Well, I usually arbitrarily choose my New Year based on my birthday, which conviently is August 6th. But I have always had a second arbitrary option, which is the second Saturday of every August, which is when my little bayside community celebrates an annual street fair at the end of my block called Salt Water Day. I’d always wondered what it would be like to hold Wep Renpet on a day when the whole neighborhood was in party mode, and even the name Salt Water Day to mark the start of Innundation seemed to work, so this year I went for it and will be trying it.

So far, it feels very very off. I had a massive dream on the day of actual astrological Kemetic new year, (most likely forecasting the passing of my supernaturally good dog, who came into my life after a desperate prayer to Nebt-Het, and therefore when the gods that give suggest on their new year that this will be his twilight and Western passage, you tend to believe them,) and since then, everything I’ve done has felt too late.

It’s also going to be strange to be an entire week or more behind everyone else as they mark their holidays.

I’m preoccupied by a great many things.

And today is block party day, which I will try to connect to Wep Ronpet, but actually am not feeling on any level.

I feel like I messed up choosing this day, it all feels wrong and don’t think I’ll be doing this again next year. Next year I’ll go back to my standard August 6th.

And try not to think that rushing to start over and correct this wrong-ness means the last year of my dog’s life.

Just very out of kilter.

Has anyone ever recalculated their calendar and moved it mid year?

One of the drawbacks of a polytheist habit I believe is the thinking in associations:

I’m car shopping after having my old Corolla for 17 years, and if it’s not hard enough choosing a large machine and very long term, very expensive purchase, two of my current top options are a Prius C in a color called Sandstorm, and a new Corolla in a color called Falcon Gray.

Suddenly I’ve gone from “omg, I’m gonna have a payment again”, to “OMG WHAT DOES IT MEAN.”

And all because of paint colors.

I’m trying to make a point of posting here at least once a month, and it’s dawned on me that I never shared any pictures of my shrine, so yay!  Fun easy post.  Plus I finally figured out how to post in-line pictures here, lol.

My shrine is the top of a bookcase in a perfect niche next to a set of stairs/landing. I added a second level on top where I put out the offerings and prop up the ritual recitations/instructions to read off of, while the Eye/fire/incence offering goes before the naos on the lower level.

Complete shrine: 

Behind the bottom level, the banisters of the stair railings allowed me to hang a small travel fan to keep the incense and fire heat from collecting under the shelf, I turn it on and off before and after ritual. The Eye/fire/incense is offered on a lotus plate to recall creation and the Nun, sometimes if it’s one of the Zep Tepi holidays I heap some sand on it. The metal box is generic storage.

Almost all of my representations are simple print-outs on fancy parchment paper in plastic photo sleeves, which reside in the naos cabinet (I can’t think of what it’s called in Egyptian). The only 2 statues I have are small images of Heru-Sa-Aset and Usir which also live tucked away in there. The large Nebt-Het picture is from my beginning on this path; I didn’t know Kemetic ways of worshiping yet so I framed that up a few years ago and have heebie-jeebies about disassembling it now so it stays, though I wish it were a little smaller. It gets in the way when I put the cover on the lower level of the shrine.

When I want to close it, I have a piece of black cardboard trimmed to fit over the bottom and scored so it bends at the edges and closes up the sides as well.

Here’s a photo of the lower level:

The top level/platform is where I spread out the food & drink offerings. I have a decorative plate stand that I use to prop up whatever ritual I’m reading/performing, because my memory is not photographic or even good. The decanter is used for the water offering; it’s a lovely delicate glass thing my mother gave me for Christmas one year with a pewter heart on it, so it seems really fitting that it should be used for what’s basically the heart of the offerings, I love the thing & it’s my pride & joy shrine implement. Also up there, an ostrich feather to represent the offering of ma’at as well. The “placemat” cloth gets folded up and stashed in the lower level once the offerings are reverted and everything gets closed up. The additional candle because I feel like I have to draw their attention up there since the offering table is above and not in front of the shrine.

Picture of top level:

I have a padded storage bench along the wall in front of the book case to sit on while communing, and that is about it.  I love it; it’s home.

This is a post I meant to write months ago for Halloween, and I’m still dragging my feet on putting into practice.

In ancient Egypt as well as other places, people fashioned some of their gods after things that were dangerous and scared them and appropriated them with worship.  Sekhmet is probably the most famous one, what’s not terrifying about a stalking vicious lioness?  Or a scorpion, or a cold-blooded lurking crocodile?

I think living now, it’s easy to overlook just how frightening and present these nature based terror-deities were for the cultures that created them.  And because we have come to really respect and hold nature in high reguard, they don’t hold the same fear for us.  Only the awe and power comes down to our time.

That’s all well and good (…”but how did I get here?”…) but this past summer I found myself growing more and more aware of the complacency in which things formerly fearful have the potential to be held.  (“you have plants here in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good.”)

You see, I have, for 2 decades now, had recurring nightmares about Jurassic Park velociraptors.  And after trying on all sorts of traumas and fears onto them that they could represent, all of which were valid, came to the conclusion that they are simply all, any of them, at any given time.

Clever girl.

And it’s made me wonder and question if any of us are doing our practices justice being post-modern of ancient fears.  Especially if you have a compelling one.

So I have been turning the idea over in my mind of setting up a shrine to these stalking terrors, and feeding the velociraptors.

And I’m growing more and more respectful of them, and more on the verge of offering them this, as much as I don’t want them coming around.

But it isn’t easy.

After all, would you want to feed a clown?

Or light a candle and incense in front of an antique Bluette?

I love the original Jurassic Park.  Our fears usually ARE tied to things we formatively love, as the raptors hunting me farther from my family and from safety in the sprawling places in my dreams know.

And I’ve been meaning to give a place and a shrine for them.

I wanted to bring it up and encourage anyone who might read this to incorporate their own real current fears as well.

The ancient Kemetics apparently thought appropriating them was a necessary part of their practice.

The decision to make them concrete?  That’s the hard part.

Two recent posts over on Cards & Feather’s blog is really helping me crystalize some things I haven’t really sat down & thought about with this much clarity, so I”m rolling with it.

Their first post touches on the concept of “favor” and whether and how much it has to do in Kemetism: https://cardsandfeather.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/reaping-what-you-sow-does-religion-reward-even-if-it-doesnt/

I think because Kemetic religion relies on an active reestablishment of connection between the worlds, that the gods may be more *aware* of worshippers who pump more connection out there.

How it works with “favor” and intervention in general I think is…I do think the netjeru can effect things that aren’t outside of ma’ats ruling. Like they can influence you to drop your keys and find $20 in the grass, but it is a matter of ma’at whether you use it to buy drugs or donate to charity so they need to defer to will. They can throw a few pamphlets at you if they’re really determined, but ultimately the choice is yours because it’s the governed and under jurisdiction of this fundamental universal structure. I also think you can pray to them for clarity and suggestions in a situation, say choosing a job, and that this can be effective in improving your own perception, and they can even aid in with a perception for your benefit based on the universal order that doesn’t encroach upon it. (Hold on to those words a bit.) They aren’t omniscient unlike monotheistic faiths, though; they might have a view of what may seem to be the best outcome, for you and for your ma’at, but they would not necessarily know if the subway is going to derail on your way there, nor do I think saying ‘it was the disapproval of the netjeru” to explain such a death is valid. I’m sure the netjeru who’d helped you would be just as surprised at the outcome, being that it’s based on someone else’s decision to speed or fudge an inspection until they became aware it had happened.

The keyword that came up a lot in my mind, and in Card & Feather’s second related post: https://cardsandfeather.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/piety-relationships-and-what-if-i-make-it-all-up/

Is Perception. And that and awareness is the philosophical key to it all these posts I think.

It all relates to sia. The gods’ intellegence is perceptive. Our way of connecting with the gods often is very often via our humanesque peceptions of them. We, humans and gods, enact connection with each other through sia. We perceive them as humanish most times when we think of them/direct our awareness/our own human sia to them. And once they are aware of us, which worship encourages and establishes, they perceive us with their divine intellegence which probably suggests to them how best to engage with our requests and with us as individuals. If we are given the intellegence of a deity, it is their sia, perceptive awareness. They may not give their sia, their perceptive, active/accute intelligence, to a person at any given time, (and likewise we get busy). We can know they exist and know them in our minds at any time from our own perception once an awareness has been actived, though, (and likewise them). And so I think sia is at the crux of how humans and gods know and interact with each other.

I don’t know if I explained myself well, and don’t feel like I really hit half of what’s bubbling. I didn’t wake up expecting to post a blog, and it’s half-thought. But sia, sia-sia-sia, it feels infinitely more important than is usually focused on and gone over, for all these questions and probably more.

Here is the Hendalogy page for Sia that I have my knowledge of it from: https://henadology.wordpress.com/theology/netjeru/sia/

Together with this comprehensive paragraph on it from “Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods” by Meeks (p. 95-96, not all included here b/c it’s long,) that got me thinking about how it might relate to human/netjer relationships:

“The special faculty that enabled the gods to perceive an event the instant it occurred, together with the reasons for its occurrence, was called sia. Sia embraced all the possible knowledge brought into existance by the act of creation. Only the creator himself comprehended this knowledge in it’s totality. […] This capacity, which every god possessed in some measure, was a dormant kind of knowledge that became active in the presence of the event that brought it out; it enabled a god to grasp, in the fullest sense of the word, what was going on. It made it possible for already existing knowledge, reactivated by a signal, to emerge at the conscious level. “Sign of recognition” that is the basic meaning of the word sia in Egyptian. Not to have sia of something (or someone) was thus not a matter of not knowing it, but rather of not being able, or of no longer being able, to recognize or identify it. […] Sia operated like an absolute intuition irreducible to logical knowledge.”

There’s so much in the concept and I can’t shake the feeling that it may be a pretty fundamental theological one.

For the past year, I’ve been following the Kemetic Orthodox calendar, and it’s fantastic as a guideline because good friggin lord are there a lot of holidays.

As for when the New Year starts, though, I’m jumping traces for the next few days from their calculation to one for my own area.

I don’t actually know what I’m looking at on these things, but I’ve used the websites below to arrive at a ballpark:

http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/ancientastro/heliacalrisingsim.html

This one you choose your star, town’s latitude, choose the start of twilight, and the click around the dates bar. I like this one as a start because it’s visual data, you can see the fade that represents twilight.

After that getting the most likely few days, I went to this one:

http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york

It gives 3 seperate types of twilight, astronomical twilight, nautical twilight, and civil twilight. Civil twilight it’s already too light, so I jotted down the range between nautical twilight (I live near a bay so my elevation is close enough to sea level,) and astronomical twilight.

From there I jumped here:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/mrst.php

Putting in the earliest estimated date from the first step, it gives you star rise times for a few days. I chose the one closest to nautical twilight because that seemed closest to the visual time estimate in the first one.

…That’s the scientific sounding stuff. Whether or not it’s so, I have not a clue, I would need to figure out how to use the Skyview free app on my phone. And then I would need to wake up and go outside at 5:00 AM.

Conveniently for me though, August 6 is my birthday, when I’m used to mentally and emotionally starting a new year. So while its probably really August 4th or 5th here in the New York metro area, using the 6th neatly ties in to an existing mental schema and makes Nut’s children’s days a tidy 1 through 5.

Ultimately it’s a judgment call.

And hopefully Reverend Suida’s Daybook perpetual calendar project gets published this year at some point so the roster of holidays can become public and usable for years starting on other dates.

For now I just wait, well and truly in a no-man’s land between years for a few days.

Since it came up in a comment elsewhere: Some Kemetic hacks I’ve found for curbing potential bad behavior in myself.

My specific set of issues revolve around attention/inclusion and perceived neglect, and I’ve found that thinking on Set has helped me parse this a lot:

–If it legitimately wants to swallow your light, then destroy it; if anything less, then even if it feels like it’s stealing your thunder, ask yourself if it’s really only trying to share your sky.

Heru, or the Eye of Heru, has really helped with this as a topic of meditation, too:

–What is your injury cycle? Can you identify and learn to recognize it before you reach your blind spot?

They’ve been deeply and with time fundamentally effective to me as someone who gels with Kemetic mythology; since I finally sat down and wrote these out, I figured I’d share them and maybe they could be effective (and consoling) for other people, too.

Before coming to Kemeticism, I spent a little over a decade casually poking around Arthurian legend through the books of John and Caitlin Matthews.  Much of the wisdom gained through these legends, with their (varyingly spiritual) schematic of challenge-quest-fulfillment, and stressed by the Matthews’, was based around Celtic kingship myths, and a spiritual path geared towards envisioning one’s self as sovereign.

At first it seemed that this decentralized self-styling couldn’t be more of an antithesis to imperial, god-king ruled Ancient Egypt.  From what I’ve gauged so far, I don’t know if that needs to be entirely so.  The ancient Egyptians were democratizing life after death to more individuals than the pharaoh as early as the Middle Kingdom, with the goal in death of becoming downright god-like, not to mention a very Egyptian sensibility of modesty.

I was first introduced to the Kemetic deities as worship-able via a book that viewed Heru as universal.  When I arrived at revival polytheism as a serious, historically informed religion I hid that out of embarrassment.

After trying so hard to jettison what I’d absorbed, one of the things that occured to me during my hiatus from WordPress and working with Wesir (who is somehow not a deceased Fisher King, for reasons that are still kinda beyond me :) was the epiphany of Why? Why not structure your faith around where your path has taken you?

We are all the heirs of life, living Herus. You can adopt the full use & length and breadth of Kemetic myth structure by aligning yourself with/as Heru, and it is even built in to the faith to do this sort of heka.

I know a big part of why this philosophical angle isn’t broached more is probably because Kemetic Orthodoxy is so prevalent, which really does have a reigning Nisut and a set of structures which define that office.  And Nisut with elaborate state rituals isn’t what I’m meaning.

But especially after recent discussions about the uneven give and take there can be between deities and devotees, I don’t think there’s anything to be lost from bearing yourself as a minor princeling of your own god-forsaken corner of bumblefuck. It presents the expectation of a certain level of dignity.

And that’s why so many of us drifted to polytheism, isn’t it? We were given options here, options that empowered ourselves that weren’t available in the presiding religions. That dignity is a big part of Afrocentric Kemeticism. And yet Pagans seem to stay away from this interpretation, preferring self-effacing service than…service as a vassal, basically.

From what I’ve very tentatively found, the gods are used to ridiculous humans thinking they’re important. There’re deities I wouldn’t try it with, (Amun-Ra? FUCK NO.) but Wesir enthusiastically encouraged presiding over your own patch of life while you have it and Heru-sa-Aset has been positively generous the last month or two that I presented myself to him and set out to explore his myth cycle, use his stories. I’ve gotten a raise; I’ve won money in Las Vegas; the response has been very positive. In return they have a worshipful and respectful accolyte.

Of course, my god phone is the equivalent of an early 90’s pager. This is all declared from a space of relative newness. If people don’t usually take this tack, there’s probably a reason that I haven’t absorbed yet.

But…from what I can tell there’s really nothing wrong with working with sovereignty/kingship myths in this faith, and it’s sort of my new way of exploring.

It’s a good way to engage with the material.

I was super fortunate enough to celebrate the Beautiful Feast of the Valley with other Kemetics this past Saturday with a group from the House of Netjer/Kemetic Orthodoxy, with a picnic in Central Park followed by a ritual indoors last minute since the weather was dicey.  Bit on the expensive side with the $30 train fare, and exhausting barrelling through city crowds all day, but worth it.  It was really good to observe a holiday with others.