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

A Meditation on Being Genuine

I am afraid of being alone.
I am afraid of not being good enough to deserve connecting with others.

There are a million fears in the world, but this is the one which keeps me awake in the predawn hours. This is why it is so hard sometimes, to be genuine, because it means being vulnerable in the face of this fear. But without being genuine, there is no real connection with others, and so I am forced to sometimes be brave, if only because my fear demands it. (How ironic.)

I have strived to be genuine on this blog. It helps that my name is not on it—but even then, the chance that someone might find it and link it to me, even just knowing that there are people reading it… I pause before clicking “publish” and wonder: have I said anything which might make me unworthy? I click anyway, and I rarely change what I had prepared to post for any reason but to clarify meaning.

Because the question of worthiness is an insidious one—as if I could change what was genuine in me, what I am at my core, to suit someone else. If I could not do that much for my mother, whom I loved more than I can fully express, then I certainly cannot do that for an audience unknown to me.

There is a purpose to what I do here: I am trying hard to believe that I am worthy already. I am trying hard to believe that those who matter can see my worth and deserve nothing less than my most unadulterated genuineness.  For me, this blog is an exercise in courage.

I dream of a day when I have enough of that courage to be as genuine in life as I am in this space.

No Shortcuts

Attempts to find professional psychological care in this town yielded little in the way of encouraging results. But since that is what my doctor and I have determined I need, I am not willing to give up my search after a single afternoon.

I spoke with the doctor who prescribed the Celexa to me and it was clear that he felt responsible for what happened and was shaken by how badly I had reacted to what he had considered to be a “safe” drug. In his words, I’ve given him “a lot to think about”. Gee, he has a lot to think about? In any case, he agreed with me that treating what was almost certainly episodic anxiety with long term anxiety medication had been a mistake and that seeking counseling from a certified psychologist was a far more rational approach, and that if they became necessary, it would be best for me to consult a psychiatrist about using psychiatric drugs. Thanks Doc…kind of had that figured out already given the events of the prior night. :P

But at least it seems that he learned a valuable lesson about willy-nilly prescribing SSRI’s to his patients without really thinking it through first. So perhaps remembering my case will improve his general practice and there is some good to be gained from this after all. (Especially since, regardless of whether he feels bad or not, I’m still the one that has to pay for that ER visit…*grumble*)

For my part, I have learned something too: there are no shortcuts. There is no pill for grief. There is no pill for the natural stress of living and dealing with death. It is still valuable to seek professional help and to rule out physical causes of symptoms before addressing them as psychologically based manifestations of personal fears. But getting help is not the same thing as getting “cured”. This is not an illness—it’s a natural process. Uncomfortable and difficult, but natural.

I am not an advocate of faith based medicine or “self-help” style counseling for serious chemically or hormonally rooted psychiatric disorders, nor am I saying there is anything wrong with medicines like Celexa—I have several friends on the drug who do very well with it—but my current issue is not a long term mental health disorder. It’s coping with a single event: my mother’s death. Even my five years of stress ultimately all root back to that underlying fear of her imminent passing—I could have handled any of what happened to me over the last half decade much better than I did had I not also been dealing with the ramifications of her diagnosis and ongoing treatments and the aftereffects of them.

I think prayer is appropriate here. I think generalized grief counseling or perhaps a support group is appropriate here. I think talking to people and letting myself be a bit “crazy” for a while and allowing myself to take a “sick day” from work now and then when I need to spend some dealing with things is appropriate here.

I don’t have to fight this so hard.

I used before the analogy of trying to swim to shore against a current and being too tired to swim anymore—I said that I needed help to make it or I’d drown. But it didn’t occur to me that maybe I was missing the point. Maybe swimming is the wrong approach to take—with or without help. Maybe it’s better to just float and let the current wash me down stream.

The struggle to be normal again may, in fact, be futile. Normal has changed. My mother is dead and life is different because of that. I may not be able to return to what was “normal” because things will never be quite the same. The trick now is to define a new normal and to redefine myself in light of what I have experienced.

 I was close to my mother, and for better or worse, she was a big part of my personal identity and a major figure in the life I was living. But now I have to relate to her in a new way, through honoring her as an ancestor, and she can’t fill the role that she used to fill for me. That is going to change how I do things and think about things and react to things. It is going to change me—as it should. If losing a person I love doesn’t change me, than how good was that relationship in the first place? The pain is just a sign that there was genuine love between us.

That’s not wrong.

That’s not an illness to be fixed.

That’s just the human experience.

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“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

Encounter with the Devouring Lady...

It is not that I am incapable of trusting medical professionals, it’s that every time I go to see one, they inevitably do something to me which makes me not want to go back...

I am overweight. Morbidly so, if you believe the BMI charts. I’m six feet tall and well over three hundred pounds. Just large enough to have ankle problems and to not fit comfortably in airline seats. Believe me when I say that I am aware of this fact. Medical professionals seem to think that no one must have told me before that being overweight is bad or perhaps they think that hearing them tell me that I need to “get serious” about my weight is all I need to be transformed from a state of sickness to a state of health. And of course, everything is due to the weight: nothing else matter, no symptoms I report are seriously considered on their own merit, because “Well, you know…you’re really very overweight”. They give you that look like you’re not worth dealing with, as if you should know already that, as a fat person, you don’t have the right to be healthy, and that being forced to deal with you is far from the highlight of their day.

But he did deal with me, albeit reluctantly. I just wanted to know if my panic attacks might have a physical source before I sought psychological treatment for them. That’s it. And maybe wondered if I could get a sleep aid to help me break the insomnia.The nurse asked some questions, confirmed that what I was talking about sounded like possible panic attacks, and took my blood pressure. It was 150/100. Her eyes got wide and she looked at me with that fake reassuring smile people give small children to try and convince them that things are okay when they’re clearly not.

“I don’t know what those numbers mean,” I told her.

And it’s true: I didn’t. Because blood pressure had never been something I’d actually dealt with before—not anymore than to be told all my life that mine was “a bit high”.

“Well…” she took a deep breath and then sighed, “given the stress you’re under it’s probably not dangerous because blood pressure does go up with stress… but normally, a blood pressure, sustained, this high, is not good. It’s getting into stroke territory.”

I don’t know what a normal person hears when a nurse says that, but in my anxiety ridden brain, all I heard were the words “stroke territory”. After realizing I looked scared, she quickly excused herself from the room assuring me that the doctor would be in shortly. He spoke to me only for a few minutes before filling out slips for me to go get lab work and an EKG. He met me back in his tiny office and didn’t even bother to come all the way in or sit down with me.

 “So…lab work won’t be back for a few days, but you’re EKG is normal,” he said leaning against the counter.

“So I’m not going to die from this?”

“Well, not today,” he said, in a way that heavily implied to me, in my half-psychotic state, that he hadn’t put tomorrow out of the realm of possibility, “so I guess the question is, did you come to me because you just needed that reassurance or did you expect me to do something about all of this?”

“Well,” I stuttered, “I don’t know…what do you think?”

That is why we go to doctors isn’t it? I mean, tell me if I’m crazy, but is it not a normal expectation that the doctor will make that determination?

“I think you need to get serious about your weight,” he sighed with exasperation, “and stop making excuses for yourself. But if you’re spinning your wheels with this anxiety thing, and it sounds like you are, there are products that can help with that—if you’d be willing to try them.”

I nodded and he scribbled a prescription for Celexa. He said nothing about the drug or what it would do to me. He didn’t discuss side effects verses benefits. He didn’t even wait for me to read what it was before he started out of the room. I got the prescription filled on my way home, and, worried that I was the only one who seemed to care if I died or not, I also picked up a blood pressure monitor. At home, I tried to look up the information I had not been given by my doctor. I read all there was to read about Celexa and determined that it was an antidepressant that was also used to treat panic disorder. I was a bit concerned about the dire warnings listed telling me not to stop taking the drug suddenly—it’s a four week process to wean someone off of it.

But…I figured that the doctor did prescribe it. So he knew the risks of the drug and must have decided that they were minimal in my case and that having to wean off of it later was a cost worth the short term benefit. I felt a little bit uneasy, but I took it as directed.

Should have’s are dangerous because we use them to blame ourselves and others use them to blame us for things we cannot rightly carry blame for. Yes, by conventional wisdom I should have asked more questions. Yes, by my mother’s own warnings, I should have listened to my instinct. Yes, by sheer logic, I should have waited (as my doctor should have waited) for the lab results to come back first. But “should have” doesn’t always apply when you are not in a state of mental competency: and I was clearly not competent to make those decisions. I was scared and anxious and desperate. And the doctor is the one responsible for the “should haves” when his patient is not in a state of competence to do so herself.

I was fine for the first two hours— then everything went all to hell.

SSRIs (this category of drug) do not affect everyone the same way. Instead of a calming me down, it did the opposite and I quickly took the train to crazy town once it kicked in later that night. I noticed the tingling first—up and down my arms and sides-- the same sort of tingling you get from putting your tongue on a nine-volt battery. A normal, right thinking person would have simply chalked it up to a side effect of the medicine and made a note to call their doctor the next day. But in my paranoid, anxiety ridden brain, I jumped to blood pressure being the reason for any symptoms I felt and I convinced myself it was a sign of a stroke or heart attack beginning. After all, it was now after midnight, technically it was tomorrow, and he never said that I wouldn’t die tomorrow.

I found myself checking my blood pressure—it was lower than it had been at the doctor’s office, which was reassuring, so I tried to go back to bed. But moments later, the tingling was a slight nerve burn sensation, and it was impossible to sleep through, and I was up checking my blood pressure again. And I kept checking. Repeatedly. Because the numbers kept going up. Soon, it was higher than it had been at the doctor's office. I found a chart online which showed normal to high blood pressures and compared the numbers I was getting to the chart. Eventually, it hit the upper range of stage 2 hypertension. That’s as high as most of the charts online go. I surmised, that yes, indeed, I was now dying.

This led to a panicked call to a friend and a 2am emergency room visit, where an emergency doctor was openly frustrated with my daytime physician for not explaining things to me better. See, there are actually four stages, and stage 2, while not good for you and definitely the point at which you need to see a doctor and start making changes to diet and exercise, is not deadly in any way shape or form for an otherwise normal 28-year-old. And it would have to be one's average blood pressure to even warrant as much attention as I was giving it.

“It’s not good to have your blood pressure this high,” he told me, “but only in the long term. Because over time that will weaken your heart and yes, later in life, you could be at a risk for stroke. But you have years before that will happen, not days. You have plenty of time to make lifestyle changes. I recommend a low sodium diet, 20min of walking each day, and between those two things you’ll lose a few pounds and be fine and have no more problems with your blood pressure. Even just cutting out the sodium and caffeine will bring it down ten points or more.”

“So 167/107 won’t kill me?” I asked, glancing nervously at the monitor I was hooked to, wanting to make sure I was really okay.

He smiled, “Miss, there’s a woman in the room next to you whose blood pressure is currently 280/140. Your body is flexible. The blood pressure spikes you see in your numbers are moderate at best, they are concerning from a long term health stand point, but they aren’t dangerous. Get this anxiety thing under control first, then worry about your blood pressure. If you need to feel like you’re doing something, start cutting back on sodium and caffeine and you’ll see an improvement.”

Why can’t all doctors be like that? Why can’t they all inform instead of chastise? Why can’t they all educate instead of resorting to scare tactics?

There were other symptoms that I experienced while at the hospital, however, enough to convince him that I was having a negative reaction to the drug. His recommendation was to immediately stop taking the Celexa. He explained how the drug worked and further explained why I felt physical symptoms from my psychological anxiety in the first place—to paraphrase what he told me: basically, the brain only has so many resources to process all the complicated nerve signals of the body and when our brains are preoccupied with severe anxiety and stress, our ability to do so is hampered. Signals get crossed and symptoms are felt even when there is no cause for them. Focusing in on those symptoms causes more anxiety which in turn makes the symptoms worse. It’s a cycle of negative feedback. Celexa and other SSRIs are, in theory, supposed to help break that cycle. But having severe side effects only agitates things further and makes the drugs not worth the trouble.

“And no more checking your blood pressure,” he cautioned, “it’s just going to make you feel more anxious and that will only make it higher and so on. You’ll always end up working yourself into a worse state than you started in.”

I was relieved to finally have someone tell me what I most needed to hear: it’s psychological. Disconcerting and scary, but not physical and, ultimately, not life threatening. I stayed at my friends house that night because I was still too anxious to be left totally alone. As I lay in the dark of her living room, staring up at the ceiling where the LED charging light of her laptop made a frail halo of blue light, I suddenly realized that, in all the confusion, I had missed the Zep Tepi beginner’s class chat. I didn't worry about it, but I was annoyed. Then, that got me thinking: what I really needed was a medicine I couldn’t get in a doctor’s office.

Now that I had determined that there was no real physical danger, there was no need for a physical remedy. Meds were not the solution to my problem. This was grief; this was a wound of the mind and a wound of the soul. It wasn’t a long term, chemically based, anxiety disorder; it was a short term reaction to a specific event. All I had needed my doctor to do was rule out the possibility that it was more than that.

I sighed. What I needed to do was what I should have done instead of taking the anti-anxiety meds: I should have lit a candle and sat in shrine and asked Them for help. Because doctors can’t heal your soul. But gods can.

“So how do I fix this?” I asked Them softly, “How do I make this stop? I feel like I’ve lost myself. I feel hollow and wrong.”

And I did. I couldn’t tell if it was the medication or the anxiety, but I felt detached from my soul. I felt like I was trapped in my skin, unable to reach anything deeper inside of me. I felt like I was only my body, that I lived only in my flesh and that my inner world was somehow lost to me.

I tried to sleep, but my body was still racked by the side effects of the drugs and the eclectically pulses going up and down my arms kept my attention despite the fatigue I felt. Suddenly I was startled by a weight on my chest and a shadow blocked out the blue light against the ceiling. One of my friend’s three cats had come and curled up with me. He purred loudly as he settled in. It was a calming feeling and focusing on the purr instead of the tingling in my arms helped me doze off.

I don’t recall the dream in its entirety. But I remember still being in the living room at my friend’s house, sleeping in my dream as I slept in life with the cat on top of me. Except, in the dream, there was something between me and the cat: it was a rectangular object, balanced on my body, and the cat sat atop it. It was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. Sometimes light and airy, sometimes like stone. Sometimes flexible and sometimes stiff. It changed so frequently that I simply accepted all its properties as being true all at once. Eventually, the cat stood and looked down at me over the edge of it. A voice spoke from somewhere beyond what I could see.

“It lays the foundation of a house of Bast.”

Suddenly I felt something give and the plate was pushed into me, as if the weight of the cat had punched it though my skin into the hollow interior of my dream body. It startled me awake and I found the real cat still lying on top of me peacefully. When he saw that my eyes were open, he calmly licked my chin. I sat up and he jumped to the floor indignantly and watched me. I looked through my blankets, trying to find the “barrier” he had been sitting on, convinced it should be there somewhere since nothing could really go inside me. Then I realized that the barrier had been part of the dream as well.

“A house of Bast?” I asked aloud as I thought on it.

Why that? I had never had any contact with Bast before. As I pondered what it meant, I realized that the dream had left more behind than an odd phrase: I still felt the symptoms of the drug in my blood, but I felt it clearly in my body—my soul, my mind, were separate underneath it. I was myself again. My being was out of my flesh and back in head where it belonged, the two were still undoubtedly connected, but connected the way they were meant to be—in balance. The hollow “space” inside me as gone, filled again with the familiar essence of my other souls, and there was something warm and tight wrapped around that inner me, a barrier and pathway—connecting, yet keeping everything in its place where it belonged.

I thought on it for a while until the feeling of that difference faded and I couldn’t remember how it had felt to not be normal. My mouth was dry so I got up and flicked on the light so I could get a drink from the kitchen. When I came back into the room, I happened to glance at the entertainment center next to where I had been sleeping and noticed the little altar. My friend is a kind of spiritual pagan, and like me, she keeps spiritual things out in her environment. In this case, an object immortalizing a beloved feline that passed a few years ago, and on top of a box behind it, a statue of Bast.

I remembered it now. I had bought it for her in Las Vegas at the Luxor—before I became Kemetic—because I knew how much she loved her cats. The altar she had made with it was homage to her pets. Bast had pride of place as her personal touchstone for protecting her four-legged companions.

The reason for the dream suddenly made sense— I had been sleeping under an image of a Name and had prayed for help before going to sleep—but the dream itself… I had not known Bast as a healer, a protectress yes, but protection? From what? The drug perhaps? And then there was that phrase: foundation of a house of Bast…what did that mean?

I don’t claim to know. But I suppose it at least gives me something to research today while I wait for this drug to wear off.

Beauty Born of Sorrow

In Memory of J.A.S.--May She Ascend

Today was a first: today I made the first pendant I have made since my mother passed; the first creation of mine that she cannot see with the eyes of the living, peering through her bifocals and holding it two feet from her face. It was born of sorrow and joy, longing and hope. At first I was only making it to replace a piece that sold from my online shop earlier today, but about halfway through, I suddenly realized what a milestone it was. Needless to say, it is not going in the store. I doubt I could part with it now, after that revelation.

It’s been a long time since I created anything. I hadn’t realized just how long. It felt good to have needle and thread in hand, to absorb myself in the art. It is a simple pleasure that made the summer bearable and I know it will help me through the aftermath.

It’s amazing, how much beauty can come of pain.

And so, life goes on. I’ll be seeing a doctor (hopefully tomorrow) to see what I can do about the anxiety and the insomnia. I feel a little better today than I did yesterday, because some of the problems in my life got suddenly resolved this afternoon. In fact, so many fortuitous things happened in such a short time that I have to wonder if, perhaps, someone had a hand in it. Whether hers or someone else’s, I don’t know, but I do feel a little bit bad for skipping the ahku dua today after the beginner’s class chat—I was skittish of having to think of my mother, and I told them as much. I looked over toward the shrine and said, “I offered to you on Friday, and will offer again this Thursday, but I’m tired of tears right now.”

 And that’s when things suddenly started to go right. I lay down to go to sleep for a bit and when I got up it was like the whole world had changed for me and tilted in my favor while my eyes were closed.

I’m still weepy, I’m still anxious, and I’m still tired—but it’s not as bad as it was. I feel hopeful, which is a big improvement.

Against the Swiftly Shifting Tide

And suddenly it breaks. Shatters really. A month goes by and you look around and take stock and realize you haven’t stopped running since it happened. The magnitude of the loss strikes like lightning out of a blue sky and everything changes in an instant. It’s that moment when you’re confidently swimming along just fine and then suddenly notice you’re getting tired and won’t be able to make it to the shore.

That’s when you drown.

Grief is like a finger print—it’s unique to each of us, and there is no way to know how it will be for you until you are there and dealing with it. In Hollywood blockbusters, we see a picture of grief which is all wailing or silence, anger or sorrow, acting out or sobbing. We see the tortured man suffering inwardly as he tries to contain his feelings, maybe taking his emotions out on something or someone in a bout of rage. We see the tearful woman breaking down in her kitchen in a private moment. Sometimes, when filmmakers are feeling particularly daring, we might see those gender roles reversed.

 But how come we never see the people who blame themselves for the death, who convince themselves that they amount to “murderers” for not caring for a loved one properly, despite all the reassurances of the doctors and nurses that they had done everything right? Or the people who develop somatic symptoms matching those of the person who died, and have panic attacks because they come to believe, however irrationally, that they must be dying too? Or the people who have nightmares about their other family members dying, and then become insomniacs for weeks on end because they fear their own dreams? Or the people who keep having flashbacks to the moment of death, reliving the suffering of their loved one over and over? Or those of us who experience all of the above?

My chest is tight and I haven’t slept in ages. I’m tired, but lying down just brings torrents of…stuff …washing over me. Stuff that makes me get up and pace even though my legs ache from pacing: irrational fears, flashbacks, pain in my throat, obsessive worrying over what are ultimately small stupid things, a hollow stomach that doesn’t feel full even when I’m over full.  What do I do for that? Call my father? I did. Not enough. Beg a friend to come be with me for a bit? I did. Not enough. Pray? I did. Not enough. So I've turned to my last resort: I dug out the health care card so I can make a doctor’s appointment on Monday. I have a phobia of doctors—of medical care in general, really—and it takes a lot to push me to that point.

But I’m there.

 I want this to stop and I no longer care how I accomplish that. I read the little glossy pamphlet about grief, the one they send you in the mail the week after your loved one dies, and it says clearly that this is the point where you go get help—when the grief overwhelms you and life grinds to a halt and you feel desperate. This is when you talk to a professional. This is when you stop trying to face it alone, because not everyone can just “tough it out”.

Because when I look back, I’ve been swimming toward that distant shore for a long time. I’ve been swimming since I first got the call about her cancer diagnosis, since I first knew there was a limit to the days we had together, and since I first started to worry about how many were left. But it wasn’t just her. When I start to recall the last six years, I realize that, though her cancer dominated my life, my life wasn’t a cake walk anyway:

I left a job to make sure I had a job, took a hellish job to avoid having no job, and then lost it anyway. I moved back in with my parents and worked for minimum wage for a year despite the four year degree (with a 3.94 GPA) and three years of job experience. I’ve moved five times in those six years (not counting helping my parents move to Minneapolis), had three different employers and five different teaching positions. I’ve dealt with medical problems, financial problems, psychological problems, and spiritual problems.

Not that good things haven’t come of all that. Not that I haven’t reaped the rewards of perseverance in the face of adversity. Not that I haven’t had successes and shining moments and good times. I don’t regret any of it. I don’t wish it hadn’t happened. I’ve accepted that whirlwind of personal chaos as necessary and weathered every storm knowing that in the end it would be worth it…but, it’s still okay to be tired after all of that.

I want ground under my feet again. I want sunny skies, for at least a little while. I don’t need an end to all troubles, just a break from them. And it’s okay to admit that I need help to get there, that I can’t swim that last mile…

Hidden in Plain View

I found what I was looking for.

Just as I was told in shrine, it was hidden in the tales of my childhood. Not the one offs which occupied me for a day or a week and then faded, but the stories which were on a rotation in my mind, like so many television channels to entertain me in private moments. Stories that were never written. Stories which, when they are stripped down to their naked core, to the themes that bind them under the flashy bits, say something about the mind that brought them into existence and the heart that kept them alive over months and years.

I think showing the exercise I have gone through is useful to others because those who are natural tellers of tales may find exactly what I have found by repeating the process. But a tip for others who want to try it:

No, don’t do this with your written stories: do it with your personal stories. If this will work for you at all, you know what I am talking about. I’m talking about those ones which are too guarded and too secret for you to share them with the world— save for perhaps an intent to jot them down “someday”… which is a lie we tell ourselves to justify the existence of these secret fantasies.

Once you have a list of them, the handful or so that have stood the test of time for you, simplify them until nothing but a sketch of a theme is left. It might take several tries to get them stripped down enough. Then, put them in order (roughly) of when they were conceived and they will tell you about yourself.

Here is an example from my own work with this:

The important thing to note, is that none of these stories have anything in common (“duplicates” were grouped and the most powerful among them selected before the stripping process). But despite the apparent differences at the surface level, once put in the order, their core concepts follow one another naturally, and one can see a history in them. The ones listed here are the oldest of mine. They have faded now, but were once important to me, and they speak of things which were once important to me and hint at what has been learned through the years:

A story about starting over after devastating tragedy and learning from the lessons of the past without letting those memories hold you back. (Keeper of Griffins)
A story about reclaiming hope and about honoring the memories of the lost. (Angels Within Us)
A story about reincarnation, redemption, and the meaning of self. (The Book of Eveylon)
A story about recovering from abuse through inner strength and gaining the courage to forgive but not repeat the cycle. (Psi-Gate)
A story about breaking away from society's expectations to follow ones heart. (Wild Wolf)
A story about the sometimes difficult and dangerous nature of the obsessions surrounding the creative process and about the foolishness of blind love and what makes mature relationships work. (The Ebony Room)
A story about taking on duty and a lesson about the honor required to see a commitment through even when the commitment is more than one bargained for. (Lantern Lighters)

They read like a chronology of my inner life. They are a history of my soul. And though I have not outwardly focused on myself in recent years, I have continued to work within, through the medium of story. And those which are still on rotation in my mind? They reveal something else:

A story about overcoming memories of abuse and betrayal, and learning to trust others enough to reveal ones true self to them. (Project Psion—a reworking of Psi-Gate)
A story about the power of creativity, the nature of balance and duality, and about learning to rely on oneself instead of on oracles. (Life Eternal—which shares some story elements with The Ebony Room)
A story about maturing and returning to once forsaken childhood dreams with the wisdom of age, expecting to find the ashes of what once was, only to find, instead, that the light of the hope has not diminished and that destiny is never lost. (Return to Talgeria)
A story about the brutal, but natural, cycle of life and death, and the importance of ancestry, and which also deals with the nature of trials and rightly earning the recognition one gets, as well as how that path can lead to strong and deep relationships with others who have walked it before you. (The Penumbra)

This time it reads not as a chronology but as a map. This is what is important to me now (in some cases, what has always been important and is still being worked on). These are the things that occupy my heart and mind whenever I am idle, and sometimes, even when I’m not. They are not just tales of what was…they are my present, and the foundation on which my future is being built.

So here is the thing which I have been looking for. Things which (as They told me) I say without saying. And while I know that the exact nature of what they say is cryptic to anyone who is not me, that is to be expected because personal truths are often cryptic simply by their nature, and the larger point is that it makes sense:  look into what you have created to find what you are trying to create.

Set Story: Part 6 (conclusion...for now)

So, I was asked how I came to meet and be involved with Set and started to type a “short” version of the story only to find that even the “short” version is incredibly long. So I’m doing a series of installments called Set Story. (I just had a moment where I envisioned a sort of Kemetic version of the How I Met Your Mother TV show, I hope that’s just my subconscious being *funny* because that show stretched out its premise waaaay too long...)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

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Set Story: Part 6 (The Conclusion?)

So, seven years (give or take some months) after first meeting him, he finally managed to get me to knock timidly on the door of the House of Netjer. Which brings us to now.

Mostly.

Many of you have probably already read the posts here that show what happened after. You have probably already seen my anguish and dismay as I've realized what I had feared that night when I first filled out the form.If you haven’t, here are the posts in question, in order, for reference:

When He Speaks from Within Me
A Woman's Hand
Trust and Fear
A One-Sided Argument (and the second part of that)
An Answer from the Ibis

Now, before anyone pops up in the comments to remind me that the RPD is not required and that I don't have to make that decision now: I know...but that's not the point. The point is that there is no reason not to. No reason other than fear and to use the words of a famous man, I have nothing to fear but fear itself.

See, I took Rev. Sedjemes's suggestions to heart when I started the course. Read the Ask the Nisut Archives, she told us, because many of our questions were already answered there. And I did. All of them. I also found the blogs and podcasts and the daily words and the letters. I read them all. I read them as I sat on deathwatch for my mother. And I only started to read them because it had been suggested but I kept reading because of what was said. Her words struck cords in me, and while I certainly do not have the memory to recall each sentence in that volume of wisdom, my heart has no trouble recalling the sense of relevance and truth and trust that I gained through the reading. She won me over. I trust her. And because I trust her, I trust the rituals she oversees. So while I do not have to do the RPD, there is no reason not to, because I trust that it will be right.

And in some small part of me, I fear it will be right.

And I understand that there was never any promise that this would be easy (rites of passage, by definition, are not), and I know why I keep going back to that fear of my parent not being Him: I have a sneaking, aching suspicion, that though he is unquestionably the one who walks with me, the one who always has walked with me, that he may not have been the one who created me. His silence has not helped. There are hints and whispers and thoughts which cross my mind in moments I have been forbidding myself to have. I could be wrong, but to be honest, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not even sure if I want to be wrong.

And it doesn’t change anything. Whatever my RPD holds, it cannot erase this history. There are two shrines in the back room, one for Senut and one for Set. I can handle both obligations. I do not have to forsake him, no matter how the shells fall—Rev. Sedjemes made that clear enough when I asked in class. And if he is satisfied enough with sharing my attentions to continue on with this, so too will I be satisfied.Whatever may come of it.

After all, he’ll get his way in the end.

 That has been a theme for us from the beginning.

Set Story: Part 5

So, I was asked how I came to meet and be involved with Set and started to type a “short” version of the story only to find that even the “short” version is incredibly long. So I’m doing a series of installments called Set Story. (I just had a moment where I envisioned a sort of Kemetic version of the How I Met Your Mother TV show, I hope that’s just my subconscious being *funny* because that show stretched out its premise waaaay too long...) 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

------
Set Story: Part 5


Now, lest you think I am perpetually god bothered, let me assure you that this is not the case. Once we had established that the rest of the pantheon was friendly and once I had opened up to receiving messages from other Names, Set more or less backed off and let me do as I pleased in my exploration of Kemetic paganism.  There were brief, infrequent encounters with him and other names, but most of the time I was on my own.

I accumulated better historical resources over time, but never entirely relied on them. I had been Wiccan for a short time, after all, and since the majority of my interaction with other pagans still took place on general forums, I had a tendency to swing back and forth between staunch reconstructionist leanings and freewheeling eclecticism, since those were the options which were most readily available to me.  But it was the space between those two extremes which led to some of my more interesting encounters with the Names. Like the time when I decided to “Kemeticisze” the winter solstice celebration and reframe it as a day dedicated to Set. I know; it’s a stretch…I didn’t say it was one of my shining moments:

In an attempt to convert the Wiccan wheel of the year into something I could still use on a Kemetic path, I decided that the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the darkest season, was an appropriate day to mark as a holiday of Set. In my revised mythos for the day, the long night was caused by a particularly fierce battle with the serpent preceding the nevertheless triumphant rise of the sun. The night-long vigil, then, was my symbolic support of my patron’s struggle as that battle raged. I even offered meat and the closest thing to wine that I was willing to consume (sparkling grape juice—I don’t do alcohol, a personal boundary he has thus far been willing to respect despite his own preferences). I laid out the food and "wine" at one of the darkest hours of the night in the predawn, with a solemn prayer offering the energy to help sustain him in his work.

I got so into it that I was surprised when he showed up to partake of the offerings. He literally sat across the table from me as I sat there staring dumbly at him. Then he looked at me with a bemused grin. What followed is easily the most awkward and idiotic conversations I have ever had with a deity.

What's wrong with you? Did you forget who you were offering to?  

“No, I just...I mean...shouldn’t you be…don’t you have something to be, you know, doing? Right now? At this moment?”

Are you referring to my ensuring the rise of the sun?

“Um...yes.”

You do realize that at any given moment in your time the sun is always rising somewhere on your planet. Do you not?

“Oh, well…that’s true…It’s just that I was doing this ritual to pay homage to your battles with the waxen one and—“

And even if the sun was not already rising with every breath you take, it is not so easy to preoccupy me completely. I am a god. I can, as you might say, “multi-task”. Now pour me more of this “wine”. 

Well, yeah. Duh. I realize that now…

But fun and games aside, there was a problem for me to deal with: the question of patronage. It seemed to be everywhere in the pagan world—various practitioners dedicating themselves to a specific god or goddess. It was so ubiquitous that I don’t think I ever recall meeting a polytheist who claimed to worship all the gods of a given pantheon without singling one out as a patron or matron. There were also a plethora of people worshiping a handful of patrons from different pantheons. But the undercurrent of their stories was mostly the same regardless of how it was phrased: they felt an intimate and personal connection to those gods. And newcomers to the faith often made finding that connection to deity their top priority.

Of course, I had few problems figuring out what to say in conversations where the question of patronage came up: clearly my patron was Set. He was the one I dealt with most frequently and had known the longest. And that in itself was not a problem…until I came across the Kemetic Orthodox concept of parentage. Unfortunately, I came across it out of context. I found a Kemetic Reconstructionist using “Mother” and “Father” to refer to deities and then stumbled across a brief explanation of why: “It’s the god or goddess that made you, whose essence is also your essence.”

That clicked and made sense to me. Set was the god of outsiders. I was an outsider. Set was a god of chaos. My life was always filled with chaos. Set was a god of storms. I was born during one and had always loved watching them. *Ding Ding* said my brain, we have a winner! But, as I understand now, that simplistic understanding of things was a bit far off the mark

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I read a book once which talked at great length about the ambiguity of chemical imbalance in the brain and the efficacy of treating that imbalance. How do we know, the book asked, whether a decrease in the level of serotonin in a given person’s brain is causal or dependent to a person’s mood? Psychiatric science works on the notion that the imbalance causes the mood disorder. Psychology justifies its worth by pointing out that we can’t be sure of that, because it is just as likely that a person’s mood might be causing the imbalance in chemicals. It’s a chicken or egg question, in some regard, and likely not something which can be determined due to the number of variables, so the book argues for using psychiatric and psychological techniques to cover all the bases.

 It is an interesting dilemma and tangential to the problem of patronage: how can I be sure if the things that happen in my life and the person I am are directly caused by my innate patronage, or are what drew my patron to me? The nature of our psyches change over time—how can we be sure what elements are truly our essence and which ones are merely in the forefront due to our current circumstances? 

But I digress.

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 I had decided for myself that my essence was his essence and, ultimately, that was a problem. Not that it was entirely a bad thing—it helped me make sense of my past and gave me a touchstone for dealing with the continuing problems in my life, but it also hindered me in an unexpected way: I took it not simply as an explanation of events in my life but as a set of expectations that I felt I needed to fit.

There was a buzz of an idea that I brushed away year after year whenever it cropped up. Community. More specifically, religious community, of which I had none. True I had my haunts on the general pagan scene, but nothing specifically Kemetic. But there was really only one organization which was not already defunct by the time I started looking into the idea: The House of Netjer. I had ignored the House of Netjer almost from the moment I knew it existed. (Which in retrospect was probably just as well, because I didn't have anything even resembling the maturity and humility needed to approach a community with an open mind.)

My issue with the House was rooted in my stalwart refusal to accept that  organized  religion of any kind could be at all beneficial to me. That was one part my upbringing and one part my view of my essential nature being that of an outsider: I wanted fellowship, but didn’t want the rules. And of course, there was something else which had always bothered me about the temple, one thing which no one doing even the most cursory research on the House (or even just reading posts on general pagan forums about them) could miss even if they tried: The RPD. Of course, I didn’t understand really what it was or why it was done, but at the time, I really didn’t want to.

“It doesn’t matter. Fellowship would be nice, but I don’t really need anyone else,” I told myself, “he raised me as an outsider precisely so I wouldn’t.”

But I realized eventually that it was awful lonely on the solitary path. I also saw again and again in my scholarly resources how important community was in Kemetic thought, and I came to understand that there was a reason for those rules, for that structure. It wasn’t an arbitrary feature of a state religion—it was woven into the fabric of the faith. Still I resisted. I delved into my local community and hung out on general pagan forums, and I did eventually patch together something that felt like community. It's a community that helped sustain me, and a community I still value to this day…but it wasn't enough.

And more importantly, though I could suppress my desire for company and convince myself the nature of the community didn't matter as long as I had one, there were moments when things in my life conspired to cloud my judgment and make hearing any of the Netjeru, even Set, extraordinarily hard...and it was always those moments when I really needed to hear them. It was the most recent of these incidents which finally woke me up to the truth: sometimes, I need other people--other Kemetics-- to see what I’m missing--to hear them for me when I cannot.

I won’t detail what happened here, because it is technically already on the blog under the separate page, To Strike the Waxen One Away. I will say that afterward I found myself lying on the floor at the foot of my shrine and looking up at where the shadows of the statues were cast on the wall by the candle light--trying to piece it all together. I had always been solitary on my path. Why did that have to change? My way had always worked before...but then, if had not been for the message delivered to me by one of their other children...by a member of the House no less…

“Am I wrong about them? Like I was wrong about Wesir?”  I asked.

 I saw the shadow cast by Set’s statue on the wall and realized that, from the angle I was viewing it from, it looked oddly hawk like, with something atop the head. Heru? I suddenly recalled that they were brothers as much as they were rivals. There was something oddly symbolic in how Set's statue could cast his brother's reflection. Strange. Why had I never noticed that shadow before? Set spoke:

Because you are on the floor. A different view requires a different perspective—and the humility to seek it. 

I found myself online later that evening, reading the website and, eventually, filling out an application for the beginner’s class.

“But I'm not going to do the RPD,” I told Set as I hit send. I had read that the beginner's class, and even membership in the temple, carried no obligation to undergo that rite of passage, and it didn’t seem like something which would be necessary to find what I was looking for, but there was a small niggling worry in my heart and I wanted Him to confirm what I thought I already knew, “I don’t need it. I already know you.”

To my surprise, he didn't respond.

 My heart skipped a beat in the silence.

 I was used to many things from him... but silence wasn't one of them.

Set Story: Part 4

So, I was asked how I came to meet and be involved with Set and started to type a “short” version of the story only to find that even the “short” version is incredibly long. So I’m doing a series of installments called Set Story. (I just had a moment where I envisioned a sort of Kemetic version of the How I Met Your Mother TV show, I hope that’s just my subconscious being *funny* because that show stretched out its premise waaaay too long...) 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

------
Set Story: Part 4

"You do realize I'm German right?" I asked him once.

Why should that matter?

"Well, I suppose it doesn't matter now that I think about it, but...I did sort of think I ought to belong to some Heathen god or something."

 You belong to me, *smirk* and I take who I will. 

"Well, I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, you're... sort of stubborn."

Heh. You understate me greatly.

It took and intense period of instruction and research for me to really get it through my head that I was meant to be Kemetic--and always had been, in a way. But I was a very willing student. I devoured the books the library had to offer and ordered others on interlibrary loan. I grew comfortable with Set and came to like having him about. I even managed to secure a statue of him over the winter break. For his part, Set had a lot of changes planned for me--my life abruptly became a whirlwind of unplanned setbacks which nevertheless turned quickly into opportunities. I got so accustomed to his style of "fixing" things that when my family's car got totaled in an accident I immediately turned to my mother and said,

 "Awesome, we're getting a new car! We needed one of those for the summer trip."

She responded by looking at me like I had three heads.

"What?" I asked, "No one got hurt..."

But somewhere in the background there was a problem, which, as usual, I didn’t notice: I was comfortable with Set only by virtue of the fact that I hadn’t addressed my real concerns about his mythos. I loved him for who and what he was, but I still had it in my head that there was something wrong with worshiping a “murderer” even if he wasn’t as bad as some sources made him out to be. (I know, I know...but I didn't read Seth: God of Confusion until much later, so I was still working off of a lot of Plutarch based stuff)

And because I couldn't bring myself to be scared of the god who had taken me in and given me a new lease on life, I defaulted to being scared of the rest of the pantheon instead. I just couldn’t see how any of them could have a favorable opinion of me given the mythology of the god I was regularly talking to. And I feared Wesir in particular. Set had a solution to that, of course.

Talk to him.

“What are you, crazy? You murdered him! What am I supposed to say: 'Hi, my patron killed you, here's some offerings.' I mean, seriously, how am I supposed to make that conversation not awkward?”

You’ll see. 

“No. I won’t. Because I am not going to do that.”

I had not figured out yet that when Set decides I need something, and I refuse to go along with it, he usually forces the issue. I have written about this particular misadventure elsewhere, and while the memory is strong enough that I could easily retell it, it has been many years now, and I think it’s better said from a closer point of view, so I’m going to cheat a bit and repost some of my original recording here (edited for grammar and clarity issues)

*

04-30-2006

In all fairness, they did give me a heads up that it was coming, and I did get the message. I just didn’t believe it. I had picked up my new cards to do my second ever reading the weekend after I created them and laid out my usual spread. It seemed like a pretty normal reading save for one card laid out in the spot representing the future. The card which came up was Khenty-amenti ‘foremost of the westerners’ a card that I associated as Wesir in his role as ruler of the dead. I jokingly said to myself, “What does that mean? Am I going to die?” No joke. I should have paid more attention.

Less than a week later it started with a high-five from a sick kid at the end of a school day, We were celebrating the end of pre-testing reviews and I was encouraging them to get lots of rest and eat a good breakfast and think positively. I didn’t think much of my sniffling and mild fever, despite that I felt pretty yucky by Friday, and the sick student had gone missing from school. I stopped at the store on my way home and bought some cold tablets figuring I’d spend the weekend sleeping and be better by Monday. I had a good talk with my parents and brother over the phone and then went to bed.

I woke up at 3am with a very high fever. Cursing to myself I got up and took more fever reducer, downed a few glasses of water and went back to bed. What I couldn’t have known was that the fever didn’t go down, and my body didn’t absorb that water. Under the thick covers on my bed, my fever began to cook my body slowly, draining the moisture from organs.

When I woke up the next morning I felt weak and was shivering violently despite the heavy blankets. I checked my temperature, and with more cursing, took more medicine and bathed myself in cool water to bring the fever down. I also consumed half a gallon of apple juice and a few bottles worth of Dasani, attributing my thirst to the fever. A few hours later, the temperature came down to 100 and exhausted, I went back to bed, figuring the worst of it was over. I didn’t notice how frequently I got up to go to the bathroom and down more juice. I didn’t notice that my skin was growing hot to the touch. I didn’t notice how I was getting weaker and weaker. In fact, I didn’t really notice anything until a friend called and woke me from my increasingly deadly slumber.

I talked with her for a while, now somewhat delusional with fever. She could tell something was wrong and suggested that I should call someone, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I thought the fever had gone down. When the shivering started again I said goodbye to her and got up to take more medicine. It was then that I turned on the light and looked in the mirror.

 At first I didn’t even recognize myself, my skin had pulled tight and turned redder than the sun setting in the western sky, not just my face, but all of me. Terrified, I took more medicine, ignoring the dosage restriction, and took another cool bath. This time it didn’t help.

I laid down in my room again, weighing my options, getting weaker by the second. Suddenly I heard a small still voice in me recite the dreaded card from my reading. If you don’t go now you will die here, it said. In a state of panic I called my parents who immediately told me to call a family friend in town, and that failing, to call 911. I called our friend and she raced to my side of town to take me to the hospital. While I waited for her I took another cold bath and sat in front of my fan. I was scared enough to cry, but by that point I didn’t have enough water in my body to make tears.

Adrenalin kicked in to get me out of the apartment and into my friend’s car. I was able to walk into the ER without too needing too much assistance and signed in, but I started to feel woozy while they took my blood pressure and heart rate during the initial processing. My blood pressure was low so the nurse ran the machine again-- doubting the results-- but the second time the machine wouldn’t read it all.

“This machine must be busted.” The nurse told me. “We’re going to take you into triage to use their machine.”

I nodded, at that point, I didn’t care anymore, all I wanted to do was lie down and I said so. But I hobbled into the triage room, feeling dizzy again, and nauseas as well. I got three steps into the room and my body finally gave out completely. I remember someone grabbing me as I fell and slipped into blackness. When I came to, the nurse next to me was trying to get a heart rate with a stethoscope.

“Still no blood pressure,” another said.

“Well, ICU is full, but I don’t think anyone in unit 11 is dying, so we could move someone out and put her there,” a third said from behind me.

I was terrified, I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, and couldn’t understand what was happening. Am I dying? I thought. After a few minutes my family friend noticed me moving my eyes and mouthing silent words.

 “She’s coming back,” she said.

I regained enough strength to mumble my way through some basic questions about allergies and what I had taken that night. Then they quickly wheeled me into ICU. As we sped down the hallway I faded out a bit, starting to feel distant from the world around me. Everything suddenly went white and a large, overwhelming presence touched me.My soul knew him before my mind did.

 Wesir.

I am here, in this. What do you feel?

My inner soul responded first, while my mind struggled to make sense of things. I trust you, it said, take me if it is my time. My mind, with no way to grasp any thought but a simple recognition of his presence, agreed. Then I felt comfort and love from him. It was a beautiful feeling.

 Suddenly, I was back in the hospital, they were striping my clothes off and transferring me to a cot. They put an IV in me right away, trying several times to find a vein that hadn’t recessed into my skin, and bruising me up and down my arms while trying to take blood for testing.

“You are one dehydrated little girl.” The doctor said with great concern, “We’ll do some tests, but I think some chilled saline will do the trick to get you back up and running.”

Some saline was an understatement. Three liters of it latter I was finally re-hydrated enough to look human again. And that was all. I was just dehydrated, gather, nearly to the point of death, but just dehydrated. Seven hours after I was admitted, I walked out of the hospital to go home with my family friend and be treated as an out-patient, but not before the doctor gave me a chilling insight.

“You know, if you had come in about fifteen minutes later, and we would have a real hard time saving you,” he said, “there was a moment there when I thought we hadn’t.”

I spent a week at my friend’s house, recovering slowly from the ordeal. It was several days before I was strong enough to sit up for more than a few hours at a time, much longer before I could walk. I missed a lot of school, but I didn’t even think about that. All I could think about was the contact with Wesir. I kept playing it over and over in my head, trying to understand what had happened. It was dramatic. It was unmistakable. It was life changing. I have never been so sure of anything in my life than I was of the fact that he had touched me in love as my body lay dying.

*

And so it went. In the end I was grateful for the experience and the fringe benefit was an extraordinary sense of calm and peace that lasted through most of the semester (it’s hard to get stressed about anything in life when you have recently been so close to death as to taste your mortality). But that wasn’t the end of my problems balancing my focus on my relationship with Set and my perspective on the rest of the faith…

Set Story: Part 3

So, I was asked how I came to meet and be involved with Set and started to type a “short” version of the story only to find that even the “short” version is incredibly long. So I’m doing a series of installments called Set Story. (I just had a moment where I envisioned a sort of Kemetic version of the How I Met Your Mother TV show, I hope that’s just my subconscious being *funny* because that show stretched out its premise waaaay too long...)

Part 1
Part 2
------

Set Story: Part 3

I didn’t think I would find what I was looking for in the library’s book stacks—which was mainly because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I bypassed them and headed to the sprawling sea of computer stations on the main floor to log in on a machine and check the pagan forums I had haunted as a teen. I found the sheer number of pantheons and cultures overwhelming. But I did encounter a suggestion that one way to go about narrowing the options down was for one to simply pick a pantheon and a god and ask the deity in question to take one under wing for a few days, and see how it goes. Even if that deity didn’t respond, the process of elimination alone could ultimately lead to an answer—one could hope to just get lucky early in the search.

I spent the lunch hour thinking it over. After my teenage experience of calling on “Brigid” randomly from a book, it was at least a tactic I was familiar with. But I was skeptical: there were hundreds of names in that book. I went home and put it out of my mind for a few weeks, hoping for some revelation, or failing that, a sign.

I ended up going to college in Las Vegas. I hadn’t wanted to originally, but the school that I had set my heart on didn’t admit me and UNLV was the better of the options I had left (the honor’s college invitation had sealed it for me—none of the other schools offered me that). I hated the city when I first moved there. I was used to open plains and fantastic prairie skies. I was used to storms in the summer, migrating geese in the fall, and crystal sparkling snow in the winter. Vegas was dusty and dirty and unchanged year round. Even the temperature varied only slightly. But it did have the strip—and even if I didn’t drink or gamble or have much money to spend on shows and such, there was fantastic architecture and people watching to my heart’s content.

I didn’t usually go to the strip alone, especially at night,  but one day, out of the blue, I decided I wanted to go to the new age store I frequented and see if any of the deity statues spoke to me. It was about as good as picking a name from a list, I reasoned, and perhaps I would get a better feel from an image than I would from just seeing a name. I hopped on a bus that evening and headed for the store in question—a little shop under the escalator at the center of my favorite casino: the Luxor.

Yep. The big black pyramid shaped, Egyptian themed one. It’s almost ironic how I never even thought to look up the Egyptian pantheon despite the number of hours I probably spent walking through all those Egyptian themed shops and eating at that Egyptian themed café and sneakily taking pictures with my friends in the fake King Tut exhibit. But to me, Ancient Egypt was a kitschy Hollywood trend—The Mummy was an entertaining movie, and I remembered reading a chapter on the Pyramids in a history text book once, but my experience outside that watered down commercialized version of Ancient Egyptian culture was very limited.

In any case, I putzed around the Pyramid Shop for a long time without seeing anything interesting. It was actually on my way back out of the casino that something on a sale table outside a souvenir shop caught my eye. It was a tiny Egyptian style box with a black jackal sitting on it. “Anubis Box”, read the tag. I put it back down and was a bit surprised when it pained me to do so—I really liked it. But while I didn’t know much (read: didn’t know anything) about the Egyptian gods, I knew Anubis was a “death god” of some kind. However, I couldn’t quite put it down. The briefest thought crossed my mind—what if…could I ask him? Why not? It at least gave me a reason to buy the box.

I took it home and put it on my desk in my dorm room. Immediately after doing so I felt silly. This couldn’t be the right god. It couldn’t even be the right pantheon. I went to bed, convinced I was going crazy. And… it proceeded to stare at me all night to the point where I was uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep.

Would you believe me if I told you that, despite that, I didn’t take the hint?

Well, I didn’t. I had this idea in my head that, surely, only a European pantheon would be interested in a tall, day-glow white, blued-eyed, girl with German ancestry. I couldn’t conceive of finding any important part of my destiny in Africa, of all places—that legacy couldn’t possibly belong to me. Besides, in general, jackals aside, I found the Egyptian god statues ugly to look at. Eventually, I got up and put the “Anubis Box” in a drawer so I could get some sleep.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Suddenly, references to Ancient Egypt were popping up all over the place. Every other post on the pagan forums seemed to be talking about this or that Egyptian god. Then, in a thread on finding patron deities, I came across a post where one woman was talking about a god she referred to as Big Red. I got a sudden flash back to the image of the figure I had seen in that early ritual I did as a teen. Red hair…it was only coincidence, right? Other voices chimed into the conversation on that discussion, relating their own experiences with him. Naming him properly: Set.

The name wouldn’t leave me, even well after I left the library that night. In fact, no matter what I did or where I went I couldn’t quite distract myself enough to keep from thinking on it. But when I did break down and do a web search on the name, what I found was not encouraging. The god of desert, storms, and foreigners. That I could handle but…Chaos? Darkness? The murder and mutilation of his brother? He didn’t sound much like the sort of god one ought to follow. And yet, there was something compelling about him, and he was being portrayed differently on the forums: a god of outsiders, trials, and initiations. The more I read the more I felt that there was something there worth looking into.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to do some real research. I hit up the library again, and this time I went to the book stacks, I found exactly what I was looking for: Egyptology texts. I did a lot of reading and learned fairly quickly that Set was one of the more confusing figures in Ancient Egyptian mythology, and that the forum goers had the right of it: his near demonization came later in history.

But it actually wasn’t the information about Set specifically which caught my attention—it was the information about Ancient Egyptian religion itself. I found myself agreeing with things I stumbled across and I was intuitively drawn to descriptions of Ancient Egyptian magic and ritual. That surprised me. Maybe there was something to all of this after all.

I found myself at a railing on the top floor of the library looking down seven stories into the main lobby. The sense of space was at once freeing and terrifying. Fearful of the height, I kept back from the ledge. But it was quiet and empty there, and I found myself talking the emptiness, asking,

“So, you’re… Set. Aren’t you?”

Hey kid. What took you so long?

I was startled to get a response, but something clicked suddenly inside me. It was like finally turning a puzzle piece just right and feeling it snap into place. I was filled with trepidation, but when you have a god talking to you, and staring at you expectantly, you can’t help but respond.

 And so it started.