widows, lending an arm to drunken old men and giving them the support that their children might provide if they were present, and forgiving two-thirds of the debts held by the poor. If there is beer in his son's jug, he ought not turn away a thirsty stranger. His son is encouraged not merely to not cheat the laborers of their fair day's wages (Egyptian laborers were paid in food) but to measure out their meals as if he were laying out food for a friend. Care and charity for the poor ought to be greater than debt to the mighty, and judging the poor should be done without harshness. If life is a ferry ride, he is not to leave people behind at the dock, should not worry too much about collecting fares, and should take his fair turn at the oar without demanding special treatment. It is unjust to use power to oppress those who do not have it, and Amenopet specifically mentions widows and the elderly in that category; he also objects to mocking the disabled.

He has a lot to say about living in a just society. He lists off a dozen different forms of fraud in order to say "don't do any of these": moving boundary-stones, falsifying weights, crafting false weights, falsifying writings, altering scales and balances, changing proportions of measures. On top of this he notes that messing with the planting of another man's land produces no benefit, but cultivating that man's good will does. He disapproves of associating with swindlers and thieves. He disapproves of threats and bribes, though he will allow as how it may be wise to speak what praise one can for someone who offers a bribe ... in case they come back. He goes so far as to suggest that one should not accuse others of criminal behaviour, for one does not know what motivated their actions; I imagine one 24601 would have appreciated that one. He suggests neither accepting favors from the powerful nor harassing the weak in their name.

There is a delicate balance of status to be navigated here, as well. It is important to know one's place; it is also possible that, by doing good, a god will chose to elevate one's station. This is not to be counted upon or begged for, because pleading for such things proves an unworthiness. One should not hang out in bars looking for someone important to latch on to and toady to, nor should one hold back dues to the temple in the hope of accumulating more. One should not covet the goods of the poor, for they have enough damn problems; instead, look after them. Nor should one covet the goods of the rich, for if the rich man asks one to administer his property, how could one do that honorably if one wants it for one's own? Both seeking wealth and seeking poverty are inappropriate in Amenopet's view of the world: a properly balanced personality will be provided with the gods with sufficiency, and wealth aside from that is a matter of luck or fate.

There is a great deal, as well, about putting on a correct social face. Some of this reflects the heirarchical nature of Egyptian society: to not criticise the conversations of the great, to not eat before a nobleman, to not backtalk superiors, to remember that a servant will serve a master's interests. At the same time, he advocates a certain set of attitudes so that his son's reputation will be a protection to him: his integrity should be so publically known that it is a comfort to his neighbors. He should be a good friend; if a friend is troubled, he should neither silence nor provoke into greater agitation, but rather let the friend speak, hear the issues with an understanding of where that friend is coming from, and attempt to bring about peace through listening. Amenopet holds the good will and good speech of others to be more valuable than the contents of storehouses. Another line I will simply quote from the translation, for it is too fantastic to paraphrase: "A strong arm is not weakened by discretion, nor is one's back made safe by bowing."

The Egyptian focus on truthfulness is clear throughout the writing. Not merely falsehood is denigrated, but the specifics of speaking false praise, of keeping quiet about one's goals so that others will be unable to interfere with them, and passing false laws get their own mentions. He is against not merely perjury, but babbling on in court. Goals achieved by lies are rotten in the heart, he says - the heart, the shrine of right action - and will come to no good in the end.

There is, further, a thread of prudence throughout the work. Take care of your health, Amenopet tells his son. Sleep on it before you speak. Pursue self-sufficiency in your fields, for work well-done brings the most satisfaction, and it is better to stand on your own feet than be dependent or deceive for sustenance. Do not overeat and indulge to excess, and do not associate with those who do. (Amenopet would not have approved of certain aspects of Roman high society.) You cannot know what tomorrow will bring, and you are of this time, not any other; live accordingly.

So. A set of values put forth by an Egyptian sage, and inculcated in generations of schoolboys.

Price of Power

Here's some more Pagan Values Blogging, specifically dealing with the concept of rulership/leadership. Here is a reconstructionist approach, for those who are less familiar with the process of reconstruction; I look at the texts and evidence of the ancients, what they thought was the right thing to do, in order to derive an understanding that can be applied to the now.

Obviously, in a system that was, effectively, a theocracy mediated through a half-divine king, the concepts of rule and leadership were tightly intertwined with religion. Many of the royal duties were to perform ceremonial functions bound up with the gods' obligation to maintain the balance and function of the universe; in fact, many of those duties could only be performed by the king or his special delegates in the temples.

In the oldest days of dynastic Egypt, much was done solely in the name of the king as the son of the sun, by fiat, divine right as it were. In the turmoil of the First Intermediate Period, though, "I am in charge because I am in charge" lost a lot of its lustre; the nomarchs (local rulers) started to write tomb biographies explaining why they were the rightful rulers. It was not enough that they ruled and thus had the blessings of the gods; they established that the proof of the blessings of the gods was in how they ruled. That they upheld order and ruled properly showed that the gods had chosen them; that they were successful as caretakers of the people was proof of their worthiness to rule.

(Keep in mind that tomb inscriptions are basically propaganda, so that the afterlife judges will think the best of the official buried there. However, it's worth seeing what the ancients thought worthy of putting forth as propaganda.)

So, for example...

Nomarch Ankhtifi:

Heru (presumably of Edfu) asked Akhtifi to reestablish the rulership of the nome of the House of Khuu, and the rightness of this divine order is proven through its accomplishment. And how is that deed accomplished?

- the previous administrator, characterised as "a rebel and a wretch", was deposed (and history is written by the victors)
- peace was made between the survivors of murder victims and those who had done them harm (if I'm reading that line right)
- the hungry were fed; the naked were clothed
- those without oil for protecting their skin from the sun were anointed
- the barefoot were given sandals
- the unwed "were given" wives
- not only were the people of this nome fed in time of famine, but travellers from other nomes could trade for food

So: a justice system is reestablished, the needy are taken care of, there is no starvation, families were founded. (One does wonder about the opinions of the wives thus given, though.) Basically, the justification for the claim that the god willed this rulership is that the ruler took care of the people of the nome.

Nomarch Henku:

- fed the hungry, obviously a popular concern, including provisions for cattle
- depopulated towns were reestablished, and their proper organisation reaffirmed
- property rights were protected
- and he says he was a pretty nice guy

A little more bourgeois, this list, but much in the same mode: people were able to live good lives under his rule, so clearly he did it right.

Nomarch Tefibi:

- people were safe on the roads from bandits, brigands, and other evildoers
- the king was defended from rebels (in this time period, there was a lot of dispute over who was a proper king anyway; many nomarchs had their personal preferences)
- the temples flourished and proper offerings were made to the gods

This fellow had a rather militaristic attitude, and most of his tomb inscription talks about his success as a warrior in support of the king, but the support of both the ordinary person who would rather not be robbed and the proper heirarchy is present.

We also get a mention of the temples, which were, in many ways, the centres of the Egyptian economy. Not only did they serve as local collection points for tax money and redistribution of wealth to the needy, the temples were sources of education, trained medical practitioners, and similar professional-class services, and supported communities of artisans. If Egypt was a place of great culture and luxury, the means for that was largely focused through the religious structure.

Nomarch Kheti:

- built monuments
- supplied water where there had not been water access
- made sure grain harvests were plentiful
- provided tariff rebates (presumably to people in economic distress)
- cattle, again, and apparently magic extra-special fertile cattle which can certainly be chalked up to tomb inscriptions being propaganda pieces
- military competence
- shipbuilding
- speaker of truth
- close to the king

So this one, in addition to the standard "keeping people fed" procedures, offered public works products, support for local industry, tax rebates, and the suggestion that he had an in with the royal family that could be played for local advantage. Thus, we have introduced political awareness into the qualifications for rulership.


So what can we say, conclusively, about the theology of power here? That a theologically correct ruler will demonstrate that correctness in action; that the most important (or at least most consistently mentioned) action is the feeding of the hungry; that justice and public safety are established and reliable; that the economy is stable. The good ruler, in this system, proves the worth of that rule by the well-being of his people: their health, safety, security, and wealth.

And there is the religious justification for power, the thing that the heirarchy is intended to produce in all of that talk about social order and the right way to do things.

Health, safety, security, and wealth. These are the fruits of power well-applied.


I will conclude by quoting Sheshi:

I have come from my town;
I have descended from my nome;
I have done justice for its lord;
I have satisfied him with what he loves.
I spoke truly; I did right;
I spoke fairly; I repeated fairly;
I seized the right moment,
so as to stand well with people.
I judged between two so as to content them;
I rescued the weak from one stronger than he
as much as was in my power.
I gave bread to the hungry, clothes ...
I brought the boatless to land.
I buried him who had no son;
I made a boat for him who lacked one.
I respected my father; I pleased my mother;
I raised their children.
So says he whose nickname is Sheshi.

(I think next I will write about Wisdom Literature. I'll note I'll probably not write about the Negative Confessions, because I expect that most Egyptian recon types will wind up wanting to write about the Negative Confessions and there's a whole big heap of other stuff out there for exploring the concepts of values.)

Ear to the Ground

Okay, some serious theological musings now, without pop culture at all. Next in the Pagan Values Month blogging.

Value systems evolve in environments.

This is both more and less complicated than modern ecopaganism (the ancients, as I have noted many times, really stank at environmentalism); rather than a straightforward concern about preserving the health of systems with a modern understanding of how they work, those values are derived from those systems, grow up as a part of them.

I am going to paint a landscape for you now.

Start with the river, a pulsing, throbbing artery that cuts through the land. Everything here focuses around the river, not just in the way that its banks are bathed in seasonally refreshed fertile land, but the way it divides the world into halves: east and west, upstream and downstream. Imagine it clogged with boats, little reed things most of them, with the occasional hefty barge made mostly from imported wood. The current flows north; the wind blows south; the great highway of the river is made to connect the place its feet are sunk in cataracts with its mouth. It is full of fish and fowl, yes, and also dangerous animals, whether predator or simply huge by human scale. The banks are covered with flowers and useful plants. The river is a living, essential entity; its god is painted in blues and greens, with pendulous fertile breasts and a great well-fed belly, and His crown is made of reeds like those that the people pluck from His banks.

Expand out, now, from this view of the river, and look at the land, its stark divisions. The fertile strip runs along the fat blue god's sides, covered in fields, fruit trees, gardens, sliced through with canals, all feeding grain and flax and vegetables. The range of floral scents is amazing; travellers from foreign lands come here in search of perfumes. And beyond that rich wealth of fertility, there is the stark desert, punctuated with monuments and tombs and graves, reaching to the horizon under the cloudless sky. Out here there is wealth, for those who brave the starkness, of a different kind: wealth of metal and gemstone and quarried rock. The two lands, it is called, the red land of the hostile and protective desert; the black land of rich life.

Sky and earth are similarly starkly divided, for the horizon is painfully sharp in the desert, and for all the rich wet central heart around the river, this is a desert land. Day and night are sharp and clear.

Let time pass. Watch the red land swell and grow and swallow up the fields in its time, the river dwindle. Watch the river swell again, in a great surge that devours the encroaching desert, bringing with it not just the new year's rich earth but malaria and other plague, a dual-edged sword of life and death. Watch the river secede, now, and the people clear their fields and once again plant flax, wheat, barley, cabbages, onions.

This is the land of the Nile, in ancient days.

What are the values of this land?

Look at it, see how it is divided into pairs: east and west, north and south, riverland and desert, earth and sky, fertility and starkness, life and death, all in the same packages. See how these pairs dance with each other, sometimes one ascendant, sometimes the other, all in intense, dynamic balance. This is not a land that lends itself to easy absolutes, not in a place where the river's rising brings disease that may kill your children or might swallow the foundation of your house and wash it away, nor a place where the terrifying and dangerous desert both holds wealth and forms a barrier that foreign raiders so rarely dare to cross. It is a place where twinned forces, equal and opposite, dance with each other in perfect balance, and the greatest value is that balance. All cosmic energies have ambivalent natures, even the ones that seem most friendly, and are dangerous out of their proper place.

It is a precarious land, balanced entirely on the grace of that androgynous reed-crowned god, and yet its wealth is amazing. In a good year, and most years are good, it can produce more food than it needs to feed itself, even while supporting the presence of many craftsmen, priests, scholars, artisans. That precariousness is aligned so perfectly, though, that it reveals an obvious divine order; why else would the wind blow so consistently southward, letting travellers reach the inner cities of Egypt by raising sails, and return to the Great Green simply by letting the current carry them? And thus it is apparent that so long as that divine order is preserved, maintained, encouraged, there will be wealth almost beyond imagining, and people will lead happy lives. The price for falling out of balance is harsh and generally immediate; the bounty of right action is equally dramatic.

And so this is what their land taught that set of ancients: that the world was made of synergistically opposing forces, in the center of which is the perfect balance of utter abundance. That even the most benevolent power might have a bitter edge, and even the most dangerous have worthy and valuable secrets. That preserving the order laid forth in these monumental terms was a delicate line to walk, and that falling from order was ruinous. That all these powers were necessary, a part of the intricate design that made for the land of Egypt, Gift of the Nile.

And thus we find, when we dig further, that the concept of order, also of justice, rightness, right action, truth, is represented as a feather: a delicate thing, light and balanced. And we find that in the end, people's hearts are laid in the scales to see if they have lived in the center of balance, held all the interconnected forces with appropriate love and appropriate fear, and thus was abundant rather than scarce.

This is what that land taught.

I do not live in that land. I live in the land where the Three Sisters teach the lesson of balance and synergy, not where those lessons are writ to the scale of giants. My bones are New England granite, and my land teaches me endurance, stability, order, ritual, and pattern in its own language. My bones are New England granite, and my heart is full of the dance of loving brothers in constant opposition.