when reading is writing

Today: a blog post. It's hot again. I've just been for a run and I feel sweat actually trickling down my bare torso--ticklish. Through the open window: the rumble of a small front-end loader on Keith Road, which has been blocked off to enable the loader to ferry manured dirt up the block. Translucent green leaves sparkle across the brick patio. The large flat windows of the neighbors' cubic townhouse are plunged in inscrutable shade.

Morning notes: From Eden to Exile, A History of Technology.

On to the main course. I opened up chapter 17, which I keep thinking wishfully is almost done. And so it is, I think--in terms of length. But conceptually I'm not there yet.

My musings on the precessional ages had come to focus more specifically on the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt. This was the site of the famous Zodiac of Dendera, a circular ceiling-plaque depicting constellations, planets, and the so-called decans (ruling symbols of each of the 36 10-day ancient-Egyptian weeks--one for each nome, or administrative district). The original plaque was carried off in 1820 by Sebastien Saulnierin and now resides at the Louvre in Paris. A reproduction has been installed in the temple. John Anthony West, following R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz and some others, believes that the temple, which was built over a much more ancient temple site in the 1st century BC, was intended, in part, to mark the beginning of the Age of Pisces.

When I first came across a reference to the temple and its zodiac a year or two ago, I filed away the information, just in case it might come in handy. I didn't have any existing story plans for it, and it wasn't anywhere near what I was working on at the time, so I just parked it mentally somewhere in the back, in the dark. But, as noted in a recent post, the Age of Pisces is my project, so I knew I'd have to look into it more at some point.

Today I realized I was at that point. I could not progress with my current scene without knowing more about this temple. So: I opened a Word document I had made based on the text in a very good web-page I'd found on the temple at Dendera, and started reading. I sighed. Reading, not writing.

Pretty darned interesting reading, though. I revisited the web-page. There are images of Cleopatra VII and her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV, carved on the rear wall of the temple. Hmm. Starting to feel very relevant. What does this mean? I enjoyed the feeling of folding this information into my brain, like, say, eggs into pancake batter. Something is cooking, and I don't know how it's going to play out. I read all that material, including a very good article by a certain Joanne Conman (can I trust that name?), who seems well versed in the astrology of the period.

Then I got wondering: who exactly was Hathor? I knew she was an Egyptian goddess of women, fertility, and childbirth--but what else? I went to my floor-to-ceiling office bookshelves. Where to look... I pulled out Middle Eastern Mythology by S. H. Hooke--couple of mentions but nothing much. Life in Ancient Egypt by Adolf Erman--some stuff, mainly quoting ancient texts. Grimal's History of Ancient Egypt...a few mentions but the focus of the book is wrong. I tried The Great Mother by Erich Neumann...fair amount of material, but wrong orientation--psychological. Nothing in The Golden Bough. How about Joseph Campbell? Does he talk about Hathor? Must. I pulled out Oriental Mythology, the volume of The Masks of God in which I knew he deals with Egyptian mythology. To the index: yes! Pages 52-53, 54ff, 75f, 90-91, 93, 100, 111, 128.

I opened my good old Penguin paperback (bought in December 1980) to page 52 and found myself in the middle of Campbell's discussion of the Narmer palette, an especially ancient (2850 BC) two-sided palette depicting a King "Narmer" (= Scorpion, thought by many to be the legendary Menes) conquering the Northern Kingdom and thus uniting Egypt into a single state under himself. I felt a little burst of excitement, because I remembered being especially impressed with his discussion of the Narmer palette last time I'd read the book, maybe three or four years ago.

Since the text was already highlighted, I went back to the previous subheading, The Hieratic State, and started keying. Yes, I thought with pleasure as I typed--jackpot. Here is a partial extract:

On both sides of the Narmer palette there appear two heavily horned heads of the cow-goddess Hathor in the top panels, presiding at the corners. Four is the number of the quarters of the sky, and the goddess, thus pictured four times, was to be conceived as bounding the horizon. She was known as Hathor of the Horizon, and her animal was the cow--not the domestic cow, but the wild cow living in the marshes. The neolithic cosmic goddess Cow. Hathor stood upon the earth in such a way that her four legs were the pillars of the four quarters. Her belly was the firmament. Moreover, the sun, the golden solar falcon, the god Horus, flying east to west, entered her mouth each evening, to be born again the next dawn. Horus, thus, was the "bull of his mother," his own father. And the cosmic goddess, whose name, hat-hor, means the "house of Horus," accordingly was both the consort and the mother of this self-begetting god, who in one aspect was a bird of prey. In the aspect of father, the mighty bull, this god was Osiris and identified with the dead father of the living pharaoh; but in the aspect of son, the falcon, Horus, he was the living pharaoh now enthroned. Substantially, however, these two, the living pharaoh and the dead, Horus and Osiris, were the same.

The "house of Horus," the cow-goddess Hathor, was not only the frame of the universe, but also the land of Egypt, the royal palace, and the mother of the living pharaoh, while, as we have just seen, he, the dweller in the house, self-begotten, was not only himself but also his own father.

Hathor--the "house of Horus"--was the frame of the universe, and simultaneously the land of Egypt, which was considered the earthly reflection of the night sky. Hmm. Cleopatra regarded herself as an incarnation of Isis, the mother of Horus. That would be Ptolemy XV. Which would make his father, Osiris, Julius Caesar. Hmm...

These thoughts tumbled through the space of my mind, not really alighting anywhere, but feeling suggestive, provocative, while I typed and typed from Campbell's book. I typed till I was fed up with it, and then some. Finally I broke for lunch.