In Heka, you have both your personal path and the paths walked by the Neter or glorious ones, and were thought even to be able to achieve immortality and even equality with the gods, more or less.

Could you give us a bit of an historical time-frame for this way of thinking? Are we talking ancient Egypt? Like 4000-5000 years ago? Well, the chronology is spotty, but it ended more or less with the Roman subjugation.

Is the cosmology represented in hieroglyphics then? It is indeed and differently in different necropoleis. There were multiple traditions of Heka even when it was a current tradition, and it shares something in common with Native American practice. Heka was a word used synonymously with medicine. One reason for engaging in Heka rituals was that they were healing. They could restore balance between you and the god that you have Isfet with.

I ponder Native American healing circles, mandalas. Hieroglyphs could be compared to mandalas easily, just without the circle motif.

People considered these “gods” to be very, very close, didn’t they, not just some lofty entity far, far away? Exactly. The gods weren’t hiding in the machine. They were the machine, not beyond it. The only thing beyond creation in the Egyptian tradition is chaos or meta-creation. In fact, Egyptian traditions likely did migrate to the Greeks and beyond.

A Heka, which was also the name of their priests, was a student of astrology as well as mathematics and medicine. Pythagorean mathematics to be specific. Of course as with many migrating deities, the male god Heka, as concepts were gods also in the Egyptian tradition, became the female goddess Hekate, and went from a pillar of the community to a spooky foreign power. Though to describe Heka as male is generally incorrect. Gender identity is rather mysterious in Egyptian lore.

Goddess of magic? Yes. Memetic influences could be considered gods, including their ability to influence beyond just the individuals holding the concept.

I haz a sacrifice 4 U? Actually appropriate, perhaps Bastet now enjoys cheezeburger sacrifices.

That would explain why people believed some things should not be spoken. You would be creating a god. Or creating a demon. That was another purpose Heka was used for, repelling foreign demons. Interesting and actually true. A lie can spread very quickly. Most public personas ascribed to our celebrities these days would have more of the demonic than the deific, even to the illicit sexualization aspect.

Heka could perhaps be at least intuited these days, if not reconstructed, from the Hekau. Hekau are hieroglyphic phrases. Statements in the picture concepts that illustrated their original world view. When describing an abstract idea involved the more or less direct depiction of elements of your environment, seeing the unity of the Ka probably wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination.

I wonder if it has any relation to haiku. I suppose that is possible. The Asian Kanji are more or less hieroglyphic in nature. Some similar form found throughout nature, and more and more archaeological evidence is pointing to culture having existed well before current reckoning thought it did.

Something like a Jungian archetype? Indeed.

“Unity of the Ka” feels to me like an isomorph. The eye, for example, found in many species of different phyla and orders. Exactly. Even current neuroscience supports a simple observation. The patterns formed in our brain that give rise to our experiences can be reconfigured, and are at times reconfigured in what might seem to be a spontaneous way. We do have “artifacts” or sensory webs that primarily exist only in what we think of as a narrow subset of the animal kingdom. Humans do have an echo location sense, and it can even be reactivated.

“Reptilian brain”? Yes, or Apophis brain? Sobek brain? Seen from the point of view of Heka.

So through Heka, the priest, for lack of a better term, activates or re-activates connections with the natural world, and then can intuit the Maat or order that either currently exists or needs to be restored.

Opens the gates of resonance? Exactly.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~