An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul: Introduction

When functioning normally, the arrangement of our various souls is seamless. This is an important distinction to make, because I doubt that I am the only one who, upon first hearing about the Kemetic concept of the soul, wrongly assumed that I should be able feel all of the individual pieces… and nearly drove myself crazy trying to because I was almost certain that not feeling them meant something was “wrong”—much as it would be “wrong” if I could not feel sensation from each of my individual limbs. But the reality is that most of our souls are less like limbs and more like organs. Just as we aren’t consciously aware of our lungs—unless we work to be aware of them through breathing exercises or when an illness, like asthma, unavoidably brings them to our attention—we also aren’t often aware of our myriad souls. If they are performing their intended functions correctly, they simply continue to do so without any effort on the part of our conscious selves.

Thus, the topic of etheric anatomy is largely an intellectual one (outside the realms of healing and mystical work). It is also important to note here that, when things do go wrong and draw our attention to our pieces, it is not a matter of the souls themselves being “defective” in any way: I believe that Netjer made all souls perfect. But just as we may fall and break bones, so too may the less physical parts of us be injured by forces in our environment and events in our lives, and just as a broken bone is not a moral comment about a person, a broken soul isn’t either.

For my part, it was trying to understand the long-term ramifications of just such an injury that led me to write these essays. I speak to you from a place of experience, not a place of authority or a place of academia, and it may be useful to keep that in mind so you can put my descriptions in proper perspective: I do not claim that any of this is taken from actual ancient beliefs. It is largely inspiration born of UPG (my own and that of others) and as with all such things, you should take my personal theories with a large pinch of salt, for exactly that reason: they are ultimately personal—your mileage may vary.

I will close this introduction with the two things you’ll need to see from whence this series of essays has been derived: an image and a statement. The statement first, for it encapsulates the core concept of what I learned through my explorations and was the guiding principal for the creation of the accompanying image:

“The components of the soul are balanced against each other such that they are bound to one another through the mechanism of an interlacing set of dualities, and one best learns about them by observing and studying the connections between them.”

And of course, the infamous image which consumed my life for several days as I unpacked its meaning:

A full explanation of everything in this graphic is coming soon, I promise. :)

Next time I’ll be talking about the Ka and the Khat (and to a lesser extent, the Ib) and why they are more complicated then we often make them out to be.

Discovering the Anatomy of My Soul

I walked into work to find that my coworker had been kind enough to get my mail for me from the main building. It’s a long hike from the small, stuffy rooms above the auto shop to the overly air-conditioned and cavernous main lobby of the school, and I hate making the trek. I put my things away in the locked drawer, so as not to tempt my students, and turned to my stack of mail to sort out the inevitable junk.

Yes, junk mail. We get a ridiculous number of catalogs as teachers—often for subjects we don’t even teach—along with the occasional flyer from a local business that hasn’t yet figured out that teachers don’t have the sort of money they’re looking for. Normally, I toss all of it out with barely a glance. But this morning there was only two pieces of junk and I couldn’t help but notice them: one was a medical catalog for anatomy models like the ones you see in doctor’s offices and the other was a local spa advertisement with a big picture of a lotus on it.

This is why omens can drive someone crazy—they are subtle, but just noticeable enough to impinge on your normal reality even in moments when you least expect them to appear. It would have meant nothing if not for an earlier hint, but in the context of my current situation, it was unmistakable. But to understand why, you need some background.

I have always associated the image of the lotus with “spiritual things” especially with matters concerning the soul. (I think that’s mainly UPG— and if it is sourced somewhere, I do not recall the source.) To find the image of a lotus next to images of human anatomy is telling, because I have been inadvertently poking at the cross-section of those two things, when pestering Bast— asking insistently what she did to me that night after I went to the ER and why she keeps going on about this mysterious “foundation” thing.

Knowing I am still obsessed with double confirmations, she didn’t give me long to contemplate the omen. She spoke softly to me in my mind, ignoring the students starting to file into the room.

If you want to understand what I have changed, you will first need to understand the anatomy of your soul, Bast said, watching from behind me with steady, unblinking eyes.

I realize now that She was the one who prodded me to pose the question about souls to the Nisut (AUS) during the final beginners chat. Though I didn’t recognize the prodding at the time—the question just popped into my head out of the blue—I did recognize that the answer I got was significant. I correctly identified it as a puzzle piece even though I had not been able to identify the puzzle it went to. Now I knew in no uncertain terms.

I played with the concept all day in idle moments, scribbling on a small notepad during my prep period and contemplating the nature of souls over my lunch. When I got home, I started the process of checking terms in the indexes of the various Egyptology books I own and gathering snippets here and there. I hopped online and looked through the UPG of countless Kemetics in their blogs and their forum posts.

I was frustrated by the apparent lack of consensus: academic sources didn’t match with people’s UPG and neither matched exactly with what Hemet (AUS) had told me during the chat. In fact, after a good while searching under different terms, I came across an earlier post in the Ask the Nisut (AUS) forum in which she seemed to directly contradict part of what she had just told me! However, I soon discovered that things are more cohesive underneath then they appear on the surface.

I keep forgetting that Kemetic thought is inherently polyvalent and that opposite truths can co-exist in reality at times. It was when I remembered the importance of duality, and the nature of things to be balanced through duality, that I realized the comprehensive picture I was looking for was hidden not in the pieces but in the connections between them. The answer was not in the dissecting, but in the process of reassembling. I got a sudden feeling that, if I could only draw all of what I knew—all the contradicting seemingly unrelated pieces of it— into a single image, I would be able to learn what I needed to from that image.

Eventually, I managed to create one which, once I had fitted it together properly, proved to be quite wide of scope indeed. I realized immediately that it would take several posts to describe and explain the thing (along with a few hours in Photoshop just to make it recognizable—my drawing skills leave something to be desired). Still, I’m willing to make the effort because putting it into words is a good exercise in making sure that I really understand what I have discovered and because if it might prove useful to even a few others than it ought to at least be available to the community at large.

Understand that this will be 98% my UPG and intuitions about things, and a lot of that remaining 2% is the UPG of others. I have few academic sources to back any of this up (read: almost none to back it up). But…yeah, that never stopped me ;)

 Next time I post it will be the first in a new series: An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul.

So...Bast says I'm not crazy, just dense :P

It occurred to me to ask why it should matter even as I fished one of my tarot decks out of the bottom drawer of the altar. I tossed it on the table in my living room and asked again.  If candles are lit in a dark room and music is played and a draw cloth is laid down on the table—why should that matter? Why can it not be a bright room with only the noise of the fans and the AC and a clear workbench?

 I have come to believe that it likely doesn’t.

The gods are powerful enough to step in regardless of the circumstances, but the trappings of ritual provide a sense of security and containment of the unseen for we mortals—a way to reassure ourselves that we are still in control. It is also an invitation. Invitations can be given in other ways, but the preparation of a mystical space signals one’s intent most clearly. It leaves no doubt about one’s consent.

I finished reading Filan and Kaldera’s book on God Possession today. Now, I should mention, I was not reading it from an instructional standpoint: I have done aspecting and shadowing before, and I have some extremely hesitant and limited experience with channeling that I would be embarrassed to recount, but have never experienced a full on possession by anything, god or otherwise—and I am very grateful for that after having read the experiences of the authors. I read the book mostly out of curiosity and because I had seen a reference to it elsewhere, and it served to satiate my lingering curiosity about the phenomena. It is not a how-to manual anyway, though there was some practical advice, which I took from the text, for dealing with deity communication of all kinds regardless of how it is received:

In one chapter they advocated the combined use of omens, dreams, and divinations to confirm (or cast doubt on) messages one receives from the gods before acting on those messages. The general concept is to verify one form of communication with another—sort of like when one calls their phone company to confirm that they really were the ones who sent the e-mail asking for personal information. Double checking helps prevent the unseen equivalent of phishing scams. Which makes sense to me: these are gods we’re talking about here, it’s reasonable to expect them to be strong enough that they can at least confirm that the messages really are coming from them.

But in my case, doing that means giving them permission to answer a question I may or may not really want the answer to. So here I am, sitting in the living room with all the lights and fans on and staring at the tarot deck on the table, wondering if I’m brave enough to ask: Is it really you? Am I really hearing you? And if so, is this appearance just an FYI or do you expect me to act on it? Is there something you want me to do?

 I hesitate to give full permission for them to answer me—because I suspect they will. I ask other questions through my actions: just how badly do you want this? Will keeping the lights on be enough to make me not worth the bother? Will you raise your voice to talk over the fan? If I am impure in my womanly way, and not in white, and far away from the designated shrine, and sitting at a table I eat on and work at…will that be enough buffer of human reality to keep you from answering?

Some part of me fancies that I am playing the scientist (as my atheist family would expect me to when making such a serious decision) when I insist on being rational and controlling the variables: I will shuffle the cards in this particular way and deal them in this particular way which relies on randomness and numbers more than intuition. I have picked a new deck I feel little connection to, and I know very little about it, so I am unfamiliar with the symbolism and images and will have to rely solely on the accompanying book for interpretation and not my own intuition.

But I don’t want to seem unwilling, either—because I’m not. I just want to know if this is really Them or just craziness talking through me. I just want to know if I am really “keeping one foot always in the unseen” or if I am simply stepping into fantasy. A small part of me wants the answer to be that this is no fantasy, and it is that part of me which wants to find my old drawing cloth and turn down the lights and go back to my old ways, and light the candles, and purify as best I can.

I compromise. I will draw the cards on my cloth, but I will still draw the cards careful to keep myself separate from the reading, and there will be no music or mystical funny business, just slightly dimmed lights and a single candle—at the core, this will merely be me, fresh from a shower, sitting in my living room at a table, stating my intentions and humbly asking for confirmation or doubt as They see fit to give me either: Is this you; is this real?

I will return and record when I am done.

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It’s Them.

I am not imagining this; I am not making it up in my mind.

The yes/no mechanism of the spread showed three in favor, two not. The last one I turned over was the deciding card, because they apparently like suspense, and when I first saw it, I thought it was a “no” card because the image looked upside down (I was using reversals as “no” and uprights as “yes” since this deck doesn’t assign meanings to reversals), so I had a moment to go “whelp, that confirms it” and get a good feel for exactly how strongly I had been expecting that outcome and exactly how much more comfortable it was to think there is nothing to all of this but an overactive imagination. But on closer examination, my heart skipped a beat when I saw that it was indeed upright after all. It was just the style of the art that made it momentarily look reversed.

At first, I was still underwhelmed even if I was mildly surprised. After all three out of five isn’t an overwhelming or resounding “yes”— the chance was 50/50, hanging on that last card. It was the content of the cards that pushed me toward believing the general outcome was right. Reading the descriptions of them made me cry for how brutal and spot on they were—however, even that I could have talked myself out of given enough time. But there was one final, unmistakable sign, not only of Their hand in the reading, but also of Bast’s confirmed presence in this:

The center card representing both me as the seeker and the “core” of the present issue was the single card (and I know it’s the only one because, believe me, I checked) from the 72 card deck which happens to contain an image of a solitary house cat. A house cat that is suspiciously similar to the one in my dream. And who is standing beside a woman who reminds me vaguely of myself. On a card whose meaning perfectly fits what I’m facing.

I’ll admit that was a nice touch.

By my estimation, there was only a 1.4% chance of drawing that specific card in that specific place. Even the scientist in me can’t deny that’s one hell of a coincidence given the circumstances, especially since I had no control, not even subconscious control, over the fall of the cards…and that estimate still doesn’t even touch on the chances that the artist who made that particular deck (which I purchased several years ago as a collector’s piece without any intent to ever read with it) just happened to draw a housecat on one of the 72 cards when the meaning didn’t call for it and the cat isn’t mentioned in the artist’s description of the symbolism. I checked my other decks, and six of the other seven didn’t have any images of house cats at all much less on that specific card—hence I doubt the image is common place—and the one other deck I own that did have depictions of house cats didn’t have them on said card (the other deck with cats in it was, ironically, my first deck and the one that They helped me pick out back when I was a teen—the only one selected before I was Kemetic).

Touché.

I believe in you now.

Another Bast Dream...because, apparently, I am going insane...

I had wanted to spend this evening’s blog post talking about the end of the beginner’s class and my take on it. But, I was tired after the last chat lesson because last week was the first week of school in my neck of the woods and it is tradition for teachers like myself to spend the first weekend of the school year sleeping in a desperate attempt to catch up on rest before the semester gets into full swing. So as the sun started to set in the west, I took advantage of the soothing shift in the light and let it lull me to sleep for a quick nap.

My sleep is never dreamless, but often I do not hang onto the images upon waking. They dissipated like so much fog when I open my eyes and leave me with only a vague notion of what transpired. But every now and then, a dream sticks with me long after waking. It’s most common with night-time dreams, but has happened in day-time naps as well. It happened tonight. I woke up with clear memories of what I had seen and with a sense of utter confusion over why I would be dreaming of this again.

This one wasn’t nearly as dramatic but it still had a lot in common with the other dream. Just like before she was in cat form and sitting on top of me, and once again was responding to me being in need of protection—though this time it was more an issue about trusting her to protect me from something which might or might not happen than an actual thing I needed protecting from.

Another dream about Bast…what is going on here? One was strange enough, but to visit this topic again…and this time there wasn’t even anything to provoke it.

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The setting was as close to my waking life as dreams ever are and was fairly mundane, the lead up to the main events of the dream even including me buying a gallon of milk at Wal-mart (which is a thrice-weekly ritual for me in real life, as I drink a lot of milk). At one point, I found myself “on the net”. I got the sense that I was virtually “chatting” with other members of the House, but we could see each-other physically in the room. I wasn’t really participating, but rather just watching and listening to the others, feeling a bit like I was in over my head from a theological knowledge stand-point.

There was a debate, which was edging on an argument, about ritual safety and the need to discover vs. the need to protect the ones discovering. I remember someone saying that the *thing* in question, which they were all up in arms about, “should work” and someone else retorting that it wasn’t guaranteed to, and that it was extremely dangerous, and not entirely necessary, and therefore shouldn’t be done by anyone. This *thing* they were talking about involved a metal cylinder with a carved edge. I remember being curious about it but not wanting to ask any questions.

 Suddenly, I found that I was away from the others and the cylinder they had been talking about surrounded me like a barrier. I was sitting (cross-legged) on something in the center of it. Though, whatever I was sitting on wasn’t connected to the metal, and the cylinder itself only came up part way—higher than my waist but lower than my chest—and I could still see the room beyond, which had transformed into some kind of garage/workshop. Bast was sitting in my lap (in cat form, as she was last time I dreamed of her) and she leaned against my chest. I was clutching her pretty tightly because I had the sense that the carved edge of the cylinder held fuel of some sort and was going to be lit on fire. I remember being concerned that I wasn’t small enough to keep myself far enough from all the edges at once and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to avoid being burned by the heat radiating off the flames. I also knew that once the flames were lit, it would be impossible to get out without getting seriously injured.

I remember saying “Bast, are you sure?”

She didn’t reply but just watched me calmly. Not purring or doing other cat like things—just watching me in a way that I’m sure was supposed to be reassuring, but wasn’t. Eventually it was obvious I needed a firmer answer than what she was giving. There is the foundation, she imparted without speaking.

 Then the dream abruptly moved on to something else entirely with no ongoing mention of what had just happened and I woke up partly from the jarring shift back to the mundane atmosphere of the dream before she had appeared.

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Allow me to stress again: I have never had contact with Bast before all of this started. I have never sought her out, nor shown anything but a passing interest in her—not even early on in my Kemetic explorations when she was one of the only Netjer whose image I was familiar with. I don’t even own any cats. If I really stretch my mind, I can recall a stray cat that used to walk me to and from school when I was a child, but it’s most likely that it was just looking to be petted and/or fed. That’s it. So when I woke up from this latest dream, all I could think was that this was ridiculous. Why would I be dreaming of Bast? I had no connection to her.

I’ve been on enough pagan boards to know that seemingly everyone wants to be in the company of Bast, to the point that it’s somewhat cliché—kind of like she’s the default Netjer for every animal loving 101Wiccan who needs to justify their cat-hoarding. I had seen her name abused so many times in that context, that whenever I see someone on the general pagan boards mention her at all, my gut reaction is always *sigh* another one of them.

Back when Djehuty was showing me why the RPD is important and necessary, Bast was even on my list of Netjeru that I didn’t know how I’d deal with. Yet…here she is, saying this thing to me like I should know what it means: There is the foundation. I asked again, what foundation? What do you mean?

I opened up my notebook to jot down details of the dream before I forgot it and happened upon a single, unattributed phrase.

You can find the “phrases” throughout my recordings—small snippets of words that make no sense to what I am currently doing when they pop into my head and have a feeling around them that they are “voices not mine”. Most of them are attributed to specific Names already, but there is an odd one here or there where I did not recognize the accompanying energy and wasn’t able to guess at who had whispered it into my consciousness.

What astonished me was how, when I read it back to myself, the energy of the phrase seemed to feel remarkably like the energy around her voice:

“I have stood before you and uttered your name in that moment of darkness which almost claimed you forever.”

Did you? There is no answer.

 I wrote that phrase long before my ER visit, but time doesn’t mean to them what it means to us. Just less than a week to the day from my ER visit, I am keenly aware that something inside of me broke that night, something that had broken before—and this time there was no attempt to fix it. Something was added to replace it. Something fundamental was changed. And yet that change is subtle. So subtle, that when I look around my internal landscape I can’t see the difference. Like someone has worked in the walls of my soul and done such a thorough job replacing the drywall and covering up the hole that all I can find for evidence that it even happened is a slight, impossible-to-pin-point whiff of fresh paint.

That line of thinking stops me cold. Impossible. What is wrong with me, considering something like that?

 I am clearly going insane.

That is what’s wrong with me.

Serpentine Transformation

In the western world, our dominant image of transformation is that of the caterpillar emerging from the cocoon as a butterfly. I am reminded of that as I scroll through pages of new age books which feature the fluttery, airy bug on their covers. Why do we never see the caterpillar? I wonder.

I would like to challenge this image of transformation, along with its contemporary—the tale of the ugly duckling.  There is something insidious about both stories in the way that the small, ugly creatures that star as the protagonists are only validated by their wholesale transformation into beauty and their abandonment of what they once were. It is as if these tales tell us: “Do not worry if you are imperfect and unwanted now, someday you will overcome yourself.”

I resent the insinuation that there is anything so wrong within me that it would require me to become someone I am not in order that I might fix it.

 And how often have I seen a friend begin some new lifestyle with the claim that her old self is dead and that her new self now lives forever…and how quickly I see the peculiar necromancy of the soul as the façade breaks and the truth reveals itself: we cannot escape the persons we are. We can become better versions of ourselves but we cannot become something entirely other.

I have never aspired to be a butterfly, for I realized some time ago that I am not a caterpillar, but a snake. My transformation is of a different kind:

To Become as a Snake Becomes

My skin slowly dies around me and makes me aware of my double.
 I did not know until now that I was two things.
That I, for a moment, lay at the horizon like that doubled lion—made of yesterday and tomorrow,
With no concept of the moment between them.
Now I move beneath myself.
I find no fault in this old skin but for its being old.
 It is dusty and dry and fragile.
I am sleek and moist and sinuous.
This skin can no longer contain the stronger, larger version of me that awakens within.
It is my ghost, a nostalgic echo of what I was once proud to be.
It is paper, and like paper, it can only hold so much of the essence of life.
I rip and tear it on the thorns and brambles and rough edged rocks of wisdom.
It splits.
And where it breaks, something flashes at the sun.
I assert myself as my colors turn vibrant and the pattern of my being is seen again by the sky.
That bright air strikes fresh scales and I remember the power of self.
I am new again.
I am alive again.
It is once more my moment,
My thousandth first time in the world begins.
For I am no longer the double one of yesterday and tomorrow,
I am whole once more.
I am once more the moment in which I dwell.

~Aeshna