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qosOne of the concepts that fascinated me the most during my graduate studies in comparative religion was that adherents of different religions inhabited different conceptual worlds or cosmos. How time is perceived and experienced subjectively is one of the key elements of those differing cosmologies. The classic example is that Christian time is linear, moving from creation through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, and ending in an Apocalypse. A human being gets one birth and death as Creation progresses toward the Second Coming. Time as I've usually seen it in Pagan belief tends to be perceived as cyclical, with creation/birth-maturation-death-rebirth conceived of as ongoing cycle, even for humanity.
One of the holes in my religious knowledge is Egyptian myth and spirituality. I have enough of a familiarity to not be completely lost when a reference is made, but no expertise to speak of. The Passion of Isis and Osiris is already helping with that, and one of the fascinating insights of the early part of the book is the ancient Egyptian concept of time.
As Sir Alan Gardiner noted in his Egyptian Grammar, the ancient Egyptians had only two verb tenses. These revealed the singleness of an event or its repetition -- they recognized only the "present" or the "eternal present." Although the "present" could have happened today or yesterday, the significant distinction in the two verb tenses was revealed in a difference in whether perceived events occurred in man's time or in the gods' time.
The dual notion of time permeated all of Egyptian life. The mud brick and thatch houses of the people were temporary affairs, never meant to last, for the Nile floods came annually and washed everything away. But the houses of the gods, the temples, were built of stone. They were to last for eternity, the lifetime of a neter.
This is fascinating to me just in itself -- but beyond that, it strikes a chord with what I experienced of Isis yesterday.
One of the unexpected qualities of that encounter was the very distinct impression that while the death of Osiris and the grief of Isis and their painful separation is eternal, so is the eternal now in which they are joyfully alive together. She showed me that very powerfully, and although I didn't dwell on it at the time, it now strikes me as being very different from the impression that I get from The Descent of Inanna in which the ongoing state of Inanna and Dumuzi is the cyclical togetherness and separation of his sentence to spend half a year in the underworld. Ditto Hades and Persehpone. Their cycles of change/movement are part of the essence of their stories. That's not what I got from Isis. It's as if joy and grief coexist eternally.
Of course every year the divine calendar celebrates the succesion of events that the myths recount, but each time it happens, it's as if for the first time -- or so it seems to me.
Hurm. When I started writing this, what I'd just read about time seemed to suggest that during my brief contact with Isis I'd picked up on something that was -- in my experience -- unique to Egyptian cosmology, not something that I would have expected. What I just read confirmed that it wasn't just me, it was an actual aspect of these beliefs, adding an extra sense of validity to the theophany.
At least maybe. . .
One of the holes in my religious knowledge is Egyptian myth and spirituality. I have enough of a familiarity to not be completely lost when a reference is made, but no expertise to speak of. The Passion of Isis and Osiris is already helping with that, and one of the fascinating insights of the early part of the book is the ancient Egyptian concept of time.
As Sir Alan Gardiner noted in his Egyptian Grammar, the ancient Egyptians had only two verb tenses. These revealed the singleness of an event or its repetition -- they recognized only the "present" or the "eternal present." Although the "present" could have happened today or yesterday, the significant distinction in the two verb tenses was revealed in a difference in whether perceived events occurred in man's time or in the gods' time.
The dual notion of time permeated all of Egyptian life. The mud brick and thatch houses of the people were temporary affairs, never meant to last, for the Nile floods came annually and washed everything away. But the houses of the gods, the temples, were built of stone. They were to last for eternity, the lifetime of a neter.
This is fascinating to me just in itself -- but beyond that, it strikes a chord with what I experienced of Isis yesterday.
One of the unexpected qualities of that encounter was the very distinct impression that while the death of Osiris and the grief of Isis and their painful separation is eternal, so is the eternal now in which they are joyfully alive together. She showed me that very powerfully, and although I didn't dwell on it at the time, it now strikes me as being very different from the impression that I get from The Descent of Inanna in which the ongoing state of Inanna and Dumuzi is the cyclical togetherness and separation of his sentence to spend half a year in the underworld. Ditto Hades and Persehpone. Their cycles of change/movement are part of the essence of their stories. That's not what I got from Isis. It's as if joy and grief coexist eternally.
Of course every year the divine calendar celebrates the succesion of events that the myths recount, but each time it happens, it's as if for the first time -- or so it seems to me.
Hurm. When I started writing this, what I'd just read about time seemed to suggest that during my brief contact with Isis I'd picked up on something that was -- in my experience -- unique to Egyptian cosmology, not something that I would have expected. What I just read confirmed that it wasn't just me, it was an actual aspect of these beliefs, adding an extra sense of validity to the theophany.
At least maybe. . .
