Building a Shrine Part 3: With Bonus Material ;)

I still remember the intensity of that stare. They were in the center of the mall in a roped off circle—the local raptor rescue organization—and the young presenter had a golden eagle on her arm. He was restless and moving and making her nervous… and then he noticed me. Stillness. That stare. So keen and so persistent. No matter how she moved him, he contorted easily with that supernatural sense of balance that all birds have, so he could keep both eyes on me. I glanced down at myself looking to see if perhaps there was some glint on my shirt or pants that might draw such eyes. Nope. He was looking at me.

I had seen a lot of the big birds of prey in the wild, (it comes with the territory when you live in a largely wilderness area), but the closest I had ever gotten to one of them before that day was when I found a great horned owl on a low branch in the woods and tried to sneak up on it from behind to get a picture. It heard me and turned its head smoothly backward in that eerily sharp manner that is so alien to human experience. I remembered the flicker of fear when it looked through me with those eyes. The stare of the golden eagle was much like that. 

The golden eagle flapped his wings and pulled up on her arm with his claws—talons that tightened deeper into the heavy yet insufficient leather protecting the flesh of her forearm. I had seen videos in biology of other big birds pulling goats off mountain sides, tossing them to their deaths for an easy meal. She quickly moved him back to his perch.

“We’ll let him rest for a bit. He’s strong enough to dislocate my shoulder if he wants to,” she explained to the audience with a nervous laugh.

He still watched me. I realized that I had every right to feel a small bit of fear. There was something so powerful about him—something so much larger than what the frame of the bird should have allowed for. He stretched his wings briefly and showed just how much of the airy space around  himself that he could consume with the volume of his presence.  

Not at all weird to be scared, I thought, this being could hurt me if he really wanted to. He could do some real damage.

But he didn’t want to hurt me. He just wanted to look at me, as if there were some interesting in my frail humanity, as if I held within my visage something fascinating. That shouldn’t be surprising. Fragile things can be fascinating…

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I think back on it now and wonder if that was the first time I met Her-wer. I still remember the feeling of being so much smaller despite how much larger I was physically. It’s the same feeling I now get when I stand before the statues in my shrine.

There is something about seeing my whole lineup together in one space that has so much weight and volume beyond what the physical representations actually take up. The shelf is strong enough to hold the weight of the statues but so thin against the weight of their presence.  The cabinet is wide and tall enough to allow for the bases and extremities, but far too tightly confined for the radiance shining from within them.

The top shelf of the shrine where the statues stand is so full as to be intimidating. That left the largely empty bottom shelf (where the offerings go and where the sacred tools of faith reside) feeling overly empty—vacant, even—despite its myriad contents. Which explains why I went a little crazy with the  decorating both there and above—to trick the eye into see the spaces as a united whole and to balance the visual weight a little.

Not that it makes the top shelf any less intimidating. I’m not sure what to do about that. I suppose I will just have to get used to the feeling.

 It might not be possible to “soften” up the space, since at least some of that feeling of intimidation may be due to Sekhmet’s statue. She has weapons. Weapons that look convincingly sharp (Later edit: weapons that are sharp. Need to remember to be careful when moving that one or I’ll be re-purifying the shrine). Not to mention the falcon dagger which Her-wer insisted on having near His statue. The blade is not bared only because I do not yet have a stand for it. He would rather the pointy bits to be out, I think.

I will say that the top shelf balanced out better than I thought it would…but only after I figured out what was wrong with how I had it. Two things: one, Nebt-het was alone on her side of the shrine and two, on the other side of the room there was a lone Netjeru whose statue I purchased long ago but didn’t add back to the main shrine because He wasn’t in my lineup. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, that is a statue of Djehuty to Nebt-het’s left, and no, He wasn’t in my lineup (hence the reason He is not on the platform with Her). He is only allowed to be in the shrine now for the same reason Set allowed him to be in the old shrine before I converted from general Kemetic pagan to Kemetic Orthodox: He’s kneeling.

That’s because He is actually a candle holder repurposed as a statue. (No, I have never put a candle in Him) It’s the only statue of Him that Set would let me have. That’s a long story and, for brevities sake in an already long post, I won’t go into that here. I will do a post on it in the near future, though, since I’d like to ponder my relationship with Djehuty aloud and explain why He is a necessary component of my relationship with my Fathers. Suffice to say that, for now, He definitely belongs in the shrine because They need Him to be there.

The bottom shelf turned out to be interesting once I finished decorating it. The general theme was to make it sort of “household-like”. The fake green “reed leaves” are there due to having been used in a relevant ritual six years ago which has tentative connections to Sekhmet (another long story I’ll need to tell at some point) and the two woven wicker balls are relevant to both Ra and Nebt-het via a creative work they both helped me with (again, a story for another day). The “Egyptian” (as in, made in Egypt as a tourist trinket) box on the right holds the hospital band from the night I met Wesir in person and the pendulum which got dedicated to Ma’at and led to an incident which now makes me question whether that was really Her or if it was an encounter with a misnamed Nebt-het.  The little beaded star in front of it was made for and offered to Mut during a Dua and is there as a reminder that She answered my prayer. On the left you can see the Kemetic Oracle Deck I made in its butterfly pouch (inside joke with Set related to chaos theory) and the set of Egyptian-ish prayer beads I made several years ago.

Other points of interest:

* The large fancy candle (the one with the metal accent) on the main shelf is from a Solstice ritual that Set unexpectedly participated in.

* The green lotus candle holder, that currently holds the Kapet-scented oil I use in place of incense, was purchased while I cared for my mother before she went west. It is one of the remaining items from my original beginner’s senut shrine. Other items from that original travel shrine include the green offering plate on the bottom shelf, the two linking talismans hanging to either side of the ankh drawing, the white cloth lining the top shelf, and the decorative tin being used as a central platform for Set and Ra—inside the tin are the remaining materials from the original travel shrine I used while taking the beginner’s class from my parents’ home.  

* The red and black scarf hanging in the background of the main shelf was the one used as a lining for the temporary second shrine to Set that I constructed on His birthday during Wep Ronpet (for use during the period when I was home but still needed to keep my main shrine generic for the last weeks of the beginner’s class).

* The white feather was used as part of an altar to Ra back when I still had Ra confused with Tem (yet another thing I need to post about at some point). The pyrite “sun” on the center platform between Ra and Set was also purchased for Ra inadvertently, and still gets used as a tool for grounding before trance work on occasion.  

* The second offering plate, the little bowl like thing, is a nod to my ancestors—it’s part of my grandmother’s china set, the rest of which I use largely to make offerings to my Akhu.

So yeah… a little space with lots of meaning packed into it. :)