Yama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yama
This article is about the Asian deity in general. For Yama in Hinduism, see Yama (Hinduism). For Yama in Buddhism, see Yama (Buddhism). Yama or Yamarāja is a god of death, the south direction, and the underworld, belonging to an early stratum of Rigvedic Hindu deities. In Sanskrit, his name can be interpreted to mean "twin". In the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, he is called "Yima".
According to the Vishnu Purana, Yama is the son of sun-god Surya and Sandhya... According to the Vedas, Yama is said to have been the first mortal who died....
Hinduism: Three hymns (10, 14, and 35) in the 10th book of the Rig Veda are addressed to him....
Buddhism: judge the dead and preside over the Narakas ("Hell" or "Purgatory") and the cycle of rebirth....
Both Yamas in Zoroastrian and Hindu myth guard hell with the help of two four-eyed dogs....
Yama
Yama sits on his throne of judgement (Vicarabhu) and considers the three options he has at his disposal. The first and best is to be given immortality by drinking soma and sent to live forevermore with the wise and saintly pitrs or Manes, to whom Yama is king. Here the good will enjoy eternal happiness and shine as stars in the celestial heavens. The second option is to be sent back into the world and be reborn in order to, as it were, have another go at leading a good life, although not necessarily as a human. The third and worst option is to be sent down into the 21 levels of hell; the lower the level, the worse the punishment. ...
AVESTA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avesta
AVESTA ZOROASTRIANISM
CERNUNNOS AND THE RAM-HEADED SERPENT
https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/cernunnos-and-the-ram-headed-serpent/
In contrast to other creatures, depictions of the ram in Celtic art are comparatively rare.... the ram-horned serpent which is a well-attested cult image throughout Celtic Europe both before and during the Roman period and which appears, for example, three times on the Gundestrup Cauldron.... As in the Gundestrup case, the enigmatic hybrid creature is often associated with the horned or antlered god Cernunnos, in whose company it is regularly depicted. This pairing is found as early as the fourth century BC, for example in Northern Italy, where a huge antlered figure with torcs and a serpent was carved on the rocks in Val Camonica. Other examples include a carving at the curative sanctuary at Mavilly (Cote d’Ôr), carvings at Beauvais (Oise) and Néris-les-Bains (Allier) in Gaul, or on an altar at Lypiatt (Gloucestershire), England (Green M. (2002) Animals in Celtic Life and Myth. Routledge). Perhaps the best known example of this hybrid creature is the ram-horned serpent represented on the cheek-piece of the Agris Helmet (dated to the 4th century BC), which was discovered in 1981 during archaeological excavations in Perrats Cave ... Coiled serpent with ram’s head on the obverse of a Celtic bronze issue (Trinovantes or Catuvellauni) from southern England ... Horned serpent attachment from a Celtic firepot discovered at Sliven, Bulgaria... Other such images include those from a bronze statuette from Étang-sur-Arroux (Saône-et-Loire; below) and a stone sculpture at Sommerécourt (Haute-Marne; both in France) which depicts Cernunnos’ body encircled by two horned snakes that feed from bowls of fruit and corn-mash in the god’s lap, while at Cirencester in Gloucestershire (England) two snakes, eating fruit or corn, rear up on each side of the deity.... Another such relief, from Vendoeuvres (Indre, France)... Bronze statue of Cernunnos from Etang-sur-Arroux (cavities at the top of his head indicate that the statue was horned). The deity is depicted with torcs at the neck and on the chest, and two ram-headed serpents encircle him at the waist....
Despite being described by most commentators as a ‘monster’, in fact in most iconography the ram-headed serpent is depicted as a beneficent beast, evocative of plenty and fertility – representing a dualistic scheme illustrating the interdependence of life and death, and encapsulating the theme of regeneration intrinsic in Celtic religious belief....
ANIMALS IN CELTIC LIFE AND MYTH SACRED SNAKES
https://www.worldhistory.biz/prehistory/88911-animals-in-celtic-life-and-myth-sacred-snakes.html
The ram-horned snake was occasionally a companion of the sky-gods: its association with the wheel-god (a solar divinity) on the Gundestrup Cauldron has already been noted. This is repeated far away at Lypiatt in Gloucestershire, where a Romano-Celtic devotee set up an altar to the sun-god on which were carved a solar wheel and a ram-horned snake. It is well established that the Celtic sun-god possessed links with fertility, healing, death and resurrection, and it is probable that the snake was chosen as a companion of the sun-god precisely because much of the symbolism associated with it was envisaged as relevant to the solar cult. It is worth noting that conventional snakes are often associated with the Celtic sky-sun-god.... But in other iconography of the Celtic sky-god, the snake appears to play a different role, primarily as a chthonic symbol of the negative, dark forces of the underworld....the iconography represents a cult that is essentially dualistic, where there is interdependence and symbiosis between the elements of sun and earth, sky and underworld....
To Cernunnos
http://www.deomercurio.be/en/cernunnos.html
...The Ram-Headed Snake: This animal may be related to guardian genii, visualized as serpents in the Mediterranean tradition.... Ceisiwr Serith associates the ram-headed snake with the dragon hoarding riches (a familiar motif from Europe to India and China) and considers this a symbol of death, of the Otherworld, of disorder. Serith considers Cernunnos as the mediator between this chthonic disorder and the well-being of the living, just as he is the mediator between nature and culture.... Personally, I prefer to see Cernunnos and the ram-headed snake as allies (after all, we sometimes see Cernunnos nourishing the serpent)
Mystery Of The Horned Serpent In North America, Mesopotamia, Egypt And Europe
Known under different names, the horned serpent has been encountered in North America, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Europe. ... Is the horned serpent somehow related to the mysterious Serpent People?...
Horned Serpent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_Serpent
Cernunnos: The Horned Pan of the Celts
https://gnosticwarrior.com/cernunnos.html
Cernunnos shows the same exact traits and symbols in common with the patron God of physicians, healers and magicians known as Hermes or Hermes Psychopomp (conductor of souls), the very same title given to the Lord of Death (whom the Celts recognized as Cernunnos) in his union with the Lady of Life. His other name of Herne or Cerne is very close to Hermes....
This image also would be very similar to the more ancient Gods in the East known as Pan in Phoenicia and Greece and as Amon Ra in Egypt. All are found to be horned Gods that are characterized as men with Horns that are the Gods of All Things, and all could be called Sons of Jupiter in which on this same pillar there is a dedication to Jupiter in the form of Iovis Optimus Maximus (“Jove Best and Greatest”). These connections prove they are one in the same deities but with different names and images depending on the country and language who created them.
The name Pillar of the Boatmen is an obvious reference to their race being that of whom the Egyptians called Sea Peoples and the Greeks called them Phoenicians. The first masters of the sea, navigation and world travel. In each place they would land, colonize and live, they would honor their heritage by keeping the same ancient customs and religions and normally only changing their language since they were the exiled children of Babylon. The Parii would be the Western French Branch of their Eastern cousins being that of the Phoenicians and Greeks.
The Parisians (Pariasians) were the followers of Goddess Religion whom they depicted under the name of Isis which is how they get their name of the Parisii. Let me also mention they were the Priesthood of Crete who were placed in charge of protecting the God Zeus who is also known as Jove and Jupiter. Other names they had went by in the East were the Curetes, Corybnates, Telchines, Priesthood of Jupiter Ammon, Pan and Cybele. In the West they were known as Druids and Celts....
When the Emperor Augustus had made an alliance with the Celtic Gauls of France, he was presented by the Gauls with a gold torc weighing 100 pounds.
This sacred jewelry was more than just a decoration, it was an ancient healing device that also revealed the secret religious rites of the Celts that we can easily trace to the East. Many ancient statues and hieroglyphs that predate all these found in the West show various God and Kings wearing these necklaces, bracelets and were often accompanied by a rod.
In the Ancient East we can find many examples of the Torc being worn such as the Ancient Assyrian God Ninurta in the 9th and 8th centuries BC...
the name Cernunnos is actually a Greek word and I have found that this God is simply the Western adaptation of the more ancient well-known Eastern Horned Gods such as Pan, Hermes and Amon Ra. The name Pan means “all” and he was the God of “all things,” just like Cernunnos was as well.
Many of these Celtic deities, their mythology, the artwork and dating of them can easily be connected to the East with the people known as the ancient Phoenicians, Greek Ionians and Hellenes who had almost the same exact religion and pantheon of God and Goddesses....
Pan is associated with a mother goddess, perhaps Rhea, or Cybele...
Symbolism of the Serpent
http://www.irishoriginsofcivilization.com/serpent-symbolism.html
…The outer darkness is a great serpent, the tail of which is in his mouth, and it is outside the whole world, and surroundeth the whole world: in it there are many places of punishment, and it containeth twelve halls – Egyptian Passage (from E. A. Wallis Budge’s Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. 1)...
The ancient Aryan god Herne (also known as Hermes, Nikor and Cernunnos). This deity is found in India as Pashupati or Shiva....
At first an emblem of the sun's light and power, it is worshipped in lands where the sun is not recognized as a Deity...
...the Egyptians made use of an instrument called the ur-heka, or great magical power. It is sometimes a sinuous, serpent-like rod without the serpent’s head. At others it has the head of the serpent on it, united with the head of a ram - Gerald Massey (Ancient Egypt: Light of the World)
The Coins of the Ancient Britons: Supplement
the horned head of the animal is very similar to that of the serpent under the horse on the gold coins of Vosenos Plate IV No 13 and the question arises whether the animal may not be a coiled ram headed serpent and not simply a ram M Alexandre Bertrand in the Revue Arch ologique 1880 vol xl p 14 has called attention to the dragon or serpent with a ram's head which occurs on some Gaulish altars and in connection with certain statues of Gaulish divinities as for instance the altars of Beauvais and Montlucon and the statuettes of Autun and Epinal He also calls attention to the myth mentioned by Pausanias as to the connection of the ram with Hermes in the mysteries of the Mater Deum M Edouard Flouest has likewise cited a statue from Vignory in which a ram headed serpent appears The mythological signification of this strange form has still to be discovered but the occurrence of such a serpent on the coins of Vosenos and possibly on the coin now under consideration seems to point to the same mythological traditions having prevailed in Britain and in Gaul and to suggest much matter for study I am unable to offer an interpretation of the legend CNI for such it appears to be It may however be a blundered rendering of CVN in which case this coin will not be out of place in this plate all the other coins on which were undoubtedly struck by Cunobelinus
The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology
This is a counterpart of Lugus. The serpent is one of the forms of the Indo European god of evil....
The Horned God and the Mythic Serpent in Gaul The serpent on the altar in the museum of Cluny that serpent whom the Celtic god identified with Mercury is about to strike with his club and who is one of the personifications of the god of Evil reappears on other monuments which have been recently made the subject of deep study 1 In most representations published up to the present this serpent has a ram's head He is represented as one of the attributes of Gaulish divinities on monuments found at Autun Montlucon Epinal Vandoeuvre Indre and La Guerche Cher One of the most curious of these is at Autun The god is represented crouching with three heads bearing horns and two serpents with rams heads form a sort of girdle for him His three heads remind us of the Gaulish triad Teutates Esus and Taranis or Taranus and the Irish triad Bress Balor and Tethra He has three horns In Ireland the father of Bress is called Buar ainech that is to say having the face of a cow 2 The ram headed serpents on the other hand are the goat headed monsters the goborchind of Ireland 3 On the altar at Vandoeuvre Indre the horned god still crouching is not three headed but he is accompanied by two other gods standing who complete the triad and the two serpents instead of serving as a girdle are placed at the ends of the bas relief The horned god father of Bress and consequently of his two doubles also Balor and Tethra is not in Gaul called cow faced Buar ainech in Irish but Cernunnos 4 Oer nunnos in our opinion is the first father the elementary god of night and death his horns are the crescent moon queen of night Teutates Esus Taranis or Taranus are his sons or in some sort it may be said his doubles The name Cernunnos is inscribed on the third side of the altar number 3 in the museum of Cluny below a horned human figure is clearly discernible The lower part of the body is defaced but considering the height of the monument it is certain this god was in a crouching attitude like the two other horned gods on the altars of Autun and Vandoeuvre Indre There is no serpent accompanying him the sculptor has made two designs of this myth after placing Cernunnos on the third side of the altar he has represented the murder of the serpent on the fourth side.
In the Celtic doctrine such as we find it in Ireland the god of Death after being slain by his grandson continues to live and reign under a different name the Gallo Romans preferred another form of the myth In the system of which the Paris bas relief is representative the god of dawn does not slay the god of night his father he merely slays the serpent who usually accompanies that redoubtable god Moreover though the Indo Europeans habitually confuse night with storm the serpent represents the storm and thunderbolt rather than night and it is not a matter for astonishment if this distinction was noted in Gaul so early as the first century of the present era Indeed we find examples of the horned god without the emblem of the serpent Let us take for instance the bas reliefs of Beaune and Rheims The god of Rheims has a kind of bag in his hand from which beech nuts or acorns are falling ii the direction of an ox and a stag placed beneath who seem to be expecting them The Irish pagans it may be remembered when they immolated their children to the great idol Cromm Cruach the bloody curb expected corn and milk in exchange 1 This idol was nothing other than a huge image of the god of death In return for innocent victims the god was believed to give nourishment and life to his cruel worshippers...
Evil, Power, and Healing The Serpent's Many Roles
http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/Articles_Serpents2.html
divine serpent Vasuki as the rope (samudra manthan)...
Vasuki (snake)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasuki_(snake)
Vāsuki is a nāgarāja, one of the King serpents of Hindu and Buddhist mythology... Vāsuki is famous for coiling around Shiva's neck, who blessed and wore him as an ornament. Vāsuki took part in the incident of Samudra manthana by allowing both the devas and the asuras to bind him to Mount Mandara, so that they could use him as their churning rope to extract the amṛta from the ocean of milk. Vasuki is also mentioned in other Hindu scriptures, such as Ramayana and Mahabharata....
In the Buddhist mythology, Vāsuki and the other Nāga Kings appear in the audience for many of Gautama Buddha's sermons. The duties of the Nāga Kings included leading the nāgas in protecting and worshiping the Buddha, as well as protecting other enlightened beings. ...
Vāsuka/Vāsuca (or Vāsuki) is the name of a Nair and pedireddla clan found near Mannarasala in Kerala and also Visakha district in Andhra Pradesh. They claim that their ancestors were Nāga serpents spared when the Khandava Forest (modern day Delhi) was burnt and cleared by Krishna and the Pandavas to make way for their capital Indraprastha.
Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda
Serpent Dravidian symbol of Earth probably frequently symbolical of Dravidian Earth worship in the Rig Veda adopted in time by the Aryas sacred symbol of most Turanian races....
Vasuki also Shesh or Sheshna King of Serpents...
Nāga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C4%81ga
Sanskrit word which basically refers to a "serpent" or "snake", especially the King cobra. The term Naga in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism denotes divine, semi-divine deities, or a semi-divine race of half-human half-serpent beings that resides in the heavenly Patala (netherworld) and can occasionally take human form. ....
Hinduism: The mythological serpent race that took form as cobras often can be found in Hindu iconography. The nāgas are described as the powerful, splendid, wonderful and proud semidivine race that can assume their physical form either as human, partial human-serpent or the whole serpent. Their domain is in the enchanted underworld, the underground realm filled with gems, gold and other earthly treasures called Naga-loka or Patala-loka. They are also often associated with bodies of waters — including rivers, lakes, seas, and wells — and are guardians of treasure....
Nair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nair
The Nair , also known as Nayar, are a group of Indian Hindu castes,... These people lived, and continue to live, in the area which is now the Indian state of Kerala.... The serpent is worshipped by Nair families as a guardian of the clan. The worship of snakes, a Dravidian custom, is so prevalent in the area that one anthropologist notes: "In no part of the world is snake worship more general than in Kerala."...
Caste system: A theory has been proposed for the origins of the caste system in the Kerala region based on the actions of the Aryan Jains ... An alternate theory states that the system was introduced by the Nambudiri Brahmins...
Nat (spirit)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_(spirit)
The nats are spirits worshipped in Myanmar in conjunction with Buddhism. They are divided between the 37 Great Nats and all the rest (i.e., spirits of trees, water, etc.). Almost all of the 37 Great Nats were human beings who met violent deaths... One may inherit a certain member or in some instances two of the 37 Nats as mi hsaing hpa hsaing(mother's side, father's side) from one or both parents' side to worship depending on where their families originally come from. One also has a personal guardian spirit called ko saung nat...Worship of nats predates Buddhism in Burma...
The widespread traditional belief among rural folks that there are forest guardian spirits called taw saung nats and mountain guardian spirits called taung saung nats... dwellings of tree spirits called yokkazo...
Offerings of alcohol and liquor to Min Kyawzwa at a nat pwe in Amarapura... During a nat pwè, which is a festival during which nats are propitiated, nat kadaws ("lord-consort", i.e. "medium, shaman") dance and embody the nat's spirit in a trance.... Music, often accompanied by a hsaing waing ("orchestra"), adds much to the mood of the nat pwè, and many are entranced. People come from far to take part in the festivities in various nat shrines called nat kun or nat naan, get drunk on palm wine and dance wildly in fits of ecstasy to the wild beat of the Hsaing waing music, possessed by the nats....
Native spirit: An introduction to Burmese nat worship
https://www.insideasiatours.com/blog/2017/02/02/burmese-nat-worship/
Practitioners of nat worship believe that everything in the world is governed by nats, or spirits. Places, people, trees, rocks and areas of life are all associated with particular spirits – and not all of them benign. Nats can guard and protect, but they can also be mischievous and vengeful, and some even have the power to possess people and force them to do their bidding. These types of nats require offerings to keep them sweet, and Burmese people will often leave out food and other gifts to placate them. Some nats are analogues of gods from Hindu mythology or the ghosts of historical figures, but most are simply the vengeful spirits of people who died particularly bloody and violent deaths....
Nat-Worship among the Burmese
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/533927.pdf
The belief in the Nats is not special to the Burmese; it is found amongst all the nations of Indo-China... given a form to the immortal part of our being, and they call it Leip-bya, the exact translation of which is butterfly-spirit. They say that when a man is asleep his Leip-bya is wandering around, sometimes very far from his body, and that it returns when he wakes again. Thus dreams are explained by the various good or bad encounters made by the Leip-bya when it is wandering about. When a man falls really sick, the Burmese pretend that his Leip-bya has been swallowed or captured by a bad Nat, and if the medicines of the doctor (ze'thama) are of no avail, the ceremony of the Leip-bya ko takes place immediately...
It is not a worship in the exact sense of the word; it is not even the Indian occultism, or study of the unknown forces of nature: it is a simple propitiation of spirits, which a thin veil only separates from the exterior world, in fact a pure geniolatry. The old popular beliefs of the aborigines have persisted in Burmah in spite of the purer influences of Buddhism, just as they are found nowadays in the table-lands of the Himmalayan Mountains, whence the Burmese emigrated to the Iraouaddy valley. It is the old phenomenon so well known to the students of folk-lore, and which nowhere can be more clearly traced than among the populations of Indo-China, and especially among the Burmese.
According to past articles some tribes were lunar, some were solar, and some both. Some view the moon as male, and some view moon as female. The fact that moon keeps a 13 cycle suggests a female, while the sun resurrects once may indicate male. Opinions are personal, and religious doctrine...
List of lunar deities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lunar_deities
The monthly cycle of the moon, in contrast to the annual cycle of the sun's path, has been implicitly linked to women's menstrual cycles by many cultures...though this identification was not universal as demonstrated by the fact that not all moon deities are female....Male lunar gods are also frequent, such as Sin of the Mesopotamians, Mani of the Germanic tribes, Tsukuyomi of the Japanese, and Igaluk/Alignak of the Inuit. The ancient Egyptians had several male moon gods, for example, Ibis and Khonsu of Thebes...These cultures usually feature female sun goddesses. An exception is Hinduism; both its solar and lunar deities are male. The original Proto-Indo-European lunar deity appears to have been male.... Hinduism in which the word Chandra means "moon" ...
List of moon deities: (Incomplete. Just a few listed here...):
Iah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iah
Iah is a lunar deity in ancient Egyptian religion. The word simply means "moon". It is also transliterated as Yah, Jah, Jah(w), Joh or Aah...
Khonsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khonsu
Khonsu is the Ancient Egyptian god of the moon.... At Thebes: Mut as his mother and Amun his father. ... Khonsu is described as the great snake who fertilizes the Cosmic Egg in the creation of the world. Khonsu's reputation as a healer spread outside Egypt;...
Ilargi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilargi
Ilargi, Ile or Ilazki is the name of the Moon in Basque language. In Basque mythology, she is the daughter of Mother Earth, to whom it returns daily.
Kuu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuu
Kuu is a Moon goddess in Finnish mythology. According to the Kalevala, the daughter of the air Ilmatar allowed a teal to lay its egg on her knee as she floated in the abyss. The egg fell and its parts formed the universe: the white of the egg became the moon, and the yolk the sun.
Selene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selene
In Greek mythology, Selene is the goddess of the moon. She is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, and sister of the sun-god Helios, and Eos, goddess of the dawn. She drives her moon chariot across the heavens....the sun-god Hyperion espoused his sister Theia, who gave birth to "great Helios and clear Selene and Eos...
Máni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1ni
Máni is the personification of the moon in Norse mythology. Máni, personified, is attested in the Poetic Edda, and the Prose Edda,state that he is the brother of the personified sun, Sól, and the son of Mundilfari... they must pass through the heavens every day to count the years for mankind... the sun and the moon are pursued through the heavens by wolves; the sun, referred to as the "shining god" is pursued by Sköll to the "protecting woods", while the moon is pursued by Hati Hróðvitnisson....
Luna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_(goddess)
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Luna (goddess) is the divine embodiment of the Moon... Diana and Juno are identified as moon goddesses...In Roman art, Luna attributes are the crescent moon plus the two-yoke chariot... Luna drives a biga drawn by oxen (right), while the Sun drives a horse-drawn quadriga... A biga of oxen was also driven by Hecate, the chthonic aspect of the triple goddess in complement with the "horned" or crescent-crowned Diana and Luna. The three-form Hecate (trimorphos) was identified by Servius with Luna, Diana, and Proserpina. According to the Archaic Greek poet Hesiod, Hecate originally had power over the heavens, land, and sea, not as in the later tradition heaven, earth, and underworld.
Mano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mano_(mythology)
In Sami mythology, Mano, Manno, Aske, or Manna is a personification of the moon as a female deity. ... Like other nature-deities, the goddess Mano was seen as unpredictable and dangerous. She was worshiped around the time of the new moon, especially around the Winter Solstice, and during that time it was taboo to make any kind of noise...
Jutrobog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deities_of_Slavic_religion
Jutrobog is the moon god, but also the moon light at daybreak, whence the meaning of his name, "Morning God" or "Morning Giver".... Slavic Mythology
Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_(deity)
Mēn (Greek Μήν "month; Moon", presumably influenced by Avestan måŋha) was a lunar god worshipped in the western interior parts of Anatolia.... Mēn is often found in association with Persianate elements, especially with the goddess Anahita. Lunar symbolism dominates his iconography. The god is usually shown with the horns of a crescent emerging from behind his shoulders... Strabo describes Mēn as a local god of the Phrygians....
Chandra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra
Chandra is a lunar deity and is also one of the nine planets (Navagraha) in Hinduism. Chandra is synonymous to as Soma.... Chandra is described as young and beautiful, two-armed and carrying a club and a lotus. In Hindu mythology, Chandra is the father of Budha (planet Mercury).... Chandra literally means the "Moon" in Sanskrit, Hindi and other Indian languages.... Indu, one of the other names for Chandra...
Kušuḫ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku%C5%A1u%E1%B8%AB
Kušuḫ is the Hurrian Moon god. In the Kaluti List [de] he is named after Ea and before the Sun god Šimige. Kušuḫ was syncretised with the Moon god of Harran (Hurrian: Kuzina). Kušuḫ, "Lord of the Oath" was invoked, along with his wife Nikkal, "Lady of the Oath" and Išḫara [de], as guarantor of oaths. At the Hittite cliff sanctuary in Yazılıkaya, he is depicted as a winged god with a crescent moon on top of his pointy hat.
Sin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(mythology)
Sīn or Suen (Akkadian) or Nanna (Sumerian) was the god of the moon in the Mesopotamian religions of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. Nanna is a Sumerian deity, the son of Enlil and Ninlil, and became identified with the Semitic Sīn. The two chief seats of Nanna's/Sīn's worship were Ur in the south of Mesopotamia and Harran in the north. A moon god by the same name was also worshipped in South Arabia.
Ta'lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%27lab
Ta'lab was a god worshipped in pre-Islamic southern Arabia, particularly in Sheba. Ta'lab was the moon god and also a protector of pastures.
Yarikh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarikh
Yarikh (also written as Jerah, Jarah, or Jorah, Hebrew spelling ירח) is a moon god in Canaanite religion...The city of Jericho was a center of his worship...
Ay Ata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ay_Ata
Ay Ata (Turkish & Azerbaijani: Ay Ata, Cyrillic: Ай Ата; sometimes Ay Tanrı or Ay Dede, or Turkish: Ay Dede, Turkmen: Aý Däde, Azerbaijani: Ay Dədə) is one of the mythological entities in Turkic mythology and Tengrism. In English, the meanings are: Ay Ata: Father Moon, Ay Dede: Grandfather Moon and Ay Tanrı: The Moon God. ...
According to the mythology, he is a moon god, and he has been living in sixth floor of the sky with Gun Ana (Turkish: Gün Ana), the sun goddess, who he is coupled with. While Gün Ana is symbol of warmness and hotness, Ay Dede is the symbol of cold. ... The mythology is more common amongst Central Asian Turks, such as Altaians and Yakuts, who still have populations who actively practice Tengrism. Notably, in the Epic of Oghuz Khan, Ay Tanrı also is mentioned as the father of Oghuz Khan, even though that part remains somewhat unclear. It's also notable Oghuz Khan's second son was named Ayhan (Ay Khan, "moon khan").
From ancient times, the Turkic people believed that humans had secret lunar powers (Aisar or Aysar)....The Turkic people trusted the magic influence of the Moon. She was their sole "night lantern". The celebrations of malicious spirits occurred mostly at night. The rituals and trances of witches and demons were always timed according to the phases of the Moon.
Moon Lore
http://www.sacred-texts.com/astro/ml/index.htm
III. The Moon a World-Wide Deity
http://www.sacred-texts.com/astro/ml/ml13.htm
In Chaldæa "the moon was named Sin and Hur. Hurki, Hur, and Ur was the chief place of his worship, for the satellite was then considered as being masculine. The name for the moon in Armenian was Khaldi, which has been considered by some to be the origin of the word Chaldee, as signifying moon worshippers." With this Chaldæan deity may be connected "the Akkadian moon god, who corresponds with the Semitic Sin," and who "is Aku, 'the seated-father,' as chief supporter of kosmic order, styled 'the maker of brightness,' En-zuna, 'the lord of growth,' and Idu, 'the measuring lord,' the Aïdês of Hesychios." ... Chaldæans being thus either 'moon worshippers,' or simply, inhabitants of the town dedicated to, and called after, the moon." ... "The Babylonian and Assyrian moon god is Sin, whose name probably appears in Sinai. ... "Queen or Princess of Heaven is a very frequent name for the moon." Again, "Even in the latest times the Hebrews called the moon the 'Queen of Heaven' (Jer. vii. 18), and paid her Divine honours in this character at the time of the captivity."...Ashtoreth was the moon goddess....
Passing on we find that "in Pontus and Phrygia were temples to Meen, and Homer says Meen presides over the months, whilst in the Sanskrit Mina, we see her connected with the Fish and Virgin. It is not improbable that the great Akaimenian race, as worshipping and upholding sun and moon faiths, were called after Meni, the moon." Among the Arabians the moon was the great divinity... The Saracens called the moon Cabar, the great;... we find in the Zend Avesta: "We sacrifice unto the new moon, the holy and master of holiness: we sacrifice unto the full moon, the holy and master of holiness."... In Central India the sun and moon are worshipped by many tribes,... In Northern Asia the moon had adoring admirers... Moon-worship in China is of ancient origin, and exists in our own time....
"The first generation of men in Egypt, contemplating the beauty of the superior world, and admiring with astonishment the frame and order of the universe, judged that there were two chief gods that were eternal, that is to say, the sun and the moon, the first of which they called Osiris, and the other Isis."...By Isis, as we saw from Diodorus, the Greeks understood the moon. Diana was also one of the Grecian moon-goddesses, but Sir George C. Lewis thinks that this was not till a comparatively late period.... The Romans had many gods, superior and inferior. The former were the celestial deities, twelve in number, among whom was Diana; and the Dii Selecti, numbering eight. Of these, one was Luna, the moon, daughter of Hyperion and sister of the Sun....
"The ancient Goths," says Rudbeck ("Atalantis," ii. 609), "paid such regard to the moon, that some have thought that they worshipped her more than the sun."
And of the ancient Germans Grimm says: "That to our remote ancestry the heavenly bodies, especially the sun and moon, were divine beings, will not admit of any doubt." Gibbon, Friedrich Schlegel, and others, say the same.
The Finns worshipped "Kun, the male god of the moon, who corresponded exactly with the Aku, Enizuna, or Itu of the Accadians."
In ancient Britain the moon occupied a high position in the religion of the Druids, who had superstitious rites at the lunar changes, and who are "always represented as having the crescent in their hands."... "There are many proofs, direct and circumstantial, that place it beyond all doubt that the moon was one of the objects of heathen worship in Britain. But under what name the moon was invoked is not discoverable, unless it may have been Andraste, the goddess to whom the British queen Boadicea, with hands outstretched to heaven, appealed when about to engage in battle with the Romans." ...
And the people of Athol, in the High-lands in Scotland, doe worship the: New Moon." ...Sylvester O'Halloran, the Irish general and historian, speaking of "the correspondent customs of the Phœnicians and the Irish," adds: "Their deities were the same. They both adored Bel, or the sun, the Moon, and the stars. The house of Rimmon (2 Kings v. 18), which the Phœnicians worshipped in, like our temples of Fleachta, in Meath, was sacred to the moon.... in Irish, 'the blessings of Samen and Eel be with you!' that is, of all the seasons; Bel signifying the sun, and Samhain the moon."... Here, on every eve of November, were the fires of Samhain lighted up, with great pomp and ceremony,... another Irish moon-god Molua, alias Euan, alias Lugidus, alias Lugad, and Moling,... Luan is to this; day the common Irish word for the moon.... worshipped as the symbol of Female nature....
The American races practise luniolatry very generally. The Dakotahs worship both sun and moon. The Delaware and Iroquois Indians sacrifice to these orbs,..."The Ahts undoubtedly worship the sun and the moon, particularly the full moon, and the sun while ascending to the zenith. Like the Teutons, they regard the moon as the husband, and the sun as the wife;...
In the far-off New Hebrides the Eramangans "worship the moon, having images in the form of the new and full moons, made of a kind of stone....
My personal thought about Venus of Laussel is she was Mother Earth, not a moon goddess but, rather gives birth to the moon possibly 13 times each year. And also giving birth to the sun once each year, or each day?...
The Doors of Precession: Lunar Deities and the Sacred Landscape of the Neolithic Peoples
https://mediamonarchy.com/the-doors-of-precession-lunar-deities/
In the Paleolithic Era, the first moon goddess appears holding the horn of a bison or auroch. Known to archeologists as the Venus of Laussel, Dordogne, France this figure portrays the moon's growth cycle from the newly crescent moon to the full moon in the thirteen vertical strokes on her elevated bison horn. Here, we have firmly established two concepts that will remain constant from the Paleolithic Era of approximately 23,000 BC to the Bronze Age. The first concept is that the moon is a power of regeneration of life from death, a parallel made from observing the growth of the moon from the new moon to the full moon with the growth of plants and with the growth of humans; the goddess's left hand draws the viewer's attention to her womb indicating the parallel to the growth of life itself. The second concept is the idea that the moon and the bison are one in the same power. Therefore, the process of regeneration of life from death or the creation of life itself must involve both a feminine and a masculine force as the bison is an adept representation of the fecund power of the masculine.... Our first moon goddess and bison's horn is therefore understandably part of a group of four of goddesses which might possibly represent each mask we must don or each of the four phases of the moon: first quarter, full, last quarter and new. Unfortunately, little detail on the figures in low relief is clearly discernible other than the fact that two of the four elevate an object and the fourth is a mirror image of herself (Leroi-Gourhan 303)....
Astronomers who have studied Stonehenge from Gerald S. Hawkins and Alexander Thom, to John Edwin Wood and Robin Heath agree that the original Stonehenge was about lunar astronomy and was a lunar observatory from its earliest times. The earliest known observer of this phenomenon was Diodorus Siculus, a Greco-Roman historian writing in the first century B.C, who describes the ancient peoples to the north, called the Hyperboreans. Diodorus states that these ancient peoples worshipped the god Apollo when Apollo visited the island they inhabited every nineteen years at their "magnificent circular temple adorned with many rich offerings" (Heath 181)....he might have translated their worship of Apollo as a worship of Apollo and Artemis, the deities of the sun and the moon,...
From the Minoan mythology of the goddess and the moon as the bull, to the Greek and Celtic myths of the goddess and the moon as the bull,...
MYSTERY OF DEATH
https://sites.google.com/site/n8iveuropean/home/religions-3/Mystery%20of%20Death.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1
Omnisutra Book of the Dead - Invocation of Ra video - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbpumxvpqRY
Traditional Berber religion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEHlrAuZLd0
the Festival of Neith
https://templeofathena.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-festival-of-neith/
In ancient Alexandria, every year a great festival, called the Feast of Lamps, was held for Neith, the primordial Goddess of Lower Egypt. Herodotus tells us that the celebrants burned uncountable numbers of candles and lamps in an outdoor feast that lasted all night. This year that date fell on Wednesday (the 30th), but the Temple celebrated it on Friday, yesterday. Besides myself, four other people were in attendance. Information about Neith, and the ritual itself, is below.
Unique Goddess, mysterious and great who came to be in the beginning and caused everything to come to be, the divine mother of Ra, who shines on the horizon.
Neith, mother of Sobek, is a complex Goddess. Neith (also Nit, Neet, and Neit) is attested to even before the First Dynasty. She is the patron Goddess of Sais, whose ancient Egyptian name was Zau. Her city is located in the Western Nile Delta. ...
In Esna it was believed that Neith created the entire world. Neith is a Goddess of war and weaving, a huntress and a Creatrix.... War-Goddess...She protected women and the home...weaving Goddess...She is associated with the primordial waters of creation, and in fact Her name might even mean “water”. Her name in Egyptian, Nit, is close to the word for the red crown of Lower Egypt – nt. Her name is also linked to the word for “weave” – ntt,...
Since Ra arose from the waters of Nun at the birth of the world, Neith came to be considered His mother....the temple of Neith at Sais carried the following inscription: I am all things that are, that will be, and that have been, and no mortal hath ever Me unveiled. The fruit which I brought forth was the sun....
The people at Elephantine said Neith was the wife of Khnum, the ram-headed Deity Who creates men and women on His potter’s-wheel. But most often She is considered to have no husband, as a Virgin Mother Goddess.... Neith and Athena were the same Goddess...in Libya. This was probably actually a festival of Neith:...
Neith
Her annual festival was celebrated on the 13th day of the 3rd month of summer and was known as The Festival of the Lamps. On this day people arrived from all over Egypt to pay their respects to the goddess and offer her gifts. At night they would light lamps which, according to Herodotus, were "saucers full of salt and oil, the wick floating thereon, and burning all night" and even those who did not attend the festival lighted such lamps in their homes, in other temples, and in the palaces so that the whole of Egypt would be illuminated all night long (Histories, II.62). These lamps were thought to mirror the stars in the night sky which were claimed to be either deities or paths to those deities. At Neith's festival the veil between the earthly realm and the land of the dead was thought to part and people could see and speak with their departed friends and family members. The lights on earth mirroring the stars helped to part this veil because earth and the heavens would appear the same to both the living and the dead. The festival touched upon the Osiris myth and Neith's part in his resurrection as she opened the way for the dead to communicate with the living in the same way she had helped Isis and Nephthys bring Osiris back to life.
The Veil of Neith and the Flame of Brigid Goddesses of Light in Darkness
http://mirrorofisis.freeyellow.com/id91.html
In ancient Egypt a great festival was annually celebrated in Sais, the ancient city of Neith, called the Feast of Lamps. On this night the veil between the worlds was drawn aside....
The Festival of Lamps was part of the Osirian Mysteries, and on this night Osiris, Who was titled “Lord of the Otherworld“ and “King of the Dead" was honored alongside of Neith. The light of the lamps mirrored the lights of the stars of heaven, and they symbolized the creation of a pathway to the Starry Fields of the Heavens, leading the dead to the ancient Egyptian paradise for righteous souls. On the night of the Festival of Lamps, Neith drew aside Her Veil, guiding the wandering souls to their true home with Her Living Light....
Brigid’s sacred festival at Imbolc celebrates the earliest signs of the coming spring....
Like the burning lamps of Neith, a sacred flame is also featured in the traditions of Brigid, both as Saint and as Goddess. The lighting of candles and ritual fires is carried out on Her feast day, representive of the gradual increase of sunlight...
An oracle of Olivia’s came from the Goddess Brigid, Who has this to say about Her interactions with humankind: “The division between (the) two worlds is only in your mind. In verity you travel to other spheres while your body sleeps. It is only at dawn and at twilight, at Beltaine and Samhain, that the veil is drawn aside for those who seek greater consciousness … It is My fiery Wheel that enflames creative artists, all those who would transform this world for greater good. And at last with a touch of My serpent wand I draw the soul away from material existence through the Dolmen Gateway to the world beyond the grave." ...
"So shall the Swan Children return with humility to daily existence, knowing that at dawn and dusk, spring and autumn, they may draw the earth and the World of Spirits into harmony.”...
The Libyan Berber Goddess Tannit (Neith)
https://tannit-neith.firebaseapp.com/
A FESTIVAL CALENDAR OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS
http://www.panhistoria.com/www/AncientEgyptianVirtualTemple/calendar1.html
December 8 Feast of Neith
A VERY INCOMPLETE LIST, AND PROBABLY DEBATEABLE AS WELL...
Category: Justice gods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Justice_gods
Anbay Baldr Datin Enlil Forseti Haukim Hendursaga Honos Issitoq Jupiter (mythology) Mandanu Mangindusa Marduk Mitra Nahundi Ninsusinak
Pugu (deity) Shani Shezmu Shiva Sydyk Takhar Týr Utu Varuna Yama Yama (Buddhism) Yama (Hinduism) Zeus
Themis (/ˈטiːmɪs/; Ancient Greek: ָליע) is an ancient Greek Titaness. She is described as "[the Lady] of good counsel", and is the personification of divine order, fairness, law, natural law, and custom. Her symbols are the Scales of Justice, tools used to remain balanced and pragmatic. ... Themis is untranslatable.
Itaran (god) http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/itaran/index.html
The male patron deity of Der, who is associated with justice.... his assertion of the borders of Umma and Laga, while Gudea (ca. 2144-2124 BCE), the ruler of Girsu, said of himself, "I justly decide the lawsuits of my city like Itaran" (ETCSL 2.1.7, line 273). In the poems praising the Ur III king, ulgi (2094-2047 BCE), his justice is "comparable to that of Itaran" (ETCSL 2.4.2.02, line 264), and a song to Nergal praises the god thus: "Like Itaran ... you reach correct judgments" (ETCSL 4.15.3: 41).... Akkadian period show a snake-like form, an element which may have later split off and become Nirah, Itaran's messenger,...Itaran is often equated with Anu rab "Great Anu", and in the Babylonian Chronicles relating to Esarhaddon (680-669 BCE) the usual writing for his name is replaced with AN.GAL....
Utu/ama (god) http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/utu/index.html
ama (Sumerian Utu) is the god of the sun. He brings light and warmth to the land, allowing plants and crops to grow. At sunrise ama was known to emerge from his underground sleeping chamber and take a daily path across the skies. As the sun fills the entire sky with light, ama oversaw everything that occurred during the daytime. He thus became the god of truth, judgements and justice. ama also played a role in treaties, oaths and business transactions, as he could see through deceit and duplicity. As a defender of justice, the sun god also had a warrior aspect (Black and Green 1998: 183-4)....
Prehistoric Religions: Old Europe
The term Old Europe is used here to describe Europe during the Neolithic and Copper ages, before it was infiltrated by Indo-European speakers from the Eurasian steppes (c. 4500–2500 bce). The Indo-Europeans superimposed their patriarchal social structure, pastoral economy, and male-dominated pantheon of gods...
The Old European religion of southeastern Europe and the Danubian basin persisted through three millennia, 6500–3500 bce; the Neolithic period extended from 6500 to 5500 bce, the Copper Age from 5500 to 3500 bce. In northern Europe, the Neolithic period continued to about 2000 bce....
Old European religious beliefs stemmed from the gynecocentric Paleolithic and early agricultural world, created by a birth giver, mother, root gatherer, and seed planter and concerned with feminine cycles, lunar phases, and seasonal changes. Skylight and stars, prominent in Indo-European mythology, hardly figure in Old European symbolism....
Goddesses:
The water-bird goddess...duck, goose, or swan...The V sign...She is associated with the number three (triple source, totality) and with the ram, her sacred animal....She is of Paleolithic origin. Since the early Neolithic she also was a weaver and spinner of human fate...
The snake goddess...The snake spirals and snake coil are her emblems...The horns of a snake, resembling a crescent moon, link this deity with lunar cycles....
The birth-giving goddess...Paleolithic art in France (Tursac, c. 21,000 bce) and in all periods of Old Europe (from the seventh millennium onward). The vulva, depicted alone (known from the Aurignacian period, circa 30,000 bce, and throughout the Upper Paleolithic and Old Europe)...
The vulture or owl goddess...appears as Death in the guise of a vulture, owl, or other predatory bird... A vulva, umbilical cord, or labyrinth is painted or engraved on her images. Hooks and axes...are engraved on western European stone stelae and on passage-grave slabs representing the owl goddess.... central Anatolia (seventh millennium bce), the beaks of griffins emerge from the open nipples of female breasts. The owl goddess's breasts, depicted in relief on slabs of megalithic gallery graves in Brittany....
The snowy owl appears in a number of engravings on the Upper Paleolithic (Magdalenian) cave walls of France, probably already as an epiphany of Death... Neolithic, Copper, and Early Bronze ages... Burials of birds of prey as sacrifices to this goddess are known from the Paleolithic (Ksar Akil, Lebanon, mid-Paleolithic; Malta, c. 15,000 bce), earliest Neolithic (Zawi Chemi Shanidar, northern Iraq, more than 10,000 years before our time), the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age (Isbister, Scotland)...
The White Lady, or Death, is portrayed with folded arms tightly pressed to her bosom and with closed or tapering legs. She is masked and sometimes has a polos on her head. Her abnormally large pubic triangle is the center of attention...Her images are made of bone...Upper Paleolithic, has been found throughout Old Europe, and appears in the Aegean Bronze Age as the Cycladic marble figurines...
The goddess of regeneration...fish, toad, frog, hedgehog, triangle, hourglass, bee, and butterfly...and hybrids: fishwoman, frog-woman, hedgehog-woman, hourglass with bird's feet or claws, bee and butterfly with a human head.
The Pregnant Goddess (Mother Earth )...nude with hands placed on her enlarged belly... Her image was associated with lozenges, triangles, snakes, and two or four lines. Her sacred animal is the sow. She is the Mother of the Dead: her uterus or entire body is the grave (hypogea of Malta and Sardinia, passage graves of western Europe, and court tombs of Ireland) or temple (Malta)...Upper Paleolithic, it was probably not until the Neolithic that she became the earth mother and bread giver, appearing enthroned and crowned. She is the dominant figure in the early phases of the Neolithic....
Gods:
The Sorrowful Ancient is portrayed as a peaceful man sitting on a stool, hands resting on knees or supporting his face. Since the Sorrowful Ancient appears together with seated pregnant figurines that probably represent harvest goddesses, it can be assumed that he represents a dying vegetation god. The bull with a human mask and the goat-masked male sculptures of the Vinca culture (fifth millennium bce) may portray an early form of Dionysos in the guise of a bull or a he-goat—the god of annual renewal in full strength. However, lack of documentation from other culture groups warrants his preclusion as a stereotype.
The mature male holding a crosier and seated on a throne, from Szegvár-Tüzköves (Tisza culture, Hungary), may be a relation to Silvanus, Faunus, and Pan, historical era forest spirits and protectors of forest animals and hunters who also are depicted with a crosier. This image, as well as representations of bearded men, is probably of Upper Paleolithic origin (cf. bison men and other half-man, half-animal figures from the French caves of Les Trois Frères, Le Gabillou, and others...
Male images are rare among the Old European figurines; usually they constitute only 2 to 3 percent of the total number recovered in settlements....the religion of Old Europe was polytheistic and dominated by female deities. The primary goddess inherited from the Paleolithic was the Great Goddess, whose functions included the gift of life and increase of material goods, death-wielding and decrease, and regeneration. She was the absolute ruler of human, animal, and plant life and the controller of lunar cycles and seasons....
the Pregnant Goddess of the Paleolithic was transformed into an earth fertility deity in the Neolithic....They personify life, death, and regeneration... Upper Paleolithic ancestors, the people of Old Europe used caves as sanctuaries...
Summary: ...it is women who are portrayed in the overwhelming majority of figurines as engaged in cult activities or as supervising these events from thrones. Furthermore, the rituals mirror daily secular tasks associated with women, most importantly, preparation of bread from grains, manufacture of ceramics, and weaving.... Also integrated into rites were music and dance, the use of masks, sacrificial offerings, lustration, and rites involving bread and drink.
NO ONE KNOWS ITS ORIGINAL INTENT. SOME ALIGN WITH SOLAR AND LUNAR. SOME CONTAIN BURIAL. LATE NEOLITHIC/EARLY BRONZE AGE....
Stone circle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_circle
They are commonly found across Northern Europe and Great Britain, and typically date from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age eras, with most concentrations appearing from 3000 BCE. ... Ancient stone circles appear throughout Europe, with many appearing in the Pyrenees, on the Causse de Blandas in southern France in the Cevennes, in the Alps, Bulgaria, and Poland. Another type can be found in the Horn of Africa. ...Although many theories have been advanced to explain their use, usually around providing a setting for ceremony or ritual, there is no consensus among archaeologists as to their intended function. ...
There is growing evidence that megalithic constructions began as early as 5000 BCE in northwestern France, and that the custom and techniques spread via sea routes throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region from there. The Carnac Stones in France are estimated to have been built around 4500 BCE, and many of the formations include megalithic stone circles. The earliest stone circles in England were erected 2500–3000 BCE, during the Middle Neolithic (c. 3700–2500 BCE). Around that time stone circles began to appear in coastal and lowland areas towards the north of the United Kingdom....
Recent research shows that two oldest stone circles in Britain (Stenness and Callanish) were constructed to align with solar and lunar positions... Sometimes a stone circle is found in association with a burial pit or burial chamber, but the great majority of these monuments have no such association.... Scottish recumbent circles...It is fairly common for the circle to contain a ring cairn and cremation remains....
A funerary purpose is thought likely... Burials have been found at all excavated concentric stone circles: both inhumations and cremations, with the burnt remains either within an urn or placed directly in the earth....
Megalithic monuments are found in especially great number on the European Atlantic fringe and in the British Isles....A 2019 comprehensive radiocarbon dating study of megalithic structures across Europe and the British Isles concluded that construction techniques were spread over sea routes starting from northwestern France....
Examples can be found throughout much of Continental Europe, from the Black Sea to Brittany....Ancient stone circles are found throughout the Horn of Africa....
The Aztec myth of the unlikeliest sun god
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMPG-2vXi-s
Discover the myth of how the weak and pimply Aztec god Nanahuatl sacrificed himself to become Lord Sun and created a new world.
Nanahuatl, weakest of the Aztec gods, sickly and covered in pimples, had been chosen to form a new world. There had already been four worlds, each set in motion by its own “Lord Sun,” and each had been destroyed. For a new world to be created, another god had to leap into the great bonfire and become the fifth sun. Will Nanahuatl complete the sacrifice? Sacrificed himeself into the fire to become Lord Sun of the 5th age.
? Deus > Zeus > Hesus > Iseous > Jesus ?
SKY FATHER HAS HAD MANY NAMES, AND MANY DIFFERENT STORIES OVER THE THOUSANDS OF YEARS, AND THOUSANDS OF MILES.
SKY FATHER IS PROTO INDO EUROPEAN. ALTHOUGH THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE SAYS JESUS IS FROM A LEVITE MOTHER AND HIS FATHER WAS THE SKY FATHER NEITHER ARE JEWISH. THE NAME JESUS IS NOT JEWISH EITHER. JESUS DERIVED FROM GREEK ZEUS. THE BIBLE DESCRIBES THE ISRAEL STORY OF SKY FATHER RELIGION THERE. ISRAEL HAD ADOPTED PAGAN RELIGIONS TO FORM THEIRS. THEY THEMSELVES WERE SPLIT ON MONOTHEISM AND POLYTHEISM. BUT ALL RELIGIONS OF SKY FATHER, AND SUN GOD RELIGIONS ARE SOLAR RELIGIONS WHICH ARE PROTO INDO EUROPEAN, AND NOT ORIGINAL JEWISH NOR HEBREW.
PROTO INDO EUROPEAN RELIGION MAY HAVE COME FROM ATLANTIS. THE SIGN OF THE CROSS IN THE CIRCLE. SUN SYMBOL WHICH IS PRE CHRISTIAN, PRE JEWISH, PRE ISLAM, PRE HINDU, PRE TENGRI, PRE EGYPTIAN, ETC...
IT IS INTERESTING THAT THE JEWS HATE THE INDO EUROPEAN PEOPLE YET THEY WORSHIP PROTO IE AND IE GODS...
Iesous in Greek
http://www.sabbathcovenant.com/christianitythegreatdeception/IesousinGreek.htm
So Yahusha is English for the Hebrew name of the Messiah (anointed King of Israel) and Jesus is the name of the Greek “good man” or Chistos. It is that simple. But what does “Iesous” mean in Greek. It has no meaning in Hebrew; as it is not a Hebrew word. In Greek, “Iesous” literally translated means “Hail Zeus”. The name “Jesus” didn’t even exist until the 4th Century and was a later derivative of the late Latin Isus.
“It is known that the Greek name endings with sus, seus, and sous were attached by the Greeks to names and geographical areas as means to give honor to their supreme deity, Zeus."
"This name of the true Messiah, Jahshuwah (Jehoshua), being Hebrew, was objectionable to the Greeks and Romans, who hated the Judeans (Jews), and so it was deleted from the records, and a new name inserted. Jahshuwah (Jehoshua) was thus replaced by Ie-Sous (hail Zeus), now known to us as Jesus."
We see in historical documents that the name “Jesus” did not even come into existence until the 1600’s when the letter “J” was introduced into our English language. So the name “Jesus” is only around 400 years old! The Greek "Iesus" comes from the name Zeus, the ruling God in the Greek pantheon. "Jesus” is a transliteration of a Latin name only ONE letter off “Ioesus” pronounced hey-sus - which has no meaning in Hebrew, but in Latin it means “Hail Zeus”. If Yahusha’s name had been transliterated into our language, it would have been Joshua. If the name was treated properly using the compound naming convention YHVH intended it would be YAH(weh)(ye)SHUA shortened to “Yahusha” using the short contracted form maintaining the meaning of the name and fulfilling prophecy that the Messiah “came in the NAME of YHVH”....
The Jesus Paradox: Were Gods Real Beings of Flesh and Blood, Who Once Existed on Earth in Ages Lost?
... Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Iao of Nepal, Hesus of the Celts, Thammuz of Babylon and Dumuzi of Sumeria, just to name a few. Horus of Egypt is the direct predecessor to Jesus, for Horus in Greek is Iesus, who is Jesus....
Greek Gods: The 7 Core Males Exposed
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/greek-gods-0012623
The ancient Greeks were a polytheistic people and worshiped a multitude of gods. The most important gods of the Greek pantheon were the Twelve Olympians, so-called due to the belief that they resided on the peak of Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece.
This group of deities consisted of Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Poseidon, and Zeus. This article will look at the male Olympians, i.e. Apollo, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Hermes, Poseidon, and Zeus...
Thoth Hermes Trismegistus and his Ancient School of Mysteries
But he was not only known to the Egyptians. To the Sumerians he was Ningizzida; he may have been Enoch to the Jews, Odin to the Scandinavians, Wotan to the Teutons, and some even suggest Buddha....Before he was revered as a god, he was the first great Egyptian philosopher and founder of the Ancient Mystery Schools, receiving his wisdom while in meditative trances, writing over 40 books including (allegedly) the Emerald Tablet, The Book of Thoth, and The Divine Pymander...his teachings on reincarnation and the creation of the world....This school was also known as the Great White Brotherhood...
this powder was seemingly identical to the ancient Mesopotamian fire-stone or shem-an-na - the substance that was made into bread-cakes and used to feed the Babylonian kings and the pharaohs of Egypt....
The Ram: (Source: BOOK OF THE DEAD
Khnemu worked with Ptah in carrying out the work of creation ordered by Thoth, and is therefore one of the oldest divinities of Egypt; his name means, "to mould," "to model."...
He is depicted in the form of a man having a ram's head and horns surmounted by plumes, uræi with disks, etc.; in one hand be holds the sceptre and in the other the emblem of life. Occasionally he is hawk-headed, and in one representation he holds the emblem of water, in each hand. On a late bas-relief at Philæ we find him seated at a potter's table upon which stands a human being whom he has just fashioned....
The god Horus, under the form of a lion, was worshipped at Sekhem.... "The Ram, lord of Tattu," i.e., Osiris....
The hieroglyphics by the side of Ani's soul read ba en Ausar, "the soul of Osiris."...
The name of the sanctuary in which the bennu bird was worshipped was Het-bennu. Greek writers called this bird the phoenix, and the Egyptians considered it as a symbol of Osiris....
five ram-headed gods, whose names are Ra, Shu, Tefnut, Seb and Ba-[neb]-Tattu.... "I rise up in my land, I come into (or from) mine eye." ...
The hands of Osiris Ani, triumphant, are the hands of the Ram, the lord of Tattu....
OSIRUS IS THE FATHER, AND HORUS IS THE SON. BA'EL MUST BE THE SPIRIT.
AS GREEN SKIN DIETY OSIRUS MAY HAVE BECOME THE GREEN MAN OF THE OAK KING LEGEND WHICH WAS A FERTILITY GOD. OSIRUS WAS FORMOST OF THE WESTERNERS OR "LAND OF THE DEAD". OSIRUS AROSE FROM THE DEAD, WAS RESURRECTED, AND WAS JUDGE AND KING OF THE UNDERWORLD GIVING HOPE IN A NEW LIFE AFTER DEATH. THE ETYMOLOGY OF OSIRUS IS ó.siː.ris VOCALISED AS Asar, Ausar, Ausir, Wesir, Usir, or Usire FOLLOWS THE SAME PATTERN AS ODIN O, OS, OSS, A, AS, ASA, ASIR, ETC.... ODIN HAS THE SIMILAR PATTERN IN HIS NAME, AND ODIN HAS SIMILAR CHARACTERISTICS AS RULER OF UNDERWORLD AND JUDGE OF THE DEAD.
HORUS WAS SON OF GOD OSIRUS. SET IS THE ENEMY AND USURPER OF GOD OSIRUS. BA IS THE SOUL OR SPIRIT REPRESENTED AS A RAM. IT FOLLOWS THAT BA'EL MEANS THE SPIRIT OF GOD BECAUSE EL MEANS GOD BUT IS NOT THE NAME OF GOD, IT ONLY MEANS GOD. SO BAEL MUST BE THE SPIRIT OF GOD WHOSE NAME IS OSIRUS, OR ODIN.
OSIRUS IS LORD OF THE SKY AND LIFE OF THE SUN GOD RA. IN THE 4TH CENTURY CHRISTIANITY BANNED ALL RIVAL RELIGIONS....
Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
Parents: Geb and Nut. Siblings: Isis, Set, Nephthys, Heru Wer. Consort: Isis.
Offspring: Horus, Anubis (in some accounts).
Osiris (, from Egyptian wsjr, Coptic ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ) is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was classically depicted as a green-skinned deity with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive atef crown, and holding a symbolic crook and flail. He was one of the first to be associated with the mummy wrap. When his brother, Set, cut him up into pieces after killing him, Isis, his wife, found all the pieces and wrapped his body up, enabling him to return to life. Osiris was at times considered the eldest son of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, as well as being brother and husband of Isis, with Horus being considered his posthumously begotten son. He was also associated with the epithet Khenti-Amentiu, meaning "Foremost of the Westerners", a reference to his kingship in the land of the dead. Through syncretism with Iah, he is also a god of the Moon. Osiris can be considered the brother of Isis, Set, Nephthys, and Horus the Elder, and father of Horus the Younger....
Osiris was the judge of the dead and the underworld, and the agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River....The kings of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death – as Osiris rose from the dead so they would be in union with him, and inherit eternal life through a process of imitative magic. Through the hope of new life after death, Osiris began to be associated with the cycles observed in nature, in particular vegetation and the annual flooding of the Nile, through his links with the heliacal rising of Orion and Sirius at the start of the new year. Osiris was widely worshipped until the decline of ancient Egyptian religion during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Etymology of the name:
Osiris is a Latin transliteration of the Ancient Greek Ὄσιρις IPA: [ó.siː.ris], which in turn is the Greek adaptation of the original name in the Egyptian language. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the name appears as wsjr, which some Egyptologists instead choose to transliterate ꜣsjr or jsjrj. Since hieroglyphic writing lacks vowels, Egyptologists have vocalized the name in various ways, such as Asar, Ausar, Ausir, Wesir, Usir, or Usire...
Osiris is the mythological father of the god Horus, whose conception is described in the Osiris myth (a central myth in ancient Egyptian belief). The myth describes Osiris as having been killed by his brother Set, who wanted Osiris' throne. His wife, Isis, finds the body of Osiris and hides it in the reeds where it is found and dismembered by Set. Isis retrieves and joins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, then briefly revives him by use of magic. This spell gives her time to become pregnant by Osiris. Isis later gives birth to Horus. Since Horus was born after Osiris' resurrection, Horus became thought of as a representation of new beginnings and the vanquisher of the usurper Set.
Ptah-Seker (who resulted from the identification of the creator god Ptah with Seker) thus gradually became identified with Osiris, the two becoming Ptah-Seker-Osiris. As the sun was thought to spend the night in the underworld, and was subsequently "reborn" every morning, Ptah-Seker-Osiris was identified as king of the underworld, god of the afterlife, life, death, and regeneration.
Ram god:
Osiris' soul, or rather his Ba, was occasionally worshipped in its own right, almost as if it were a distinct god, especially in the Delta city of Mendes. This aspect of Osiris was referred to as Banebdjedet, which is grammatically feminine (also spelt "Banebded" or "Banebdjed"), literally "the ba of the lord of the djed, which roughly means The soul of the lord of the pillar of continuity. The djed, a type of pillar, was usually understood as the backbone of Osiris.
The Nile supplying water, and Osiris (strongly connected to the vegetable regeneration) who died only to be resurrected, represented continuity and stability. As Banebdjed, Osiris was given epithets such as Lord of the Sky and Life of the (sun god) Ra. Ba does not mean "soul" in the western sense, and has to do with power, reputation, force of character, especially in the case of a god.
Since the ba was associated with power, and also happened to be a word for ram in Egyptian, Banebdjed was depicted as a ram, or as Ram-headed. A living, sacred ram was kept at Mendes and worshipped as the incarnation of the god, and upon death, the rams were mummified and buried in a ram-specific necropolis. Banebdjed was consequently said to be Horus' father, as Banebdjed was an aspect of Osiris.
Regarding the association of Osiris with the ram, the god's traditional crook and flail are the instruments of the shepherd...
The annual festival involved the construction of "Osiris Beds" formed in shape of Osiris, filled with soil and sown with seed. The germinating seed symbolized Osiris rising from the dead.... The first phase of the festival was a public drama depicting the murder and dismemberment of Osiris, the search of his body by Isis, his triumphal return as the resurrected god, and the battle in which Horus defeated Set.... The ritual reenactment of Osiris's funeral rites were held in the last month of the inundation (the annual Nile flood), coinciding with Spring, and held at Abydos which was the traditional place where the body of Osiris drifted ashore after having been drowned in the Nile....
The cult of Isis and Osiris continued at Philae until at least the 450s CE, long after the imperial decrees of the late 4th century that ordered the closing of temples to "pagan" gods. Philae was the last major ancient Egyptian temple to be closed....
CHRISTIANITY GROWS OFF FROM OSIRUS LEGEND WITH SOME CHANGES ON WHO IS THE GOOD GUY FROM THE BAD GUY. ORIGINALLY OSIRUS IS THE GOOD AND SET IS BAD. SET IS KICKED OUT OF EGYPT AND THE SET FOLLOWERS GAINING POWERS IN OTHER LANDS CENTURIES LATER TURN OSIRUS INTO THE BAD GUY AND SETS NEW GOD(S) BECOME THE GOOD GUY.
SETS WIFE WAS A WHORE, AND THE JAHWEHS PEOPLE TURN JEZEBEL INTO THE WHORE....
Osiris
https://www.ancient.eu/osiris/
He is the first-born of the gods Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) shortly after the creation of the world... He is associated with the mythical Bennu bird (inspiration for the Greek Phoenix) who rises to life from the ashes...."The Foremost of the Westerners". The west was associated with death and 'westerners' became synonymous with those who had passed on to the afterlife.... His worship spanned thousands of years from shortly before the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150-2613 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323-30 BCE), the last dynasty to rule Egypt before the coming of Rome. It is also possible that Osiris was worshipped in some form in the Predynastic Period of Egypt (c. 6000-3150 BCE) and probable that he originated at that time....
The Osiris Myth...Nephthys, Set's wife, disguised herself as Isis and seduced Osiris, becoming pregnant with the god Anubis....Set had a beautiful coffin made to Osiris'...Set slammed the lid on, fastened it shut, and threw it into the Nile...Osiris' body traveled out to sea and eventually his coffin became lodged in a great tamarisk tree growing near Byblos in Phoenicia....The tree grew quickly around the coffin until it completely contained it. The king of Byblos, Malcander, came to the shore with his wife Astarte and admired the tree and the sweet scent which seemed to emanate from it. He ordered the tree cut down and brought to his palace as an ornamental pillar for the court, and there Osiris remained, trapped inside the coffin within the pillar, until he died....
Isis cut Osiris from the tree and carried his body back to Egypt where she hid him from Set in the swampy region of the Nile Delta....Set learned of his brother's return...he hacked it into pieces and scattered it across the land and into the Nile....Isis was able to revive Osiris and, once he was alive...drew the seed from his body into her own, and became pregnant with a son, Horus....He withdrew into the afterlife where he became Lord and Judge of the Dead. Isis, fearing what Set might do to her son, hid Horus among the swamps of Egypt until he was grown. At that point, Horus emerged as a mighty warrior and battled Set for control of the world. In some versions of the story, Set is killed but, in most, he is defeated and driven from the land. The chaos Set had unleashed on the world was conquered by Horus....
The city of Abydos was his [OSIRUS] cult center... As Isis was the mother of Horus, she was considered the mother of every king, the king was her son, and Osiris was both their father and their higher aspect and hope of salvation after death.... The kings of Egypt identified with Horus during life (they each had a personal name and a 'Horus Name' they took at the beginning of their reign) and with Osiris in death....It is for this reason that Osiris is so often depicted as a mummified pharaoh; because pharaohs were mummified to resemble Osiris....Their appearance as Osiris himself would not only remind them of the god but also would drive away dark spirits by fooling them into thinking one was the great god himself....
Osiris' identification with eternal life, with life from death, gave rise to his mystery cult which would travel beyond the boundaries of Egypt as the Cult of Isis.... Osiris' earlier mysteries celebrated at Abydos beginning in the Twelfth Dynasty (1991-1802 BCE). These were very popular festivals which drew people from all over Egypt to participate in the ritual. Bunson notes that "the mysteries recounted the life, death, mummification, resurrection, and ascension of Osiris"... The story known as The Contention Between Horus and Set was then acted out in mock battles between The Followers of Horus and The Followers of Set where it seems anyone could participate. Once the battle had been won by the followers of Horus, the people celebrated the restoration of order and the golden statue of Osiris was brought forth from the inner sanctum of the temple and carried among the people who lavished gifts upon the image. The statue was carried through the city in a circuit and finally placed in an outdoor shrine where he could be admired by his people and also participate fully in the festivities. The emergence of the god from the darkness of his temple to participation in the joys of the living symbolized Osiris' return to life from death. [SIMILARITIES TO THE BATTLE OF GREEN MAN OF THE OAK KING LEGEND]
Isis eventually became detached from any given locality and was considered the Queen of Heaven and the creator of the universe. All other Egyptian gods were finally seen as aspects of the mighy Isis and in this form her cult traveled to Greece, to Phoenicia, to Rome and throughout the Roman Empire.... The Cult of Isis was so popular in the Roman world that it outlasted every other pagan belief system once Christianity took hold of the popular imagination. The most profound aspects of Christianity, in fact, can be traced back to the worship of Osiris and the Cult of Isis which grew from his story....
BAAL MAY HAVE BEGAN AS OSIRUS BECOMING THE SPIRIT OF GOD OSIRUS AS HIS LEGEND TRAVELS TO PHOENICIA AND UP TO SYRIA, OR VICE VERSA BUT MOST LIKELY THE FORMER BECAUSE BEL WAS SON OF POSEIDON AND LYBIA, AND BECAME KING OF EGYPT WHO SET UP THE FIRST COLONIES ON THE EUPHRATES AS THEY TRAVELLED TO PHOENICIA UP TO SYRIA AND OUTWARD.
OSIRUS WAS A WESTERN GOD FROM THE LAND OF THE DEAD AND UNDERWORLD WHICH IS THE WEST, OR ATLANTIS.
THE PEOPLE OF THE GOD YAHWEH BECAME MORE POWERFUL AND OVERTHREW BAAL IN THE LAND OF THE CANAANITES. BAAL LEGEND HAS SIMILARITIES TO OSIRUS LEGEND. IN CANAAN OSIRUS MAY HAVE EVOLVED INTO BAEL. RATHER THAN CALLING HIM BY HIS NAME OSIRUS HE WAS CALLED THE LORD GOD (EL), AND SPIRIT OF GOD OSIRUS (BAEL). OR BAEL MAY HAVE BEEN BEL, KING OF EGYPT, SON OF POSEIDON AND LYBIA, AND HE WAS A DEIFIED GOD KING PHAROAH. OR BOTH....
Baal
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Baal-ancient-deity
among the Canaanites, who apparently considered him a fertility deity and one of the most important gods in the pantheon.... meant “owner” or “lord,”... Baal’s epithet as the storm god was He Who Rides on the Clouds. In Phoenician he was called Baal Shamen, Lord of the Heavens.... a number of tablets uncovered from 1929 onward at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), in northern Syria, and dating to the middle of the 2nd millennium bce....In the mythology of Canaan, Baal, the god of life and fertility, locked in mortal combat with Mot, the god of death and sterility. If Baal triumphed, a seven-year cycle of fertility would ensue; but, if he were vanquished by Mot, seven years of drought and famine would ensue.... Ugaritic texts tell of other fertility aspects of Baal, such as his relations with Anath, his consort and sister, and also his siring a divine bull calf from a heifer.... But Baal was not exclusively a fertility god. He was also king of the gods, and, to achieve that position, he was portrayed as seizing the divine kingship from Yamm, the sea god.... [SIMILARITIES TO OSIRUS MYTH]
The worship of Baal was popular in Egypt from the later New Kingdom in about 1400 bce to its end (1075 bce). Through the influence of the Aramaeans, who borrowed the Babylonian pronunciation Bel, the god ultimately became known as the Greek Belos, identified with Zeus.
For those early Hebrews, “Baal” designated the Lord of Israel, just as “Baal” farther north designated the Lord of Lebanon or of Ugarit. What made the very name Baal anathema to the Israelites was the program of Jezebel, in the 9th century bce, to introduce into Israel her Phoenician cult of Baal in opposition to the official worship of Yahweh (I Kings 18). By the time of the prophet Hosea (mid-8th century bce) the antagonism to Baalism was so strong that the use of the term Baal was often replaced by the contemptuous boshet (“shame”); in compound proper names, for example, Ishbosheth replaced the earlier Ishbaal.
VERY BRIEF SUMMARY: PHARAOH WAS MEDIATOR BETWEEN MAN AND THE GODS. EGYPTS PREHISTORY BEGAN THE ROOTS OF EGYPTS RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. EARTH GOD GEB; SKY GODDESS NUT; SEPARATED BY AIR GOD SHU; UNDERWORLD BENEATH EARTH; BEYOND THE SKY IS NU WHICH IS CHAOS BEFORE CREATION; DEATH AND REBIRTH DUAT IS IN THE UNDERWORLD AND/OR IN THE SKY; RA TRAVELS UNDER THE SKY IN THE DAY AND AT NIGHT HE TRAVELS THRU DUAT TO DIE AND REBIRTH EACH DAY. THE KING WAS ASSOCIATED WITH HORUS AS THE SON OF RA. IN THE NEW KINGDOM HE WAS ASSOCIATED WITH AMUN-RA.
THE KA IS LIFE FORCE THAT LEAVES THE BODY AT DEATH OF MAN. THE BA IS THE SPIRIT THAT MUST BE RELEASED BY FUNERARY RITUALS TO JOIN WITH KA EACH MORNING IN THE PRESERVED BODY TO MAKE NEW LIFE AS AKH. OSIRUS IS JUDGE OF THE AKH IN WEIGHING OF THE HEART WHICH IS WHY THE HEART IS LEFT IN THE PRESERVED BODY OF THE DEAD. AKH MUST PASS A SERIES OF FEATS BEFORE ENTERING DUAT. OSIRUS DECIDES THE FATE OF THE AKH WHICH MAY RESIDE ETERNALLY WITH OSIRUS IN PARADISE, BE SENT TO THE REALM OF DUAT TO BE TORMENTED BY THE VENOMOUS SERPENT, OR REINCARNATED BACK TO AN EARTHLY BODY. IN THE OLD AND MID DYNASTIES THE GUBMINT OFFICIALS PERFORMED RELIGIOUS RITUALS BUT THE NEW KINGDOM USED PRIESTS WHICH OVER TIME BECAME AS POWERFUL AS THE KING. MASTABAS OF THE OLD KINGDOM WERE RECTANGULAR SHAPED BRICK BUILDINGS TO HOUSE THE DEAD BODY WHICH THEN EVOLVED INTO PYRAMIDS IN THE MID KINGDOM THEN EVOLVED INTO ROCK CUT TOMBS BY THE NEW KINGDOM. EACH REGION OF EGYPT HAD ITS OWN DEITY. AS ONE REGION CONQUERS ANOTHER REGION THE DEITIES WERE EITHER COMBINED OR ONE ABSORBED THE OTHER. OVER TIME THIS COMPLEX BASTARDIZING OF THE GODS COLLAPSED THE SYSTEM SO THAT THE RELIGIOUS HAD TO CREATE A NEW SYSTEM. AMUN AROSE AS THE MAIN DEITY OVER MONTU IN THE MID KINGDOM. AMUN WAS INCORPORATED WITH RA AND CENTERED IN THEBES. THEN AKHEN ATEN MADE ATEN THE MAJOR DIETY IN THE NEW KINGDOM BUT HIS SON LATER REVERSED BACK TO THE PRIOR AMUN-RA SYSTEM. BUT THE DAMAGE DONE BY AKHENATEN PRODUCED A PHARAOH MORE HUMAN AND LESS DIVINE. BY THE 1ST MILLENIUM BC EGYPT BECAME SO WEAK FOREIGNERS TOOK OVER. ANIMAL CULTS, AND ISIS CULT GREW POWERFUL. THE 4TH CENTURY BC GREEK RULED OVER EGYPT AND THE GREEKS ADOPTED THE EGYPTIAN GODS AS THEIR OWN. IN 30BC EGYPT BECOMES A ROMAN PROVINCE AND THE RELIGION REMAINS THE SAME UNTIL CHRISTIANITY REPLACES THE TRADITIONAL EGYPTIAN RELIGION. BUT ALOT OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF COMES FROM THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN RELIGION . AND SOME EGYPT SYMBOLS ARE USED IN FOREIGN CULTURES...
Ancient Egyptian religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_religion
It centered on the Egyptians' interactions with many deities believed to be present in, and in control of the world. Rituals such as prayer and offerings were provided to the gods to gain their favor. Formal religious practice centered on the pharaohs, the rulers of Egypt, believed to possess divine powers by virtue of their positions. They acted as intermediaries between their people and the gods, and were obligated to sustain the gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain Ma'at, the order of the cosmos, and repel Isfet, which was chaos. The state dedicated enormous resources to religious rituals and to the construction of temples.
Individuals could interact with the gods for their own purposes, appealing for help through prayer or compelling the gods to act through magic. These practices were distinct from, but closely linked with, the formal rituals and institutions. The popular religious tradition grew more prominent over the course of Egyptian history as the status of the pharaoh declined. Egyptian belief in the afterlife and the importance of funerary practices is evident in the great efforts made to ensure the survival of their souls after death – via the provision of tombs, grave goods and offerings to preserve the bodies and spirits of the deceased.
The religion had its roots in Egypt's prehistory and lasted for 3,500 years. The details of religious belief changed over time as the importance of particular gods rose and declined, and their intricate relationships shifted. At various times, certain gods became preeminent over the others, including the sun god Ra, the creator god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. For a brief period, in the theology promulgated by the pharaoh Akhenaten, a single god, the Aten, replaced the traditional pantheon....
This polytheistic system was very complex, as some deities were believed to exist in many different manifestations, and some had multiple mythological roles.... recognizable forms to the abstract deities by using symbolic imagery to indicate each god's role in nature. This iconography was not fixed, and many of the gods could be depicted in more than one form....The relationships between deities could also be expressed in the process of syncretism, in which two or more different gods were linked to form a composite deity....
The Egyptian conception of the universe centered on Ma'at, a word that encompasses several concepts in English, including "truth," "justice," and "order." ...Ma'at was constantly under threat from the forces of disorder...
the Egyptians saw the earth as a flat expanse of land, personified by the god Geb, over which arched the sky goddess Nut. The two were separated by Shu, the god of air. Beneath the earth lay a parallel underworld and undersky, and beyond the skies lay the infinite expanse of Nu, the chaos that had existed before creation. The Egyptians also believed in a place called the Duat, a mysterious region associated with death and rebirth, that may have lain in the underworld or in the sky. Each day, Ra traveled over the earth across the underside of the sky, and at night he passed through the Duat to be reborn at dawn....
The king was also associated with many specific deities. He was identified directly with Horus, who represented kingship itself, and he was seen as the son of Ra, who ruled and regulated nature as the pharaoh ruled and regulated society. By the New Kingdom he was also associated with Amun, the supreme force in the cosmos. Upon his death, the king became fully deified. In this state, he was directly identified with Ra, and was also associated with Osiris, god of death and rebirth and the mythological father of Horus. Many mortuary temples were dedicated to the worship of deceased pharaohs as gods....
They believed that humans possessed a ka, or life-force, which left the body at the point of death. In life, the ka received its sustenance from food and drink, so it was believed that, to endure after death, the ka must continue to receive offerings of food, whose spiritual essence it could still consume. Each person also had a ba, the set of spiritual characteristics unique to each individual. Unlike the ka, the ba remained attached to the body after death. Egyptian funeral rituals were intended to release the ba from the body so that it could move freely, and to rejoin it with the ka so that it could live on as an akh. However, it was also important that the body of the deceased be preserved, as the Egyptians believed that the ba returned to its body each night to receive new life, before emerging in the morning as an akh.
In early times the deceased pharaoh was believed to ascend to the sky and dwell among the stars. Over the course of the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC), however, he came to be more closely associated with the daily rebirth of the sun god Ra and with the underworld ruler Osiris as those deities grew more important. In the fully developed afterlife beliefs of the New Kingdom, the soul had to avoid a variety of supernatural dangers in the Duat, before undergoing a final judgement, known as the "Weighing of the Heart", carried out by Osiris and by the Assessors of Maat....Several beliefs coexisted about the akh's destination. Often the dead were said to dwell in the realm of Osiris, a lush and pleasant land in the underworld....
The procedures for religious rituals were frequently written on papyri, which were used as instructions for those performing the ritual. These ritual texts were kept mainly in the temple libraries.... The Egyptians produced numerous prayers and hymns, written in the form of poetry....Hymns were written to praise particular deities....Among the most significant and extensively preserved Egyptian writings are funerary texts designed to ensure that deceased souls reached a pleasant afterlife. The earliest of these are the Pyramid Texts....At the end of the Old Kingdom a new body of funerary spells, which included material from the Pyramid Texts, began appearing in tombs, inscribed primarily on coffins. This collection of writings is known as the Coffin Texts, and was not reserved for royalty, but appeared in the tombs of non-royal officials. In the New Kingdom, several new funerary texts emerged, of which the best-known is the Book of the Dead.... The Coffin Texts included sections with detailed descriptions of the underworld and instructions on how to overcome its hazards. In the New Kingdom, this material gave rise to several "books of the netherworld", including the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the Amduat....
mortuary temples to serve the spirits of deceased pharaohs and temples dedicated to patron gods,...state-run temples served as houses for the gods...ritual duties were almost always carried out by priests. During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, there was no separate class of priests; instead, many government officials served in this capacity for several months out of the year before returning to their secular duties. Only in the New Kingdom did professional priesthood become widespread, although most lower-ranking priests were still part-time. All were still employed by the state, and the pharaoh had final say in their appointments. However, as the wealth of the temples grew, the influence of their priesthoods increased, until it rivaled that of the pharaoh. In the political fragmentation of the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–664 BC), the high priests of Amun at Karnak even became the effective rulers of Upper Egypt....
At many sacred sites, the Egyptians worshipped individual animals which they believed to be manifestations of particular deities....the Apis bull worshipped in Memphis as a manifestation of Ptah....Twenty-sixth Dynasty, when people began mummifying any member of a particular animal species as an offering to the god whom the species represented....
The word "magic" could be used to translate the Egyptian term heka, which meant, as James P. Allen puts it, "the ability to make things happen by indirect means". Heka was believed to be a natural phenomenon, the force which was used to create the universe and which the gods employed to work their will. Humans could also use it, however, and magical practices were closely intertwined with religion. In fact, even the regular rituals performed in temples were counted as magic....The Egyptians also commonly used objects believed to be imbued with heka of their own, such as the magically protective amulets worn in great numbers by ordinary Egyptians....
Because it was considered necessary for the survival of the soul, preservation of the body was a central part of Egyptian funerary practices....The first Egyptian tombs were mastabas, rectangular brick structures where kings and nobles were entombed....In the Old Kingdom the mastaba developed into the pyramid...Middle Kingdom pharaohs continued to build pyramids, but the popularity of mastabas waned. Increasingly, commoners with sufficient means were buried in rock-cut tombs with separate mortuary chapels nearby, an approach which was less vulnerable to tomb robbery. By the beginning of the New Kingdom even the pharaohs were buried in such tombs, and they continued to be used until the decline of the religion itself....
Each region of Egypt originally had its own patron deity, but it is likely that as these small communities conquered or absorbed each other, the god of the defeated area was either incorporated into the other god's mythology or entirely subsumed by it. This resulted in a complex pantheon... The Early Dynastic Period began with the unification of Egypt around 3000 BC.... Horus was identified with the king,... During the Old Kingdom, the priesthoods of the major deities attempted to organize the complicated national pantheon into groups linked by their mythology and worshipped in a single cult center, such as the Ennead of Heliopolis, which linked important deities such as Atum, Ra, Osiris, and Set in a single creation myth...
Early in the Old Kingdom, Ra grew in influence, and his cult center at Heliopolis became the nation's most important religious site. By the Fifth Dynasty, Ra was the most prominent god in Egypt and had developed the close links with kingship and the afterlife that he retained for the rest of Egyptian history. Around the same time, Osiris became an important afterlife deity. The Pyramid Texts, first written at this time, reflect the prominence of the solar and Osirian concepts of the afterlife, although they also contain remnants of much older traditions.
In the 22nd century BC, the Old Kingdom collapsed into the disorder of the First Intermediate Period. Eventually rulers from Thebes reunified the Egyptian nation in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC). These Theban pharaohs initially promoted their patron god Montu to national importance, but during the Middle Kingdom, he was eclipsed by the rising popularity of Amun....
The Middle Kingdom crumbled in the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650–1550 BC), but the country was again reunited by Theban rulers, who became the first pharaohs of the New Kingdom. Under the new regime, Amun became the supreme state god. He was syncretized with Ra, the long-established patron of kingship and his temple at Karnak in Thebes became Egypt's most important religious center....
The New Kingdom religious order was disrupted when Akhenaten acceded, and replaced Amun with the Aten as the state god. Eventually, he eliminated the official worship of most other gods and moved Egypt's capital to a new city at Amarna....
Akhenaten claimed unprecedented status: only he could worship the Aten,...and the Aten seemed distant and impersonal...once the traditional religion was restored...The populace began to believe that the gods were much more directly involved in daily life. Amun, the supreme god, was increasingly seen as the final arbiter of human destiny, the true ruler of Egypt. The pharaoh was correspondingly more human and less divine.... These trends undermined the traditional structure of society and contributed to the breakdown of the New Kingdom....
In the 1st millennium BC, Egypt was significantly weaker than in earlier times, and in several periods foreigners seized the country and assumed the position of pharaoh. The importance of the pharaoh continued to decline, and the emphasis on popular piety continued to increase. Animal cults, a characteristically Egyptian form of worship, became increasingly popular in this period.... Isis grew more popular as a goddess of protection, magic, and personal salvation, and became the most important goddess in Egypt.
In the 4th century BC, Egypt became a Hellenistic kingdom under the Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 BC), which assumed the pharaonic role, maintaining the traditional religion and building or rebuilding many temples. The kingdom's Greek ruling class identified the Egyptian deities with their own. From this cross-cultural syncretism emerged Serapis, a god who combined Osiris and Apis with characteristics of Greek deities...
Ptolemaic-era beliefs changed little after Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire in 30 BC, with the Ptolemaic kings replaced by distant emperors.The cult of Isis appealed even to Greeks and Romans outside Egypt,... Christianity spread across Egypt, and in the third and fourth centuries AD, edicts by Christian emperors and iconoclasm by local Christians eroded traditional beliefs. While it persisted among the populace for some time, Egyptian religion slowly faded away.... In late antiquity, the Christian conception of Hell was most likely influenced by some of the imagery of the Duat. ....
In pharaonic times many of its symbols, such as the sphinx and winged solar disk, were adopted by other cultures across the Mediterranean and Near East,...
SIMILARITES WITH EGYPTIAN GOD ATEN. SIMILAR MONOTHEOCRACY. THE SAME WINGED SOLAR DISK FROM EGYPT USED BY THESE OSSIRIANS, AND BY IRANIAN ZOROAUSIRIANS. THE NAME IS ALSO SIMILAR TO OSIRUS, AUSIR, ANSAR, ANSUR, ASUR, OSS, ODIN. SINCE OSSIRUS HAS BEEN WORSHIPPED IN PREDYNASTIC EGYPT 6000BC IT IS LIKELY ASSUR CAME TO THE OSSORIANS BY EGYPTIAN EXPANSIONS. BUT EGYPT CLAIMS TO HAVE GOTTEN THEIR BEGINNINGS FROM ATLANTIS, OR THE WESTERN ATLANTEANS. ASSURIANS HAD CONTACTS WITH EGYPT DURING THE SAME TIMESPANS AS AUSIRUS WAS MOST WORSHIPPED. HOWEVER, ATENISM MAY HAVE CAME TO EGYPT FROM THE ASSURIANS. AKHENATEN MUST HAVE GOTTEN HIS ATENIST BELIEFS IN PART FROM ASSUR. WHICH SOUNDS LIKE A BACK MIGRATION FROM EGYPT OSIRUS TO MID EAST ASSUR THEN BACK TO EGYPT AS ATEN?...
Ashur (god)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashur_(god)
A Neo-Assyrian relief of Ashur as a feather robed archer holding a bow instead of a ring (9th-8th century BC)... Planet: Sun. Symbol: Winged sun. Tree: Tree of Life.
Ashur, Ashshur, also spelled Asur, Assur (Sumerian: 𒀭𒊹 AN.SAR2, Assyrian cuneiform: Rassam cylinder Anshar.jpg As-sur, also phonetically 𒀭𒀀𒇳𒊬 a-sur₄). Assur was a deified form of the city of Assur, which dates from the mid 3rd millennium BC and was the capital of the Old Assyrian kingdom... As such, Ashur did not originally have a family, but as the cult came under southern Mesopotamian influence, he later came to be regarded as the Assyrian equivalent of Enlil, the chief god of Nippur, which was the most important god of the southern pantheon from the early 3rd millennium BC until Hammurabi founded an empire based in Babylon in the mid-18th century BC, after which Marduk replaced Enlil as the chief god in the south....
Some scholars have claimed that Ashur was represented as the winged sun that appears frequently in Assyrian iconography.... il assuri "god of Ashur". The symbols of Ashur include:
a winged disc with horns, enclosing four circles revolving round a middle circle; rippling rays fall down from either side of the disc;
a circle or wheel, suspended from wings, and enclosing a warrior drawing his bow to discharge an arrow;
the same circle; the warrior's bow, however, is carried in his left hand, while the right hand is uplifted as if to bless his worshipers...
An Assyrian standard, which probably represented the world column, has the disc mounted on a bull's head with horns.... Jastrow regards the winged disc as "the purer and more genuine symbol of Ashur as a solar deity". He calls it "a sun disc with protruding rays", and says: "To this symbol the warrior with the bow and arrow was added—a despiritualization that reflects the martial spirit of the Assyrian empire"....
The Assyrian Tree of Life: Often, Ashur is depicted in a winged disk hovering on top of a tree,...
Assur
The Assyrian Empire, like the later Roman Empire, had a great talent for borrowing from other cultures....Assur's family and history are modeled on the Sumerian Anu and Enlil and the Babylonian Marduk; his power and attributes mirror Anu's, Enlil's, and Marduk's as do details of his family: Assur's wife is Ninlil (Enlil's wife) and his son is Nabu (Marduk's son). Assur had no actual history of his own, such as those created for Sumerian and Babylonian gods but borrowed from these other myths to create a supreme deity whose worship, at its height, was almost monotheistic....
The iconography of Assur is often taken from the Sumerian Anu, a crown or a crown on a throne, but he is as frequently represented as a warrior-god wearing a horned helmet and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows. He wears a short skirt of feathers and is sometimes depicted within a winged disk (although the association of Assur with the solar disk is contested by a number of modern scholars, among them Jeremy Black). Assur is also sometimes represented standing on a snake-dragon, an image borrowed from the Babylonian Marduk, among other gods.
Assur is first positively attested to in the Ur III Period (2047-1750 BCE) of Mesopotamian history. He is identified as the patron god of the city of Ashur c. 1900 BCE at its founding and also gives his name to the Assyrians.... the capital of Assyria by the time of the reign of the Assyrian king Shamashi Adad I (1813-1791 BCE). Shamashi Adad I drove the Amorites from the region in Assur's name and secured his boundaries but was defeated by the Amorite king Hammurabi of Babylon (1792-1750 BCE) who then controlled the region....
In the tumult following Hammurabi's death, different powers controlled the region and their gods were considered supreme. The Mitanni and the Hittites both held Ashur and Assyrian areas as a vassal state until they were defeated by king Adad Nirari I (1307-1275 BCE), who united the lands under the first semblance of an Assyrian empire.... From about 1300 BCE we can trace some attempts to identify him with Sumerian Enlil. This probably represents an effort to cast him as the chief of the gods...Then, under Sargon II of Assyria (reigned 722-705 BCE), Assur tended to be identified with Anshar, the father of Anu (An)...
In the Enuma Elish, Assur (under the name Anshar) replaced Marduk as the hero. Tiglath Pileser I (1115-1076 BCE) regularly invokes Assur as the god of the empire who empowers the army and leads them to victory and even credits Assur with the laws of the empire. Adad Nirari II (912-891 BCE) expanded the empire in every direction with Assur as his personal patron. Everywhere the Assyrian army traveled, Assur traveled with them, and thus his worship spread across Mesopotamia.... Assur was now the supreme god not only of the Assyrians but of all those people who were brought under their rule....
In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonians, Medes, Persians, and others rose against the Assyrian cities and destroyed them. Included in this onslaught was the city of Ashur and the temple of the god as well as other statues of Assur elsewhere....
RA-HORUS IS THE INVISIBLE SOURCE OF ENERGY OF THE SUN GOD OF WHICH THE VISIBLE MANIFESTATION OF THE SUN GOD WAS THE ATEN.
THE WORD ATEN (jtn) MEANS DISC, THEN SUN DISC, FIRST FOUND IN 24TH CENTURY BC ABUSIR PAPYRI OF THE 5TH DYNASTY. ATEN FIRST APPEARS AS A GOD IN A 12TH DYNASTY TEXT AS THE SUN DISC. IN THE MID KINGDOM ATEN IS ONE ASPECT OF SUN GOD RE. REIGN OF THUTMOSIS IV ID'd ATEN AS A DISTINCT SOLAR GOD WAS WORSHIPPED DURING AMENHOTEPIII REIGN AS FALCON HEADED MAN LIKE RA. AKHENATEN SAW HIMSELF AS THE SON OF GOD ATEN. HIS PREDESSESSORS SAW THEMSELVES AS MERGING WITH THE GOD HORUS. EARLY FORM RE-HORAKHTI IN THE HORIZON IN HIS NAME SHU IS THE ATEN. LATER FORM RE RULER OF THE 2 HORIZONS IN HIS NAME OF LIGHT IS THE ATEN. RA-HORUS = RA-HORAKHTY = RA, WHO IS HORUS OF THE 2 HORIZONS. RA-HORUS-ATEN = ARMANA PERIOD MADE THIS RA-HORUS THE INVISIBLE SOURCE OF ENERGY OF THE SUN GOD OF WHICH THE VISIBLE MANIFESTATION OF THE SUN GOD WAS THE ATEN. SOUNDS LIKE THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY, AND OTHER MONOTHEOCRATIC SOLAR RELIGIONS. IT APEARS TO EVOLVE AS A MIXING OF OSIRUS WESTERN RELIGION WITH A MIX OF ASIATIC MIXED RELIGIONS. SKY GOD AND SOLAR RELIGIONS OF THE TURS, ARYAN, INDOEUROPEAN, INDIA, AND ETC ARE MIXING THEIR IDEAS AS THE PEOPLES MIX IN BY CONQUEST, TRADE, MIGRATIONS, ETC.. BY THE TIME ALL THESE MIXES GET TO EGYPT IT MIXES IN AND EVOLVES THERE AS ATENISM, THEN POSSIBLY INTO ZOROASTRIAN, THEN ABRAHAMIC JEW, ISLAM, CHRISTIAN....
ATEN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aten
Major cult center Amarna. Symbol: Sun disc and reaching rays of light.
Aten also Aton, Atonu, Itn (Ancient Egyptian: jtn, reconstructed [ˈjaːtin]).
Atenism, the religious system established in ancient Egypt by the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten. The Aten was the disc of the sun and originally an aspect of Ra, the sun god in traditional ancient Egyptian religion, but Akhenaten made it the sole focus of official worship during his reign. In his poem "Great Hymn to the Aten", Akhenaten praises Aten as the creator, giver of life, and nurturing spirit of the world. Aten does not have a creation myth or family but is mentioned in the Book of the Dead....
The word Aten appears in the Old Kingdom as a noun meaning "disc" which referred to anything flat and circular; the sun was called the "disc of the day" where Ra was thought to reside.... The first known reference to Aten the sun-disk as a deity is in the Story of Sinuhe from the 12th Dynasty, in which the deceased king is described as rising as a god to the heavens and uniting with the sun-disk, the divine body merging with its maker. The solar Aten was extensively worshipped as a god in the reign of Amenhotep III when it was depicted as a falcon-headed man much like Ra....Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten...
The principles of Aten's religion were recorded on the rock tomb walls of Akhetaten. In the religion of Aten (Atenism), night is a time to fear. Work is done best when the sun, Aten, is present. Aten cares for every creature, and created a Nile river in the sky (rain) for the Syrians. Aten created all countries and people. The rays of the sun disk only holds out life to the royal family; everyone else receives life from Akhenaten and Nefertiti in exchange for loyalty to Aten.... Akhenaten represented himself not as a god, but as a son of Aten, shifting the previous methods of pharaohs claiming to be the embodiment of Horus. This contributes to the belief that Atenism should be considered a monotheistic religion where "the living Aten beside whom there is no other; he was the sole god"....
Later, iconoclasm was enforced, and even sun disc depictions of Aten were prohibited in an edict issued by Akhenaten. In the edict, he stipulated that Aten's name was to be spelt phonetically...
The principles of Aten's cult were recorded on the rock walls of tombs of Amarna. Significantly different from other ancient Egyptian temples, temples of Aten were open-roofed to allow the rays of the sun. Doorways had broken lintels and raised thresholds. No statues of Aten were allowed; those were seen as idolatry. However, these were typically replaced by functionally equivalent representations of Akhenaten and his family venerating the Aten and receiving the ankh (breath of life) from him.... Incense was burnt several times a day. Hymns sung to Aten were accompanied by harp music....
The early form was Re-Horakhti who rejoices in the Horizon, in his name Shu, which is the Aten. The later form was Re, ruler of the two horizons, who rejoices in the Horizon, in his name of light, which is the Aten. Ra-Horus, more usually referred to as Ra-Horakhty (Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons), is a synthesis of two other gods, both of which are attested from very early on. During the Amarna period, this synthesis was seen as the invisible source of energy of the sun god, of which the visible manifestation was the Aten, the solar disk. Thus Ra-Horus-Aten was a development of old ideas which came gradually. The real change, as some see it, was the apparent abandonment of all other gods, especially Amun-Ra, prohibition of idolatry, and the debatable introduction of quasi-monotheism by Akhenaten. The syncretism is readily apparent in the Great Hymn to the Aten in which Re-Herakhty, Shu and Aten are merged into the creator god....
The cult of Aten was still in Egypt for another ten years or so as it faded and there was no purge of the cult after Akhenaten's death. When Tutankhamun came into power, his religious reign was one of tolerance, the only difference was that Aten was no longer the only god. Tutankhamun rebuilt the temples that were destroyed during Akhenaten's reign and he reinstated the old pantheon of gods. This return to the gods that were before Aten was "a move based publicly on the doctrine that Egypt's woes stemmed directly from its ignoring the gods, and in turn the gods' abandonment of Egypt"....
Atenism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism
The religion centered on the cult of the god Aten, depicted as the disc of the Sun and originally an aspect of the traditional solar deity Ra. In the 14th century BC, Atenism was Egypt's state religion for about 20 years, before subsequent rulers returned to the traditional polytheistic religion and the pharaohs associated with Atenism were erased from Egyptian records.
The word Aten (Ancient Egyptian: jtn), meaning "circle," "disc," and later "sun disc," is first found in the 24th century BC Abusir Papyri, discovered in the mortuary temple of the Fifth Dynasty pharaoh Neferirkare Kakai. Aten, the god of Atenism, first appears as a god in texts dating to the Twelfth Dynasty, in the Story of Sinuhe. During the Middle Kingdom, Aten "as the sun disk...was merely one aspect of the sun god Re."... During the reign of Thutmosis IV, it was identified as a distinct solar god, and his son Amenhotep III established and promoted a separate cult for the Aten. However there is no evidence that Amenhotep III neglected the other gods or attempted to promote the Aten as an exclusive deity....
The collapse of Atenism began during Akhenaten's late reign, when a major plague spread across the ancient Near East. This pandemic appears to have claimed the life of numerous royal family members and high-ranking officials, possibly contributing to the decline of Akhenaten's government....
Link to monotheism in Abrahamic religions:... psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud assumed Akhenaten to be the pioneer of monotheistic religion and Moses as Akhenaten's follower in his book Moses and Monotheism. The modern Druze regard their religion as being descended from and influenced by older monotheistic and mystic movements, including Atenism. In particular, they attribute the Tawhid's first public declaration to Akhenaten....
Ash (deity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_(deity)
Ash as depicted in seals of Peribsen. Ash was the ancient Egyptian god of oases, as well as the vineyards of the western Nile Delta...Saqqara (also spelt Sakkara) found several references to Ash in Old Kingdom wine jar seals: "I am refreshed by this Ash" was a common inscription....In particular, he was identified by the ancient Egyptians as the god of the Libu and Tinhu tribes, known as the "people of the oasis". Consequently Ash was known as the "lord of Libya", the western border areas occupied by the Libu and Tinhu tribes, corresponds roughly with the area of modern Libya.
In Egyptian mythology, as god of the oases, Ash was associated with Set, who was originally a god of the desert. The first known reference to Ash dates to the Protodynastic Period, and he continued to be mentioned as late as the 26th Dynasty. Ash was usually depicted as a human, whose head was one of the desert creatures, variously being shown as a lion, vulture, hawk, snake, or the unidentified Set animal.... The idea of Ash as an import god is contested, as he may have been the god of the city of Nebut, now known as Naqada, before Set's introduction there. One of his titles is "Nebuty" or "He of Nebut"...
A Possible Late Representation of the God 'Ash
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (Apr., 1925), pp. 78-79 (3 pages)
https://doi.org/10.2307/3854277
MY THEORY IS ODIN (OSS) CAME FROM ATLANTIS TO BECOME ASH IN NORTH AFRICA, OSIRIS IN EGYPT, BEL IN LEVANT, AS AND ASA IN CAUCASUS AND SUMER, ASUR IN SYRIA, ASURA IN INDIA, ASSURA MAZDA IN IRAN, THE GREEN MAN IN IBERO CELT, BUDHA IN EURASIA AND FAR EAST, ETC.... BEL IN MY OPINION IS BAEL WHICH MEANS THE SOUL OF OSIRIS WHICH WAS WORSHIPPED AS THE VISIBLE RAM WHEN OSIRIS BECAME LORD OF THE AFTERLIFE....
SIMILARITIES OF NORTHWEST GODS AND EGYPTIAN GODS:
GOD OF UNDERWORLD: ODIN (OS, OSS) AND OSIRIS.
GOD OF SKY AND SON OF GOD OSS OR OSIRIS: THOR AND HORUS
GOD OF SHINING DAY SUN: BALDR AND BEL
THE GREEN MAN MAY BE ODIN (OSIRIS, BEL, ).
NEITH AND ISIS ARE SIMILAR. NEITH IS OLDEST AND IS THE COW OF THE OGDOAD. SHE IS GODDESS OF LOWER EGYPT. SHE RESURRECTS OSIRIS AND BECOMES PREG'D BY HIM TO HAVE A SON HORUS. OSIRIS BECOMES GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD. HORUS THE SON OF FATHER GOD BECAME GOD OF THE SKY, AND WAS RULER OF UNIFIED EGYPT LOWER AND UPPER AS PHAROAHS. HORUS WAS TOLD BY HIS MOTHER TO PROTECT EGYPT FROM SET AN ENEMY OF OSIRIS....
Neith
https://www.worldhistory.org/Neith/
Neith (aka Net, Neit or Nit) and is one of the oldest deities of ancient Egypt who was worshipped early in the Pre-Dynastic Period (c. 6000 - 3150 BCE) and whose veneration continued through the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323 - 30 BCE), the last to rule Egypt before the coming of Rome. She was a war goddess, goddess of creation, mother goddess who invented birth, and funerary goddess who cared for and helped to dress the souls of the dead. Her cult center was at Sais in the Nile Delta and she continued as the most popular goddess of Lower Egypt even after her attributes were largely given to Isis and Hathor and those goddesses became more popular in Egypt. Neith continued to be honored as the patron goddess of Sais throughout Egypt's history as she was considered a great protector of the people of the land and the most effective mediator between humanity and the gods. Neith is said to have been present at the creation of the world and, in some stories, even the creator herself who gave birth to Atum (Ra) who then completed the act of creation. She is always represented as extremely wise and just as in the story of The Contendings of Horus and Set where she settles the question of who will rule Egypt and, by extension, the world.... Neith is frequently depicted sitting on her throne holding either a sceptre or a bow and two arrows. She is also sometimes seen as a cow, linking her with Hathor or with the Great Cow who was mother to Ra....
Neith is also known by the names Net, Neit, Nit... She was also called "mother of the gods", "grandmother of the gods", and "great goddess".... she became a war goddess by the time of the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150-2613 BCE)... According to one myth, Neith preceeded creation and was present when the waters of Nun began to swirl at her command to give rise to the ben-ben (the primordial mound) upon which Ra (Atum) stood to complete the task. In another version of the story, Neith created the world and then went directly to found her city of Sais, leaving the rest of the work to Atum. By the time of the end of the Ptolemaic Dynasty Neith was still recognized as a creative force of enormous power who "created the world by speaking seven magical words" (Pinch, 170). She was closely associated with the creative element of water and was "the personification of the fertile primeval waters" and was "the mother of all snakes and crocodiles" as well as being the "great mother who gave birth to Ra and who instituted giving birth when there had been no childbirth before" (Pinch, 170). In still other myths, it is Neith, not Isis, who is the mother of Horus the divine child and restorer of order....
In the same way, Neith invented birth and gave life to humanity but was also there at a person's death to help them adjust to the new world of the afterlife....she was associated with weaving... Her annual festival was celebrated on the 13th day of the 3rd month of summer and was known as The Festival of the Lamps....
ISIS IS MORE RECENT MOTHER GODDESS IN EGYPT. SHE MAY HAVE BECOME GREAT MOTHER TO THE NEW UNIFIED EGYPT OF THE LOWER AND UPPER CROWNS...
Isis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis
Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BCE) as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her slain husband, the divine king Osiris, and produces and protects his heir, Horus. She was believed to help the dead enter the afterlife as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the pharaoh, who was likened to Horus....During the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BCE), as she took on traits that originally belonged to Hathor... In the first millennium BCE, Osiris and Isis became the most widely worshipped Egyptian deities, and Isis absorbed traits from many other goddesses... Whereas some Egyptian deities appeared in the late Predynastic Period (before c. 3100 BCE), neither Isis nor her husband Osiris were mentioned by name before the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2494–2345 BCE)....Several passages in the Pyramid Texts link Isis with the region of the Nile Delta near Behbeit el-Hagar and Sebennytos, and her cult may have originated there....
Isis is part of the Ennead of Heliopolis, a family of nine deities descended from the creator god, Atum or Ra. She and her siblings—Osiris, Set, and Nephthys—are the last generation of the Ennead, born to Geb, god of the earth, and Nut, goddess of the sky. The creator god, the world's original ruler, passes down his authority through the male generations of the Ennead, so that Osiris becomes king. Isis, who is Osiris's wife as well as his sister, is his queen...
AMUN IS ONE OF THE 8 PRIMORDIAL DEITIES WHO BECAME FUSED WITH SUN GOD RA AND REPRESENTED AS A RAM. KING TAHARQA OF THE 25TH DYNASTY WERE KUSHITE RULERS USED THE RAM AND SUN DISK SYMBOLS. KUSHITES ALSO HAD POWERS IN INDIA WHERE DAKSHA IS A RAM GOD IN HINDU RELIGION A PRIMARY SOLAR GOD OF CREATION....
RAM OF AMUN-RE
https://www.ashmolean.org/ram-of-amun-re#/
This imposing and stoic statue was built by King Taharqa, conqueror of Egypt. The Ram represents the powerful god of sun and air Amun-Re, with Taharqa standing below. King Taharqa was the third in the line of Kushite rulers whose power extended from their native Nubia (northern Sudan) to the whole of Egypt, which they ruled as the pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty. Throughout his reign of Egypt Taharqa used the symbolic imagery of Amun-Re to evoke power and strength. Many depictions of King Taharqa show him with the ram’s head and sun disc, symbolic of Amun-Re, worn as earrings or an amulet around his neck.
Amun was a major ancient Egyptian deity who appears as a member of the Hermopolitan ogdoad (the Ogdoad were eight primordial deities worshipped in Hermopolis). Amun acquired national importance in 16th century BC after the rebellion of Thebes against the Hyksos and the rule of Ahmose I. At this time Amun was fused with the Sun god, Ra and became Amun-re (or Amun-Ra).
The statue sits in the Egyptian and Sudan galleries outside the Shrine of King Taharqa in the Ashmolean, the same position it was originally found in. A duplicate of this statue would have sat opposite to intimidate intruders and protect the shrine. The shrine itself was a self-contained structure within the temple of Amun-Re at Kawa, Sudan.
AMUNS SACRED ANIMAL IS THE RAM. RAM GOD GAVE PROPHECIES TO THE SOVEREIGN. IN THE LATE PERIOD HNUM BECAME 4 HEADED RAM KNOWN AS THE FOUR LIVING SOULS OF RE, SHU, GEB, AND OSIRIS. THE RAM IS THE VISIBLE MASK OF THE INVISIBLE GOD AMUN BECAUSE AMUN IS THE MYSTERY HIDDENESS OF THE PRIMEVAL WORLD PERSONIFIES THE DISORDER OF PRIMEVAL CHAOS PREVIOUS BEFORE CREATION OF THE WORLD....
PROPHECĪES OF RAM GODS
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23656723
In the Late period of Egypt the Ethiopian Kings who honor Amun are driven out of Egypt putting an end to the Theban theocratic State.... Hnum is lord of the flood (of the Nile?) Gods of the Elephantine... a prophecy of Hnum during the 6th year of Bokhoris' reign a lamb predicts heavy trials for Egypt an Assyrian conquest...the lamb dies and is mummified... The Greeks adopt this prophecy in Manethos texts Potters Prophecy.... Hnum as lord of the Potters Wheel... Amuns' sacred animal is the Ram... Amon and his counterpart Amaunet is member of the Ogdoad personifying the disorder of the primeval chaos previous before the creation of the world (Hiddenness of the primeval world). This pair had a greater significance in Egypt compared to the other 3 pairs of the Ogdoad (Infinity, Darkness, Primeval Water).... The Ram God gave prophecies the Oracles of Amon to the sovereign passing to the priests then to the people.... Atum foretells in 175th chapter of Book of the Dead the destruction of the world , and end of most of the gods... Ram gods Hnum (great, large, Nun) are the most ancient divinities... in later Ptolemic and Roman times Ram God helps with births of the children of the Sun on the potters wheel to creator of the world....
The 8 primeval deities are connected to the otherworld sphere. Hnum was not originally a God of the beyond... by the late period Hnum was a 4 headed ram where the 4 gods are embodied in him known as the Four Living Souls (rams): lord of the town Elephantine soul of Re, the soul of Shu lord of Esna, soul of Osiris lord of Hypsele, soul of Geb superior of Antinoe... he is mysterious, unknowable, he is the magic....he reveals the future by night... The cemetary of sacred Rams in Elephantine...
the ram is an external visible mask for humans to see the invisible Amun ( Zeus, Jupiter,etc) as he appeared to Heracles in the form of a ram. Porphyrios explained the ram statue of Hnum in Elephantine as the conjunction of the sun and moon in the constellation of the ram. In Ptolemaic times the Ram god of Mendes "He was the Ba of all Gods". Ram god in the dispute of Horus and Seth sends them to the goddess Neith....
Another prophecy is told later by Ram god called the Demotic Chronicle for the oppressed Egytpians of a King coming from Heracliopolis... The Egyptians drew strength from the prophecies to resist the Roman invasions...
Study of the Ogdoad Scenes in the Late Period
https://cguaa.journals.ekb.eg/article_32558_031b1e8d34e1ae8b5adb17b8227dbe21.pdf
Each pair of the Ogdoad represented the male and female aspects of the four creative powers or sources, represents also an aspect of the primordial chaos out of which the world was created. They all came into being at the same time. Nun and Naunet represent the primordial water’s, Kuk and Kauket represent the infinite darkness, Heh and Hauhet represent empty space, and Amun and Amunet represent quintessence, or the secret powers of creation. The gods are usually depicted as men with the heads of frogs, the goddesses as women with the heads of snakes. Together they built an island in the middle of the vast emptiness and the egg that was placed upon it. From this egg, the sun god Atum was born, and he began the process of creating the world while the others withdrew....
the lotus flower that is said to emerge from the water, the petals of the lotus unfolded and sitting on its centre was the divine child, the sun god (the Ogdoad is called the 'fathers and mothers of Re, for the child that comes forth from this primordial lotus is Re) ...
A hare-headed god and goddess can be seen on the Egyptian temple walls of Dendera, where the female is believed to be the goddess Unut (or Wenut), while the male is most likely a representation of Osiris, who was sacrificed to the Nile annually in the form of a hare....Hermopolis, was also at times called Wenu, ‘the city of Hares’, probably derived from the fifteenth Upper Egyptian Nome which had as it’s emblem the royalhare standard....
Khnum, the ram-headed god, also has a place among the creator gods of ancient Egypt...
OSIRIS FIRST RECORDED IN EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS AS OS - IR, OSS WHICH IS THE A (0), AS (OS), ASA (OSA) AND THE ASIR (OSIR) OR ASUR (OSUR), OR ASSUR (OSSUR), OR ASSURA (OSSURA) ALL ARE ODIN FOLK. FIRST RECORDED USING EGYPT HIEROGLYPHS AS WS-IR OR OS-IR. GOD OF THE AFTERLIFE AND THE DEAD, AND OF VEGETATION, AND FLOODING OF THE NILE. HE IS THE GREEN MAN AND SOMETIMES A BLUE COMPLEXION. AFTER HE BECAME GOD OF THE DEAD HIS BA OR SOUL DEPICTED AS A RAM IS WORSHIPPED. THE BA IS THE POWER AND CHARACTER OF OSIRIS REFERRED TO AS BANEBJED. HIS FESTIVAL IS 17TH ATHYR (NOV. 13) COMMEMORATES HIS DEATH AND RESURRECTION. GREEK RULE MERGE OSIRIS AND DIONYSIS THEN BECOMES APIS AND THEN SERAPIS. OSIRIS WAS BANNED BY CHRISTIANITY IN THE 4TH CENTURY CE. ...
Osiris
https://ancientegypt.fandom.com/wiki/Osiris
Osiris (Greek language, also Usiris; the Egyptian language name is variously transliterated Asar, Aser, Ausar, Wesir, or Ausare) is the Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility.... The origin of Osiris's name is a mystery, which forms an obstacle to knowing the pronunciation of its hieroglyphic form. The majority of current thinking is that the Egyptian name is pronounced aser where the a is the letter ayin (i.e. a short 'a' pronounced from the back of the throat as if swallowing). ... The name was first recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs only as ws-ir or os-ir because the Egyptian writing system omitted vowels. It is reconstructed to have been pronounced Us-iri (oos-ee-ree) meaning 'Throne of the Eye' and survives into the Coptic language as Ousire...
Osiris was not only the merciful judge of the dead in the afterlife, but also the underworld agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River. Beginning at about 2000 B.C. all men, not just dead pharaohs, were believed to be associated with Osiris at death. Osiris is normally depicted with a blue or even sometimes a green complexion....
Ram god: Since Osiris was considered dead, as God of the Dead, Osiris' soul, or rather his Ba, was occasionally worshipped in its own right, almost as if it were a distinct god, especially so in the Delta city of Mendes. This aspect of Osiris was referred to as Banebdjed...Ba does not, however, quite mean soul in the western sense, and also has a lot to do with power, reputation, force of character...Banebdjed was depicted as a ram, or as Ram-headed....
Plutarch and others have noted that the sacrifices to Osiris were “gloomy, solemn, and mournful…” (Isis and Osiris, 69) and that the great mystery festival, celebrated in two phases, began at Abydos on the 17th of Athyr (Nov. 13th) commemorating the death of the god, which is also the same day that grain was planted in the ground. “The death of the grain and the death of the god were one and the same: the cereal was identified with the god who came from heaven; he was the bread by which man lives. The resurrection of the god symbolized the rebirth of the grain.”...
Osiris-Dionysus: By the Hellenic era, Greek awareness of Osiris had grown, and attempts had been made to merge Greek philosophy, such as Platonism, and the cult of Osiris (especially the myth of his resurrection), resulting in a new mystery religion....
Serapis: Eventually, in Egypt, the Hellenic pharaohs decided to produce a deity that would be acceptable to both the local Egyptian population, and the influx of Hellenic visitors, to bring the two groups together, rather than allow a source of rebellion to grow. Thus Osiris was identified explicitly with Apis, really an aspect of Ptah, who had already been identified as Osiris by this point, and a syncretism of the two was created, known as Serapis, and depicted as a standard Greek god.
Osiris-worship continued up until the 6th century AD on the island of Philae in Upper Nile. The Theodosian decree (in about 380 AD) to destroy all pagan temples and force worshippers to accept Christianity was ignored there. However, Justinian dispatched a General Narses to Philae, who destroyed the Osirian temples and sanctuaries, threw the priests into prison, and carted the sacred images off to Constantinople...
A QUICK CONDENSED OVERVIEW OF SOME INTERESTING HILITES OF THIS BOOK...
Adoration of the Ram: Five Hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple (HI-LITES):
https://sites.google.com/site/n8iveuropean/home/egypt/ADORATION%20OF%20THE%20RAM%20HILITES.rtf
Adoration of the Ram: Five Hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple: (FULL BOOK)
https://www.academia.edu/240044/Adoration_of_the_Ram_Five_Hymns_to_Amun_Re_from_Hibis_Temple_2006_
Ogdoad is labeled as The first primeval ones, The sons and daughters of Iri-ta, The males and females who created light, Who were fashioned in Opet by their father, Tatenen, in his workshop of the first moment. (…) The Ogdoad, they give praise to Re when he illumines earth for them.... Thus Amun-Re is the father of those who created him... The Ogdoad (…) who swam <to> their hometown, the Island of Flames, who created Light within the primeval mound (q3y.t), who made their throne in Hermopolis (Wnw) before their father, Shepsi....
the Ammonians, who follow the worship of the Zeus of Thebes; for, as I have said before, the image of Zeus at Thebes has the head of a ram.” Most scholars agree that Herodotus describes Siwa Oasis...
The resurrection/rebirth par excellence for the Egyptians was that of the sun god who died at the end of the previous day. ... these texts were recited to invoke the sun god to come back to life, to resurrect or even recreate himself...
all creator gods (beginning with Atum) come forth initially from the primordial waters (Nun),... Amun himself creates the primordial chaos (Hibis: the Nun-waters; Ptolemaic: the Ogdoad), which in turn gives birth to the sun, which in both cases is Amun himself....
As Amun inherited solar aspects as the syncretistic Amun-Re, so could he adopt a deceased manifestation, such as Kematef. While it is true that Amun assumed the “positive,” Res-wedja resurrected-god aspect of Osiris, this particular Ba of Amun shows us that he could take on the decomposing corpse aspect of Osiris as well....
the mehen-serpent that surrounds the Ba of Re as he travels through the underworld (particularly in the Amduat and Book of Gates)........ In the papyrus vignette, the serpent is unlabeled, but the caption before the god reads: “Osiris Res-wedja, foremost of the westerners, within the netherworld.” The location of the Solar-Osirian unity in the Sixth Hour of the Amduat is within a five-headed serpent, while in the Seventh Hour, the flesh of Osiris is encircled within a serpent (iwf) with the label “Osiris, who is in the mHn-serpent.” ... In the Book of Caverns, the ithyphallic Osiris rests within a coiled serpent in the Third Section. In the Fifth Hour of the Book of Gates, the Akh-spirits stationed at “the sacred place (bw dsr)” praise Re as follows... Jubilation unto you, when you enter the sacredness within the mhn-serpent....
a hymn to the Mendesian Ram (the b3-ram form of Re-Osiris), at the conclusion of which the speaker identifies himself with this deity, and says to his enemies: “Distance yourself from me! I am the one who is in the mhn.t-serpent. The parallel to the Mendesian ram is interesting, because he is precisely the b3-ram form of Re-Osiris, famously depicted in the tomb of Nefertari. The mhn-serpent can protect Re throughout his entire netherworldly journey, but it can be used specifically to ensure the sanctity (dsr) and safety of the Solar-Osirian unity....
in a chapel of Osiris at Dendera, where an image of a phoenix is labeled as “the great Ba of Osiris Res-wedja.”...
The “living royal Ka” is the divine aspect of the king. The association of Amun with the royal Ka is rather complicated. Primarily, Amun impregnates the King’s mother with the Ka, and in that sense the Ka-nature of the Pharaoh is a manifestation of Amun....
The solar god appears with a b3-ram head in the Netherworld Books, referring perhaps to his physical, animal manifestation; to his powerful, respected position (associating the b3-ram with the sfi-ram); or to the elderly ram-headed form the sun god assumes in the final hours of the day, and hence the association with Atum. Based on this understanding, one might translate this passage “most ram-formed of the rams,” or “Ram of rams.” ...
Given the possible “Nubian” origin of the Invocation Hymn (since it first appears in the Edifice of Taharqa)...“
The Roman-period “Book of the Ba” mentions “the srq-waters in the House of Natron inside the Netherworld” together with “the sea of the West (s-imnt.t)” as the water sources from which a Ba lives....
The flying scarab represents the morning form of Re, who has been reborn and thus ascends from the Netherworld into the sky. The Heh-gods are the eight deities who, along with Shu, support the Heavenly Cow (Nut). Since the Heavenly Cow is actually the sky, it makes sense that Re (as the scarab Khepri) flies up to travel upon her.
Nehebkau, literally “He who grants Kas,” is a serpent deity known primarily from early Egyptian religious texts...Nehebkau is primarily a beneficial serpent god, involved with the provisioning of food for the deceased. ...
the Invocation Hymn explicitly identifies a serpent as one of the Ba’s (and hence possibly “manifestations”) of Amun....Atum describes his original snake form in BD 175 and elsewhere; while at Edfu, Atum of Pithom is called “the living ancestor-serpent (qrh-nh) of ‘Weary-of-Heart’ (=Osiris)”... Serpentine forms of Amun in Thebes may go back much earlier, as Nehebkau is named as the agathos-daimon “who came forth from Thebes"...
Herodotus (II, 74) are also worth noting: “There are also about Thebes sacred serpents, not at all harmful to men, which are small in size and have two horns growing from the top of the head: these they bury when they die in the temple of Zeus, for to this god they say that they are sacred.”... this might also be compared to the sportive of writing of the Ogdoad with four intertwined wr.t-HkAw emblems (ram-headed vipers), for which cf. Sethe, Amun, §84....
Amun-Re entering the netherworld to give breath to Osiris (and to the rest of the blessed dead) is rather common in Solar Hymns and Netherworld Books, but is perhaps best expressed in the First Hour of the Amduat:...
In the following Ptolemaic text from the Second Pylon at Karnak Temple, the Ogdoad is labeled as The first primeval ones, The sons and daughters of Iri-ta, The males and females who created light, Who were fashioned in Opet by their father, Tatenen, in his workshop of the first moment. (…) The Ogdoad, they give praise to Re when he illumines earth for them.... Thus Amun-Re is the father of those who created him,...
"The Ogdoad is in adoration of his (Khnum-Re’s) beautiful face, he having begun (his) work in the initial moment (…) He is an august, transfigured Ba, with the head of a ram, his bones being silver, his flesh gold, and his hair true lapis-lazuli. The Ogdoad which came about in the crypt of Nun in the Great Green, It was Re who sat in his own body, he having become old. His bones were silver, his body gold, his hair lapis-lazuli."...
The Ogdoad, in addition to other gods, are often said to “recognize him as their lord,” ...
Manu is the designation of the Western mountain into which the sun sets when it enters the Netherworld...
Wenti is one of the forms of Apopis who threatens to devour the sun every night. However, he also appears as the crocodile who eats the solar disk, only to vomit or ejaculate it back out. ...The context of Horus/Seth using a harpoon may have influenced the decision to mention this particular hypostasis of Apopis, as Horus-Wenti was one of the names for Horus the Harpooner...The Papyrus Harris version writes Nwbty “the Ombite” (= Seth) instead of Horus. While some have understood the change at Hibis to be the result of the Late Period demonization of Seth.....As several scholars have noted, the image of Seth helping the sun god against the ultimate enemy, Apopis, appears at least as early as the Middle Kingdom. As such, Seth appears on the solar bark in many mortuary vignettes, and in Coffin Text Spell160, he is the only member of the crew who can stand up to Apopis. The duality of Seth/Horus appears very early in Egyptian history....Horus or Seth were both just as likely to appear in the role mentioned in the Hibis hymn: “The spear of Horus goes forth against thee, the lance of Seth is thrust into thy brow.”...Seth often appears, through his association with Ba’al, as a god of storms....
The Lake of Two-Knives can refer to several netherworldly locales: the place where the enemies of Re are punished, the location from which Re first rises, or the Necropolis itself. In this passage, it is perhaps best to understand it as referring to the Underworld or Necropolis in general.....
Anpet was located in the Mendesian nome, the traditional center of the Mendesian
Ram. This b3-ram was traditionally associated with Mendes, but from the New Kingdom on became specifically the criocephalic Re-Osiris, sometimes called the “Two Ba’s of Mendes.” One common, onomatopoetic word for ram was “ba,” and thus the word for the Ba-soul could be written with this ram. Therefore, the Book of the Heavenly Cow tells us: “The Ram (b3) of Mendes is the Ba-soul of Osiris.” As a result, the sun god becomes more and more “ram-like” as he ages and approaches the union with Osiris. This form of the Mendesian Ram is most famously illustrated in the Tomb of Nefertari, where the mummified, ram-headed solar deity stands between Isis and Nephthys with the following label: “This is Re resting within Osiris, this is Osiris resting within Re.”...
In the Late Ramesside period, this divine solarized Osiris developed into a cosmic deity, incorporating all the elements. The Mendesian Ram then appeared with four ram heads, identified in the Mendes Stela as the Ba’s of Re, Osiris, Shu, and Geb. While these happen to be the male progenitors of the Heliopolitan cosmogony (Re-Atum begat Shu, Shu begat Geb, Geb begat Osiris), the later correspondence with the elements is clear: Re is the god of fire, Shu is the god of wind, Geb is the god of earth, and Osiris is the god of water...
Harsaphes is the chief, ram-headed deity at Herakleopolis Magna; the greek designation of this city apparently derives from the interpretatio graeca of Harsaphes as Herakles. The Ancient Egyptians gave him epithets of Amun, Khnum, and the Mendesian Ram most likely because of his criocephalous appearance... It is interesting to note that Somtutefnakht twice identifies Harsaphes with Atum: “(Harsaphes), effective ram in Herakleopolis, Atum within the twenty-first Upper Egyptian nome.” This statement that the Ba/ram of Amun/Harsaphes dwells in uncountable deities closely mirrors a similar statement from the Mendes Stela: It is he who stays within all the gods in their sanctuaries, for he is the Ba/ram of all of them!... Just as in the CoffinTexts, Atum does not actually create all the gods, just Shu and Tefnut. Shu is the god who “makes/births the Ogdoad,” and the rest of creation....
In Book of the Dead Chapter 15 BIII, the st3.w-s.wt praise Re together with the Western Gods and the Great Ones. Through these examples, it is clear that the st3.w-s.wt are a certain class of blessed dead, akin to stars and the Great Ones. During the New Kingdom, the term st3-s.(w)t “mysterious of place(s)” came to be a designation of Osiris; only in the Third Intermediate Period was the word determined with a tree, leading to puns on st3-s.t and the Ished-tree (isd). The significance of this late pun is that the st3-s.t necropolis of the Ennead was seen to be a funerary mound covered by the Ished-tree, a tree associated closely with Heliopolis throughout Egyptian history...that is, as a sort of blessed dead, the Great Ones of the Divine Assembly so often described residing in the Netherworld...
the Graeco-Roman correspondences of Egyptian deities (Amun = Zeus, Osiris-Ptah =Hades, Re = Helios) one should compare the following Orphic statement quoted by both Macrobius and Julian: “Zeus, Hades, Helios Serapis: three gods in one godhead!”...
Horus Behedeti is actually the winged sun disk that presides over almost every tomb and temple scene...
This phrase, “sole god who made himself into millions/HH-gods,” simultaneously identifies Amun with Atum (“sole god”) and Shu (“who made the HH-gods”). If we understand the HH-gods to be the Ogdoad, then Amun is here the initial deity (Atum) from whom emerges Amun (Ba of Shu) who in turn creates the Ogdoad... Thus, the Coffin Texts theology provides the following sequence: Atum > Shu > Ogdoad; while the later Medinet Habu cosmogony proceeds as follows: Kematef (Amun) > Iri-ta (Amun) > Ogdoad. Therefore one might deduce the logical correspondence: Atum/Kematef (Amun) > Shu/Iri-ta (Amun) > Ogdoad. ...
The Ogdoad are often referred to as the “primeval ones,” or “first of the primeval ones,” and thus Amenope/Tatenen/Iri-ta is called “eldest of the primeval ones.” .. As the HH-gods correspond to the Ogdoad, this could once again be a reference to Amun as the creator of the Ogdoad....
Although this passage could be read “Khnum who made the Khnums,” it more likely refers to other “creator gods.” These creator gods appear at Edfu as seven ram-headed deities, who assisted in the building of the temple. However, they were also the children of Ptah-Tatenen, and thus can be associated with the Ogdoad created by Amun (Amenope/Iri-ta/Kematef)....
In earlier texts, Amun was simply a member of the Ogdoad or one who emerged from their primeval chaos. However, in the Graeco-Roman period, Amun as Kematef or Iri-ta actually fathers or builds the Ogdoad....
The Djed-pillar, often the “august Djed-pillar,” is closely associated both with the separation of heaven and earth and the subsequent creation of the world. ...
The equation made in the Hibis Creator Hymn between the surrounding wings and the fire of Amun-Re’s breath belongs to the topos of “Amun hiding himself within his iris.” Here the eye goddesses Isis and Nephthys are evoked, surrounding their lord with their wings/fire, except that Amun performs this action himself. A similar epithet applies to the newborn Horus, who is “‘lord of the course’ within the mhn.t serpent” (nb Hp.t Xn mHn.t)...
The association of the right eye with the sun disk and the left eye with the moon is fundamental to Egyptian religious texts....
Amun is technically hiding himself within his solar eye/iris...
The four-headed deity has many connotations. The main four-headed deity was the Mendesian Ram, thus the great “United Ba” of Re and Osiris. ...
the Mendesian Ram (= Re-Osiris) also connects the four-headed deity with the newly reborn solar deity in the morning. Closely related are the depictions of the four-headed deity surrounded by eight baboons, which we know refer to the Ogdoad... “Ba of Ba’s, most ram of rams, the Ogdoad praises his face.” The Ogdoad worships Amun-Re precisely in the morning, at his birth, and thus the four-headed deity is once again specified as the morning deity....
the second interpretation of the Mendesian Ram: the four elements combined in one entity: Re = fire, Shu = air, Geb = earth, Osiris = water. In addition, the number four signifies dominion over the cardinal directions....
“the face of a ram, four heads on one [n]eck” and being “open of ears.” Elsewhere at Hibis, the (four-headed) Ram of Mendes is addressed as the “Great Listener.”... that Plutarch and other Greek authors interpreted the name Osiris as meaning “many-eyed,” perhaps because of the sportive writing of the w3s-sceptre and the eye to write Wsir....
Amun hiding himself in his iris is a perfect expression of the differences between Amarna and Ramesside solar theology. Whereas Akhenaten worshipped the sun disk (Aten) itself, the later theology stresses the hidden and imperceivable aspect of Amun-Re. Amun-Re is not the physical sun that one perceives, but the “hidden Ba,” who travels within the sun disk, radiating his divine power throughout the universe. The luminous objects one sees is not Amun-Re, but rather his fiery uraeus goddesses who are equivalent to the feminine eyes of Amun. As the Great Amun Hymn tells us, he “hides himself within his iris,” while he “illumines by means of his marvelous wedjat-eyes” (col. 6). ...
Book of the Dead 162: For Egyptian deities riding/dwelling within the solar disk, compare the comments of Plutarch: “They (the Egyptians) tell a tale that Heracles, making his seat in the sun, goes round with it, and that Hermes does the same with the moon.”...
This appears in fact to have been almost a canonical iconic image of the transcendent “Amun within the eye/iris” in the Late Period, as it appears in the Kushite Book of the Dead corpus, the Nectanebid naoi, and countless magical papyri and stelae...
It is the goddesses of the solar eye that make Amun-Re’s light-power manifest in the physical world, and thus it is these goddesses enveloping Amun-Re that one sees when looking at the sun. ...
“hiding within the iris” theme: Amun-Re can be hidden by the fire of his uraeus goddesses. This is only natural, as in the constellation of Egyptian solar theology, dwelling within the physical sun disk, thus hiding within the light of the eye goddesses, is equivalent to being surrounded by the uraeus-fire, or the mhn-serpent itself. ... “god (hidden) within the eye” would share traits of the “god within the circle of fire.” ..
Although the eye goddesses of Amun-Re allow mankind to see, their fiery nature surrounds and clothes him, rendering his true form invisible to the world. In another sense, Amun-Re himself inhabits the eyes, and it is through this Einwohnung that they obtain the light-power they distribute to the mundane realm; thus, the sun disk is only the visible and material representation of the purely spiritual Amun, as expressed eloquently in the Creator Hymn...
Thus, the supreme deity with whom the deceased wished to identify with was the four-ram-headed deity, the “iris of the wedjat,” or the deity within the flames. As also mentioned above, the composite deities within the flame were closely connected with the ten Ba’s of Amun worshipped in the Invocation Hymn. The final detail of the hypocephali, namely the worshipping baboons, brings us back to the Hibis hymns, where even the name of the Ogdoad is written with baboons. This image of the simian Ogdoad worshipping Amun, the mysterious ram with four heads, parallel to Amun who hides himself within his iris, is precisely what features prominently in the center of the hypocephali, over the head on Late Period sarcophagi and coffins, and on countless magical objects (e.g., the Metternich Stela).....
Anglo-Saxon Paganism: Gods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlZN8-lwoMQ
SURVIVE THE JIVE
HATHOR IS THE HEAVENLY COW, MOTHER OF HORUS AND RA AND ALSO WIFE OF RA. SHE GOES BACK TO THE OLD KINGDOM PERHAPS TO PREDYNASTIC EGYPT. FESTIVALS DEDICATED TO OSIRIS AND HATHOR THE GOD AND GODDESS OF THE AFTERLIFE INCLUDED A FORM OF SHAMANISM WHERE INTOXICATION WAS PRACTISED TO ALLOW DECEASED SPIRITS IN THE UNDERWORLD TO COMMUNE WITH THE LIVING. NEITH WAS GREAT MOTHER PRIOR TO HATHOR. HATHOR FOLLOWS ROLE OF OTHER SIMILAR HEAVENLY MOTHERS OR EARTH MOTHERS PROTECTOR OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN, BIRTHING THE NEW SUN GOD, FERTILITY, LOVE, JOY, MUSIC, DRUNKENESS, DANCE. HATHOR THE HEAVENLY COW IS SIMILAR TO NORSE COW AUDUMBLA WHICH PRODUCED BURI THE FIRST GOD AND GRANDFATHER OF ODIN....
Hathor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor
As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra's feminine counterpart, and in this form she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.... “Mistress of the West” and believed she welcomed the dead into the Tuat....
Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, cobra, or sycamore tree.
Cattle goddesses similar to Hathor were portrayed in Egyptian art in the fourth millennium BC, but she may not have appeared until the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC). With the patronage of Old Kingdom rulers she became one of Egypt's most important deities. More temples were dedicated to her than to any other goddess; her most prominent temple was Dendera in Upper Egypt. She was also worshipped in the temples of her male consorts. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands such as Nubia and Canaan and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. In Egypt, she was one of the deities commonly invoked in private prayers and votive offerings, particularly by women desiring children. ...
Origins: Images of cattle appear frequently in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt (before c. 3100 BC), as do images of women with upraised, curved arms reminiscent of the shape of bovine horns.... Despite these early precedents, Hathor is not unambiguously mentioned or depicted until the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613–2494 BC) of the Old Kingdom, although several artifacts that refer to her may date to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100–2686 BC). When Hathor does clearly appear, her horns curve outward, rather than inward like those in Predynastic art.... A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the start of Egyptian history, both atop the palette and on the belt or apron of the king, Narmer.... The theology surrounding the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom, unlike that of earlier times, focused heavily on the sun god Ra as king of the gods and father and patron of the earthly king. Hathor ascended with Ra and became his mythological wife, and thus divine mother of the pharaoh....
Roles: Hathor's seemingly contradictory roles as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra reflected the daily cycle of the sun. At sunset the god entered the body of the sky goddess, impregnating her and fathering the deities born from her womb at sunrise: himself and the eye goddess, who would later give birth to him. Ra gave rise to his daughter, the eye goddess, who in turn gave rise to him, her son, in a cycle of constant regeneration.... As both the king's wife and his heir's mother, Hathor was the mythic counterpart of human queens. Isis and Osiris were considered Horus's parents in the Osiris myth as far back as the late Old Kingdom, but the relationship between Horus and Hathor may be older still. If so, Horus only came to be linked with Isis and Osiris as the Osiris myth emerged during the Old Kingdom....
Foreign lands and goods: Egypt maintained trade relations with the coastal cities of Syria and Canaan, particularly Byblos, placing Egyptian religion in contact with the religions of that region. At some point, perhaps as early as the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians began to refer to the patron goddess of Byblos, Baalat Gebal, as a local form of Hathor. So strong was Hathor's link to Byblos that texts from Dendera say she resided there. The Egyptians sometimes equated Anat, an aggressive Canaanite goddess who came to be worshipped in Egypt during the New Kingdom, with Hathor... South of Egypt, Hathor's influence was thought to have extended over the land of Punt, which lay along the Red Sea coast and was a major source for the incense with which Hathor was linked, as well as with Nubia, northwest of Punt....
Afterlife: Hathor was one of several goddesses believed to assist deceased souls in the afterlife. One of these was Imentet, the goddess of the west, who personified the necropolises, or clusters of tombs, on the west bank of the Nile, and the realm of the afterlife itself. She was often regarded as a specialized manifestation of Hathor.
Just as she crossed the boundary between Egypt and foreign lands, Hathor passed through the boundary between the living and the Duat, the realm of the dead. She helped the spirits of deceased humans enter the Duat and was closely linked with tomb sites, where that transition began. The Theban necropolis, for example, was often portrayed as a stylized mountain with the cow of Hathor emerging from it...
Iconography: Hathor was often depicted as a cow bearing the sun disk between her horns, especially when shown nursing the king. She could also appear as a woman with the head of a cow. Her most common form, however, was a woman wearing a headdress of the horns and sun disk, often with a red or turquoise sheath dress, or a dress combining both colors. Sometimes the horns stood atop a low modius or the vulture headdress that Egyptian queens often wore in the New Kingdom.... When Hathor was depicted as a uraeus, it represented the ferocious and protective aspects of her character. She also appeared as a lioness, and this form had a similar meaning. In contrast, the domestic cat, which was sometimes connected with Hathor, often represented the Eye goddess's pacified form. When portrayed as a sycamore tree, Hathor was usually shown with the upper body of her human form emerging from the trunk.... Hathor was sometimes represented as a human face with bovine ears, seen from the front rather than in the profile-based perspective...
Relationship with royalty: During the Early Dynastic Period, Neith was the preeminent goddess at the royal court, while in the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor became the goddess most closely linked with the king.... She may have absorbed the traits of contemporary provincial goddesses.... The emphasis on the queen as Hathor continued through the New Kingdom. Queens were portrayed with the headdress of Hathor beginning in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. An image of the sed festival of Amenhotep III, meant to celebrate and renew his rule, shows the king together with Hathor and his queen Tiye... After the New Kingdom, Isis increasingly overshadowed Hathor and other goddesses as she took on their characteristics.... Traits of Isis, Hathor, and Aphrodite were all combined to justify the treatment of Ptolemaic queens as goddesses....
Temples in Egypt: More temples were dedicated to Hathor than to any other Egyptian goddess. During the Old Kingdom her most important center of worship was in the region of Memphis, where "Hathor of the Sycamore" was worshipped at many sites throughout the Memphite Necropolis....
Festivals: Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of religious ecstasy, which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion. Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants in Hathor's festivals aimed to reach an altered state of consciousness to allow them interact with the divine realm. An example is the Festival of Drunkenness, commemorating the return of the Eye of Ra, which was celebrated on the twentieth day of the month of Thout at temples to Hathor and to other Eye goddesses. It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times....
[THOUT the first month of the ancient Egyptian and Coptic calendars. It lies between 11 September and 10 October of the Gregorian calendar. The month of Thout is also the first month of the Season of Akhet (Inundation) in Ancient Egypt, when the Nile floods historically covered the land of Egypt; it has not done so since the construction of the High Dam at Aswan.]
On the first day of the new year, the first day of the month of Thoth, the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight....
The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion. It took place over fourteen days in the month of Epiphi(eleventh month of the ancient Egyptian and Coptic calendars. It lasts between July 8 and August 6). The third month of the Egyptian calendar, Hathor or Athyr, was named for the goddess. Festivities in her honor took place throughout the month (between November 10 and December 9)....
Nubians in the south fully incorporated Hathor into their religion. During the New Kingdom, when most of Nubia was under Egyptian control... Amenhotep III and Ramesses II both built temples in Nubia that celebrated their respective queens as manifestations of female deities, including Hathor: Amenhotep's wife Tiye at Sedeinga and Ramesses's wife Nefertari... The independent Kingdom of Kush, which emerged in Nubia after the collapse of the New Kingdom, based its beliefs about Kushite kings on the royal ideology of Egypt. Therefore, Hathor, Isis, Mut, and Nut were all seen as the mythological mother of each Kushite king and equated with his female relatives, such as the kandake, the Kushite queen or queen mother, who had prominent roles in Kushite religion. At Jebel Barkal, a site sacred to Amun, the Kushite king Taharqa built a pair of temples, one dedicated to Hathor and one to Mut as consorts of Amun...
As an afterlife deity, Hathor appeared frequently in funerary texts and art. In the early New Kingdom, for instance, Osiris, Anubis, and Hathor were the three deities most commonly found in royal tomb decoration. In that period she often appeared as the goddess welcoming the dead into the afterlife.... Festivals were thought to allow contact between the human and divine realms, and by extension, between the living and the dead. Thus, texts from tombs often expressed a wish that the deceased would be able to participate in festivals, primarily those dedicated to Osiris. Tombs' festival imagery, however, may refer to festivals involving Hathor, such as the Festival of Drunkenness, or to the private feasts, which were also closely connected with her. Drinking and dancing at these feasts may have been meant to intoxicate the celebrants, as at the Festival of Drunkenness, allowing them to commune with the spirits of the deceased....
The enigmatic netherworld books of the solar-osirian unity : cryptographic compositions in the tombs of Tutankhamun, Ramesses VI and Ramesses IX
https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-152643
Abstract: The ancient Egyptians at times employed a non-standard list of signs and phonetic values, and the resulting texts may be termed “cryptographic” or “enigmatic”. Inscriptions based on these alternate sign lists, attested already during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, proliferate during the New Kingdom. By the Ptolemaic period, many of the formerly enigmatic signs and values had become part of standard hieroglyphic texts of the time. The exact principles behind Egyptian cryptography have remained obscure, and the debate, often vitriolic, has centered around the “normalized” cryptography of the Graeco-Roman temple inscriptions. Curiously, the earlier enigmatic texts, those which one might reasonably see as the progenitors of the later cryptography hieroglyphic system, have not entered significantly into the discussion. The present work demonstrates that the principle of acrophony, as understood by ֹ. Drioton, played virtually no role in the derivation of cryptographic values in enigmatic texts of the New Kingdom. Some of the most lengthy enigmatic inscriptions of the New Kingdom occur in the royal tombs. The three most extensive occurences of enigmatic writing appear on the Second Shrine of Tutankhamun, on the ceiling of Corridor G in the tomb of Ramesses VI, and on the “Enigmatic Wall” in the tomb of Ramesses IX. This study is the first detailed examination of the texts on the Tutankhamun shrine and in the tomb of Ramesses IX and contains the first treatment of much of the Ramesses VI Corridor G inscriptions. The present investigation has found these three enigmatic texts to be related common template, incorporating enigmatic texts, Book of the Dead extracts, and a figure of the giant unified Re-Osiris. Together they may be called the Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity. The treatises focus on the root of the eastern horizon, the place of the unification of Re and Osiris, the final triumph of the nocturnal sun and the lord of the dead, the place of the firey birth of the newborn sun and the final destruction of the damned. All of the enigmatic texts describe and complement the accompanying depictions and often deal with obscure religious concepts. Among these otherwise shadowy beliefs are the inverted entry of the blessed dead into the Netherworld and their subsequent righting; the headless form of the blessed dead – akephalios – whose head journeys with the bark of the sun until it is reattached to the mummy at the eastern end of the Netherworld; the physically giant form of Osiris and the blessed dead at the eastern horizon, linking and filling heaven and hell. The Ramesses VI version of the treatise depicts and describes the pharaonic ancestor of the Helleno-Egyptian magical being Abrasax/Abraxas, the giant, omnipresent personification of the blasting and avenging power of the sun. When these treatises are compared with other examples of cryptography of New Kingdom date, one may say that New Kingdom cryptography has strong solar associations. The enigmatic texts of the New Kingdom are associated with the liminal area of the eastern horizon, and their cryptography may serve – like the flagmasts before the pylons of Egypt’s temples – to warn the reader that the text he is reading deals in some way with the dangerous and awesome land which Osiris and Re, yesterday and tomorrow, become one at the time of the solar resurrection....
The signs of nlJ,b.t=f are, however, carefully chosen to convey the idea of the solar deity emerging from the lotus, nlJ,b.t (first sign), as the sun disk coming out of the lotus (the round bread atop the dish), the eye of the sun (the feline head), the final sign harking back to the primary meaning of the word-"neck. In a description of the four ram-headed form of the solar deity this is then an elaborate expression of the image of the ram head, symbol of the night sun, emerging from the lotus at dawn a mixing of the forms of day and night, and an expression of the perpetuum mobile of the sun....
The Ram-headed post is called tp-W "Head of Re," and it is to this head (tp) that the tp in the cryptic text just above it refers....
The ram-headed ba-bird within the disk is the solar deity traveling within his disk; so in the Book of the Creation of the Solar Disk, the great god enters the Netherworld within the solar disk:...
In order to express "Resident of the Disk," Egyptian made use of the terms imy itn, " he who is in the disk," and nb itn, "lord of the disk," epitheta having reference to the nocturnal form of the sun, traversing the night in the womb-disk, to be reborn out of the disk in the morning. The forms imy itn and nb itn are attested for Amun-Amun-Re, lord of the disk/inhabitant of the disk, the night-traveling sun god who makes transformations.
The god Amun seated within the disk of the sun is the ba of Re....
The ram, as the ba form of the sun in the Netherworld, ...
When the one who is in his disk calls to you, your ba's ascend towards the one who created you. ...
The depiction accompanying this annotation shows the light of Re entering into the standing mummiform figures, the corpses of the annotation. The ba' s whom Re is said to call appear as though hovering on waves of light before the standing mummies. The concluding line apparently means that the ba's, when summoned by Re, enter into the entourage of the sun, following alongside the other ba's already called into the following of Re. The voice of Re is perhaps depicted, or at least hinted at, by the flame leaping from the mouth of the uraeus, a depiction of the fiery call of the solar deity. The stars shedding light towards the mummies are parallel in position and function to the sun disks shining onto the foreheads of the rising mummies in the scene to the far right of the upper register (pi. 1 OA). The stars here, and the disks in pl. 1 OA, are representations of the light of the sun in the Netherworld. ...
This god, Osiris Foremost of the West, is <in> this fashion, the light of Re having entered into his corpse/ the utter darkness having been illumined beneath his soles, the mysterious image being beneath his feet His ba follows Re. ...
The names of the entities adoring the hark of the night sun into distinct groups. The first name, 1tny, relates the first being to the disk of the sun. The next two beings, Dw:;ty and 1mnty, bear names relating them to the Netherworld. There follows a deity Tms, "the red one," the solar aspect of the unified Re-Osiris as the Netherworld about tobe rebom. The next narne, St:;, alludes to the hidden corpse of the solar deity, the Osirian element which remains on the root of the eastern horizon. Together Tms and St:; refer to the two constituent parts of the giant unified Re-Osiris at the eastem cusp of heaven. Finally come two entities, If tj,{jy and IJ:;y, whose names describe the actions of the Netherworld denizens resulting from the presence of the solar deity...
That this deity is made up of various other deities, who become his constituent limbs, shows that this god in the hark is the creator god Re as the recreator of the world, again the giant deity of the eastern horizon at the time of the mystic union of Re and Osiris. The arms of the solar deity, as they appear in the armed disk of the Atonists, may well refer to the arms of the creator deity and the multiplicity of his creative acts and the multiplicity of his daughters, his feminine light-power manifestations....
Apep, the fallen, damager of the earth ...
In the central portion of the Schutzbild, four snakes emerge from the sun. In the scene to the right of the central disk in the Schutzbild, the legs of the snake-legged Re-Osiris, and the arms. which are the sisters Isis and Nephthys, all appear as serpents emerging from the sun. The serpents emerging from the disk of the sun in the center of the Schutzbild suggest the snakes depicted as if issuing forth from the disk of the sun in the introductory scene to the Great Litany of Re. ...
The place of the final fiery consumption of the damned is in the glowing red bowels of the east, at the root of the Osirian corpse-horizon from which the newborn sun must rise...
The snake and crocodile in the introductory scene to the Litany of Re are not fleeing the sun, but rather the sun sends them out as its emissaries to root out and punish evil in the Netherworld/tomb. The interpretation of the snake and crocodile as evil-punishing emissaries of the sun is supported by the images in the central portion of the Schutzbild. From a small disk above the large, central disk, the head of a crocodile emerges; a snake thrusts its head from the top of another small disk below the large sun. Here, in the Corridor G treatise, where fire breathing serpents spew flames onto bound enemies, the crocodile and the snake represent the solar deity's aggressive hatred of evil. The final and most persuasive evidence for the meaning of the opening scene of the Litany of Re comes from an apparently thus far ignored scene on the exterior foot end of a Late Period sarcophagus in the Cairo Museum. The scene in question, on the foot of the sarcophagus of the lady Tadipakem, CCG 29316 shows a variant of the opening scene in the Litany of Re: from a solar disk containing a scarab and a ram-headed human figure there proceeds a crocodile to the right, and a serpent to the left. Below the crocodile a text specifies the being as !Jnty smty sbJ imnty m dJ.t, "the !Jnty crocodile (Wb. III 308, 4) who protects the westem portal in the Netherworld." The serpent is described as w1mmw s1wty sbJ ('n!J m dJ. t, "the serpent of roasting flame (<w1m "dצrren, rצsten," Wb. I 251, 10) who protects the portal of the West in the Netherworld." In this late version of the opening scene of the Litany of Re, the crocodile and the serpent are labeled, and they are each termed a guardian of the portal of the West. ....
This "august ram-form" is the corpse of the Osiride king, identified with the b3-ram form of the Solar-Osirian deity. The association of the corpse of Osiris, the fd.t chest/sarcophagus, and the ram form of the sun on the second side of the Second Shrine of Tutankhamun (pl. 8), and the parallel of the rising ram in the tomb of Ramesses VIl332 show the king's corpse as the ram-form of the sun- a ram form of the god named in the accompanying annotation in the tomb of Ramesses VII l,z3. t R<", "corpse of Re." Osiris is the corpse of the solar deity otherwise called iwf, the ram-headed sun of the night....
Primarily, the lmy. w-p.t would be the gods and the lmy. w-t3 the dead. According to the ink annotation in the tomb of Ramesses IX, the king has been born for these entities "for he is yesterday, while he knows tomorrow." This is the king as yesterday and tomorrow, Osiris and Re, the sun of the sky and of the nethersky. Osiris can be called lmy-t; and the sun in the Netherworld can be referred to as t;y, "he of the earth," the chthonic sun....
On Osiris as the sun of the under heaven.... of the Book of Traveling through Eternity, in which Osiris is referred to as ltn n d;.tyw, the "sun disk of the inhabitants of the Netherworld."...
The solar hymn in Theban Tomb 23 describes three manifestations of the solar deity: Heaven bears your ba while raising up your glow; the Netherworld bears your corpse while concealing your d.t-body; and this land bears your image. The ba is in heaven, the corpse and d.t body are in the Netherworld, and the image is on earth.... The scarab and sun disk above the reclining, ithyphallic Osiris in the penultimate scene are the ba and glow of the deity in heaven; the ithyphallic Osiris is the corpse of the deity, and the Nehep snake behind the deity may allude to the d.t-body of the god. Ptah in the final scene receives an offering from Ramesses IX appearing in the guise of earthly ruler-Ptah is the image of the solar deity on earth....
Re as Heka suggests the Re-Shu of P. Louvre E 3229 col. 6, 1. 23, as discussed above. Heka sails in the bark of Re, ensuring the daily rising of the sun by means of his magic, assisting the solar deity to sail on the sandy spine of Apep when the waters run dry in the Seventh Hour of the Amduat. The hymn to Osiris in the tomb of Imiseba, which could serve as a description of the ithyphallic Osiris in the penultimate scene of this treatise, emphasizes the four-fold ba's of the sun, the Mendesian ram-form of the supreme deity. This band of text above the Enigmatic Wall also emphasizes the four bas of the deceased king as the Solar-Osiris....
"the westemers who are in the upper and Iower Netherworld." In the Book of the Earth, the Lower Netherworld (dJ.t !Jry.t) is parallel to the Place of Destruction (IJ,tmy. t),...
The ram-headed bird within the disk in the belly of the Osiride figure is Re emerging from Osiris;... This text accompanies a scene of the disk from which emerges the head of Hathor. Here the disk is the womb from which the new sun is brno, and the St3w is the Re-Osiris of the eastern horizon, to which Hathor shall give birth....
Pharaonic period... In the Schutzbild in the tomb of Ramesses VI the eye of the sun has become the disk head of the solar deity, and the snakes are indeed supports and links with the earth, having become the lower legs and feet of the god. The legs of the sun here depict the designation of the sun as phrr, "runner," and the twice attested designation of Amun-Re at Khonsu Temple as rnp (n) rd. ttry=f(y) r (zfz. "whose legs are more vigorous than (those of) millions." These are designations of the sun as one who travels the sky not in his bark, but as the great cosmic racer running his celestial course on giant, untiring legs. Stricker and Hornung related the snake legs of the Schutzbild deity to the iconography of the entity Abrasax/ Abraxas on magical gems from the Graeco Roman period.... Abrasax is the sun as an avenger As a symbol of the violent power of the sun,...
On the enigmatic wall of Ramesses IX the ithyphallic giant emphasizes the fecundity of the creative powers resulting from the union of Re and Osiris. The Schutzbild anguipede stresses the punishing powers of the deity at the eastern horizon, the area of the final punishment of the damned. Combining the far-off disk of the sun, and the serpentine legs of his fiery power reaching to the earth and below, the Schutzbild image also symbolizes the concept of the solar deity as one who is both far and near at the same time. Like the giant Re-Osiris at the eastern horizon, Abrasax depicts the magical solar deity with his head in heaven and his feet in hell. Like Re-Osiris, Abrasax is the sun of morning, day, and night. Abrasax is usually helpful, and he often bears an epithet designating him as a destroyer of giants; he can, however, be dangerous, and have his power tumed back on himself....
This is the solar horizon-dweller embodying Osiris, reaching out to himself dmdy, the unified one," Re-Osiris. As the Osiride element reaches up to the sun, so the solar element stretches out to unite with the Osiride king. In a passage from Medinet Habu, the king is himself the unified Re-Osiris, present now in both the upper and lower worlds, and present at the beginning of time as the undivided creator: the king who is in the horizon and who is in the Netherworld; the aged one who is in Nun. In the Twelfth Hour of the Amduat, the arms of Shu receive the disk of the sun at the end of the Netherworld; the emerging sun is later referred to as 3gb-wr, the primordial Inundation waters-the sun entering the arms of Shu is the swimming soul of Re. In the tomb of Ramesses IX the Osirian king is the eastern horizon, bridging the Netherworld and the upper world of the living; he is a giant figure representing the horizon and Nun, the borders respectively of this world and the next in the realm of eternity ({j,rw n!J,J:i). The one hand masturbates, and is a feminine element, a vaginal substitute for the self creating deity; the other hand receives the disk of the sun, and represents the male element Nun. At the same time, Nun can represent the overflowing ejaculate, the result of the other hand 's masturbation. In view of these aspects of the image, the reclining Osiride king represents the eastern horizon as the vulva of the sky goddess. For this reason, the union of Re and Osiris in the east can be seen as copulation,...
Along with the explicit statement that he is the "ba of Re with whom he (Re) himself copulates," the name 'Acclaimer of Re' also carries sexual connotations. The ~ry.t into which the hand of Osiris reaches could also be equated with Nut, from whose thighs the newly born sun emerges. The hand which receives the sun also lifts it up into the sky....
1) Words spoken by Osiris, foremost of the West, perfect of face, a high of Atef-crown; 2) lord of the two horns, sharp of tips, strong of heart, who seizes the rebel; 3) first begatten of Geb, chief in the womb of Nut, living Kheprer, 4) engendering of phallus, upraised of arm, bearer of the flail; 5) mysterious ram-form, residing in Mendes, winged-one/ chief of gods, august dignitary 6) who is in Heliopolis, the Official of the Mansion of the Benben, plentiful of provisions; 7) lord of cool waters, who conducts offerings to the akh's, eldest, sole one 8) of Hidden-of-Name, this fourth ram-form in the sanctuary (of Sokar), the combined form (of Re and Osiris) in Mendes....
The forms of Osiris detailed here, mysterious ram, a Netherworldly form, and a solar, Heliopolitan form, are foreshadowed already in the Middle Kingdom...wherein Re is said to rise in order to behold Osiris' perfection upon earth (a visible, solar manifestation), as Re sets in order to behold him "in the manifestations of the Netherworld." This hymn from the tomb of Imiseba is a paean to the great deity in his form of the Ram of Mendes, the four-fold ba. The doctrine of the Mendesian ram fits well the imagery of the union of Re and Osiris at dawn, and specifically the imagery of the enigmatic treatise in the tomb of Ramesses IX: Osiris is water, the hand of Osiris is Nun into which the solar disk enters; Geb is the earth, represented on the enigmatic wall by the horizon hill on which Osiris, the successor of Geb, reclines; Shu is the air, the space in which Re-Osiris supports the sky and makes the Netherworld deep; and Khepri is the light, the rising disk of the sun. In the Ramesses IX treatise, a comparison of the dead king with Geb is possible-the deceased king, Iike Geb, does join (!Jnm) sexually with his mother Nut....
the epithet nb J:zw.V3.t is an allusion to the lord of the place where Re and Osiris commingle at the eastem horizon. At dawn Re is at the front of the Dat-netherworld, an area which may be called [mt-the "forehall" or the "interior. In Pyramid Texts Utterance this area is the b,nwJJ:z, "interior of the palace," a name for Osiris himself:...
Just as there is a hnty-forehall in the eastern and western ends of the Netherworld, so there is an r~-palace at the western beginning of the Netherworld as well. In the "Decree of Osiris," the lord of the dead instructs the deities of the infernal regions that they should set the newly arrived deceased: r wslJ. t tp. t n. t imnt. t r~pw n nb-r-{j,r, "in the first hall of the west-that is the palace of the All Lord. Here the wslJ.t-hall is the forecourt of the palace of the universal deity....
Adoration of Re-Horakhty-Atum, when he rises in the eastern horizon of heaven, by the Osiris ... ; he says: "Hail to you, oh lord of (all) which is, Khepri who is in the flood, Horus the elder who resides in the horizon, the august creator, plentiful of light, Atum, the father of the gods, the All Lord, the bull, the lord of the palace."
CONCLUSION
This study has examined three religious treatises of the New Kingdom: a composition on the exterior of the Second Shrine of Tutankhamun, a treatise on the ceiling of Corridor G in the tomb of Ramesses VI, and the Enigmatic Wall in the tomb of Ramesses IX.
Following an overview of Egyptian cryptography, a characterization of the various forms of cryptography, and a classification of the various cryptographic texts of the New Kingdom, each of the three treatises was examined in detail. As a result, the three enigmatic compositions are seen to be related, three versions based on a common template. That template is a treatise composed of enigmatic annotations and representations related to the Netherworld Books of the royal tombs, with Book of the Dead excerpts interspersed, emphasizing the union of Re and Osiris at the eastern horizon and the turning over of the blessed dead at the cusps of the Netherworld....
These gods are in this fashion in their caverns which are in the Upper Region: lt is in the darkness that their corpses(?) exist.... These goddesses are in this fashion in their sarcophagi, they beholding the light of his disk. Their ba spirits enter after him, <their> corp<s>es <remaining in their places.> ... As for this god in this fashion: lt is against the one who is evil that he shoots....
some of the royal Netherworld Books may date from the Middle Kingdom or First Intermediate Period. Assmann recognizes a pre-New Kingdom tradition as the basis of the Amduat, but sees reflections of Eighteenth Dynasty and Nineteenth Dynasty theological trends in the Book of Caverns, the Book of Gates, and the Book of the Creation of the Solar Disk. Hornung would date the Amduat to the Second Intermediate Period, the Book of Gates to the time of Amenhotep III; he would date the Book of Caverns to the early Nineteenth Dynasty. Schott has dated the Amduat to the early New Kingdom, essentially the time when it first appears on blocks from the tomb of Thutmosis I. Grapow suggested that the Amduat was composed of several elements of differing dates; he took the Fourth and Fifth Hours of the Amduat to be the oldest portions of the composition. The origins of the versions of the Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity remain obscure.... Grammatically, the enigmatic texts accompanying the various recensions of the Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity are in Middle Egyptian....
Authentic Gatha Zoroastrianism
https://authenticgathazoroastrianism.org/
the society depicted in the poetic gathas /songs of Zarathustra, most closely resembles the Sintashta Culture and Arkaim Archaeological site in Southern Ural Mountains associated with Proto or Very Early Indo-Iranians. Also, the geographical locus of the Younger Avesta (Vendidad,) is the towering Hindu Kush Mountain Ranges and the World of Oxus Civilization in Central Asia/Northern Afghanistan....
The authentic traditional Zoroastrian account simply puts the birth of the inspired poet-prophet Zarathustra, at the end of 3rd age of limited time, and before the commencement of the 4th age... The early Iron age Yaz culture, (located in modern-day northern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan,) known for its practice of the Zoroastrian sky burial, is the first ever ancient culture associated with Zoroastrianism. The timing of the Yaz Culture in the early iron Age could only mean that Zoroastrianism must have been founded earlier in the late Bronze age circa 1750-1700 BCE....
Among Greek sources, Xanthus of Lydia, is the first person on record to write in Greek about Zarathustra and aspects of the ancient Iranian religion. According to Xanthus/Xanthos, the seer-prophet of ancient Iranian religion lived 6,000 years before Xerxes’ crossing of the Hellenspont or Dardanelles strait. Xerxes’ Greek campaign happened 480-479 BCE and 6000 years before that translates into 6480 BCE....
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The last ten days before the new year are called the lesser and greater Five (days) or Panjæ. The Greater Five or gáthá/song days, are the immediate five days before the Vernal Equinox. Bonfires are lit before the beginning of the gáthá/song days to welcome the visit of the blessed spirits. The bright flames not only impart joy and pleasant warmth but shall illuminate our paths for the year ahead. This bonfire tradition has been preserved in the happy festival of Chahrshanbe suri or the “Feast of Bonfires” celebrated during the “last Wednesday night” before the arrival of Spring.... Lying is a detrimental sin in Zoroastrianism. In a dialogue between Ahûrá Mazdá and seer-prophet Zarathustra, the Mindful, Wise Lord counts three abominable sins: one who is blind to truth, one who is deaf to truth, and one who is vengeful to others.”
Celtic origins of halloween and Zoroastrian beliefs and festivities
SAMAIN like the 4th gahanbar or thanksgiving festival of the Zoroastrians, marked the end of summer and the beginning of the cold season, when the herders led the cattle and sheep down from their summer hillside pastures to the shelter. This holiday marked the end of the harvest and the lunar cycle which fell nearest to the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.... The Gaels, like the Zoroastrians believed that the border between this world and the otherworld became thin before the new year; it thus allowed the spirits to reach back through the veil that separated them from the living....
BONFIRES played a large part in the festivities. People and their livestock would often walk between two bonfires as a cleansing ritual. With the bonfire ablaze, Each family then solemnly lit its hearth from the common flame, thus bonding the families of the community together, a custom which is still practiced among the Zoroastrian villagers of iran and other iranian peasants. Often bonfires would be built side by side, and the people would walk between the fires as a ritual of purification, the cattle and other livestock would be driven between the fires, as well. The same ritual of rekindling homefires from the great fire exists to this day among the Zoroastrians. Afterwards, ashes from the fires were sprinkled over the fields to protect them during the winter months. Similarly, the sprinkling of ashes over the fields is still alive among iranian peasants...This bonfire ritual is still celebrated by the iranian people during “chahr-shanbe suri” or the wednesday night before the new year. It should be added that in the modern “chahr-shanbe suri” dancing and drinking has been substituted with jumping over fires. The “Hiroem bowy” fires lighted by the Zoroastrians’ seem to be much closer to the ancient Gaelic customs.
The ancient Zoroastrian Mid-Spring festival, Celtic Beltane and the German Witches’ Night Hexennacht,
April 30th marks the beginning of the maiδyö.zarem “mid-spring” festival in the Avestan calendar. The mid-spring festival lasts for 5 days till May4th... Maiδyö.zarem is an “in between festival” maiδyö, “mid/in between” the spring and summer solstices...
Maiδyö.zarem celebrates the triumph of spring/sun energy over winter and frost. The saps of spring are honored in connection with the waxing power of the sun wheel. Household fires are re-lit from the sacred bonfires, and village fire temples....
The ancient Avestan maiδyö.zarem “mid-spring” festival shares many common rites with, and the same roots as the Celtic Beltane, and the German Hexennacht “Witches’ Night.”... Proto Indo Europeans...
In Zoroastrianism, the spiritual life and sacred worship are entwined with hearth-fire, kinship and Clan, home, happiness, pets and farm, fertility of the land, and magical rites/seasons of the year (Avestan yaar ratö.); all related in a sacred world order wherein mortal man lives as a member of his genos, and is governed by the laws of renewal, waxing power of the sun wheel, youthfulness, virility, beauty, nobility, much happiness, and reverence for nature.
The Winter Festival of Sadæ and the Discovery of Fire
major winter festival called sadæ on the fortieth day after the winter solstice. It is believed that fortieth (also known as “čellae” in Persian) is the most freezing night of winter. The festivities start on January 24th, culminate on January 30th, and conclude on February 3rd....In the ancient Iranian myth, the discovery of fire, the age of industry and knowledge, is said to have begun on the winter festival of sadæ.... It is narrated that by the Wondrous Providence and Foresight of the Ahûrás (The original God Powers, Titans,) the epic hero Hūshang wandered into a mountain cave. Upon seeing a snake, the epic hero tried to strike the reptilian creature with a firestone. The pyrite stone hit the walls of the cave and sparked a sacred fire. From that light/flame, human civilization, and technology begun.... In the Zoroastrian sacred lore, because of his discovery of fire and his learned powers, Hūshang is remembered as victorious over demon gods and the followers of lie.... At the conclusion of the festivities, the embers from the communal bonfire are taken to the sacred flame of the fire temple and hearth of each family and are merged with the eternal flame of the fire temple, and the fire of each family hearth.... the 40th day after winter solstice is dedicated to mithrá who assigns our “duties, responsibilities, and watches over our bond/contract with the Immortals.”... A characteristic aspect of Zoroastrianism is its veneration of light/fire. The elaborate cult of fire is one of the most distinctive and striking aspects of the Zoroastrian faith and goes back to the earliest periods of the ancient Indo-European spiritual beliefs.... Zoroastrian rites associated with solstices and equinoxes involve the lightning of fires and torches....
Water as a symbol of memory, deepest wisdom/inspiration in Zoroastrianism
October 26th marks the festival of waters....
A Day in the Life of an Ancient Egyptian Priest
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/egyptian-priest-0017166
Different Types of Priests: ...
At the top of the totem pole was the high priest or hem-nejer-tepi. The high priest was appointed by Egypt’s ruler. They were thought to be mediators between mere mortals and their gods. The position held a great deal of religious but also political power.
The next rank of ancient Egyptian priests was the lector priest or hery-heb/ cherished. It was their job to write down the religious texts, teach the other clergy, and recite the heka...
At the bottom of the hierarchy were the wab priests. They were responsible for the mundane but important day-to-day running of the temple. Need something fixed? Call a wab. Need help setting up a festival? Call a wab.
In between these extremes sat many different types of priests. Anyone who acted in service to the gods in any way was a priest of some kind....
The hour priests were astronomers responsible for the calendar and choosing which days were lucky /unlucky. They also interpreted omens and dreams. Then there were doctor priests in the guise of swnw (for medical problems) and sau (for magical/ spiritual problems).
Sem priests conducted funeral services and were responsible for mortuary rituals. It was they who mummified the dead whilst reciting spells. The sem were highly regarded as they could guarantee the deceased access to eternal life through their incantations....
Apart from the high priest, most priests were only part-time. The priesthood was divided into “watches” and only served for one month in every four. The rest of the time they lived their normal lives out in the community, often working as mid-level bureaucrats....
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. ZOROAUSIRIAN FITS SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN ATENISM AND ABRAHAMISM, OR JUST PRIOR TO ATENISM....
The Avesta and Zoroastrianism: The Creation, Disappearance and Resurgence of an Ancient Text
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/avesta-0017352
The Avesta is the religious text of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism was founded by the prophet Zoroaster at some point between 1500 and 1000 BC. The religion developed from an oral tradition, and its original prayers and hymns were composed in a language which was called Avestan, now long dead. Thankfully, the Sassanian Empire (224-651 AD) went to great lengths to write the Avesta down.... Ahura Mazda is said to have revealed the texts to the prophet Zoroaster, who recited them to King Vishtaspa....
The original Avesta has expanded over time. Besides Zoroaster’s original teachings, it now includes ecclesiastical laws, commentaries, and customs. New beliefs which came long after Zoroaster have also been added....
Zoroastrianism began as a polytheistic religion (a religion with more than one god). Ahura Mazda was seen as the king of the gods... Opposing Ahura Mazda and his retinue was the spirit Angra Mainyu and his forces of darkness.... Sometime between 1500 and 1000 BC, one of these priests rose up with new teachings. This priest, Zoroaster, claimed to have received a vision from Ahura Mazda. A being of pure light, Vohu Manah, had visited Zoroaster on the god’s behalf to inform him that Ahura Mazda was the one true god. It was Zoroaster’s responsibility to spread the word.... The priesthood turned against him, and his life was threatened, causing him to flee his home. Zoroaster soon arrived at the court of King Vishtaspa, who had him imprisoned for his heresy. Luckily, Zoroaster managed to win over the king by healing his favorite horse. Impressed by this miracle, King Vishtaspa promptly converted to Zoroaster’s version of Zoroastrianism and commanded his kingdom to follow suit. Zoroaster was no longer seen as a heretic, and his new religion began to spread rapidly.
The new religion revolved solely around Ahura Mazda, the all-good, all-forgiving, all-loving god. All Ahura Mazda wanted was for humans to acknowledge his love through good thoughts, deeds, and words. According to Zoroaster, his followers had to lead a virtuous life. This was done by honoring Asha (truth) and resisting Druj (lies)....
Zoroastrianism was adopted by the Achaemenid Empire...the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire . During this time, the Greek ruling class largely ignored Zoroastrianism... Parthian Empire were much bigger fans of Zoroastrianism... All evidence points to the Sassanians being the first Persian empire to make a written record of the Avesta.... The Sassanian Empire fell to the Muslim Arabs in 651 AD, and the Arabs soon began suppressing Zoroastrianism in favor of their own religion.... many fled the area altogether. Those who fled, the Parsees, settled in India where the religion still has a strong following. If it weren’t for the Parsees, it is likely that Zoroastrianism could have been completely lost to time.... 1723 AD that Europeans realized the Avesta had survived. A merchant traveling through India found a copy and brought part of an Avestan script back to Britain....
Gathas. These were personal songs of praise directed to Ahura Mazda....
The Vendidad is made up of 22 sections called Fargards that act as a kind of instruction manual for Zoroastrians to follow. Some of the sections consist of myths and religious tales; other Fargards are made up of hymns and rituals, and some include observances. The first three Fargards contained Zoroastrianism’s most ancient tales, some of which date back to the 8th century BC. These include the Zoroastrianism creation myth and the tale of King Yama and the salvation of the earth. The tale of King Yama is of particular interest to religious historians, as it can be seen as a potential inspiration for the biblical tale of Noah and the ark. Most useful for Zoroastrians, the Vendidad also included a range of instructions.... the Vendidad also offers more spiritual instruction. For example, there are instructions on how to deal with demons and how to use dogs to ward off evil spirits after death....
The minor texts are a collection of prayers used to ask different deities for help....
Zoroastrianism is the first monotheistic religion to deal with the themes of a messiah, heaven and hell, an apocalypse, and judgment after death....
Pegasus of Greek Mythology: Majestic Winged Horse of Mount Olympus
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/pegasus-majestic-white-horse-olympus-006182
Pegasus is the majestic flying horse of Greek mythology , best known for its association with the heroes Perseus and Bellerophon. Traditionally depicted as a pure white horse with wings, the Pegasus of Greek mythology was said to have been the child of Poseidon, god of the sea and tamer of horses, and the Gorgon Medusa. In the story of Perseus’ slaying of Medusa, one can find the narration of Pegasus’ birth. This winged horse later became the mount of Bellerophon, and can be found in the legendary stories about this hero’s exploits, including the slaying of the Chimera and his flight to Mount Olympus.
The Story of Pegasus in Hesiod's Theogony
In Hesiod's Theogony, it is written that “with her [Medusa] the god of the Sable Locks [Poseidon] lay in a soft meadow among the spring flowers.” The union between Medusa and Poseidon resulted in Pegasus and Chrysaor, who were born when Medusa was decapitated by the hero Perseus, the Greek hero: “And when Perseus cut off her head from her neck, out sprang great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus. He was so named because he was born beside the waters of Oceanus, while the other was born with a golden sword in his hands.”
According to Hesiod, Perseus flew off to Mount Olympus after birth, where the flying horse came to live in Zeus’ palace. There, Pegasus was given the job of carrying the god’s thunder and lightning. Alternative stories in Greek mythology suggest that Pegasus spent some time on earth before flying to Mount Olympus , home of the Greek gods. During this time, Pegasus served two heroes – Perseus and Bellerophon.
Following the death of Medusa, Perseus is said to have been travelling home when he caught sight of a maiden chained to a rock. This was Andromeda, the daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia. Andromeda’s mother had angered Poseidon by boasting that her daughter was more beautiful than even the Nereids.
In retaliation, the god punished the people of Ethiopia by first sending a flood, and then a sea monster to terrorize them. The only way to appease Poseidon was to sacrifice Andromeda, which was the reason for her being chained to a rock.
Perseus offered to rescue the princess, and deal with the monster, provided that he be given Andromeda’s hand in marriage. The king agreed to this, and when the monster came to claim the princess, Perseus turned it to stone using the severed head of Medusa. Perseus then marries Andromeda and they go on to have many children....
SWASTIKA IS A SUN SYMBOL USED BY THE SOLAR CULTS....
History of the 12,000-Year-Old Swastika: Origin, Meaning and Symbolism
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/swastika-origins-001312
Hindus and Buddhists in India and other Asian countries...ancient Greece and Rome, and can be found in the remains of the ancient city of Troy... The ancient Druids and the Celts also used the swastika symbol, reflected in many artifacts that have been discovered. It was used by Nordic tribes, and even early Christians used the swastika as one of their symbols, including the Teutonic Knights...
The word “swastika” is actually a Sanskrit word (‘svasktika’) meaning “It is,” “Well Being,” “Good Existence” and “Good Luck.” However, it is also known by different names in different countries - like Wan in China, Manji in Japan, Fylfot in England, Hakenkreuz in Germany and Tetraskelion or Tetragammadion in Greece....
Hinduism, the right-hand swastika illustrated below is a symbol of the God Vishnu and the Sun, while the left-hand swastika is a symbol of Kali magic....
The double meaning of symbols is common in ancient traditions, like for example the symbol of the pentagram (five pointed star), which is viewed as negative when pointing downwards, and positive when pointing upwards....
The earliest swastika -like shape ever found was uncovered in Mezine, Ukraine, carved on an ivory figurine which dates back an incredible 12,000 years. One of the earliest cultures that are known to have used the Swastika was a Neolithic culture in southern Europe, in the area that is now Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, known as the Vinca Culture, which dates back around 8,000 years...
...the "Goat" is a rebus representation of "Goth," the chosen people of Indara or Ia, Iahveh, or Jove, who himself is described in the Sumerian hymns as a Goat, the animal especially sacred to Indra, and to Thor in the Eddas....
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NIz4G7bgUiPzY14e9l0Yd39FS1POJos6/view?usp=drive_web
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MhPMupH6-MpDj8DF85-srP_rdih88NeK/view?usp=drive_web
Although calling him "I-a" (or Jove), that same word-sign was also read by the
Sumerians as In-duru, the "Indara" of the Hittites, the Indra of the Vedas, the "Indri-thedivine" title of Thor in the Gothic Eddas. And this name of Indara, we shall find later, is the source of the name and of the supernatural miraculous part of the Church legend of St. Andrew, the patron saint of the later Goths, Scyths and Scots....
Trojan Sumerians prayed to God and to his angel-son Tas or Tasia, to resurrect them through the "Wood" Cross of which they figure the effigy on their amulets. And we know, from the old Sumerian psalms, that the Sumerians credited the Son of the Father-god-("The Son Tas or Dach" or "Mar-Duk") with resurrecting them from the dead, as in the following line: "The merciful one, who loves to raise the dead to life - Mar-Duk "1 [Son Tas.]...
the Sea-Storm-wind Spirit Mer or Muru ...
Phoenicians, properly so-called--were monotheists, or worshippers of the One God of the Universe, whom they usually symbolized by his chief visible luminary, the Sun...
"Bel," or properly "Bil," is the title used for this "Sun" god in the Newton Stone
Phoenician inscription, in both its versions...as the title of their Father God ...
Sol is the Cornish and Gothic Eddic for "Sun" (also in Latin), which is now disclosed to be derived from the Sumerian Zal, "The Sun."}...
This battle-axe protective character of this X "Cross" of Indara (or Andrew) is also well seen in the Hitto-Sumerian seals, in which it is placed protectively above the sacred Goats of Indara returning to the door of Indara's shrine or "Inn," wherein we shall discover that the "Goat" is a rebus representation of "Goth," the chosen people of Indara or Ia, Iahveh, or Jove, who himself is described in the Sumerian hymns as a Goat, the animal especially sacred to Indra, and to Thor in the Eddas.... "Thor's Hammer" and thus disclosing the Sumerian source of the "Hammer of Thor" or "Indri" (or Indara) as figured by the British and Scandinavian Goths. ... the Swastika Sun-Cross is likewise oriented in Scotland in the St. Andrew's Cross tilt in its key-pattern style....
Indara himself is sometimes represented as a Goat or Deer (Dara) as the slayer or tamer of the demonist Lion, as is recorded also in the Vedic hymn which says: "Indra for the Goat [Goths] did to death the Lion." Yet so little is our modern heraldry aware of the facts of origin, meaning and function of the "Unicorn," that it now represents that invincible Aryan totem of the Sun Cross-and of Ia or Jove and Thor and of Heaven,...
The descendants of the Irish Matriarch Cesair and her horde appear to have been called Fomor, or Umor. This seems evidenced by the tradition that Cesair's was the first migration of people into Ireland and that the second was that of Part-olon, and that the latter was opposed by the ferocious tribe of "demons" called Fomor.
The term "Pict" appears to have been consciously used by the Romans (who are found to be the first users of it) in the sense of "painted" (pictus) with reference to the custom of these people to stain their skin blue with woad dye....
The term "Celt" or "Kelt" is entirely unknown as the designation of any race or racial element or language in the British Isles, until arbitrarily introduced there a few generations ago. Nor does the name even exist in the so-called "Celtic" languages, the Gaelic, Welsh and Irish. It is, on the contrary, the classic Greek and Latin title of a totally different race of a totally different physical type from that of the British Isles, and that word was only introduced there by unscientific philologists and ethnologists some decades ago.
The "Celts" or "Kelts" first appear in history, under that name, in the pages of Herodotus (480-408 B.C.). He calls them "Kelt-oi" and locates them on the continent of Western Europe....
from the evidence of the Stone Circles and the prehistoric cup-markings that Sumerian
Barat-Phoenician merchants had formed isolated mining and trading settlements in Albion before 2800 B.C....
the aesthetic use of the solar spiral ornament of Troy, the AEgean and Levant, and the solar "key-pattern" swastika (still surviving largely in modern decorative art) and Sun-Crosses of the Hitto-Phoenicians is noteworthy...
The Bronze Age was clearly introduced into Britain by the earlier Phoenician Mor-ite or Amor-ite exploiters of the tin mines many centuries before the arrival of Brutus, and probably before 2800 B.C....
In the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, "ahmi" means "I am".
The term "ahmi" in the Avesta is a significant element within the Zoroastrian scripture, specifically found in Yasna 60, also known as "Avesta Tandoorasti". "Vispa-khathra nam ahmi, pouru-khathra nam ahmi, khathravao nam ahmi," which translates to "I am the UNIVERSAL LIGHT by name, I am the LIGHT ETERNAL by name, I am the LORD OF LIGHT by name".
THE ZEND AVESTA HILITES OF THE HILITES:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iL0b0D6L_2OlSLjMWXK9D9-tCNwNXtsd/view?usp=sharing
The Sacred Books of the East
TRANSLATED BY VARIOUS ORIENTAL SCHOLARS
AND EDITED BY F. MAX MULLER
VOL. IV 1880
HILITES:
... the angel Vohu-mano,, or 'good thought,'...
...a good and an evil one, Ormazd and Ahriman...
...Zoroaster is introduced prophesying that the holy religion will be overthrown three times and restored three times ; overthrown the first time by Iskander, it will be restored by Ardeshtr ; overthrown again, it will be restored by Shapur II and Adarbid Mahraspand ; and, lastly, it will be overthrown by the Arabs and restored at the end of time by Soshyos...
...When the appointed time is come, a son of the lawgiver, still unborn, named Saoshyant, will appear, Angra Mainyu and hell will be destroyed, men will rise from the dead, and everlasting happiness will reign over the world...
...' the good Spirit,' Spenta Mainyu. In front of him and opposed to him slowly rose the evil Spirit, Angra Mainyu....
Atar means ' fire ; ' he is both a thing and a person. He is sometimes described as the weapon of Ahura, but usually as his son, as the fire that springs from heaven can be conceived either as flung by it, or as born of it. Azi Dahaka, 'the fiendish snake,' is a three-headed dragon,...
...Azi, the snake, appears from his adversaries : like Azi, he fights against Atar, the fire, and strives to extinguish it....
...Saoshyant, the son who is to be born to Zarathustra at the end of time, and to bring eternal light and life to mankind, as his father brought them the law and the truth....
...Not less holy was the earth, or, at last, it became so. There was a goddess who lived in her, Spenta Armaiti; ...
... the Avesta, and the belief of that scanty people, the Parsis,...the ideas which prevailed in Iran during the five centuries which preceded and the seven which followed the birth of Christ,...
... the angel Vohu-mano,, or 'good thought,'...
... languages of Persia, and, first of all, the oldest of them, the Zend. ...
the Avesta and Veda are not derived from one another, but from one and the same original...
Zoroaster is introduced prophesying that the holy religion will be overthrown three times and restored three times ; overthrown the first time by Iskander, it will be restored by Ardeshtr ; overthrown again, it will be restored by Shapur II and Adarbid Mahraspand ; and, lastly, it will be overthrown by the Arabs and restored at the end of time by Soshyos...
...All the main features of Mazdean belief, namely, the existence of two principles, a good and an evil one, Ormazd and Ahriman, the antithetical creations of the two supreme powers, the division of all the beings in nature into two corresponding classes, the limited duration of the world, the end of the struggle between Ormazd and Ahriman by the defeat and destruction of the evil principle, the resurrection of the dead, and the everlasting life, all these tenets of the Avesta had already been established at the time of Philip and Aristotle. ...
...the sacred book of Persia was written in a non-Persian dialect it had been written in the language of its composers, the Magi, who were not Persians. Between the priests and the people there was not only a difference of calling, but also a difference of race, as the sacerdotal caste came from a non-Persian province...
...Media as the seat and native place of the Magi....
...the priesthood was hereditary,...
...Zoroaster was born and received the law from Ormazd on a mountain, by the river Darega ', a name which strikingly reminds one of the modem Darah river, which falls from the Sebililan mount into the Aras. ...
...It is likely that it began with the conquest of Media by Cyrus: Cyrus is said to have introduced the Magian priesthood into Persia ...
...The original texts of the Avesta were not written by Persians, as they are in a language which was not used in Persia, they prescribe certain customs which were unknown to Persia, and proscribe others which were current in Persia. They were written in Media, by the priests of Ragha and Atropatene, in the language of Media, and they exhibit the ideas of the sacerdotal class under the Achaemenian dynasty....
...When the appointed time is come, a son of the lawgiver, still unborn, named Saoshyant, will appear, Angra Mainyu and hell will be destroyed, men will rise from the dead, and everlasting happiness will reign over the world...
...This god was named either after his bodily nature Varana,' the all-embracing sky,' or after his spiritual attributes Asura, 'the Lord,' Asura Yisvavedas, 'the all-knowing Lord,' Asura Mazdha, 'the Lord of high knowledge. The supreme Asura of the lndo-Iranian religion, the Heaven god, is called in the Avesta Ahura Mazda,' the all-knowing Lord;' his concrete name Varana, which became his usual name in India (Varuna), was lost in Iran, and remained only as the name of the material heaven, and then of a mythical region...
...He is white, bright, seen afar, and his body is the greatest and fairest of all bodies ; he has the sun for his eye, the rivers above for his spouses, the fire of lightning for his son ; he wears the heaven as a star-spangled garment, he puts on the hard stone of heaven, he is the hardest of all gods. He dwells in the infinite luminous space, and the infinite luminous space is his place,...
...Vohu-mano (good thought}...
...The first of them all was and remained Ahura Mazda ; but whereas formerly he had been only the first of them, he was now their father.... ...The Good was centred in the supreme god, in Ahura Mazda, the bright god of Heaven, the all-knowing Lord, the Maker, who, as the author of every good thing, was ' the good Spirit,' Spenta Mainyu. In front of him and opposed to him slowly rose the evil Spirit, Angra Mainyu....
§ 11. The war in nature was waged in the storm. The Vedas describe it as a battle fought by a god, Indra, armed with the lightning and thunder, against a serpent, Ahi, who has carried off the dawns or the rivers, described as goddesses or as milch cows, and who keeps them captive in the folds of the cloud. This myth appears in a still simpler form in the Avesta: it is a fight for the possession of the light of hvareno between Atar and Azi Dahaka. Atar means ' fire ; ' he is both a thing and a person. He is sometimes described as the weapon of Ahura, but usually as his son, as the fire that springs from heaven can be conceived either as flung by it, or as born of it. Azi Dahaka, 'the fiendish snake,' is a three-headed dragon, who strives to seize and put out the hvareno: he takes hold of it, but Atar frightens him away and recovers the light. The scene of the fight is the sea Vouru-kasha, a sea from which all the waters on the earth fall down with the winds and the clouds ; in other words, they fight in the sea above, in the atmospheric field of battle....
...Azi, the snake, appears from his adversaries : like Azi, he fights against Atar, the fire, and strives to extinguish it, and together with the Pairikas, he wants to carry off the rain-floods...
...Animals are enlisted under the standards of either the one spirit or the other. In the eyes of the Parsis, they belong either to Ormazd or Ahriman according as they are useful or hurtful to man; but, in fact, they belonged originally to either the one or the other...
...Killing the Ahrimanian creatures, the Khrafstras, is killing Ahriman himself, and sin may be atoned for by this means. Killing an Ormazdean animal is an abomination, it is killing God himself....
§ 37. Man, according to his deeds, belongs to Ormazd or to Ahriman. He belongs to Ormazd, he is a man of Asha, a holy one, if he offers sacrifice to Ormazd and the gods, if he helps them by good thoughts, words, and deeds, if he enlarges the world of Ormazd by spreading life over the world, and if he makes the realm of Ahriman narrower by destroying his creatures. A man of Asha is the Athravan
(priest) who drives away fiends and diseases by spells, the Rathaesta (warrior) who with his club crushes the head of the impious, the Vbtry~ (husbandman) who makes good and plentiful harvests grow up out of the earth. He who does the contrary is a Drvant, ' demon,' an Anashavan, 'foe of Asha,' an Ashemaogha, ' confounder of Asha.' The man of Asha who has lived for Ahura Mazda will have a seat near -him in heaven, in the same way as in India the man of Rita, the faithful one, goes to the palace of Varona, there to live with the forefathers, the Pitris, a life of everlasting happiness. Thence he will go out, at the end of time, when the dead shall rise, and live a new and all-happy life on the earth freed from evil and death....
In the Veda Yama, the son of Vivasvat, is the first man and, therefore, the first of the dead, the king of the dead. As such he is the centre of gathering for the departed, and he presides over them in heaven, in the Yamasidanam, as king of men, near Varona the king of gods. His Avesta twin-brother, Yima, the son of Vivanghat, is no longer the first man, as this character had been transferred to another hero, of later growth, Gayo Maratan...
...§ 39. But the life of the world is limited, the struggle is not to last for ever, and Ahriman will be defeated at last. The world was imagined as lasting a long year of twelve millenniums. There had been an old myth, connected with that notion, which made the world end in a frightful winter, to be succeeded by an eternal spring, when the blessed would come down from the Vara of Yima to repeople the earth. But as storm was the ordinary and more dramatic form of the strife, there was another version, according to which the world ended in a storm, and this version became the definitive one. The serpent, Azi Dahaka, let loose, takes hold of the world again. As the temporary disappearance of the light was often mythically described either as the sleeping of the god, or as his absence, or death, its reappearance was indicative of the awakening of the hero, or his return, or the arrival of a son born to him. Hence came the tales about KeresAspa awakening from his sleep to kill the snake finally; the tales about Peshotanu, Aghraeratha, Khumbya, and others living in remote countries till the day of the last fight is come; and, lastly, the tales about Saoshyant, the son who is to be born to Zarathustra at the end of time, and to bring eternal light and life to mankind, as his father brought them the law and the truth. This brings us to the question whether any historical reality underlies the legend of Zarathustra or Zoroaster....
....Zoroaster is no less an essential part of the Mazdean mythology than the son expected to be born to him, at the end of time, to destroy Ahriman. Zoroaster is not described as one who brings new truth and drives away error, but as one who overthrows the demons...
...he smites them chiefly with a spiritual one, the word or prayer. We say' chiefly' because the holy word is not his only weapon ; he repels the assaults of Ahriman with stones as big as a house which Ahura has given to him...
...Angra Mainyu himself is driven away by the stones he hurls at him. But the great weapon of Zarathustra is neither the thunder-stones he hurls, nor the glory with which he is surrounded, it is the Word.
In the voice of the thunder the Greeks recognised the warning of a god which the wise understand, and they worshipped it as wOuua t.,os &yye-Aos, 'the Word, messenger of Zeus;' the Romans worshipped it as a goddess, Fama; India adores it as 'the Voice in the cloud,' Vak Ambhrini,... So the word from above is either a weapon 'that kills, or a revelation that teaches : in the mouth of Zarathustra it is both... Any storm god, whose voice descends from above to the earth, may become a godlike messenger, a lawgiver, a Zarathustra...
...As he overwhelmed Angra Mainyu during his lifetime by his spell, he is to overwhelm him at the end of time by the hands of a son yet unborn. 'Three times he came near unto his wife Hr6gvi, and three times the seed fell upon the ground. The Ized N eriosengh took what was bright and strong in it and intrusted it to the Ized Anihita. At the appointed time, it will be united again with a maternal womb: 99,999 Fravashis of the faithful watch over it, lest the fiends destroy it.' A maid bathing in the lake Kasava will conceive by it and bring forth the victorious Saoshyant (Soshyos), who will come from the region of the dawn to free the world from death and decay, from corruption and rottenness, ever living and ever thriving, when the dead shall rise and immortality commence....
The word Asura, which in: the Avesta means 'the Lord,' and is the name of the supreme God, means ' a demon ' in the Brahmanical literature ; but in the older religion of the Vedas it is quite as august as in the Avesta, and is applied to the highest deities, and particularly to Varona, the Indian brother of Ahura. This shows that when the Iranians and Indians sallied forth from their common native land, the Asura continued for a long time to be the Lord in India as well as in Persia ; and the change took place, not in Iran, but in India. The descent of the word daeva from 'a god' to 'a demon' is a mere accident of language. There were in the Inda-Iranian language three words expressive of divinity: Asura, 'the Lord,' Yagata,' the one who is worthy of sacrifice,' Daeva, 'the shining one.' Asura became the name of the supreme God, Yagata was the general name of all gods. Now as there were old Inda-Iranian formulae which deprecated the wrath of both men and devas (gods), or invoked the aid of some god against the hate and oppression of both men and devas, that word daeva, which had become obsolete (because Asura and Yagata met all the wants of religious language), took by and by from formulae of this kind a dark and fiendish meaning....
...the Avesta is only a collection of fragments, it is just the fragmentary character of the Vendidid. The Vendidad has often been described as the book of the laws of the Parsis; it may be more exactly called the code of purification...
...§ 3. The first object of man is purity, yaozdau : 'purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good...
...The identity of the four-eyed dog of the Parsi with Kerberos and Yama's dogs appears, moreover, from the Parsi tradition that the yellow-eared dog watches at the head of the Kinvat bridge, which leads from this to the next world, and with his barking drives away the fiend from the souls of the holy ones, lest he should drag them to hell. Wherever the corpse passes by, death walks with it ; all along the way it has gone, from the house to its last resting-place, a spirit of death is breathing and threatening the living. Therefore, no man, no flock, no being whatever that belongs to the world of Ahura, is allowed to pass by that way until the deadly breath, that blows through it, has been blown away to hell. The four-eyed dog is made to go through the way three times, or six times, or nine times, while the priest helps the look of the dog with his spells, dreaded by the Drug....
§ 7. As the focus of the contagion is in the corpse, it must be disposed of so that death may not spread abroad. On this point the old Indo-European customs have been completely changed by Mazdeism. The Indo-Europeans either burnt the corpse or buried it : both customs are held to be sacrilegious in the Avesta....
The elements, fire, earth, and water are holy, and during the lndo-Iranian period they were already considered so, and in the Vedas they are worshipped as godlike beings...
...The fire was in that, as in the sacrifice, the god that goes from earth to heaven, from man to god, the mediator, the god most friendly to man. In Persia it remains more distant from him ; being an earthly form of the eternal, infinite, godly light, no death, no uncleanness can be allowed to enter it, as it is here below the purest offspring of the good spirit, the purest part of his pure creation. Its only function is to repel the fiends with its bright blazing. In every place where Parsis are settled, an everlasting fire is kept, the BahrAm fire, which, 'preserved by a more than Vestal care,' and ever fed with perfumes and dry well-blazing wood, whichever side its flames are brought by the wind, it goes and kills thousands and thousands of fiends, as Bahrim does in heaven...
...§ 9. Not less holy was the earth, or, at last, it became so. There was a goddess who lived in her, Spenta Armaiti; no corpse ought to defile her sacred breast : burying the dead is, like burning the dead, a deed for which there is no atonement....
...§ 10. Therefore the corpse is laid on the summit of a mountain, far from man, from water, from tree, from fire, and from the earth itself, as it is separated from it by a layer of stones or bricks. Special buildings, the Dakhmas, were erected for this purpose. There far from the world the dead were left to lie, beholding the sun....
...§ 23. Thus far for sins that can be atoned for. There are some that are an Anaperetha, 'inexpiable,' which means, as it seems, that they are punished with death here below, and with torments in the other world. Amongst the anaperetha sins are named the burning of the dead, the burying of the dead, the eating dead matter', unnatural sin, and self-pollution....
...the first land created was ' the Airyana Vaego by the Vanguhi Daitya,' and the last was the land by the Rangha. Now, the Vanguhi and the Rangha were originally the celestial rivers that came down from heaven (as two heavenly Gangis) to surround the earth, the one in the east, the other in the west (Bund. XX);...
...The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created, was the Airyana Vaego, by the good river Diitya. Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent in the river and winter, a work of the Daevas.
4 (9). There are ten winter months there, two summer months; and those are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, with the worst of its plagues. ...
...Second part (:u to the end). On the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature, Yima, being advised by Ahura, builds a Vara to keep there the seeds of every kind of animals and plants, and the blessed live there a most happy life under his rule.
The tale in the first part refers to Yima as the first man, the first king, and the founder of civilisation (see Introd. IV, 38); the tale in Yima, as the first dead and the king of the dead over whom he rules in a region of bliss, and of old myths about the end of the world. The world, lasting a long year of twelve millenniums, was to end by a dire winter, like the Eddie Fimbul winter, to be followed by an everlasting spring, when men, sent back to earth from the heavens, should enjoy, in an eternal earthly life, the same happiness that they had enjoyed after their death in the realm of Yima. ...
...Zarathustra had three sons during his lifetime (cf. lntrod. IV, 40 }, lsad-vdstra, Hvare-kithra, and Urvatad-nara, who were respectively the fathers and chiefs of the three classes, priests, warriors, and husbandmen. They play no great part in Mazdean mythology, and are little more than three subdivisions of Zarathustra himself, who was ' the first priest, the first warrior, the first husbandman' (Yt. XIII,). Zarathustra, as a heavenly priest, was, by right, the ratu in Airyana Vaego, where he founded the religion by a sacrifice (Bund. XXXIII and Introd. III,)....
2 The baresma (now called barsom) is a bundle of sacred twigs which the priest holds in his hand while reciting the prayers.- They were formerly twigs of the pomegranate, date, or tamarind tree, or of any tree that had no thorns, and were plucked with particular ceremonies, which alone made them fit to be used for liturgic purposes (cf. Farg. XIX, 18 seq.) ...
...' The contract entered into by simple word of mouth. 'The immortal Zartust Isfitamin asked of the good, beneficent Hormazd, " Which is the worst of the sins that men commit ? " The good, beneficent Hormazd answered, "There is no sin worse than when a man, having given his word to another, there being no witness but myself, Hormazd, one of them breaks his word and says, I don't know anything about it ... there is no sin worse than this " ' (Gr. Rav. 94)....
the fire, the son of Ahura Mazda....
21 (63). 'This is the best of all things, this is the fairest of all things, even as thou hast said, 0 righteous Zarathustra ! ' With these words the holy Ahura Mazda rejoiced the holy Zarathustra: ' Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good, that purity that is procured by the law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self with good thoughts, words, and deeds'.'...
The cleansing, the purification. When Zoroaster saw that man is able to escape sin by performing good works, he was filled with joy' (Comm.)...
60 ( 168). 'Ahura Mazda, indeed, does not allow us to waste anything of value that we may have...
...44 (92). 0 Maker of the material world, thou Holy One ! Whither shall we bring, where shall we lay the bodies of the dead, 0 Ahura Mazda?
45 (93). Ahura Mazda answered: 'On the highest summits, where they know there are always corpse-eating dogs and corpse-eating birds, 0 holy Zarathustra
46 (95). 'There shall the worshippers of Mazda fasten the corpse, by the feet and by the hair, with brass, stones, or lead, lest the corpse-eating dogs and the corpse-eating birds shall go and carry the bones to the water and to the trees....
When a man dies, hell and paradise, fiends and gods struggle for the possession of his soul : Astovidhotus, Vtzaresha, and the bad Vayu drag the souls of the wicked to hell; Mithra, Sraosha, Rashnu, and the good Vayu take the souls of the good to paradise (see Farg. XIX, a9 seq. ; Yt. XXII; Mainy8-i-khard II). The struggle lasts for three days and three nights (the sadis), during which time the relatives of the dead offer up prayers and sacrifices to Sraosha, Rashnu, and Vayu, to assure him their protection (cf. IX, 56). ...
A prayer in frequent use, and considered of great efficacy, generally known as the Ahuna Vairya or Honover. It was by reciting it that Ormazd in his first conflict with Ahriman drove him back to hell (Bund. I). Of paradise, as Vohu-mano (Good Thought) is the door keeper of heaven (cf. Farg. XIX, 31). ...
When Ahriman broke into the world he was repelled by Atar and Vohu-mano (Yasht XIII, 7'7; cf. Orm. Ahr.§ ro7).
Sraosba fights for the soul of the good after death...
... for purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good ; that purity that is procured by the law of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with good thoughts, words, and deeds....
...' The will of the Lord is the law of holiness...
...'Atar, the son of Ahura Mazda,... Fire, the son of Ahura Mazda...
...Anything that has been separated from the body of man is considered dead matter (Introd. V, 12), and is accordingly supposed to fall into the possession of the demon and to become the abode of death and uncleanness. Therefore, hair and nails, as soon as cut off, are at once the property of Ahriman, and the demon has to be driven away from them by spells, in the same way as he is from the bodies of the dead....
...25 (52). '" For the three excellent things be never slack, namely, good thoughts, good words, and good deeds ; for the three abominable things be ever slack, namely, bad thoughts, bad words, and bad deeds." ...
...51 ( 108). Then he shall speak unto Spenta Armaiti, saying : ' 0 Spenta Armaiti, this man do I deliver unto thee ; this man deliver thou back unto me, against the mighty day of resurrection ; deliver him back as one who knows the Gathas, who knows the Yasna, and the revealed law, a wise and clever man, who is the Word incarnate.
...16 (54). 'I invoke the most glorious holy Word. 'I invoke the sovereign Heaven, the boundless Time, and Vayu, whose action is most high. ' I invoke the mighty Wind, made by Mazda, and Spenta (Armaiti), the fair daughter of Ahura Mazda....
...27 (89). 0 Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Where are the rewards given? Where does the rewarding take place ? Where is the rewarding fulfilled ? Whereto do men come to take the reward that, in their life in the material world, they have won for their souls?
28 (90). Ahura Mazda answered: 'When the man is dead, when his time is over, then the hellish, evil-doing Daevas assail him ; and when the third night is gone, when the dawn appears and brightens up, and makes Mithra, the god with beautiful weapons, reach the all-happy mountains, and the sun is rising :
29 (94). 'Then the fiend, named Vtzaresha, carries off in bonds the souls of the wicked Daeva-worshippers who live in sin. The soul enters the way made by Time, and open both to the wicked and to the righteous. At the head of the Kinvad bridge, the holy bridge made by Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below.
30 (98). 'Then comes the well:shapen, strong and tall-formed maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can distinguish', who is graceful, who does what she wants, and is of high understanding. 'She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above the Hara-berezaiti; above the Kinvad bridge she places it in the presence of the heavenly gods themselves.
31 ( 102 ). 'Up rises Vohu-mano from his golden seat; Vohu-mano exclaims : " How hast thou come to us, thou holy one, from that decaying world into this undecaying one? "
32 (105). 'Gladly pass the souls of the righteous to the golden seat of Ahura Mazda, to the golden seat of the Amesha-Spentas, to the GarO-namanem, the abode of Ahura Mazda, the abode of the Amesha-Spentas, the abode of all the other holy beings.
33 (108). 'As to the godly man that has been cleansed, the wicked evil-doing Daevas tremble at the perfume of his soul after death, as a sheep does on which a wolf is falling,
34 ( 110 ). 'The souls of the righteous are gathered together there: Nairyo-sangha is with them; a friend of Ahura Mazda is Nairyo-sangha. 'Do thou thyself invoke, 0 Zarathustra ! this world of Ahura Mazda.'
Every one has a noose cast around his neck : when a man dies, if he has been a righteous man, the noose falls from his neck ; if a wicked, they drag him with that noose down into hell' (Comm.; cf. Farg. V, 8, and Int.rod. IV, 26).
The Kinvad bridge extends over hell and leads to paradise : for the souls of the righteous it widens to the length of nine javelins; for the souls of the wicked it narrows to a thread, and they fall down into hell ( cf. Arda. Vtrdf V, 1 ). This bridge is known in many mythologies; it is the Sirath bridge of the Musulmans ; not long ago they sang in Yorkshire of ' the Brig o' Dread, na brader than a thread' (Thoms, Anecdotes, 89)Cf. Farg. III, 34, 35 ; XVIII, 33 seq.
The soul of the dead, on the fourth day, finds itself in the presence of a maid, of divine beauty or fiendish ugliness, according as he himself was good or bad, and she leads him into heaven or hell : this maid is his own conscience (Y asht XXII).
The dogs that keep the Kinvad bridge (see Farg. XIII, 9).
Misvana gatva, another name of the heavenly spaces; it designates heaven as the abode and source of all blessings, of all savah, or saoka....
..." For he is just born the holy Zarathustra, in the house of Pourushaspa.... Down are the Daeva-worshippers, the Nasu made by the Daeva, the falsespeaking Lie ! "
47 (147). 'They run away, they rush away, the wicked, evil-doing Daevas, into the depths of the dark, horrid world of hell.
Ashem vohu: Holiness is the best of all good.' ...