Symbols and Cues

One of them approaches me and holds a small crystal leaf out over my arm. It flashes blue against the white of my skin. Another man comes and does the same, and then another. Masters. That is the word which is used for these men in their humble robes. I am uneasy. They are there for me. I am important to the mass of people standing around me, and yet, unimportant at the same time. The crystal leaves, flashing blue, show that they have my best interest at heart. 

One of them, a gruff man with gray fur around the collar of his robe…his leaf does not flash blue. It is a cascade of orange and yellow and green and pink. I glance in his eyes and his gaze is disparaging, he continues on without waiting for me to nod. It is dangerous to ignore what has happened, but I do. I suddenly feel that the others are impatient, that I would only be holding things up, and that I might somehow displease them. I know that crystals sometimes show those colors against a white which is too pale. The leaves should not do this. They are enchanted to flash blue regardless of my skin. I know this, but I rub my arm self-consciously… and maintain my silence. 
-----

The take-away from the dream was immediately obvious to me on waking, because I have a crystal leaf with those exact properties. It is one of the most powerful talisman’s I own—a relic of my childhood—and that blue flash is a symbol in the language that only They can speak to me.

It is a well-timed dream because it comes right before I move on to Chapter 3 of Trance-portation and prepare to imprint cues on myself to help me slip in and out of trance only when I desire to. The crystal leaf is not one of them. In fact, it is not even a symbol that I will need for this trancework, but I sense that it will be important for what I think will come after. In the mean-time, I am vested in the task of deciding what cues to incorporate into my practice.

Music is obvious. I have used the route of dedicated music before and it seems the most natural for someone like me who can perfectly replay instrumental songs in her mind on demand (there is also the timing aspect of that…something loop-able would be good). And of course—Talismanarist*  that I am— I am also considering a talisman to put on when doing trancework, perhaps one which contains some vehicle for storing a scent paired to the same purpose. I am thinking one of the oils I own would be good. There is another scent which I used when doing spellwork as a teen, but I have only found it in candles and I don’t want to be limited to flame.

And for reasons I don’t fully understand, a part of me wants to use a blindfold--and my Ba is fluttering and loudly insisting it should be embroidered…

I will have to think on that.

-----
*Yes, I made up that title…we need a word for people who make Talismans which is not as grandiose as “Alchemist” or “Artificer” but not as mundane as “Artisan” or “Artist”. Also something not starting with “A”.

Noticing the Sky

The question is perhaps, whether I really need to have a single overriding purpose, and to be driven by it, in order to have destiny or if it is the nature of a being with a multiplicity of Iru to be many disparate things simultaneously and see that they converge at some point, hopefully in a way which brings something into creation that is unique to the multifaceted individual which has wrought it.

So I ask Him, because I have not asked him anything in a long while: Can I worship in as many ways as there are names and still fulfill my obligations to the whole? Yes. Can I stand within many circles of community while at the same time standing outside them all? Yes. Can I choose different careers, arts, and modalities of living and have them all contribute to a comprehensive sense of self despite them being at odds with each other now and then? Yes.

Fall has officially begun and it is that time of year when I am usually most productive. It’s that time of year when the sunlight filters at angles through the atmosphere—still strong enough to light the trees gold in the morning and evenings, but not strong enough to fill the air with heat. Light slips in its cycle and drifts way from the clock, waking me to darkness and returning me to the same long before I clock out of the small classroom where I work. Soon, we will be buried under an inundation of snow, and the fields of ice will begin collecting the water our farmers need in order to grow the next year’s crops. But for now, we still reap from the dead stalks of last year’s growth—the living still feast on the bodies of the deceased.

Things change and yet they stay the same. Students leave my room and new ones filter in to replace them. My father and brother take my mother’s place on the speed dial of my phone. The landscape of the altar changes and the icons of yesterday return in a new arrangement and their number grows, but the offerings remain as they have always been. I turn my eyes from the past to the future and contemplate change…

The chill in the air reminds me of a different night when I was led out into a field that crunched with morning ice to see the milky way spill across the sky. I felt my place in the world then—in the vastness of existence, my place was small. But knowing that did not discourage me: it comforted me and excited me. So much to see and know…I was reminded why I keep exploring, why I returned…

I pulled cards for His oracle and He left no mistake about what He intended for me. Trust the Nisut (AUS) and the community she keeps in her care, contribute to that community, believe in your multiplicity and listen to your intuition. But then a more curious thing—look toward the sky.

 Seek Nut. 

Why? Because I found my meaning in the depths of her star field once? Because my mother is ascended now, is in her keeping? Because she is the Name who presides over the year? Or is there something else? Is there something more?

I left the city because I could not see the sky. Now I live where there is nothing to obstruct my view. My mother felt the same—Midwestern skies, she said, were so beautiful. She spent her last days gazing out the window of her condo at that expanse of sky, and I sat with her and watched the same. Whenever I step outside, I look up—this has been true of me ever since I was little…there is something there for me, something which has always been wordless, but curiously, is no longer nameless. Nut.

I am surprised that I didn’t notice Her there before.

Day 70

There was a veritable feast laid out for the dead, with three liquid offerings and four food offerings—all of my mother’s favorites, because this evening we welcomed my mother home. Her picture now rests beside those of her family and her locket and ring are on the little shelf next to the others. I sigh, basking in the sense of rightness and peace before I close the little shrine’s doors and blow out the candle as I sing her song one more time.

Day 70 is an eternity away from day 1.

In some ways, it doesn’t hurt any less than it did that night, but it hurts different. It’s gentle pain now that brings reassuring tears. She has changed…but not so much that I don’t still know her. The pain is gone from her now…that’s the biggest thing. She finally sees how much my father really does love her. She finally sees how much my brother and I do to be good people and leave a positive legacy in the world. All the criticism and all the pettiness is gone. Her spirit seems somehow bigger than it was, brighter than it was, and far more knowing. She finally has that wisdom she always wanted, that universal knowledge that she always searched for…and true to the woman she was in life, she’s already started using her new found powers as an Ahku to benefit the family.

So…yeah. Closure. It feels nice, it does. :)

Wards

I realize now, long after the fact of course, that I forgot to mention in the Grounding and Centering post that it was essentially my reaction to Chapter 2 of Trance-Portation. (Remember, I’m working through the book and using this blog as my “journaling” exercise as recommended by Mrs. Paxson) To recap Chapter 2 briefly before moving on: my reaction to the chapter on basic psychic readiness techniques is that I already do those things; I just do them under a different name.

I will add to that something which I did not bring up last time: my house needs wards. Physical ones, I’m thinking, since I already do so much work in Talismanry and it makes sense to cash in on that skill whenever possible. Of course, this means getting supplies, then making the wards with those supplies, then purifying everything, then doing a full blown ritual to set the wards in place. It probably also means starting some sort of tradition of offering to whatever Netjeri end up inhabiting the wards. There is a lot that goes into something like this.

But I don’t think I need all of that merely to begin the work outlined in this book. The shrine room has been properly consecrated and dedicated—given the shift in energy of just entering that space, I know it is well protected enough to give me a safe place to begin trance practices even if I wouldn’t be comfortable doing the same in my living room—so I’ll go that route for now and take my time to do the wards properly.

Still, I thought it might be interesting for people to see exactly how I’m going to go about the warding process, so I decided to write a few posts about it. This is the initial “brainstorming” type post and I’ll occasionally post updates as I work through the stages of actually making this vision manifest.

First, I’ll start with what I mean when I say “wards”—in this case, I’m talking about specific, carefully crafted objects which can act as vessels for protective spirits (Netjeri) who will be tasked with defending my home and keeping its unseen spaces clean in exchange for offerings of some sort. There are other ways of going about warding, but many of them require a lot more dedicated time and personal energy to be spent maintaining them (sometimes weekly or even daily refreshing is required depending on how the ward has been set up and its relative staying power). I also like the idea of having some friendly and protective Netjeri around: my goal here is not to empty my house of the unseen, but to make the unseen part of my home more comfortable. I fully intend on working with spirits throughout my trance work explorations, so it makes sense to have a few allies around in case something goes wrong, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Planning is critical when going about major things like permanent wards. It helps to define one’s goals and then build one’s process around those goals. First, I’ll start with the obvious goals arising from the problems I’m trying to solve:

Goals

1. Keep my blessed (but still nosy and oblivious) dead out of the bedroom and away from the hallway in front of the bedroom so I can sleep at night.
2. Chase out the little unseen critters that like to play with the white noise of the fans and mess with random things.
3. Defend against the larger unseen things that occasionally show up when mystical work is done outside the shrine room.
4. Keep out the energies from other apartments.
5. Help get rid of the damn spiders. (Seriously. I have a dedicated dust-buster for spider removal and I have to use it daily despite the building having been sprayed on numerous occasions)

Then there are the things I intuitively want to make sure I consider when coming up with my design options because it makes me feel more comfortable and at ease when things are structured in such a way:

1. As I already mention several times, I definitely want to go with inhabited wards. Specifically, I want friendly ally spirits who are well aware that they are more or less “employed” to protect my home. (And will be “paid” through some sort of reasonable set of offerings). Companionship is a bonus for both of us, and I should hope that they would see it that way too and enjoy being around the house as much as I hope to enjoy having them around.
2. I would like said ally spirits to work together throughout the home space rather than having “domains” and/or being tied to specific areas. (ie, I don’t want to designate one as the kitchen spirit because I want a long term relationship with these beings and what do I do if I move into dorms for grad school and suddenly don’t have a kitchen? Or worse, we end up in a studio apartment and suddenly there isn’t enough space for them to each have a “domain” even if the domains are non-specific)
3. I also want them to have some autonomy and be able to express their personalities and interact with me and my guests. I don’t want them to be objects or mechanisms. I don’t want them to be servants who can only speak when spoken to. I want them to be members of the family.

My ideas based on the above:

I think I’d be best off creating a system of wards, inhabited collectively, and not individual wards inhabited individually. This does several things: it removes the tendency for wards to be “domain” driven and encourages the right types of spirits to apply for the job, aka spirits willing to work as part of a team effort and who don’t feel an overwhelming need to “claim” physical space. I don’t mind if they claim items in the house. In fact, I’d be thrilled if they, say, took an interest in managing the tarot cards or decided that one prefers to work with windows and another would rather mind the doors. I think that would go a long way toward encouraging the sort of autonomy and personality I’m hoping for.

Along that same line of thinking, it would also help to have some central focus for the system, perhaps a sort of altar where I could leave their offerings for them or speak to them in general terms even if I don’t know specifically where they are at a given moment. The outer wards then, would not be "inhabited" so much as serve to communicate the boundaries of our space and act as guidelines rather than anchors. It would make sense to place them above doors and windows to show the edges of the home. It might be nice to still make them vessels as well as markers, though, to give the spirits places where they could curl up and rest when not active. That might help keep them from all ending up at the central altar. Sort of like their own version of a “living room” (the altar) and “bedrooms” (the outer wards). In that way, I suppose they could claim the wards as their own, but in a more generalized fashion and not dependant on the placement of the wards.

That central altar could also be where I let them know what I need them to do as well as where I give them offerings for doing those things. For example, maybe a small jar where I put my requests of them—I could write a note about the spiders, for instance, and trust that they would take care of it as best they could. For bigger issues and crisis situations, I might want to skip the jar and have some way to call an emergency meeting, maybe a little bell would do the trick.

 I should also create a sort of “contract” delineating what I expect of them and what they can expect of me in return, so everyone is clear on the terms of the relationship.  I should set out a few simple but firm rules for any spirit living in my space and how I intend to hold them accountable. For example: I need them to be friendly to my dead even as I ask them to firm about the boundaries of my bedroom. They could be a bit scary toward the dead if need be, but I would draw the line at them doing anything that would overtly hurt my dead. I would want them to be clear that I will personally handle any dead that won’t listen to them. That would take a bit of explaining to communicate, but the rule itself would be simple and clear: Don’t hurt any of my beloved dead for any reason.

 I should also list the things I am willing to do in return. Things like the food and drink offerings I can provide (breads, fruits, wines, water, etc…), other non-food offerings (flowers, incense, candles, etc…), gifts I can bring whenever I find them (such as smooth stones found along the river, feathers, collections of objects of certain colors, etc…), creative offerings I can make for them (drawings, beaded baubles, origami, etc…) and actions I am willing to perform (such as singing a song they like once a week or reciting poetry or doing a dance or some such).

It might also be worth the time to create some means for them to be able to communicate when they want to leave (for whatever reason) and give them a clear, no-hard-feelings way out (rather than them having to cause enough trouble to get dismissed). Maybe some sort of sign which we both know the meaning of and will allow me to react appropriately—though in addition to the sign, I should devise a way to confirm their intent so I don’t respond rashly to an accidental coincidence. Tarot cards are an obvious mechanism for confirming, but defining actual signs…that’s trickier. I would need it to be something odd enough that I’d notice but not so odd as to be outside the realm of their ability. Maybe having a set of options is the best route to take. Off the top of my head I can think of a few: multiple light bulbs burning out all at once, the repeated sounding of a wind chime placed in a corner with very little air current…something like that.

So now that I have a basic idea of what I’m doing, it’s off to make design sketches and figure out exactly how I’m going to make all of this work. :)

[An additional note: Yes, I have already talked to my Ahku about staying out the bedroom. It hasn't changed much because I think they have trouble telling the difference between "bedroom" and "rest of the house". Having one of the ward spirits herd them out of that space if they wander into it seems like a good solution. Maybe they'll get a sense for where it is eventually. In a broader sense, while I don't mind sharing my space with them, I do need my own space occasionally, and while most of them understand that, not all of them do. It is not my intent to have the ward spirits deal with this issue in my stead, but rather, to help enforce the decisions I make.]

I am now officially a Remetj! :D

Remetj.

That was really the only word I needed to see in my e-mail this week to suddenly be having the best week. And now, of course, I have been suffering from a severe compulsion to “READ ALL THE THINGS” on the parts of the forum that I couldn’t see before. But it’s more than that: it’s a step forward in a new world. As the high school I work at winds down from an early homecoming and gears up to start the first “real” weeks of the semester, I face the beginning of another year—one in which nothing is the same for me.

I realize that is an almost redundant statement: if we aren’t trapped in a cycle of stagnation, then things are almost never “the same” as they were in the years, days, or moments before we stopped to think on them. Yet… the timing of things this summer…

My world has changed in a fundamental way on many levels.  The world of Beginner was very different than the world of Solitary Kemetic in ways I wasn’t expecting—and I know that the world of Remetj will be different still from that of Beginner. I eagerly look forward to that change, but even as I overflow with excitement for that new, shiny future which dawns in the east, I mourn the slow fading of a different light as it sinks in the west.

For a long time, I have lived in the world of Mom as Everything—in fact this summer was christened by me as the “Summer of Mom” as soon as I heard the diagnosis in April…but I only called it that until I realized that it's really more correct to say “Lifetime of Mom”. I was so close to her. I can’t say that in words that would do her justice. My world was her. My mother filled a role for me that was as dangerous as it was beautiful: Mom as All, Mom as Other Half. Which makes learning to live in the world of Mom as Ancestor especially hard…

Next Saturday is already day 70.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and yet, it feels infinitely longer. There is still a hard, sharp edge to the grief, but the wound her death caused has ceased bleeding now and it begins to pull back together as new skin grows to cover it.  That doesn’t mean it hurts any less, or that there won’t be a proverbial scar left behind, just that it isn’t a danger to me anymore. The pain is now a healing one, not a rending one.

I slowly return to myself. My hands go back to beading, my mind goes back to telling stories, and my deeper self goes back to dreaming up new destinies. My gods put tasks before me and the voice whispering within me prods me along the path. I call my brother and my father often; I speak to friends daily—and my heart is beating again. I plan and scheme and go about life in general. I am whole once more. I am hale.

The ancestor shrine is ready. The words of the prayer are already starting to echo in my heart and mind, reverberating in the unseen space I’ve made for her to inhabit when she returns from her journey. I am not certain what to expect. I am not certain what she will be now. I am not certain because, for all I knew of her, I still only knew her as one of the living. She will be different. She will be changed by death. It is my firm belief that all souls are. I welcome that change even as I fear it. I will accept her in any form she takes, but there is no way to prepare for the moment when I first catch a glimpse of her transformed and transfigured self.

So much of life is about not knowing how you will react to things, but finding the courage to keep your eyes open anyway.

A few months ago, I didn’t know how I would react to the Beginner’s class. I didn’t know if I would be impressed or disappointed, satisfied or left wanting, finally connected or more alone then ever… I didn’t know if I could come to terms with the idea of the RPD or if I would be able to accept the Nisut (AUS). Would I feel anything during Senut? Could I really learn to connect with my ancestors? Would I really hear the voices of the other Netjeru if I put Set’s statue away? Could I bear to put his statue away long enough to find out? It was those uncertainties which had kept from applying for the class years before when I first heard of the temple. I only applied this summer because after six years, I had eventually realized that there was no way to know the answers but to discover them by experience.

I wrote here once, a long time ago it feels like, about trust. I have something to add to that:

I trust now.

 I trust the Nisut (AUS). I trust the process and rite of RPD. I trust this community. I trust Senut. I trust my ancestors. I trust all of the Netjeru, when they speak, and I trust Set, even when he is silent. And in all of that trust, I have found what I had not dared to hope for. I am impressed, not disappointed. I am satisfied, not left wanting. I am connected, not alone. I have gained something which was not in the lessons proper but somewhere between the lines:

I am prepared even when I am unprepared. I am ready even when I am not ready. I have learned to put some trust in existence. I didn’t realize that I needed to learn that, and at first, I didn’t realize that I had learned it. Until I thought about it this week when I was buying flowers for the ancestor shrine…

Everything is in balance now. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or even that it’s comfortable, but it does mean that it is inherently bearable. It doesn’t have to be fair that my mother was taken from me so young. It doesn’t have to make sense that the cancer came back when she had been doing so well. It simply is what it is. The important part is that this terrible thing did not go unbalanced on the scales: there have been blessings along the way to soften the blow (I cannot even fully express how much the beginner’s class, and the HoN community in general, helped in all of this—simply by existing and taking me in and giving me something to hold on to), and there were Names who stepped in to steady me when I started to fall.

 Balance. Fairness. These things are not about individual events and single grains of rice, they are about sums and the weight of the crops against the need for them. The scales dip and soar as they even out, and as long as all eventually returns to the calm, steady equilibrium that makes things functional…that’s really all I can ask for.

Wow. That got overly philosophical toward the end there. I really did start this just to announce that I’m now a Remetj. I suppose that means the title of the post is now a bit misleading.

Sorry about that.  XD

Grounding and Centering: In Kemetic Terms

Translating the terminologies of general pagan practice into Kemetic terminology helps me make connections and recognize when I already know how to do something but just call it by a different name.

 Case in point: I thought I needed to go back to the basics. Centering. Grounding. Shielding. Things I thought I had lost over time once I drifted away from the neo-pagan scene. But once I started reading up on them again, I came to the startling conclusion that I do more of it than I think I do.

For example, Centering and Grounding are often viewed as separate things in the neo-pagan world. Take this definition from The Pagan and The Pen:

“Grounding links you to the healing energy of the Earth, bringing stability, calm, and awareness of the physical body and the world around you. Centering puts you in touch with your personal power, connecting your mental and spiritual bodies.”

But my Kemetic take on it is that what I’m actually achieving through both of those actions is consciously bringing my souls into alignment—all of them, including the Khat—and being fully present in the world as a unified being. If I do that properly, my shadows cast strongly on the worlds and are sharply defined; I am connected to existence in a fundamental way. My Sekhem flows properly through me and the world around me.

For me, both Centering and Grounding are easily accomplished through Senut. The speaking of the sacred words, the purification, the pouring of libations and offering of incense and flame, the opening of the way between the unseen realm of the gods and the seen world, the mindfulness of prayer, the act of henu…all these things catch the attention of the souls and brings them together in a shared act where each of them has a duty to tend to.

But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Aligning the souls is basic and intuitive. If I take a few seconds to pause even as I am typing this, close my eyes, and do a “roll-call”, I can feel all the parts—Ka, Ba, Khat, Ib, and Ren—present and accounted for. I can feel the sentient ones gather together calmly in the same, still place and turn their awareness in the same direction-- in readiness to work together. I become a being of one purpose and one nature, a being that can keenly feel the world around me, and my inherent connection to it.

 I am well practiced enough at doing this that I am usually able to find that calm center of self… even when I am under duress. Breath is a call to the center of being, and when breathing alone fails, mindful speech can accomplish the same. (Therapists like to call such mindful speech “affirmations”, but I prefer to call it what it is in my perspective: heka.)

Part of my spiritual “panic” that night some time back was due to the frightening and unsettling realization that I had suddenly become not able to do this myself—that my souls were so “out of whack” as to be coming apart from each other at the seams and I was incapable, through any of the techniques I knew, to pull them back together. (Though in retrospect, there was one thing that I didn’t try: saying my Ren out loud…that probably would have helped, especially if I had thought to do it early on during the crisis. It has helped before with some similar situations, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me at all in the moment.)

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that terminology matters—I find that preciseness in language, especially in naming, is a source of strength and power in both the seen and unseen worlds. So I shouldn’t be surprised that “centering and grounding” is suddenly more meaningful to me, and more obvious in my personal practice, when presented as “soul alignment ”.

And on an almost unrelated note: I just can't get into the tree roots/branches visualization thing for "grounding".

Maybe it’s just me, but if I dig too deep into the ground when intentionally visualizing in the unseen, I find the dead. The duat swells just beneath the surface of our world like a vast aquifer, supplying us water from another layer of existence: metaphorical ground water. It is that body of unseen water from which all things living grow and the living thirst for its depths as much as the dead thirst for the water of our seen world, of our lakes and rivers and oceans. It is reciprocal. It is from death that life springs and it is upon life that death thrives.

 That is a system of energy exchange, yes, but not one I find particularly comforting as a touchstone for beginning ritual work. Ask me sometime about what you find if you dig deep enough—for I have learned that there are some places the living should not go without adequate preparation. And that experience has made me a bit wary of roots.

Groundwork

It turns out that a lot of the groundwork for this has already been laid—which takes away all of my excuses, really…

My third grade teacher was fond of calling me her “little daydreamer”. She was the only one of my early teachers to be enamored with the ability. Time passed inconsistently for me as a child because I was rarely present in the ordinary world. I could never recall what happened when I faded out, but my parents and other caretakers always claimed I must have been somewhere, because they could plainly see I was not behind my eyes and even calling my name didn’t always work to bring me back. But when I did come back, I came back with bursts of creative thought and thinking far more maturely about myself than most young children should be thinking. By that third grade year, my mother liked to say of me, when someone asked my age, that I was “eight going on thirty”.

The daydreams came under some semblance of control around the time I started reading in earnest. Then my mind was occupied wandering off into the books instead. I lost the world around me when I read. All that existed was story. I called it “journeying”. My mother called it dangerous.

“I think she’d die if the house was on fire,” I heard her tell my father once, “she wouldn’t even notice.”

 She had said that after yet another incident when she had called for me repeatedly to no answer and found me reading quietly in my room, roused only by her touch. I can imagine how disconcerting that was for them. Though I tried to hold onto it, the ability disappeared slowly as I got older and real life gradually consumed more of my attention and time. Eventually, journeying was only a thing I did while I slept. My dream worlds were large and my memories of those nighttime visions numerous if not always entirely clear. I was semi-lucid on the other side and could recognize locales I had been to before and know where to find things based on prior experiences. I started to map those worlds even while awake, paying attention to how they flowed together.

I first learned relaxation and visualization exercises when I was ten, through my mother’s acting classes for a local children’s theater group. Many years later, I got interested in Wicca and spellwork, using my idle moments as a teen to experiment with grounding, centering, shielding, and raising/sensing energy. In college, I dabbled in automatic writing, shapeshifting, channeling, and divination. After finding my path in Kemeticism, I trained myself to hear the voices of Netjer and to communicate freely with them even when I had no tools at hand. I turned away from overt energy work, and worked instead in talismanry and formalized heka and rituals.

I tend to think of my childhood in terms of my “atheist upbringing”, but in reality, I have led a very magical life in spite of that (or perhaps, because of it). It’s true that I was taught to think about things rationally and skeptically, though I realize now that I rarely did when it came to my own magical workings. In college, I was further taught how science ruled all and how there were documented, researched, physical structures underneath of many of the things I thought of as mystical. Over time, I’ve learned to accept that those truths can coexist with the ones I have always sensed intuitively.

But I was also taught something else through the years, something more insidious that was as common among the wise folk as it was in the ivory tower: control. Even in liberal pagan circles, control is considered prime. Control of what things happen, when things happen, and how things happen. Go ahead and journey… but make sure you’re the one driving. Now, Set and I have had this conversation before: He thinks control (or at least mine, anyway) is overrated.  Which isn’t to say he forces anything on me…but, well...

There is something in education law called passive consent forms.  These are the sneaky kind of permission form. They usually say “check this box if you DON’T want your kid involved in X”. We merrily put them in the kids’ backpacks and if we don’t get any back the next day, the parents are said to have given consent. This is usually used for harmless events like classroom movie showings (always G-rated anyway) and field-day, but it is sternly frowned upon in the education community (and court system) for more serious things like Sex-Ed and Free At-School Medical Care (a common practice in low-income schools).

Heads up for prospective Set followers: He uses passive consent forms all the damn time. His favorite phrase to calm me down after the fact is “Well you didn’t SAY no…” which He relies on even in situations where He is well aware that my polite, rights-driven modern society would demand an explicit pre-approval. It’s hard to be mad at Him for it, though, because by the time I think to be mad, I’ve usually already seen the benefits of whatever it was that he pushed me into doing. This effect is made worse by the giddiness I feel after having intense contact with Him (or any of the Names, for that matter), and I usually follow it up on that giddy high by giving active consent in the aftermath. Then I’m committed to whatever it is and I lose my right to argue.

 I’ve basically agreed to open my head more, because it used to be open before I spent half a lifetime slowly learning how to close it.  I’ve been told that in order to get where I need to be, I specifically need to learn to do productive trance work. So I’ve dug out my copy of Diana Paxson’s Trance-Portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World and I’m resolved to work through it as a kind of self-study course. For anyone who wants to follow along (and if you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it), this entry is more or less my commentary on the first chapter’s background questionnaire. I didn’t include an item by item answer, mainly because I don’t want to bore you (I mean, I could go on for hours about how being a writer helps me with visualization stuff and about how good I am at recreating familiar music in my head), but I hope I’ve given enough to more or less summarize where I’m coming from and what I’m bringing to this experiment.

My excuse to avoid doing this before was that I wasn’t “faithful” enough to do this sort of work, that I didn’t believe in it enough, that I had become too rational as an adult and therefore wouldn’t be able to let go fully. But between the dream I had yesterday afternoon and thinking about my past history with altered states of consciousness and general energy work, I think it’s been made fairly clear that I am capable of it, and that my excuses are just that: excuses. I may not have had much luck with the “clear your mind” style of meditation that one time I tried it, and I may have been a poor subject of hypnosis ever since I got old enough to vote, but that isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, and it isn’t a good enough reason to write it all off. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater and I know it is.

Under a Magician's Spell

He was middle-aged, and yet, youthfully handsome. Strangely familiar, and yet, oddly compelling. Dressed in a suit of black and red, with a white shirt on under his coat, his white cuffs gleaming from the stage. He had a mysterious and slightly menacing presence about him that definitely fit his profession. I had seen this magician’s show once before, earlier in the dream, and I knew there was a part where audience members were selected to be hypnotized onstage before being impossibly “teleported” into various boxes on the other end of the stage. We were at that part. I remember looking around and realizing I was the only person sitting in my section--the earlier show had been a full house. I moved closer to the others to be less noticeable, worried that I might be selected if I stood out too much in such a small audience.

“No, not me,” I thought, “surely anyone skilled in hypnosis would recognize that I am that kind of person that cannot be hypnotized.”

I avoided making eye contact with him, looking down and to the side toward the other audience members, because I was certain that would show him how defiant and unhypnotizable I was. But then I saw the people in front of me turn around and look back at me when he pointed to his last selection. Damn. He picked me anyway.

I stood and went because I didn’t really want the attention and awkwardness of saying no.  As he stood before me I worried about what would happen. I was prepared to have to fake it since I was certain I wouldn’t be able to go under even if I tried to, and because he seemed nice and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed. He looked me over and smiled in a way that gave me the feeling that he must have seen something he liked. He told me (and the audience) that I was a sensitive, and an excellent candidate for hypnosis—I got the sense that he had changed his plans merely because of that fact. He said that mine would be a deeper trance than normal and that he would be able to show things that would otherwise not be possible.

 He put his hands on the sides of my head, and though he covered my ears, my hearing was sharp and crystal clear as I heard him say the words that made me feel disconnected from myself. (I also remember how it felt—it was the same rush of heat and energy through my neck, the same burning, that I felt during my “panic attack”, and it was accompanied by the same sense of losing control, but somehow not as scary as usual). I felt my awareness of my body go fuzzy and sink low until there was a dull, heavy feeling about it as if every part of me had simultaneously “gone to sleep” as a foot might when sitting in one position for too long. However, I was still curiously aware of where all of my body parts were, even though I couldn’t feel them and was completely blind— in total darkness with only a vague notion of what was going on around me. I could still hear him clearly—in fact, very clearly, speaking about what he would do with me.

He started with the simple. I could feel him raise one of my arms as a demonstration to the audience, but then I stopped working to pay attention to my arms when I was satisfied he wasn’t doing anything dangerous with them. I got the sense that there was a lot more going on than I thought there was. But it didn't matter, because I was more interested in his presence in my mind. He was hypnotizing. More than his words were, he was. I could sense his eyes and could almost see them. I got the feeling that he was with me inside my head. I was content with that, really, but then I heard him mention a tight rope and my attention came sharply back to what he was having me do. I am terrified of heights and have terrible balance. He was quick to reassure when he felt me reach for control of my legs.

 “We won’t use a very high one, she’s already done a good deal in this trance. I would not want her to fall out of it into a more literal fall.”

That struck me as a humble thing to say to an audience and a sign of a very responsible magician, even though in some part of me I knew that I had no way to know that he was telling the truth… and that he was saying it mostly to keep me from fighting the trance and breaking out of it.

 I wasn’t aware of anything else that happened while I was in the trance. There may have been a tightrope walk, there may not have been. Time seemed to run fast and skip ahead; either that or I had no concept of time at all. The next thing I was aware of, outside the darkness, was the aftermath when I was suddenly released from the trance. I remember waking up on stage into brightness and confusing amounts of noise from the audience. I was standing in a different place then when I had gone under and holding a bowl of fruit. Then I was quickly shuttled back stage by his assistants where I found a note from him saying, in not so many words, that we should perform together and that at the very least, if I had questions I should stick around in the backstage area until after the show so he could answer them.

I waited for him. Excited about the prospects of being part of the show and full of questions to ask…but mostly just wanting to see him again, in fact, that was the main reason I was excited. I would have gladly volunteered to be part of a whole slew of performances so long as it meant having more contact with him. My consent was implicit in that and whether or not to say yes hardly seemed a matter worth considering. It almost felt like there was some relationship that had been established. I wanted to know more about it, and more about him.

But I never got that chance.

The dream slipped before the show ended and I found myself somewhere else doing something totally unrelated. I was in a fancy parking garage, looking for a place to park and fixing a cell phone cover. When I suddenly realized that something was different, that the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under me, my sense of disappointment was so strong it jolted me into lucidity. I realized the theater was now completely unreachable, and that the memories of what had happened there were more important than trying to find it again. Even against the normal sirens’ call of what can be done with total lucidity in a dream, I merely used it to wake myself up so I could write down the earlier part.

This was not a normal dream. For one thing, the memories of my dreams are not usually so distinct and clear upon waking. For another, the last part of it, where I became aware of going back into the normal dreamscape and got jolted into lucidity by the stark contrast, confirms that there was indeed something different about what I had experienced in the first part.

I’d say I don’t know what it means, but I’d be lying. As I’m writing this, knowing what questions I have been asking in divination lately, I start to wonder if that wasn’t part of the point: perhaps the show hasn’t ended yet. I might still be standing backstage. In any case, I have a suspicion of who that magician might be, and if I’m right…

..then at least I know where to go to ask my questions.

*eyes the smaller shrine in the shrine room, which is cloaked in a curtain of black and red and with white accents*

An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul: Summary

Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul

Image Creation Process

First I have to say that any image of esoteric conceptualizations is subject to a number of natural restrictions in their usefulness:

1. The limits of a two dimensional format.
2. An inability to adequately represent concurrent realities within a single picture.
3. The artistic ability (or lack thereof) of the creator.

I realize this image is by no means perfect, but the process of making it did help me solidify my thinking. For those who are just joining us and are unsure of what all of this means, or who are referencing this post after the fact, here are the links to the rest of the essays in this series:

Khat and Ka (and Ib)
Ba and Ren
Khaibit and Sahu (and Sekhem)

It occurred to me that rather than restate the information presented in the prior essays (which were already as concise as my personal writing skills allowed me to be) it might be useful to see into the process of thought which went into this image. (This is also a not so subtle invitation for anyone who feels up to the challenge to improve on this image or re-imagine it entirely…as you’ll see, there is a lot I’m still not entirely happy with in my rendition) :

First and foremost, I was attempting to show the various dualities at play outside the usual Ba/Ka duality customarily mentioned in discussions of the soul. The Ka/Khat duality as well as (and especially) the duality of the Khaibit/Sahu seemed, to me, to be more obvious in this format. I hope the intention of the dotted lines to show how the Khat/Ka and Ba cast shadows into the the two realms comes through and doesn’t confuse viewers too much.

[An aside: Did you see how I included the little “unseen creature” to represent how the beings of that realm access us through our Sahu? And the tree added on the seen world side which is a call back to the David Abrahms quote on phenomenology? I was very proud of myself for being that clever. :P ]

I also wanted to show the hidden parallel between the Ka’s keeping of the Ib and the Ba’s keeping of the Ren, hence the similarity in the construction of their nested circled. Unfortunately, to do that, I did have to forsake an arrangement which would have made the Ba’s access to the Ib more obvious.

I placed the Ba/Ren in a way which I hope indicates their inherent ability to separate from the Khat more easily than the Ka is able. I overlapped the circle with the head of the Khat because I wanted to show that the Ba is still an interactive part of the person and that it influences thought even during the day. The reason I didn’t put the Ka/Ib circle in the head itself was partly an issue of space and partly a desire not to overemphasize the head as the “location of souls” and maintain the image of Ib as residing where the heart should reside so the meaning of the term is not completely lost.

I really struggled with how to place the Ren. I wanted to keep the two circles looking similar, again to emphasize the parallels between the responsibilities of the Ba and Ka, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling that (for most people) the arrangement of the Ba and Ren could (and maybe should) be inverted.  I don’t get the sense that many kau are aware of their Ren. This arrangement makes sense for me, but…I still find myself vacillating on it.

And the Sekhem is represented as glowy-stuff because I wasn’t sure how else to show it.
------
Bonus Material 
------
The Souls Tarot Experiment 

In addition to the image, I toyed a bit with using tarot cards as a means of communicating with the souls. In some ways, this isn’t entirely necessary, since ideally there already is communication between them, whether we are aware of it or not. I was actually less interested in the “Hi there!” form of communication and more interested in being able to ask “All systems go?” before doing mystical work and get individual answers if somepart was harboring an otherwise unobvious no. As with everything else, your mileage may vary in this, but I thought it was at least interesting to try.

 To design the reading, I was thinking about how each part of the soul might best express itself and also decided I was mostly interested in hearing from the “vocal” (read: sentient) souls, aka the Ka/Ib, Ba, and Khat. I decided to do a four card spread arranged thusly:

The idea was to allow each soul to have a chance to speak through the meaning of a single card, though this method could easily be adapted to allow for more cards, and hence more in depth readings. I decided that the best way to make sure the right parts were “speaking” with each card, the method of drawing the cards should be tailored to what each soul would be most comfortable with.

Khat: To my thinking, the Khat is the part of us which is most comfortable with “feeling” physical sensations. So closing one’s eyes and hold the deck in the hands, then thumbing through it and tactilely picking out the card from the deck which has the most appealing physical sensation to it, might be a good way to let the Khat have its say.

Ka: The Ka seems the more visual of the souls, and I would imagine that to draw the Ka’s card, one would be best off fanning the cards out and looking over the back images until one card stood out as visually appealing despite the apparent sameness between them.

 Ba: The Ba’s card could be selected then by having the deck fanned out but the eyes closed and running finger down the fan (without actually touching it) until feeling that intuitive “ping” that is the Ba’s voice (not sure how else to describe that…basically, it’s using the intuition to “feel” the right card) and then looking to see where the finger is pointed when the “ping” occurs.

Ib: The Ib’s card would be selected visually the way the Ka’s card was, but while feeling for a “ping” of the Ba’s intuition. In other words, both the “look” and “feel” of the card should be used to pick the Ib’s card. The idea there is to let the Ba and Ka keep each other honest when consulting the Ib (I’m not sure why I have a gut feeling that doing so is necessary, but I do).  I placed the Ib’s card under and between the Ka and Ba to further reinforce this idea of both Ba and Ka being involved in consulting the Ib.

And that’s basically it. For a deck without reversed meanings, I might be tempted to shuffle indiscriminately and interpret reversals as the equivalent of loudly drawing attention to the meaning of the card. But that’s another gut feeling I can’t adequately explain. If you happen to try this exercise and wouldn’t mind sharing how it went for you, I would love to get input from others—especially if you come up with other ways of selecting the cards. I’m still experimenting with this and would love to try out other ways of doing this that I haven’t thought of :)

Khaibit and Sahu (and Sekhem): An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul Series

Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entirely UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your mileage may vary.
-------

Now comes the part that everyone loves to wax philosophical on: the shadows. Plural, because there are two, and it was that revelation which finally snapped all the pieces into place for me. While the Khaibit is clearly represented as a shadow even in ancient times, the exact nature of the Sahu is less clear. I have seen it translated in many ways, often as the “astral body”, and the word is sometimes used interchangeably with Khat in ancient sources. It wasn’t until I asked the Nisut (AUS) about souls in general that I got my first indication that there was more to it: she described the Khaibit as the shadow cast by the body, and the Sahu as “the shadow that your ba casts in the unseen world”.

 Now, I’ve seen her contradict that statement elsewhere, and I’m sure I’m reading more into it than she personally intended me to, so I’m still going to count what follows as my UPG, while crediting Hemet (AUS) with the origination of the idea—in other words, I mean to give credit where credit is due without claiming that any of this comes directly from her (because it most certainly doesn’t...I took that single phrase and ran with it).

First, let us get past the part that is difficult for those of us who came into the faith from western occultism: the shadows are not “dark”, “negative”, or “repressed” parts of ourselves. In fact, you can take what you know of the Jungian concept of the shadow self and toss it out the window because I’m not even going to touch on it. Plainly and simply, the “shadow self”, to my thinking, would be that place where the Ka and Ba overlap and when neither wants to claim what is left between after asserting themselves… and it would have nothing to do with the actual shadows I’m talking about here.

 Our shadows are representational of the effect of our existence. They are not “souls” in the same sense as the Ba and Ka and Khat—they are not even as close to soul-hood as the Ib—but rather, they are the result of having a Khat and a Ba in a world that interacts with us as we interact with it. They are symbolic of our ability and capacity to act on the seen and unseen worlds.

 The daytime sun shines upon our Khat and a shadow is cast onto the ground. That is our most passive and inescapable action on the physical world. Our ability to cast a shadow means we have the ability to use the Khat to perform physical actions, to interact with the seen.

By the same token, the mysterious midnight sun shines upon the Ba and a shadow is cast on the other world, which is the most passive expression of the our inherent ability to use the Ba to perform actions on and interact with the unseen. It also brings to light something which I hadn’t considered before: we cannot avoid the unseen. We are present in it just as we are present in the seen world. To a degree, we can choose not to act in the unseen, but we cannot avoid casting a shadow there.

That blurs the line between the two worlds, and I know that might be uncomfortable for some, but there is a good reason to pay attention to the shadows even if the ramification of their existence is unsettling: there are recorded heka that effect the shadow(s). If one follows the line of thinking presented above, such heka involving the removal or damage of one shadow or the other would carry with it the sinister implication of seriously injuring one’s ability to act on the world. Protective heka in this regard serves to preserve one’s efficacy as part of the existent. Serious stuff.

Though it would be misleading to not mention here that the shadows alone, as representational (possibly semi-literal) concepts of capacity for action, do not constitute the actions themselves. For it is not only through the shadows that actions are enacted, the shadows merely represent the possibility of action and the effect of existing even when one does not intentionally act. The force of energy and will behind  actual actions, seen or unseen, stems from the divine spark left in each of us after the act of our creation—the Sekhem which infuses us and gives our shadows meaning. It can almost be said of the Sekhem that it is the literal light which casts our shadows, for without that vital force of life energy, we would be unable to act in any capacity.

 [Note: I will not speak too much on Sekhem aside from that, mainly because I am still learning about it and not comfortable making to many definite statements. I may revisit the idea later when I have had more time to experience and work with it.]

Yet, there is also another level of the shadows beyond being our means of interacting with existence: they are also the means through which existence interacts with us. In that way, they additionally function like gateways, two way valves in a sense, which allow us to be experienced by the world even as we experience it. But to understand that concept, we will have to take a detour and go down the rabbit hole that is phenomenology. For a more elegant explanation than I could manage on my own, I turn to David Abrahms, a philosopher and ecologist, who devotes a significant section of his book, The Spell of the Sensual, to describing how phenomenologists describe a living being interacting with its environment and the hidden reciprocity in that interaction:

“He calls attention to the obvious but easily overlooked fact that my hand is able to touch things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing, and thus is entirely a part of the tactile world that it explores…To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree.”

Just as the hand does not feel but for being touched, we do not act in existence but for being acted upon by it. Unfortunately this where my rational mind bends slightly to match the pace of my knowing and I fear that beyond this, I am somewhat less coherent. I will say this of what I learned on that mental road: to reach us in the fortress which is our Khat/Ka/Ib/Ba complex, those who lack a Khat—which is to say, the denizens of the unseen world—must approach us through the personage of our Ba (which alone, is aware of them) and the means of doing so is to tap through the Sahu. For even when the Ba dwells firmly inside our Khat during the day, it continues to cast its shadow on the unseen perpetually simply because it exists.

I have discovered other implications in this, but I freely admit that they are pure conjecture. As an example: it stands to reason that any form of possession by spirits (since the idea is fresh in my mind after reading the Filan/Kaldera book) would naturally come in through the Ba via the Shau, and likely has gaining some control over the Khaibit of the person as its goal. OBEs would, if one takes them at face value, translate into these terms as a temporary separation of the Ba/Sahu from the Khat/Ka(Ib)/Khaibit, with the Sekhem acting as tether.  I could go on, but you probably have a good enough idea of what I mean by now. If nothing else, through this exercise I have at least gained a useful set of terminologies for consistently describing the things I encounter when doing mystical work.

And there you have it: the mysterious shadows explained. :) Next time, I will summarize and tie everything to the image I posted at the start of this. I will also demo and provide instructions for an interesting tarot exercise which I developed in conjunction with this project.

Ba and Ren: An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul Series

Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entirely UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your mileage may vary.

-------

I started my book with a simple goal to write a fantasy novel which eschewed the classical concept of ghosts in favor of something more Kemetic in nature and feel. I knew the shift would be a difficult one for audiences unaccustomed to the underlying philosophy I intended to use, so I focused on imagery in the early part of the tale to set the tone, starting with a glimpse of my atypical vision of the dead, in the very first paragraph of the novel:

“Somewhere amid the bare clacking branches of the trees, the dead fluttered their wings. Ariadne stopped walking; the crunch of her boots in the morning frost echoed into silence. They watched her with unblinking eyes, their bird-forms sleek and unruffled as they waited for her to notice and pay her respects to them.”

I sometimes find myself thinking of my own soul as a bird which, as Ariadne would say “perches behind the cage of my ribs, waiting a lifetime for the chance to fly”.  I have come to believe that as much as we write stories to entertain each other, so too do we write them to better understand ourselves—our stories may not be themselves instructional, but the images should resonate with us and if they do, we may find meaning in them all the same. I think my fantasy vision of “bird ghosts” is not all too far off from how the ba that inspired them functions in actual reality.

As keepers of our intuition, our eternal/essential being, and our true names, the Ba perches within us quietly and ventures out at night, if only briefly, into the world of dreams (one of many spaces in the duat) where they share company with those bau who no longer return to living flesh at dawn. The logic of the Ba is different from the Ka’s logic, which we experience during the day when we are awake, and thus dreams have a fuzziness about them because of the translation between the souls.

When we tap our intuition, the “sense of knowing” that responds is the ba speaking its language, so it stands to reason that those gods who speak to us in waking moments, who speak in that same language of knowing, might do so through our Ba. The Ba is familiar with the Names, after all, since as mentioned, it also keeps the Ren spoken by whichever Netjeru was responsible for its creation. I have heard the Ren called the song that one’s soul sings through the act of living, and if this is true, then I imagine the Ba giving voice to that song. The Ba also casts one of our shadows, our Sahu, into the duat and it is though that mechanism which we see what is unseen.

 [I know I have teased you twice now, but the essay about shadows is coming after this one, I promise.] 

The Ba is the eternal soul (which may or may not have walked in life before, and may or may not do so again after its current life) and it has no sense of linear time—if you have ever lost track of an hour during what started as a fifteen minute meditation, you already know how poor it is at understanding your schedule. The wisdom it gathers, it gathers from unseen places, and it whispers into the Ib those things which guide us through life and make our paths unique. Where the Ka and Khat concern themselves with social and material living respectively, the Ba is obsessed with meaning and originates our feelings of destiny and purpose.

It has been called our subconscious, though I think that is only part of the story, for it is a natural part of our conscious mind as well. I think our creativity and our drive to create is the visceral substance of the Ba that we experience during our waking hours. Inspiration probably finds its source in the Ba as well. For the Ba is also that part of us which responds to poetry and music and art. It is the part of us where hope dwells and where faith resides. It is the part which can fully inhabit the present moment with no regard to past or future, and it is a spirit which can grow larger than the form which contains, and often does during periods of trial and hardship.

The Ba knows the Ren intimately, and thus is familiar with our core being, the desire of our creator, and keeper of the secret of that which transpired during the act of our creation. Because it is keeper of the sacred true name of ourselves, it is the soul which responds most strongly to the speaking of that name.  For though the Ren was spoken at the creation of the Ba, I do not believe that this was the only speaking of the name. I believe it was spoken once again at the seating of the souls.

Full disclaimer: if you haven’t figured it already, I believe in reincarnation. In a Kemetic definition of reincarnation, the Ba must be the soul to travel on though multiple lives, because the Ka, once judged, remains as an Ahku in the duat, eventually returning to the ancestral Ka from which it was born. The Ba is free to incarnate again, and it takes with it the Ren. That is not to say the Ren is unknown to the other souls: we know it is possible for the Ka to discover it, and my UPG is that all of the souls heard it at least once, whether they remember it after the fact or not.

My theory is that the Ren, when spoken the first time, is an act of creation, and when spoken again, is a powerful heka which seats the various souls within a Khat. When a Netjeru speaks the Ren it brings those souls into proper alignment and binds them together in a single life and a single being. Death is the violent and frightening process that it is because it undoes those bonds and disassociates the parts. And this is not entirely conjecture: my UPG about how the Ren functions comes mainly from personal experience.

When I was a teen I sought to know myself. I was told by friends and family alike that I already did. That I was the sum of my parts and that I was already uncharacteristically aware of my inner being. But I could not shake the nagging feeling that something was missing. Something was still beyond my ken. I asked my gods for help, and, on a sudden intuition, pleaded with them to give me my name. To this day, I do not know exactly what possessed me to make that request, but for better or worse, it was granted. I was given knowledge of my Ren, and my life was changed by it.

When Bast spoke of the night she intervened in my moment of crisis, she said “I have stood before you and uttered your name in that moment of darkness which almost claimed you forever.” It was in understanding what she meant by “uttered your name” that I realized what exactly happened that night. I remember the pain of it clearly, the sense of coming apart, of being a stranger in my body and disconnected from my deeper self…the sense of isolation that comes with dissolution of the bonds between souls. When she uttered my name, meaning when she spoke my Ren, she brought the souls which were coming undone back into alignment-- rooting them once more in the Khat, seating them, back where they belonged.

 If that sounds somewhat esoteric and outside the realm of the usual, I assure you it is: the situation is not natural and may have been caused by another instance of me being stupid with my Ren. This is not the first time. In fact, “me being stupid with my Ren” is a recurring theme ever since they gave it to me. This latest incident led to Their insistence on my being instructed in these things so I can learn to be more careful without having to do that learning through experience. (There was, of course, more to what happened that night, but this is the humbling core of it.)

And for the record, I think the Ren functions differently when spoken in the language of the Netjer (and by that, I mean spoken on the tongue of a god, not merely spoken in ancient Egyptian). It certainly functions different for Them than it functions for me when spoken in mortal language, though I won’t deny that there are certain similarities when it is spoken with no specific purpose in mind and outside of formal heka. I have noted that speaking my own Ren aloud offhandedly makes my Ba sit up and take notice in a way which makes it disconcertingly separate from my Ka for a brief instant. But when I speak it casually in my mind, as when I meditate upon the sounds of it, it has the opposite effect: it draws the Ba and Ka closer together so that the boundaries between them grow thin and permeable. Make of that what you will.

And before I get into things too esoteric to be wrapped up within this essay, I will let that mark the end of our discussion of the “body” souls…that is to say, the souls with their own inherent motivations and concerns. The others are more accessories to the whole, embodiments of the natural ramifications of one’s existence. Yes, next time I will finally get around to discussing the shadows and the vital energy. Khaibit, Sahu, and Sekhem. I will also trot that diagram back out and briefly explain how it all fits together in the image. (There may even be a tarot activity to assist one in making contact with the main parts of one’s being). I think I can fit all of that in one very long entry, but if not, I’ll split it into two parts.

Ka and Khat (and Ib): An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul Series

Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entierly UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your milage may vary.
-----
In the modern parlance, Ka is commonly described as one’s personality and conscience, while the Khat usually doesn’t even get elaboration beyond “it’s your physical body”. On both counts, this is a significant oversimplification, but particularly so in the case of the Khat. I hate to break this to anyone who is still holding onto their western body/mind division assumptions (especially if they are also mired in the body-hate culture), but: the Khat matters. In fact, it is a uniquely important soul to the living. Yes, soul. Not “vessel”, not “soul container”—soul.

The Khat is not just the soul’s vehicle in the physical world. And because I need you to entertain that idea seriously, I will tease you with a bit of the esoteric knowledge you might be denying yourself by thinking of your Khat as unimportant: the Khat is the mechanism which allows the Khaibit and the Sahu, the two shadows, to function (more on that in a later essay).  It is the seat of the other souls, yes, but it does much more than to act as container.

The Khat is the thing which feels the world and moves to the relentless beat of the cycles of life, like the dancer moves to drum beats. It is our physical ancestry—carrying the inheritance of our blood-relatives from one generation to the next. It has a mind of its own. It stores memories of movement in its muscles—as anyone who has learned to ride a bike can attest. It has needs and it speaks its needs through sensation—if we ignore it, it shouts its needs through pain. It fends off illness and makes decisions about which parts of itself are most important to preserve and which parts can be sacrificed in a pinch. We ignore its sentience at our own peril, because it shares with the other souls a responsibility for maintaining the most important organ of our earthly selves: the brain.

And this is where the dualities start to come into play.

We normally think of the Ka as our mind, but in truth, it is only part of our mind (which is also shared by the Khat and the Ba). The place where the overlap with the Khat occurs is obvious even on a rudimentary examination (we even have a cliché—mind over matter—to describe one half of the effect): the mind can have a physical effect on the body, and the body can have a psychological effect on the mind. Even if it is a phenomenon which we give little thought to, it is part of our normal experience as human beings. Most of us have experienced somatic symptoms, such as “butterflies” in our stomach, before a performance or an increase in blood pressure when stressed, and I would imagine that few people have escaped puberty without confronting the ability of hormonal changes to influence mood and decision making. The effect of the body on the mind is clearly delineated in numerous studies, as is the effect of the mind on the body.

For its part, the Ka is the opposite and double of the body. It is the inheritor of spiritual ancestry—a repository of culture and history. It is interesting to note that the Ka and Khat may have different ancestries, because the ancestry of the Ka depends on the family and friends and society that raised you and loved you, while the ancestry of the Khat depends on blood alone, hardcoded into our DNA. However, they blend and meld whether they share an origin or draw two together. In some cases it is impossible to tell the origin of some piece of ancestry: is my tendency toward an obsession with numbers is due to my father’s particular style of parenting and my willingness to learn from him and emulate his behaviors, or to some genetic feature of his line?

Others have written on the familial nature of the Ka, and how it comes to us from those who raised us and how we return to that ancestral Ka when we die. Ka is a gift of the dead, but it is also a personal and present facet of our being: it is that part of us which remembers and which makes decisions leveraging the tool of history against the challenges of the future. The Ka is the part of our personality which learns and applies the knowledge it gains. It is the part that makes the eyes follow the pointing finger of the elder teacher and recognizes the value in pointing the same for others. It holds the responsibility of the will to live and forces the body to move even when the body has given up. It also has a charge which it shares with the Ba: it one of the keepers of the Ib.

The Ib, I think, is the thing which records the actions and intents of the Ka—the subconscious, in a way, but also the ultimate seat of emotions, especially those emotions which exist outside the boundaries of conscious thought. It can be said then, to be both part of the Ka and a thing which can be separated from the Ka during the judgment to examine the life the Ka has lived—hence many heka to keep one’s heart from “speaking against” oneself during judgment. Though it is probably more accurate to say that the Ib resides somewhere between the Ka and the Khat and that the Ba has access to it indirectly.

However one views it, it is the scribe of our being and the Ka is ever mindful of what it writes down. The Ka and Ib converse in a language of emotions unique to the Ib in its role as counselor and advisor.  Righteousness, compassion, guilt, repentance, remorse, validation, shame…things such as these make the language of the Ib. That heavy feeling in our chest when we have trespassed against our morals…that is the Ib speaking to us and the Khat agreeing with it. So too is that feeling of warm content when we have done as we ought, the voice of the Ib, and if it comes with a boundless light and burst of energy, the Ba agrees with it. And what we call being conflicted, that feeling is an argument between the Ka and the Ib.

But here now, you see that I have mentioned the Ba twice already. It is hard to separate the souls when they are bound so intimately to one another. I will leave it here for today and return again to speak of the Ba in its own terms, though I will hardly be able to leave it at that—the Ren may have to feature heavily in that discussion and if I mention the Ren it will ultimately bring us back to the three we have discussed today... *sigh* this is a fair bit harder than I imagined it would be. :/

Just a note after the fact: No, I do not think the Ib is by any means a mystical or infallible moral compass. It think it largely gets its sense of direction from the Ba (which will be part of the discussion next time)