Daily Rituals of the Pharaoh
If you read the
pyramids node, it mentions the ancient Egyptian's pharaoh
performed
several rituals to
ensure stability in the universe with the stars and
this node explains the ancient Egyptians fascination
with the stars. Anyway,
order and
stability were a gift from the gods. For example, the
Pharaoh performed a ritual every morning before the
crack of dawn that ensured the sun
would rise and fall everyday.
Ancient Egyptians believed the sun traveled around the earth every day and during the
night it was making it's journey through the underworld. So before the
earliest light, the
pharaoh and all his
highest priests would meet in a special room where the pharaoh
would take a fetish called a "
ben-ben" that was a small pyramid-shaped stone. The sun
god Ra would enter this and the pharaoh would help him on that journey. You could
think of this sort of like
Voodoo (although Voodoo has been horribly misenterpretated over the years), where they re-enact things on a small scale to cause it
to happen on a large scale through-out the land. Although the one big difference is that
the Egyptians didn't believe they were just acting out the motions or putting on a little
play. They believed that it actually happened during the ritual they performed; that Ra
actually did enter the small pyramid stone. The word "fetish" has a completely different meaning to
archaeologists. If you look up the word in a dictionary you will see the meaning "representation"
which
is true but when the pharaoh believes he actually
coaxes a god into his little stone, it has a different meaning.
A couple other things the pharaoh did to bring success to Egypt: well, armies did not win
wars. The pharaoh did. The
military success of Egypt was
supposedly linked to
the king directing the
appropriate energy to the army and giving them the strength to
win. Everyone was born with this energy, it's just that the king had much, much more of
it. Also, the king and his high priests kept a "secret garden". He kept the garden very
carefully protected and well
tended to. This was to ensure the agricultural growth of
Egypt.
So, you see the King was not just a lazy bum who sad around eating grapes all day. He
worked very hard, got up very early, and thought he was important. Everybody else
thought he was important too. The very fact that he was thought of as important is
important itself. Without forms of
massive communication it was very difficult to get the
word around everywhere. Even having people read
hand-written messages aloud in every
town was very effective or efficient. And with such a huge empire that grew constantly,
how would keep up a feeling of comradery throughout the empire? Well, basically Egypt
was run on
rumors; the rumors that the King was winning wars and helping everyone
farm. Last but not least, he was the reason the sun rose and set everyday! Also, after
working on the king's pyramid every single flood season, people got used to getting
things from the government and eventually the government was taxing the people so
much that it had a
huge surplus. So it
redistributed around the kingdom. It continued
this practice until basically you gave the government everything you had and people
became completely reliant on the government for food. You couldn't survive as a farmer
without your
food regiment from the government.
Now let's go back to the pharaoh's
sun ritual. Now even further back to the legend of
how the world was created. Why use the
pyramid stone to represent Ra? Before the
creation of the world, there was only darkness, except for the primordial waters called
"nun" and the creator god "Amen" (who was later fused with Ra to become
Amen-Ra)
created
himself from the nun. Then a mound of dirt
arose from the waters and
light came from it. So the pyramid is either this
mound of dirt that rose out of the nun or
the pyramid could represent the light from the sun (sun=Ra). You can visualize a sun at
the
point at the top of the pyramid. In fact, pyramids used to have granite capstones
(they looked like they were gold but they were just painted with gold powder mixed in
with some liquid) that would shine brightly from the early morning light until the sun set
in the evening. This could definitely be a
representation of the sun. And if you look on
the back side of a
one dollar bill you a pyramid with a huge eye on top of it. What's
coming out of the eye?
Rays of light!
I repeat if you look at the
pyramid node, it shows a few examples of the shape of the
pyramid being used as a modern-day "ben-ben".
An Original Work of BigHoliday.