Wesir's Birthday Celebration: A Lesson on Timing

Voices and small unfamiliar sounds chase my footsteps as I leave the shrine room. I had meant to start at midnight, but ended then instead. It is only now that the veil grows thin and the sounds of the unseen pierce through. That is unfortunate: I would have been happier to hear them fifteen minutes ago because it was disappointingly quiet during the ritual.

Timing is a problem.

I have always been early to things—a habit grown from my mortification of always being late as a child due to my mother (may her soul forever shine) always running on her own clock. I tend to overestimate how much time I will need in order to arrive at the appointed moment. Hurry up and wait. That is the life I lead.

Because of the purity requirements of this (I conducted the short ceremony as the personal prayer part of Senut) I had to take a ritual shower first. I ordinarily like purity requirements because it makes me feel better about my preparedness to do things in ritual space. But I was so worried about the show taking too much time that I started way too early and without looking at any clocks between the shower and the actual proceedings, I had no idea how off I was from my target time.

It’s probably a mute point because Wesir didn’t wait for me to be in ritual space anyway. In fact, he didn't even wait for the ritual shower. It happened earlier in the evening:

I had meant to read the spell (from the Book of Going Forth by Day) during the ceremony when I offered the special libations and the black plum. But as I was copying it onto the small card I intended to read from—my intent was to save space, the book itself is rather large—I activated it. That’s the wrong word (activate) but I don’t know what else to call it.

It grabbed me, held me, and infiltrated every limb and every organ in my body. I felt shivers rustle through my arms and legs and something that was both warm and cold settled in the core of me.

But I wasn’t looking for it to happen just then. In my mind I though “Gee…if writing it makes this much happen, I wonder what saying it will be like?” totally oblivious to the fact that the act of writing had already accomplished what I had hoped to accomplish by saying it.

Paying no mind to it, I threw on proper clothes so I could head to Wal-mart to pick up some last minute supplies. It was already 10:30pm and I was worried about being ready in time for midnight. The night air was hot and muggy—and misty. Not in a physical sense. The mist of the unseen.

“Huh,” I thought, “sort of long off from midnight isn’t it?”

I got in the car and headed off toward the store, taking the country back road because it was quicker. The pavement was a black river winding through hills lit dimly by the half moon. Wind stirred the sparse trees throwing shadows into the pools of light cast down by the street lamps that dotted the empty road. The night was deeply, heavily silent—save for the wind through the windows. Suddenly, I felt a small rush of an essence I knew.

I had felt it once before—in a triage room as the nurses debated the best course of action to save me from the dehydration that was weakening my heart and leaving my brain without life giving blood—and I knew the name of the source. Wesir. I breathed in sharply and felt something tight curled around my torso, something like strips of cloth wound firmly, but made of something warm and light—for a brief second I felt as though those strips of *something* were holding me together, keeping my heart centered within me, keeping my lungs beneath my breasts, keeping me right and in balance.

I pulled into the Wal-mart parking lot and noticed that most of the lights in the lot where burned out. Strange. They were all lit the last few nights I had gone. I could still feel the strange essence of the unseen curling around me when I got out of the car and something in my step was odd as I walked to the door.

But when I walked into the bright fluorescent lights and harsh smell of industrial cleaners the feeling quickly faded. Of course, Wal-mart didn’t have what I wanted. I knew nothing else would be open, so I got something that was close enough and headed home. On the drive back I noticed that the road looked different—the street lights seemed brighter and the hills darker, the pavement was a dull grey and the trees were still. I kept looking for something, but didn’t find it. Kept waiting to feel something, but felt nothing. The sounds of my car were loud and garish so I turned the radio on.

Back at home I did the ritual shower and Senut and the ceremony went off without a hitch. But when it came time to read the spell, I found that there was very little power in the words. The images that had been evoked in me before when I was writing it weren’t there. The odd little shivers and the strange physical sensation of his presence were absent. I read it twice. I read it with feeling. I paced while reading it and acted out portions of it. Nothing. I finally ended Senut, removed the foot, and reverted the offerings.

Then the dead decided to mess with things in the apartment while I was cleaning up. Which brings us back to where we are. “How ill-timed”, I thought as I chased the spirits out of the shrine room by flipping on the lights. I hardly wanted them cavorting around while I was in another room, or worse, once I had gone to bed.

Ill-timed ...

I don’t think gods care much for our human time. I am reminded again of how Set laughed at me once when I insisted he had things he should be doing in the hour before dawn on the longest night of the year. It is dawn somewhere on this plant every minute, he reminded me. Local time was uniquely my concern. I had been waiting for midnight because the saying goes that it is midnight when the veil is thin. Apparently no one told Wesir that. No one told him that spells are only supposed to work when you say them, either.

Something seems…wrong. My Senut is suddenly too formal, too stilted. Too dependent on timing. I had a deeper more meaningful experience while driving to Wal-mart, for goodness sakes! An experience I all but ignored because the timing was off.

And I should know better: my mother had no sense of time when she was dying. Does that not imply that time is different in the unseen? I am trying to force these things into Dejet when they dwell firmly in Neheh. This is not the time of humans and history. This is the time of myth and cycle. These things happen in the time of the gods, not in the time of men. By their very nature, the epagomenal days lay outside the linear year.

Time is out of joint; as it should be.

*sigh*

I have a lot to learn.