The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars... By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s... The poets made all the words... For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius... Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which... have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it... Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things... This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study...
On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying... Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet [for it is he who] unlocks our chains... The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze... Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false... Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one... The symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem... The mystic must be steadily told—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it... The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 329–36
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If hieroglyphic writing may be described as a series of concrete representations, some of which are phonetic in character and others ideographic, it is equally valid to consider Egyptian sculpture and painting as the equivalent of the ideographic component. In paintings and relief the difference is a matter of relatively greater size... Gardiner and his English colleagues failed to see that “Egyptian pictorial art” does not merely show “analogies with methods of writing,” but is so intimately related to the hieroglyphic system that it virtually is writing.
—The Orientation of Hieroglyphs, Henry Fischer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), 3–5
Considering Fischer’s insight above, it would be valid to make the observation that the relief that has been interpreted as Akhenaten worshipping the sun is not a representation of the worship of the sun as a god, but in fact the iahw hieroglyph that is the divine principle as the bright shining light that shines through all things, much as Heraclitus and T. S. Eliot wrote of the holy fire as the background of all life. This is the word, in keeping with Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, that would seem to become the word yahweh. This iconic image of the light that touches all beings with its gentle reaching hands is the icon of Avalokteshvara, who reaches out compassionately to touch all that is in the world.
The iahw hieroglyph appears in verse 5 on the west wall of the entranceway, as the energy behind the movement of life, and directly across in verse 2 on the east wall of the entranceway, doubled, as the shining, burning life force that is the essence of the eye.
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“How can we talk about netchers?” by which he meant primary hieroglyphs, pristine archaic nouns, words that would be drawn directly from nature.
—Mark Lehner, in conversation, 1989, Fustat, Cairo, Egypt, in Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things (New York: Riverhead, 1997), 10
Who wants to know and describe living things seeks first to drive out the spirit, then hold the parts in his hand, but, alas, the spiritual bond is now lacking.
—Goethe, quoted by Alexandre Piankoff, in The Pyramid of Unas (Princeton: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1968)
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Egyptian Astronomy
Another method of telling time was by observation of the transiting hour stars during twenty-four fifteen day periods. Two priests, seated opposite each other on a north–south line, made the observations on the flat roofs of the temples by means of the merkhat, a sighting instrument in the form of a slotted stick. The observer held it close to the eye with one hand while, holding a plumb line at arm’s length in the other, he looked southward at the assistant priest. The hours were defined when certain stars were seen to cross the plumb line aligned with the heart eye elbow or some other part of the assistant’s body. The results of these findings were tabulated on a diagram ruled in squares, showing the seated figure of the “target” priest and the stars posited around him.
—Alexandre Piankoff, The Tomb of Ramesses VI (New York:Pantheon, 1954)
…and, after the Singer, advances the Horoskopus [star-watcher] with a horologium in his hand, and a palm, the symbols of [astronomy]. He must know by heart the Hermetic [astronomical] books, which are four in number. Of these, one is about the arrangement of the fixed stars that are visible... and one concerns their risings.
—Clement of Alexandria
Carlyle wrote of it in his Heroes and Hero Worship:
Canopus shining-down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild, blue, spirit-like brightness far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man... It might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great, deep Eternity... Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus... We do not worship in that way now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a “poetic nature”... ?
[The astronomer Sir Norman] Lockyer tells us of a series of temples at Edfū, Philae, Amada, and Semneh, so oriented at their erection, 640 B.C., as to show Canopus heralding the sunrise at the autumnal equinox... At least two great structures at Karnak, of 2100 and 1700 B.C., respectively, pointed to its setting; as did another at Naga, and the temple of Khons at Thebes, built by Rameses III about 1300 B.C.... It thus probably was the prominent object in the religion of Southern Egypt, where it represented the god of the waters.
—Richard Hinckley Allen, Star-Names and Their Meanings (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1899), 70–71
There are four essential points which dominate the four seasons of the year... They correspond to the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The solstice is the “turning back” of the sun at the lowest point of winter and at the highest point of summer. The two equinoxes, vernal and autumnal, are those that cut the year in half, with an equal balance of night and day, for they are the two intersections of the equator with the ecliptic. Those four points together made up the four pillars, or corners, of what was called the “quadrangular earth.”
—Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Jaffrey, N.H.: Godine, 1977), 62
The untranslatable particle pi appears throughout this earliest version of the Pyramid Texts whenever a transformation takes place. This may or may not be related to its use as a mathematical formula commonly dated to the seventeenth century A.D., but apparently in use long before that, and the possibility of its having been passed down through the ages as, perhaps, a Masonic secret. Tantric pe-wa, the transference of consciousness, and the Greek verb pe-lo, “to turn or become,” also come to mind.
In The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot’s “sapphires in the mud” (quoted on page 12) refers to Job 28: “the stones of it are the place of sapphires,” the earth is as the body.
The poem “Death Is Before Me Today” is from “Songs of the Harper,” Papyrus Harris 500 in the British Museum. I believe it was used as a book or cover detail when I was working in the Wilbour Library of Egyptology.
The purpose in writing this book is to bring the language and literature of Egypt out of obscurity and into the land of the living. The underpinning of this effort is to make connections wherever possible, in natural history, poetic traditions, world religions, and language. Hieroglyphs are called an Afro-Asiatic Proto-Semitic language, meaning they are under the broad umbrella of one of the primary language groups in the world, where we now place Arabic. It is not known how this language group developed. Current theory has Proto-Semitic coming out of North Africa into the Levant because of the rapid desertification caused by climate change at the end of the Neolithic in 3500 B.C. (Edward Lipinski). In this book I am looking not at historical questions or derivations but to root parallels between the hieroglyphic vocabulary and the vocabulary of Egyptian Arabic today. Mw, water; mwt, death; nfs, breathe; lwn, color; shgr, tree; sghr, small; rah, go; wakh, fall; akl, food; haga, thing; and hayy, snake are basic words common to both Egyptian Arabic and hieroglyphs, all of which appear throughout the Pyramid Texts. Egypt, by virtue of its geographical position on the Mediterranean as a cornerstone between Africa, Asia, and Europe has absorbed one cultural and ethnic wave after another. And yet it is distinctly itself. To this reader the Pyramid Texts are a timeless and distinctly Egyptian creation. “There have always been good and bad paintings… In art, however, the words ancient and modern have no place.” Hsieh Ho, A.D. 500.