Creation, Radiance, and a Meditation of Self

I was thinking this week, on the relationship between my Fathers and what it means for me, which led to meditating on the meaning of my name, which led to some rambling writing on creativity and the nature of my being. I will share the result of that here because it has been a while since I posted anything and because some of it may be interesting even if the overall composition is not fully translated out of my internal language:

Winged Set Animal Statue

First, if you haven't seen Setken's awesome winged Set painting, go see it! I saw that just before the photo shoot of my newly minted little guy here and had to laugh at the coincidence. Especially since we were both  at least partially drawing from the same source images in Te Velde as inspiration. (^_^)

I made this little guy earlier tonight and I think He came out pretty good, if I do say so myself...

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.

Randomness Related to my Divine Family

Is it strange to spend an entire evening mining the archives of someone else’s life trying to find evidence of dissonance between your personalities? Or, failing that, to unearth at least some indication that you are at not walking an identical path and existing as an echo of someone else? Is it strange to be oddly comforted when you succeed?

I wonder if I am just skittish about the startling number of similarities I have with some of the other Set kids because, for so long, Set was the reason I was different and not the reason I was the same. Or maybe this is some twisted echo of my fear that well-meaning relatives are right and that I will “become my mother” someday. An extension of the terror that brews in me at the mere suggestion of the loss of identity that implies. A generalized phobia of not being unique enough to be my own person.

Not that I feel like much of a Set-kid this weekend...

An Apology, More on Te Velde, and my Project for the Year

The Te Velde thing has been on my mind, and it has been bothering me in that manner that a determined biting fly bothers a potential blood donor.  When it became clear that other things weren’t going to get done until I dealt with it, I finally succumbed and started re-reading the text. The first thing I would like to say in the aftermath of that is: I am so sorry.

Building a Shrine Part 1

Building a shrine which represents my full line-up has proven challenging to say the least. Acquiring images that were agreeable to both the Names and to me took some doing. (Warning: lots of pics in the post)

Reevaluating My Te Velde Recommendation

Later Edit to “How do we know Set isn’t evil?”:

 I realize now that, ironically, I recommend Te Velde right after I definitively state my view that the Hyksos were primarily responsible for the later demonization of Set and destruction of the Setian cult. This is ironic because Te Velde spends several pages objecting to this perspective and attempting to debunk it.

Even more ironically, Te Velde probably won't improve anyone's opinion of Set if what they are hung up on is his homosexual advances/attacks on Heru. Te Velde also doesn't do much to dissuade the "Set is evil" crowd because he uses the word evil liberally throughout the book. However, in my estimation, a lot of the things Te Velde brings up do not correlate to our modern concepts of evil the way he seems to think. 

Note the publication and copyright date of the material is in the late 60’s: there is a lot of cultural bias in his work especially in his recounting of the homosexual interpretation of the contendings.  Also remember: Te Velde, like all professional Egyptologists, is concerned with science, not faith. He isn't attempting to understand Egyptian faith, he's attempting to describe Egyptian religion, which isn't exactly the same thing. He also has the same issue as Meeks in that he squeezes all the myths from across all the millennia together and merits them as a whole. He's better about pointing out the evolution of the myths over time, but is so obsessed with Plutarch being a superior source that many of his descriptions still treat the later evolutions of the myths as somehow "purer" forms of the earlier ones.

I'm second guessing my recommendation.

One would have to read a lot into Te Velde's work to find what I found in it. It's also worth noting that I read it concurrently with a number of other Egyptology texts and that influenced my opinion of it greatly--in a more positive direction than someone taking it on its own merits might. Despite my fondness for it, and allowing that there is a lot of good information to be found within, it's unlikely to change any minds about Set. 

At some point, I should probably do a write up, or at least an annotated guide to the Te Velde book. That might help explain where I'm coming from better than simply referencing the title does.  

"How do we know Set isn't evil?"

This again. I am at the point where I bite my tongue whenever this comes up. We've been over this. 

 "Yes, but given the myths, how do we really know he isn't evil? How did we end up trusting him and including him in our faith?" 

"Look, I know chaos can be useful, but the chaos in my life certainly isn't, so I would definitely steer clear of him."

The number of times I have heard it. The questions all blend together for me and I can't remember who asked what anymore. I see it mostly on the general forums but sometimes on the House forum as well. The problem is that I can think about this far more coherently and calmly than I can write about it. That’s why I don't answer these types of questions on the forums anymore and why I hesitate to post about it here, but I’ll give this a try anyway because I'm feeling ranty this evening: 

A Random Discourse with my Ba after my Naming

We were talking about the name and the nature of the ruling duality that I am now aware oversees us. It is a curious thing, to speak with one's Ba--that quiet still voice within that is not quite divine yet not quite mortal, which is part of myself and yet still distinct:

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It is like gilding chaos. Its essence gilded in gold.

Baggage

[I’m home from the holidays and slowly getting caught up on e-mails, comments, and what-not…sorry for the delay folks. Internet access is inconsistent at best when I’m at home for a variety of reasons despite the relatively good internet my father has, but I digress…this post is the first of many catch up posts…]

Set and I have a thing about baggage. I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: He loses my bags. Seriously. No one could possibly be as unlucky as I am in this without some sort of divine intervention. And no, the irony of this being about baggage has not escaped me.

First Thoughts on My (Awesome) Dual Parentage

It was 2006 and the silence in the late-90s Impala was stifling. The sun outside was beating down heat from above and the black tar radiated the same from below. The ancient AC of the car struggled to keep up. The sickly whirl of its fan was the only sound to cling to as I waited for her response. My ostensibly liberal Christian co-worker seemed stunned.

 Of all the religions I could say she had not been prepared for me to say Kemetic and was even less prepared for my brief explanation of what it was. It’s a modern faith that reestablishes the worship of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. I told her calmly. I didn’t say the word pagan but I could see it reflected in her eyes nonetheless. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and my first thought was that I had just made this the most awkward Wal-mart supply run ever.

The First Day

I can’t decide if the timing couldn’t be better or if it couldn’t be worse.

Hip deep in the debris of a kind of mental and metaphysical transformation I wake up to an e-mail in my inbox that would have been far easier to answer to if it had arrived a month ago. Having the RPD option on the table right now seems at once dangerous and a perfect way to speed things up a bit. There is a strong temptation to gain access to yet another little piece of the puzzle while I’m still in those early stages of reformation and foundation building…it could have a significant impact on this reconstruction of me. On the other hand, I’m also buzzing with Set’s energy right now and there is a small chance that doing anything even remotely community related might be disastrous in unforeseen ways.

It leads to a host of other problems as well:

The Tower Falls (aka "why I've been absent")

She tried several dreams earlier in the week, when she first sensed what was happening, but I didn’t catch on to the fact that it was her. This time she appeared as herself. She started with the house as a metaphor. It wasn’t a house we had ever owned in real life, but rather, it was the dream house we’d built from bits and clips of shows on HGTV. A bedroom like that, a living room like this, a double oven, beautiful craftsmen woodwork, a Victorian façade… we were arguing over the thermostat.

My Feet Are Small in His Footsteps

I got to play the part of a trickster god. The dreamscape was a strange and warped mythology, filled with characters from my life, people who represented things far bigger than themselves.  My role was both eerily familiar and yet crucially different from the one I play in my regular life…

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.

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*

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

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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.