-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-12-23 13:16:14 EST, Archarya writes:
<< Horus was a SUN GOD, and these various characteristics listed are those of
the SUN GOD, which the December 25th birthdate alone is enough to prove.
So that's the first point where Das Goat is wrong and doesn't even display
common sense. In fact, he apparently doesn't understand that Horus is a
SUN GOD, which even the most basic books will tell you. >>
Everything Archarya says she makes so "simple," it's exasperating ... Horus
was not really a "sun" god. The TWO "eyes" of Horus, that god's most
ubiquitous icon apart from the predatory falcon, represent sun AND moon -- as
befits a deity who was always first and foremost a SKY god, and a god of the
DAY sky and of LIGHT in particular. It's Re who was the "sun" god -- and for
Horus to be thought of at all as "solar," he had to be COMBINED with Re,
"Re-ified," as occurred in a later age. The ONLY sun-god who journeyed
through the "underworld" after his "death" at sunset, who traversed the night
sky in the Pyramid Texts, in the Prt Em-Hru ("Book of the Dead") and the Book
of the Am-Duat, was explicitly Re, the enemy of Apepi, serpent of darkness.
In no text in Egypt was Horus EVER described as making any equivalent kind of
"solar" journey.
Also, Osiris was never identified as the sun. He has, however, been equated
with the moon --mostly from being cut into pieces and then reassembled, a la
the waning and then waxing moon-- although properly, the moon was the sphere
of the god Thoth, who was sometimes referred to as the OTHER eye of Horus, a
sky god. To the Egyptians, the moon was, as a rule, MALE in gender, just as
their oldest "solar" deity was, in fact, a sun-GODDESS, Sekhmet. Osiris
ruled fertility and the fertilizing waters of the Nile:
his icon shows a mummified man colored GREEN, with reeds sprouting from his
body
His father Geb, from whom he inherited the throne of "king of the gods," or
at least the rule of Egypt, was likewise an EARTH god, portrayed reclining
beneath his wife the SKY goddess Nut -- mother of the twins and opposites
Horus (day sky) and Set (night sky).
Nut and Hathor were dual forms of the same cow-form sky-goddess -- Hat-hor
("home
of Hor," Horus) was Horus' wife, just as Nut was his mother, and
SKY-goddesses both
When the Egyptian religion was in its heyday, it was the Age of Taurus, when
the Sun entered the sign of the Bull at the equinox -- so cow Hathor was
portrayed with a solar disk headdress, representing the sun between her
horns. In that same age, the Sun at the summer solstice, the
brightest-hottest day of the year, was in the sign of Leo, the lion -- hence
the sun-GODDESS Sekhmet and the twin lions, either as the Akriu or as Shu and
Tefnut (Tef-NUT, wife of the god of celestial light, was also leonine in
form) , who represented those two points where the sun rose above and fell
below the horizon.
In the Horus myth, Horus strikes off his mother Isis' head and replaces it
with a COW's head (reflecting, again, Nut and Hathor) -- because the sun at
the equinox rose in the
sign of Taurus. Does that fact make ISIS, therefore, a SUN goddess?
Was Osiris, the dying and resurrected god, the "sun"? No. Was Horus "of the
two eyes" --who was never slain but who was, in the form of the child born to
Isis from Osiris, "reborn"-- the "sun"? No. (How could HORUS be "reborn"
from OSIRIS' seed?) Was Isis, the bride of Osiris and mother of "child Horus"
[the ELDER Horus was Isis' BROTHER, one of the FIVE children of Geb and Nut,
alongside Osiris, Set, Isis and Nepthys, and therefore the UNCLE of "child
Horus"] the moon? Not originally -- but in later times, only thanks to the
GREEK and later ROMAN syncretism of ALL foreign goddesses as "mother"/"moon"
goddesses -- because to THEM (in contrast to ancient Egyptians and Sumerians)
the sky-deity HAD to be a "male" and the earth "female."
(The Greeks were the first proponents of an allegedly "original" and
"universal" religion, manufactured for the express purpose of universalizing
GREEK culture, and they were
not above twisting foreign deities out of shape in order to make them "fit"
this project. Hence, anything that the GREEKS said about the gods of Egypt
must be taken with a big grain of salt, because the texts as written by
earlier EGYPTIANS contradict them.)
Even Re, generally accepted as the "sun" god, was not entirely "solar" in his
character, since, in order for him to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the
Egyptians to whom he was introduced as a relative LATE comer, Re had to be
identified with OLDER gods such as
Atum (he who first emerged from the watery chaos of Nun to become "creator")
and Ptah "the smith," for example, neither of whom had any purely solar
characteristics.
(According to the interpretations of some, Re may have represented the POLE
star ...)
But even assuming Re to be the sun, for the sake of simplicity, Re is never
explicitly said to have DIED, even though he is portrayed in the texts as
growing old and weak
and death-like as he begins his journey below the horizon, into the night sky
among the invisible stars below, as he passes through the hours of the
"underworld." Nor was he ever portrayed as REBORN, only as rejuvenated. In
contrast to SET --the "evil" god of the night sky (his Thigh was located near
the pole star) and as such the enemy of both Osiris and day-sky god elder
Horus-- who WAS slain, sacrificially, by Horus no less, and yet who was
understood to somehow RETURN -- inasmuch as Horus and Set ruled
an Egypt symbolically divided into south (light) and north (dark) halves,
alternating in their rule of ALL Egypt at summer and winter, like Yin and
Yang in the annual cycle of
the year, and in a lifetime, as "young" pharaohs replaced "old" pharaohs on
the throne, (as Set did vis-a-vis Osiris and Horus in turn vis-a-vis Set).
After the "evil" god Set was identified with Apepi, the ancient serpent-form
enemy of Re, and thus made the SUN's arch enemy, it was Re who, being "God,"
had to be "ageless and eternal," and SET who had to be perpetually slain and
reborn -- "Darkness" conquered by "God," only to return for another bout in a
later cycle, daily or annual. In that case, the dying/reborn god was not
only NOT "solar," he was EVIL, the ADVERSARY of the sun-god. To repeat, Re
never died and was certainly never slain, and Horus, though symbolically
"reborn," never died or was slain, so neither of these alleged "sun gods" fit
the "Christ" model at all.
One can't blithely identify each god with every other god --"everything is
everything"--
because, for the Egyptians, "sun," "sky," "day," and "light" were separate
and distinct concepts, even though related. For example, Shu was a "light"
god -- "light" without form, whether as stars, planets, sun or moon. Shu was
the father of Nut, the goddess of the night sky, her black body covered with
stars. Nut was the mother of Horus (day sky), Osiris, and Isis. Osiris and
Isis were the parents of "child Horus" (who, by the way, was often shown with
a topknot, in the image of a more ancient MOON god!). And back at the
beginning, identifying him with Atum, RE was father of Shu and Tefnut. So
WHO, EXACTLY, in this large extended family of different gods, is THE "sun
god" here?
And that's only scratching the surface of the argument, citing the EGYPTIAN
sources.
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