Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 6

I do wonder, after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem,” whether language has indeed enabled these ancient stories to be drawn out of our unconscious in ways to help us understand who we are, where we came from and what we’ve tried to do to ensure our survival as a species. I ended Part 5 with the Mesopotamian story of Marduk.

In this part, Part 6, I will go through the Egyptian story of Osiris, Isis and Horus but there are a few other things I’d like to include before I get there.

I’ve written briefly in past parts of Do We Know Why We Know about the Nephilim, Anakim and Rephaim. In the article that started this series—A Changing Frame-Of-Reference—I wrote, “And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included.” I also included all three in Part 4 when I wrote, “the soil beneath the earth’s surface,” or how Sheol from (Psalm 6:5) is defined. The Sheol known as the abode of the Rephaim or the dead, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name two of several instances where the giants are mentioned in the OT. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead,” while other names of these giants from this ancient text include the Nephilim and the Anakim. Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim.

That these giants mentioned in numerous places throughout the OT piqued my curiosity, when the pyramids are not mentioned at all. Why is that? What were the authors’ intentions or the hermeneutics behind including the Nephilim, the Rephaim or the Anakim? We may never know. But recently I discovered that in another book not included in The Bible was The Book of Enoch that includes writing about the Nephilim at length.

What I find interesting here is the apparent association of Enoch, who is mentioned several times in The Bible, to Thoth (the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing) and part of Osiris story I will soon talk about. Enoch is also associated with the Greek god Hermes—messenger of the gods. Together the three represent the figure Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great). Poking my head a little ways down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I had written about Giordano Bruno who was executed for his ideas around an helio-centric galaxy in Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know, who was one that thought Hermes Trismegistus was a pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity. There were several other Christian writers including Augustine who predicted the same thing in their writings.

I’m still in the rabbit hole. Hermes Trismegistus seems may be associated with Atlantis but more of that will have to come in my next update. But some more on Enoch from Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Enoch was one of only two people God took to heaven without them dying. The other was Elijah 2 Kings 2, “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal.”

I will investigate further The Book of Enoch in coming articles but do you know why God took Enoch and Elijah to heaven without them dying? Some believe they are the two people mentioned in Revelations 11:3 that will witness end times, “And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” Leave it to say there’s more to come.

But it’s time to get on with the story of Osiris, Isis and Horace.

Osiris was an old king who had established the Egyptian state when he was young. He was great hero but had become archaic and stubbornly blind. Though he represented the embodiment of Egyptian custom and tradition, which is what the “pyramid” had come to represent, he no longer saw the world as he should, given his position. Osiris, being old and unseeing of what he should, represents culture, as culture seems to be an essence that is old and deliberately blind; culture always seems to be this way. It’s a construct of what came from those who are now dead, the dead who have stopped living and are out of date. Being dead they can’t update themselves, and the living inhabit their corpse like in the Marduk story where the gods inhabited their father Apsu’s corpse, the story I describe in my last article Do We Know Why We Know Osiris is old and not seeing what he should and stubbornly won’t look where he knows he should.

Osiris doesn’t have the energy or the spirit to deal with his brother Seth, who is a scoundrel, a precursor to the western idea of Satan. Osiris knows this but underestimates his brother’s malevolence and strength. Seth wants to be the ruler and take over the kingdom.

In reading history, every stable society is threatened by this stubborn blindness and malice. Every bureaucracy becomes stagnate and lethargic. History has shown this in the rise and fall of empires like the Roman and Ottoman but also in the business world with fortune 500 companies of limited life spans (i.e. Digital Equipment, Compaq). Mention DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) or Compaq to anyone under 30 years of age and they don’t know who you’re talking about. I wrote a paper on what makes a company sustainable years ago in holding what made them successful in the first place (as a start up) being quite opposite to what keeps them going in a sustainable way (systems and procedures).

Osiris ignores Seth. Seth waits in the wings for Osiris to one day make a mistake or show his weakness. When he does, Seth is ready and pounces. He kills Osiris and then cuts him up into pieces that he spreads across the entire Egyptian state. The Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris’s body. Now Osiris is a god and can’t actually die that represents the inherent spirit of structure that can’t be destroyed either; there’s always structure, as the new one replaces the old one. The structure may be different but it’s still structure and always returns. Structure can be hurt and broken into pieces like Osiris; things fall apart because they get old and are under minded by something else. It seems to be what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. Not unlike their predecessors in Mesopotamia with Marduk. The pieces of Osiris are spread over Egypt so he can’t get himself back together; things fall apart and can’t be brought back together.

But the spirit of Osiris lives in the pieces. Order is demolished and chaos emerges in Isis. Isis is Queen of the Underworld. She is chaos. She’s also Osiris’s wife. Osiris and Isis (order and chaos) are together like Apsu and Tiamat from the Mesopotamian story in my last article. The order of Osiris collapses and up comes chaos: Isis—searching. She’s looking for order; chaos cries out for order. Isis goes all around Egypt that’s in a state of chaos, trying to put Osiris, her husband, back together. She finds Osiris’s phallus and uses it to make herself pregnant. The pieces of Osiris are still alive and unite with chaos to produce something new—a new order. That’s the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and its resurrection, or coming back to life. Isis is pregnant and goes back down into the underworld to give birth to Horus on the advice of Thoth, god of wisdom, as he knows that Seth will try to kill her child. Horus is the son of the great mother and the great father.

A quick side note on Thoth, who I mentioned earlier, being connected with Enoch in Hermes Trismegistus, who is also said to be an engineer from the destroyed Atlantis.

Horus is known as the Egyptian eye and a messianic figure. Much of the mythology that described Horus parallels the Christ story from the Judeans coming out of Egypt and Christians emerging from the Jewish community. There’s influence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian thinking apparent in the development of later ideas on organizing society. Paintings of Isis with Horus on her lap seem similar in content and form to Mary holding infant Christ. The Holy Mother of God and the hero described as a metaphor by Joseph Campbell. This is not only a Christian motif but goes much deeper. “It’s a human motif,” as Jordan Peterson describes.

Isis gives birth to Horus and Horus grows up outside the kingdom in the underworld. He sees what differentiates him from his father Osiris, and like Marduk from my last article, he can see, see like a falcon and is symbolized as such. Birds of prey have better sight than humans.

Horus comes back to fight Seth. A significant difference between Horus and Osiris is that Horus doesn’t underestimate Seth malevolence and knows what he is up against. Horus battles Seth to get the kingdom back. While Horus and Seth are fighting, Seth tears out one of Horus’s eyes. Horus’s eye is torn out but still he defeats Seth banishing him to the nether regions of the kingdom. Horus can’t kill him because, like structure, the malevolent destructive force that threatens structure never dies. It’s always there and can only be removed temporarily.

Horus is king. King god. With his removed eye, one might think he’d pop it back in his head and take his place in the upper most position amongst the pantheon of the gods. But that isn’t what Horus does. He goes back to the underworld where Osiris’s metaphysical existence lies. Horus hands Osiris his eye giving Osiris sight. Osiris regenerates himself only with vision. Horus and Osiris now linked together return to the world to rule jointly. The Egyptians came to believe that the pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit, was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris and gave the pharaoh sovereignty. The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians I wrote about last time, were trying to puzzle out who should lead civilization. Who should be pharaoh and what does the pharaoh have to be in order for things to work and order to be restored? The pharaoh has to be awake to evil and chaos while embodying Egyptian tradition to place him at the highest pinnacle of society’s structure.

This in a way is similar to the battle of the gods through the centuries with the expectation that the highest possible moral virtue would emerge as a consequence of that competition. That’s the eye on the top of the pyramid that hasn’t yet been part of my pyramid discussion. What’s at the top of the pyramid isn’t the same as what the rest of the pyramid is made of. The pyramid is a representation of structure. Something rises to the top of the pyramid—the eye in this case. The Egyptians figured out what puts something at the top of the pyramid is attention, paying attention. Keep your eyes open; keep watch, which is not the same as thinking. The thing about human beings is that we can see, better than any other mammal. The capacity to see is what we use in the world. More than fifty percent of the human brain’s cortex—the largest part and the ultimate control of—is organized around vision. The brain of most animals is organized around smell. We stand up right and can see a long distance. The human ability to see is what saves us and what saves human communities and that’s what the stories like Marduk and Osiris seem to be trying to tell us.

Why didn’t storytellers just say so? They likely didn’t know how. It’s taken a long time—forever—to figure out. We’re still trying to understand it.

This extends back to the first article I wrote for Do We Know Why We Know and the Cormac McCarthy essay, “The Kekule Problem.” McCarthy describes that our unconscious has been whirling around and developing for two million years or longer and language infected us with the primary purpose to help us understand our unconscious, for less than a hundred thousand years. That is virtually all but an instant in time when we know our universe is 13.8 billion years old; earth is 4.5 billion years old and life on earth is 3.5 billion years old. However long our unconscious has been developing 13.8 billion years or 3.5 billion years the development of language is a mere, smidgen of an instant of that time; we’re still in the beginning of the beginning stages.

I’m still finding out lots. For me, it’s an interesting journey. I hope next to look deeper into Enoch with the potential of learning more on the Greek story of Gaia and Uranus. Maybe some more even on Atlantis. We’ll see.

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More will come in my next post.

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