What is a Hypocephalus? What is the Aztec Calendar Stone? What of the Aztec Mosaic Shields?

The Aztec Calendar Stone and the Aztec Mosaic Shields in Light of Book of Abraham Facsimile 2


I  Too Close To Be Ignored

In one of the many startling moments of One Eternal Round, a study of Book of Abraham facsimile 2 (the hypocephalus), Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes describe the Aztec Calendar Stone as "too closely resembling the Joseph Smith hypocephalus to be ignored" (197; see pages 197-200).

The reader holds his breath--a vast distance obtains between Egypt and Mesoamerica--as the authors quote the long forgotten but striking words of Zelia Nuttall:


The Calendar Stone is "an image of the nocturnal heavens as it is of a vast terrestrial state which. . . had been established as a reproduction upon earth of the harmonious order and fixed laws which apparently governed the heavens." It is also, note Nibley and Rhodes, "a calendar with stars as indicators, marking time and space together," even--so Nuttall--"a complete count. . . expressive of a great era of time." "Like the hypocephalus, the Calendar Stone is conspicuously divided into two parts," worlds above and below (Zelia Nuttall, The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: a comparative research based on a study of the Ancient Mexican religious, sociological and calendrical systems, Cambridge, MA).


Referencing Nuttall, Nibley and Rhodes continue: "Around the center are placed 'symbols of the four elements, the union of which was believed by the native philosophers to be essential for the production and maintenance of life.'" Nibley here recalls the four sons of Horus standing just below the central quadrifrons, or four-faced, creator and sun god, though on the lower, upside-down side of the hypocephalus. The Egyptians associated these sons of Horus with the funerary canopic jars, which hold the vital organs taken from the deceased and sealed up for the mummy's promised day of resurrection. The Calendar Stone's "central luminary," in Nuttall's words, who provides "the motive power," even "the divine power who ruled heaven and earth from a changeless and fixed centre in the heaven," is likewise quadrifrons, gazing out toward the four directions: "the quadruple lord, 'He who looks in four directions." The Calendar, at once, depicts the fourfold former world eras, "ages that have collapsed--Jaguar, Wind, Fire, and Rain" (David Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs, 174). The "Four Movement" name of the present, fifth, age is Earthquake.

While the sons of Horus (or surely also of Geb, god of earth, whose four "sons" travel back-and-forth in the four quarters of the earth), certainly keep the elements of life in their manifestation as the canopic jars, there is more to consider; for the quadruple heads of the central ram-headed figure, according to Egyptian texts, also represent the four ba's, or the four spirits, powers, colors, cardinal points, or elements, so well as the four dynasts ruling over their respective patriarchal spheres and ages, these last being primeval eras in which semi-mythical rulers held sway long before Egypt's Pyramid Age (see David Klotz, Adoration of the Ram: Five Hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple, 99, 168).

As element or mineral, we accordingly find the successive generations, ages, or reigns, of Re (fire), Shu (air), Geb (earth), and Osiris (water). The quadrifrons Ram of Mendes, ancient and enduring image of fruitfulness and potency, at the center of the hypocephalus, is thus the forefather of every king, beginning with Re, Shu, Geb, Osiris, who "happen to be the male progenitors of the Heliopolitan cosmogony (Re-Atum begat Shu, Shu begat Geb, Geb begat Osiris)" (Klotz, 99). Osiris' son Horus succeeds him, the pattern for each successive historical king, or Horus, of Egypt, a fifth age. If such concerns stand revealed in the iconography of the hypocephalus, how telling that the first chapter of the book of Abraham, from verse one forward, comments on the patriarchal order that held sway in earlier eras, sets forth the origins of Egyptian kingship, and further introduces the cosmogonic and cosmological themes that make up the balance of the book.


Many have wondered why Joseph Smith so blithely termed the hypocephalus "Facsimile 2 of the book of Abraham." Did he not know that the object was nothing more than an ordinary funerary amulet? Everyone on the Internet knows that.


The correspondence of color and mineral to the fourfold Mendesian Ram also evokes Nibley's rare quest to trace links between the hypocephalus idea and green gemstones, a theme to which he and Rhodes devote an entire--and deeply beautiful--chapter. And why not? For as David Carrasco points out of the Aztec Calendar: Tonatiuh, the sun god, "wears a headband studded with three jewels of precious greenstone. . . and circular ear spools with [descending] greenstone jewel signs" (Carrasco, 173). In fact, the entire Stone glistens with  representations of precious jewels, including, says David Stuart, the green xiuhhuitzolli diadem.

The round hypocephalus, placed "under the head" of the mummy is, significantly, also a "headband."

Diadem? In another chapter, Nibley and Rhodes treat the all-important idea of the cosmocrator, the conquering emperor who aspires to rule the whole cosmic demesne. Nibley notes how the name of the owner of the hypocephalus, Sheshonq, is associated with a whole line of Egyptian cosmocrators--including Pharaoh Sheshonq himself. Whether Nibley's identification of a royal Sheshonq, in this particular case, is correct or not, another significant name, Heliopolis, or Pillar City, occurs more than once on the hypocephalus rim--and Nibley hastens to note the significance of the place as the center of royal and priestly rule and the setting of the unfolding of the solar cosmogony. At once, Heliopolis is both an earthly temple complex and a heavenly solar city, a pillar or axis of the Egyptian cosmos.

Mayanist David Stuart, in a paper appearing just this month, "El emperador y el cosmos," notes how glyphs suggesting the names of Moteuczoma II (the same Moctezuma or Moteczoma who welcomed Cortez), the Warrior god Huitzilopochtli, so well as glyphs representing the precious green jade and the word central plaza or market, all occur on the Aztec Calendar. To Stuart, these glyphs signal the (solar) deification of the warrior king, or in other words, a solar identity for Moteuctzoma II as cosmic emperor, what we might even call a "solarization" of his face. Remember that the very name of the Aztec ruler, Frowning in severity like a lord, reflects the angry heat of the sun at its apex (Gordon Whittaker, Mexicolore.co.uk). And now consider Dimitri Meeks's explanation of the hypocephalus as "solarized" head of the deceased, who now finds identity with Re, or rather Amun-Re, and participates in his ever-encircling procession. In this sense, the hypocephalus becomes a mask, as replacement and substitute for Amun-Re's invisible head. (Amun signifies "hidden"; "not visible.") (Dimitri Meeks, "Dieu masque, Dieu sans tete," Archeo-Nil, 1991).

The Solar stone, Professor Stuart postulates, was "carefully designed to link the above-mentioned energized and animated cosmic spaces and spheres to the specific identities of Moteuczoma II and the heroic deity of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli, both represented as if one sole being in the center of the cosmos" (Stuart, "El emperador y el cosmos: nueva mirada a la piedra del sol"," Arqueologia Mexica, No. 24, 2018; for a draft of the same in English, see also: https://decipherment.wordpress.com/tag/piedra-del-sol/ ).

And exactly who is the Transcendent Cosmic Amun-Re (Hidden Supreme god-and-Sun), as Professor Klotz "names" the central figure on the hypocephalus? There is no Western "exactly" to keep in mind--and certainly no pretentiously "precise" reading. For is this central power not also, so Klotz, the Cosmic Amun-Shu (Hidden-Supreme god-and-brilliant solar atmosphere)? the Unified and Resurrected Re-Osiris (sun-and-deified deceased king)? as also the four-faced Ram of Mendes: Re-Atum, Shu, Geb, Osiris? or even the Transcendent Amun--Ta-Tanen (Hidden Supreme god-and-emergent god of Earth)? Does it not also represent the resurrected Osiris Sheshonq? or even the royal Osiris Sheshonq? The accompanying text refers to him simply, though most Abrahamically, as the "great" and "noble" god of the "First Time," ruler of the five regions of cosmic space.

Again, How does the cosmology of the Calendar Stone tie-in to ritual? For the Mexica, the sun must "draw its power from the sacrifices carried out by gods and humans" (Carrasco, 173), a rejuvenating power. We recall how the Prophet Joseph Smith explains Facsimile 2 in light of "revelation" "from God to Abraham, as he offered sacrifice upon an altar." (His own community also attempted to offer Abraham himself upon an altar--but God delivered him.) David Stuart notes that the Aztec Calendar is essentially the uppermost level of a fourfold altar, an altar positioned in the capital's main plaza to represent the enthroned center and thus the axis of the universe. As such, the Stone also becomes a mirror image, reflecting both day and night, sun and stars, and especially the Pleiades that signal the cosmic center and govern the time of the all-important New Fire Ceremony, the re-igniting of sun and hearth fire, a new and ever-repeating cosmogony, cycling round every 52 years (Stuart, "El emperador y el cosmos").

The seven stars of the Pleiades cross the zenith of the night sky to signal the regeneration and re-transmission of the solar flame. When Professor Stuart further notes how the Pleiades and the Sun, standing at the separate poles of the cosmos--night and day--become each the reflection of the other, and that here we find the true significance of the Calendar Stone, we come close indeed to the idea of the Transcendent Cosmic Amun-Re, the hidden Re, or power beyond the sun.  For the Egyptians the sun is a star, for the stars are all Re's, or suns (r'.w). Re thus stands lord of Re's (nb r'.w). Joseph Smith sees on the hypocephalus a celestial hierarchy, including hints at multiple "suns." Does the idea of Enish-go-on-dosh being both "one of the governing planets" so well as sun, though found in the upside-down region, or of Kolob as both superstar and supersun, stray far off the mark?


And does not Joseph Smith inform us that the sun, according to the Egyptians, "receives its power through the medium" of other celestial powers, an idea which signals the necessity of a continuing solar replenishment? Everything about this replenishment and renewal is timed by complementary celestial revolutions, according to his Explanation anyhow. The hypocephalus, like the Calendar Stone, is thus programmed by "the measurement of time," including, "the measurement of this earth." Ritual procedure thus accords with cosmically timed measurement to ensure the continuing downward flow of divine power. That's the Egyptian view and the Egyptian practice--and that's also what Brother Joseph is telling us.

The timing, which also depends on the convergence of the various earthly, lunar, solar, and planetary or stellar, cycles or revolutions, requires the precision of a priestly class of observers.

David Carrasco, detailing the standard reading of the iconography, speaks of "a narrow band of the twenty day-signs circling the central core of the stone," which again describes the coordinated revolutions of earthly and celestial time (Carrasco, 174). Another ring--of turquoise, the precious greenstone--runs round the symbolic "day count," and is pierced by the four solar rays at the four quarters of the cosmic scheme (see Khristaan Villela, http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/calendar/calendar-stone; and K.
Villela and M. E. Miller, eds,. The Aztec Calendar Stone).

Stuffed between the rays are a profusion of feather symbols, which recalls the double ostrich feather crown, a symbol of intense and translucent atmospheric radiance, sported by the standing solar figure in the upper half of the hypocephalus disk. His tall feather crown pierces, at apex, or zenith, the rim of facsimile 2 (here see One Eternal Round, 267). Along with the feathers are what Villela tells us are likely droplets of blood, the sacrificial blood that empowers the whole. Might they also represent droplets of atmospheric water, shot through with light--the vivifying rains? The outermost circle, the rim, represents "the blue sky vault," which recalls the text on the hypocephalus rim that speaks to the ever-encircling course of the sun and his retinue through the sky with its bright Heliopolitan gates or shrines. (Hugh Nibley notes how the outer rim of Achilles' Shield displays the earth-encircling Okeanos.)
(For new translations of facsimile 2 rim, see http://bit.ly/1bthZpQ .)

II  Test Results

"Too closely resembling the Joseph Smith hypocephalus to be ignored?" Note how, in this last sentence, "Joseph Smith hypocephalus" signals both the standard Egyptian hypocephalus and, at once, the Prophet's Explanation of the particular example in his possession. In other words, not only might we compare the round Calendar to the round Egyptian object per se, we can go so far as to compare what Mesoamericanists say of the one to what Joseph Smith says of the other.

So let's hold the explanations of both Joseph Smith and the Egyptologists regarding hypocephali studiously in mind, as we examine the principal themes that Professor Stuart, writing this very year, descries in the Aztec Solar Stone:


1) temporal and solar dynamism
2) the vertical axis, earth to celestial zenith
3) the idea of the cosmic center (both in heaven and on earth)
4) cyclical movement
5) the cosmic rule of the divinized earthly ruler, as warrior, in the likeness of the sun
6) the divinized earthly ruler as the "embodiment of time"


Nibley and Rhodes (2013: ps. 240-241) helpfully sum up Joseph Smith's "brief explanation" with the following headings over "words used":


1) cosmology: earth, planets, firmament, Sun, stars, moon, revolution
2) measurement and number: measurements of time, celestial time, day, cubit, years, one thousand, quarters, revolution
3) transmission of power or energy: receiving light, borrows its light, governs planets or stars, receives its power, governing power
4) hierarchy or dominion (intelligence and purpose): creation, residence, government, key, power, God, throne, authority, crown, light, the governing power
5) ordinances and procedures (relating the above to humanity): sacrifice, altar, Temple
6) Joseph Smith's use of "special idiom or notation to convey the above," that is, the idea of representation, overlapping of symbolism, iconography conveying more than one meaning: represent, signify, pertaining to, answering to, "but in this case, in relation to this subject, the Egyptians meant it to signify" x and not just y.


We don't yet know how Professor Stuart's peers will receive his new interpretations of the Stone, but that's not our present concern. We speak of a Prophet; and his most vocal, and even mocking and shaming, critics to the contrary, Joseph Smith's spare and orderly Explanation shows, should we compare it to what others say about like circular cosmic drawings, a thoughtful and ordered thematic reading. Professor Robert Ritner hears in the Prophet's Explanation voluble ravings in the manner of pre-Egyptologist Athanasius Kircher (Ritner, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham--A Response"). Here's how Kircher translates a handful of hieroglyphs:


Hemphta the supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtue and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world, that is the solar spirit subject to it whence comes the vital motion in the material or elemental world, and an abundance of all things and variety of species arises. From the fruitfulness of the Osirian bowl, in which, drawn by some marvelous sympathy, it flows ceaselessly. . . 


Is Ritner correct? The "ceaselessly flowing" example from Kircher by which Ritner illustrates what he considers Joseph Smith's own absurd interpretations lacks the specificity, balance, concision, and coherence one finds throughout the thematically compact book of Abraham--and a little mystery besides. Kircher elaborates on but a single, spent, idea.

Joseph Smith's Abraham, including the Explanation of facsimile 2, merits a second look. Even should one disagree with him to the point of laughter, Joseph's take on the matter merits a jot of charity. Remember what he sadly records of the persecution he continuously suffered at the hands of even neighbors: "being of very tender years, and persecuted by those who ought to have been my friends and to have treated me kindly, and if they supposed me to be deluded to have endeavored in a proper and affectionate manner to have reclaimed me" (Joseph Smith--History 1: 1:28). Where was kindness, propriety, affection?

Whether we believe even a jot of it, we can all take a charitable look at Joseph Smith's explanation of Kolob (the central solar figure) as being: "The First Creation . . First in government, last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time." The Prophet's focus on revolutions, temporal cycles and measurement, "grand governing" and thus hierarchically descending cosmic powers; on stars, earth, and sun, and transmission of light; or on altars and sacrifices and thrones, hardly deserves to be pilloried by either supremely gifted and educated scholars (who really must smile at amateurs); or by the countless following eager sophisticates who, though professing an advanced and and up-to-millennial understanding of all things past, present, and on Wikipedia, have never given a moment's thought to the symbolic representations found on works of great antiquity.


III  Case Two: The Turquoise Mosaic Shields 

Though products of vastly differing cultures, such nevertheless breathtaking points of thematic comparison between the hypocephalus and the Calendar Stone, which certainly date from chapter drafts of One Eternal Round made by Hugh Nibley in the mid-Eighties (the book was posthumously published in 2013), also serve to introduce my own new comparative findings about another Mexica artifact depicting the cosmos: the mosaic Aztec shields. These rare mosaic shields also merit a page or two in any consideration of the hypocephalus.

"The mosaic design on the shield now in the British Museum. . . portrays the principal division of the Aztec universe. The small circular shape of the shield corresponds to the surface of the earth. At its center is a circle of mosaic with four rays. . . this is a solar disc. The four rays emanating from the solar disc divide the earth into four quarters. In each quarter stands a sky-bearer" (Colin McEwan, et al., Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico, 62). As the reader will recall, the sons of Horus may also take the role of sky-bearers at the corners of the earth. The Prophet Joseph Smith explained these last figures, as follows: "Represents this earth in its four quarters."

Of a recent finding we further read "The position of the mosaic disc discovered at the bottom of Offering 99 [at Templo Mayor--the pyramidal center of the universe--to which compare Nibley and Rhodes, 100] links it with the night-time journey of the stars through the earth's interior during the recreation of the Mesoamerican underworld--one of the very important functions of this journey was the underworld's fertilization."

A similar theme obtains on the lower, nightly, half of the hypocephalus, which depicts the upside-down netherworld dominated by the mother cow and replete with symbolism of her impregnation, for she will bear the brilliant central power which, in the form of the four-faced Ram of Mendes, we can call the Transcendent Cosmic Amun-Re (see discussion in One Eternal Round). For the Egyptians, the mother cow, represents Hathor, a goddess who is not only the mother of the sun, but herself the Female Sun, Solar Disk of Solar Disks, at Dendara, the Female Heliopolis, or Sun City. Joseph Smith expresses the idea thus: "and [the cow] is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun." Even so, Rait, nearly a textual "unknown," hardly contests Re's glorious one act play.

The name Joseph claims the Egyptians gave her: Enish-go-on-dosh is right on the mark for the Lady of Dendara. Should on-dosh reflect 'n-ds(r), beautiful in (her) solar redness (as the Eye of the sun); then Enish-go might well answer to ins-q3, both "exalted in scarlet" and also "exalted as the scarlet solar eye." I see the name as referring to the Female Sun, the exalted (go) and beautiful (on) Red (enish, dosh) Solar Eye (Enish and Dosh), in an elaborated word play typical of such Hathorian names and, at once, powerful recalling the name attached to one of Horus' sons in his manifestation as fiery red star--one of the seven Akhu--that is, as a sun himself: Dosh-iati-imi-hawt-ins (the One whose two eyes are red [dSr.(ty) j3t.ty], who dwells in the House of Scarlet [Hw.t jnsw.t], i.e., in the Horizon, sometimes also called the House of Dosh [Hw.t dSr.wt]). 


The surprising Egyptian view of a female sun in a feminine netherworld, the womb of creation, at opposite pole from the solar powers on the upper half of the disk, leads us on to Professor Stuart's conclusion about the Stone: "We might with justification argue that the upward-facing solar image was but a reflection and was thus, in a concrete and physical sense, materially 'in the earth,' while, at once, uniting the earthly and netherworldly sphere with the solar zenith." (translating, "Puede verse que la imagen solar acostada fue un reflejo y estuvo, materialmente, 'en la tierra,' uniendo la esfera del suelo con el cenit solar").


IV  A Many-Valued Logic and an Openness to Surprise

Eduard Seler, losing patience with the array of re-interpreters of the Aztec "Sunstone" ("Earthstone?"), famously decreed of the central figure: "It is the sun--no more and no less." David Stuart takes a more nuanced view. When Professor Stuart asks us to accept that a particular representation on the Calendar or elsewhere need not refer to a sole god or a single concept but to multiple interpretations, we wonder whether he has, after all, read Erik Hornung on the many-valued logic of the Egyptian mind (Hornung, The One and the Many; compare the magnificent Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World, 1979).

We all resist facile comparisons between Egypt and Ancient America, an often exceptionally cloying and boring game. And we may consider how even brilliant students, like Nuttall, Brundage, or Florescano have themselves shot beyond the mark in targeting cross-cultural comparisons; yet try as we might to push the poles back to their places, try as we must to understand separate cultures on their own terms, and on their own soil--authochthons all--we may still take up Stuart and Carrasco one day, Klotz and Meeks the next. And should we chose to marvel, what of it?

If Hugh Nibley chooses to compare the Homeric Shield of Achilles to the Round Egyptian hypocephalus--Why not? The abounding parallelism delights the reader. When critics simplistically carp at "parallelomania," not only are they often blind to crystalline influence, they also fail to discern a rich and buoyant poetics, a "loud and bold" new look from "a peak in Darien."

Or shall we, like Calvin at Geneva, careful, prosaic, special, clerical, scientific, and so very deeply and puritanically disturbed, avert our eyes from Keats's teeming Pacific?

Did any idea ever bridge that deep? The Mexica themselves famously do say their own ancestors made that sea-crossing, carrying with them an ancient "book of knowledge" (Sahugun, Codice Matritense de la Real Academia; see esp. Alfredo Lopez Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist; I'm translating from Miguel Leon-Portilla,  Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares (1961):       .

They arrived, they came. . .

Over the water in their ships they came,

in many groups.

And it was there they arrived, at water's edge,

on the north coast.

And that very place where they beached their ships

is Panutla,

which means: the place where one goes over the waters,

and we still call it Panutla today.


We must point out," says Lopez Austin, "that the data [about Panutla, their migrations to Tamoanchan near the snow-capped volcanoes, the loss of their "original books" and creation of new ones] is so strange and enigmatic that it has led to many interpretations"--but that's the joy of it (Lopez Austin, Tamoanchan, 79; 55; for a map and diagram showing the ships and migrations, fig. 3, 57). "The document is a history of the Mexica, told by themselves" (Lopez Austin, 56), that is to say, the emic view, that which touches as close to the reality of the Mexica origins as we can possibly come.

It is left to us, outsiders, to take up the etic view of things, to make models that approximate, but never reach, the cultural, religious, and historical truth. Such models must be shaped with rigor and with care, in a word: scholarship; yet curious students keep on the lookout for all kinds of surprises. My own work in Egyptian and Hebrew won't permit me, for instance, to look favorably on the conclusions of others who have tried to see in these languages a dual-origin for Uto-Aztecan--a startling enterprise. All I can see, despite the formidable work spread before me, are the telling multiple misses about Egyptian and Hebrew semantics and phonology. And once you start to tally the misses, it's easy to whittle down the cognate count to next to nothing: consider the case of Japanese and Korean. But at least I give things a considered examination.


Of the extant hypocephali, the Calendar Stone, or the Mosaic Shields: What thematic correspondence, what shared semiotic, may we, with eagle eyes, descry on these? Our keen informants again tell us that the latter "commemorates the descent of the stars into the interior of the earth," a cosmic dance of seven all-encircling "warlike star deities" in which Descent and Ascent make up One Eternal Round, a continual renewal of the powers of life. (See Turquoise Mosaics, notes on Image 94 by Adrian Velazquez and Maria Eugenia Marin).

Indeed, some curious students today discern the symbolism of the caterpillar and the butterfly, images associated with the warrior cult, both coursing the rim and unfolding at center of the Aztec Calendar itself:

"The outer image is the body of some kind of animal or insect that has fire symbols in boxes along its body. . . The body of the animal or insect curves down to the bottom, and the heads face each other as gaping serpent jaws. . . The traditional view is that these huge images are 'fire serpents,' as indicated by the huge serpent heads and the images of fire that cover their bodies. . . But a more recent interpretation, offered by Karl Taube, suggests that these images are not serpents at all, but giant caterpillars representing the transformation and rebirth of the warrior as the sun, emerging in the center of the image in the shape of a great butterfly" (Carrasco, Daily Life, 174; Karl Taube, "The Turquoise Hearth: Fire, Self Sacrifice, and the Central Mexican Cult of War," in Mesoamerica's Classical Heritage, 2000; also, Taube, "The Symbolism of Turquoise in Ancient Mesoamerica").

For Professor Taube, the imagery of jaguar, serpent, and butterfly (or caterpillar) all overlap. Vanishes forever, in the light of multiple approaches, the prohibitive Western voicing: "no more and no less." Whether they know it or not, and whether it speaks, at all, to influence, diffusion, or the like--and that's impossible to unscramble--today's Mesoamericanists not only discern in the Mayan glyphs the same system of mixing logographic and syllabic writing that obtains in the hieroglyphs of Egypt, they likewise find in Ancient American composition, both text and iconography--to us, richly chaotic--an "illogical" many-valued logic perfectly at home in Ancient Egypt.

And the noses of these serpent-caterpillars converging at the nadir of the Calendar Stone? These, says Professor Villela, are indeed bespangled with star symbols. According to Taube, their proper "supernatural caterpillar" home is the fifth level of the heavens, whence dart falling stars. One wonders whether falling stars, in appearance of fiery serpents or caterpillars, might have been thought to fertilize the ground? (See Karl Taube, "Symbolism of Turquoise"). The New Fire Ceremony likewise draws the flaming energy from the Pleiades to this lower earth: "Go and Catch a falling star."

Do not all these things also recall the two serpents appearing at either side the ram-faced figure of the hypocephalus, a manifestation of powerful solar energies? (lightening bolts? comets? meteors?) or even the fledgling falcon, with tiny, hopeful, outstretched wings (labeled imty or Infant on certain disks dramatically appearing in the upper left panel as symbol of solar rejuvenation, in the cycle of time, manifest in the heavenly firmament (see Explanation of Facsimile 2, fig. 4)?


These serpents, says Tamas Mekis, in a new dissertation considering all extant hypocephali, both "protect" the central solar god and also "ensure" for him a continuation of "light and energy, at day or at night" ("Hypocephli," Budapest, 2013). All of which recalls what Joseph Smith explained about the figure of four-faced ram, an emblem for the Ancient Egyptians of both unceasing creative and procreative abundance: the central figure receives his power through the medium of other powers. As for the fledgling solar falcon, Mekis tells us, citing the hieroglyphic label, that it embodies in mysterious and transcendent form, as Amun-Re's Ba of Ba's, that is, at once both hidden and radiant, all four of the Ba's, or powers, aspects, and cosmic extension, of the four-faced ram. Now glimpse the Calendar Stone's unfurling butterfly bursting from its chrysalis with four manifest wings--"strange sights"--each bearing the epochal record and pattern of a Sun.

"Tell me where all past years are."


V  Cultural Diffusion or Independent Invention?

Yet how could all these themes and motifs from Ancient Egyptian iconography also appear in 16th century Mexico? Obviously, given the intervening millennia separating the two, core ideas and attitudes from Ancient Egypt were as likely to circle the globe several times over as was the royal Egyptian bloodline. Do not the mathematical models of genealogy show us how every living person today must descend from the royal line that built the pyramids?


"When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors--every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace.

"If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

"It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right" ("Statisticians: Common Ancestor of All Humans Lived 5,000 Years Ago," AP, 5 July 2006).


Nibley and Rhodes, while insisting on the arcane and rarefied nature of the hypocephalus idea, an idea that can be summarized in a few telling points, also take us far afield: the Ascension Literature (the Apocalypses of Abraham, Enoch, and so on, the Shield of Achilles, the Hermetic Tradition, a word or two about the Chinese jade disks--even a page about the Aztec Calendar. Nothing is said about the Book of Mormon or of Jaredites, Mulekites, Southeast Asians, or any others who might have borne the freight of the cosmic circle. However telltale the cross-cultural signs of recognition, however clear the trace of the pollen, Nibley leaves the matter in the air.


Diffusion of knowledge from clime to clime is a delicate thing, as delicate as the lift of a butterfly.







Notes: Essay updated in January 2018.

Reading Facsimile 1 of the Book of Abraham with Wisdom at Our Side

I  Come and See

Today I visited the Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, and looked once more at the vignette from which book of Abraham Facsimile 1 is taken. I looked at it several times, and thought deeply. What a joy to see the papyrus itself, not a facsimile, not a photograph nor a digitized copy, but the very ink, the very hieroglyphs, the vignette itself  in all its design and character!

To understand the vignette in its fullness, we must turn to the pages of the book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price and read the explanations of a latter-day Seer. Otherwise, we risk seeing only a part of the meaning, that part that reflects darkly in the mirror of modern scholarship, a scholarship at a dusty multi-millennial distance from the lost past.

I do not fault today's scholars for not seeing what Joseph Smith saw: Who can be expected to possess the high gift of the seer to see things as they really are, and as they really once were?

Yet I do detect a mote in the scholarly eye, when students of an ancient civilization pretend to a preeminent knowledge of that past. We learn to read an ancient script, yes, and master our tentative lexical lists--but to boast? "Yea, how quick to boast" (Helaman 12:5).

What do we know? What can we know? Professor Westendorf would tell his students that no living person can know Ancient Egypt as it once was; the best we might do is to build theoretical models by which to approximate that past. We may come thereby, if not to understanding, at least to a common ground for observation and discussion. We all recall those ridiculously disproportionate models fashioned by scientists to teach the public something of the swirling atom, to grant students a brush with molecular structure, and the like. Without the model, there can be no logos, that is to say, no -ology. We would all drift into incoherence, then into stillness.

Such limitations, however, do not apply to seers, because "things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known" (Mosiah 8:17). Such gifted revelators something call to mind the transcendence of translated beings, like Enoch or John the Beloved, being themselves translating beings capable of putting disparate peoples and cultures in touch with each other, as though they themselves transcended space and time and differences in language and culture.

As I consider the tone of scholarship everywhere today, I wonder how well any of us are doing at building models that invite dialogue--open, demanding, cheerful dialogue--about the forgotten past.

For instance, as Professor Robert Ritner, in The Joseph Smith Papyri: A Complete Edition, winds up his argument against the Prophet Joseph's explanation of Facsimile 1, an argument consisting of merest ex cathedra declaration after declaration of Folly and Error, he pronounces:

"Except for those willfully blind, the case is closed."


The words of Scripture best suited to set alongside such an eager, un-nuanced, and incompletely argued pronouncement are those of King Limhi (Mosiah 8): 

"And now, when Ammon had made an end of speaking these words [about the interpreters and the high gift of seers] the king rejoiced exceedingly, and gave thanks to God, saying: Doubtless a great mystery is contained within these plates, and these interpreters were doubtless prepared for the purpose of unfolding all such mysteries to the children of men."

I say the same of Facsimile 1: a great mystery is contained within that vignette, rich as it is with representation and symbolism. And, as I see it, Joseph the Seer has unfolded a portion of its ancient "mysteries to the children of men" in latter-days, with more unfolding to come for those who seek. Neither is the door shut to those who seek either to understand or add to the Prophet's Explanation of Facsimile 1 by the study of Near Eastern languages and cultures. I attest to just how very open that door lies. Enter and seek--and find. It doesn't make a jot of difference whether anybody attempts to stop up that avenue of pursuit: seek and you will find abundance "of treasures hid in the sand." "And [you] shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures." Yes, you shall find even the Pearl of Great Price (Deuteronomy 33; Doctrine and Covenants 89).

As I reflect on Professor Ritner's pronouncement of blindness, even willful blindness, I am compassionately startled at what many apparently cannot see or do not even care to look for. "Look to God and live" (Alma 37). Like Limhi I feel to exclaim:

"O how marvelous are the works of the Lord, and how long doth he suffer with his people; yea, and how blind and impenetrable are the understandings of the children of men; for they will not seek wisdom, neither do they desire that she should rule over them!"


II A Word to the Wise

Wisdom! You may rule over me! Like Emerson, "I am weary of the surfaces, and die of inanition." If Hokhmah, Ma'at, Sofia, the Wisdom of the Ages, not sophistication nor prating invective, desires to rule my mind, a mind that now hopes to see, She may.

Let's take a look at her judicious works.

Journalist Doug Gibson, reprising via Twitter a frankly objective review of Professor Ritner's study of the Joseph Smith Papyri, a review originally appearing in the Ogden Standard Examiner, observes:


"To Ritner, the 'case is closed.' What Smith claimed, and the LDS Church claims today, is simply false, he says.

"Ironically, that certainty of Ritner's may be the weakest point of his arguments. One can make a case that to draw any conclusion that science is settled can be called unscientific.

"With ancient Egyptian-era digs going on in the world, it's an audacious claim to say that part of a book that millions regard as scripture is forever concluded to be a hoax" (Mormon History and Culture: "The Mummy's Curse and the Book of Abraham").
http://www.standard.net/stories/2012/04/29/scholar-challenges-joseph-smith-translation

While there is little original about the case Ritner presents against the book of Abraham, he presents it with a blare of trumpets. And few blasts are so sharp as his ridicule of the Prophet's explanations of certain goddesses appearing on Facsimile 3. How is it that the Prophet confuses goddesses with mortal males?

Yet addressing the very same embarrassment in 1956, before Professor Ritner was even born, Hugh Nibley had the following to say (in the form of an imaginary dialogue):

"'It is rather quaint,' Professor F. commented. 'Any fool can see, for example, that the figures called Pharaoh and his son are women.'

"Yes,' Mr. Blank answered, 'a myopic moron could see that, and that is why it so remarkable. It is plainly intentional.'"

Mr. Blank, in search of the patiently recovered remarkable rather than the surface visible--that is, what scholars do--goes on to cite arcane works of Egyptology in hopes of discovering why Joseph Smith might so discern a trace of the Pharaoh or the Prince in the outward form of a goddess (Lehi in the Desert. The World of the Jaredites. There Were Jaredites, 336-337).

To read anything of the Egyptian past, the student must drop all preconceived notions, including the norms of Western logic, and, well, venture. . .


As a serious reader of Professor Ritner's Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (though not the only published edition!), I also note strengths and weaknesses; I note sound transcription, sound translation--and the unsound. The book may have its errors, and I've tallied a telling list, but the surprising, and I think the significant, thing to note is the singular lack of intellectual curiosity about the documents Professor Ritner assays to translate. Everything translates into the matter-of-fact, if not the outright dull. Another weakness is that Ritner does not await anyone else's sheaf-laden return from the library. Even as we, brim with joy, rejoice in discovery and ready our report, he interrupts by slamming the classroom door in our faces. Ritner makes it abundantly clear, however, that he is, by no means, the first to do so. Student after student, he notes, has slammed the door on the book of Abraham since 1861 or so. Yet as Nibley asks: Will the latch hold?

The latch simply never holds.


Intellectual Curiosity? We wonder whether documents such as the Book of Breathings or the hypocephalus have anything profound to tell us about the Egyptian mind? Do they yield a chapter in the intellectual history of the race? Might they have something--anything--to say to religious seekers? Or are they, as the Chicago Professor dryly puts it: "amulets" of "common" funerary hopes?

Ritner's "complete" transcriptions and translations, fleeting in comment, carry a cold and hurried air. We don't come to understanding. The book evinces a single-minded purposefulness in an impatient and aggrieved tone. Ritner not only declares: All Joseph Smith says is false! He also insists of the supposedly ubiquitous, thus "common" "amulets": Nothing to see here, move along.

If it is so, such a neglect seems to be very much at odds with Professor Ritner's other famous book, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, which the reader can hardly put down. If it is so, then Ritner's terse museum-label comments about these Egyptian texts also stand at odds with the trend of Egyptological writing since 1980. Go to any library and select books written by Jan Assmann, Erik Hornung, Alexandra von Lieven, Dimitri Meeks, Sylvie Cauville, John Baines, and so on, and see whether these ever fail to stir the soul with the wonders of the Egyptian mind, see whether these don't seek to draw the universal treasuries into the expanding picture.

Professor Ritner is always worth reading. Yet had Ritner's contracting book on the Joseph Smith Papyri undergone standard Egyptological peer-review or the requisite editing for printing at a standard publishing house (one not given to Mormon controversy), how many counts of sarcasm, what tally of the personal barbs, might have vanished from the final cut? So declawed, the book, written for a specific lay audience, would have lost its crowd appeal.

Hugh Nibley, by way of contrast, at least tried to gather documents having a similar thematic and cultural bearing, all of which he believes ought to read in light of the Joseph Smith Papyri and vice-versa. He invites the reader to study these, ponder the larger Kulturkreis, and then to decide whether such productions of the Egyptian mind as the hypocephalus, the Breathings document, or the vignettes, are worthy of our attention (see The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975) and One Eternal Round (2010). Shall we brush these collections aside in our knowing simplicity? or shall we take a second look?

The test has to do with curiosity--and with attentiveness to matters of eternal concern. Ever reading, ever studying, ever discovering, we wait on the Lord for the fullness of truth.

Alma 37:12: One Eternal Round: Thoughts on Egyptian Cosmology and Intellectual History

In Alma 37:12 we read:

[God] doth counsel in wisdom over all his works,

and his paths are straight,

and his course is one eternal round.


Here we discover yet another place in the Book of Mormon that calls to mind the delightful Egyptian and Hebrew expressions about Lady Wisdom, both Ma'at and Hokhmah.

Note how Wisdom (or Ma'at) governs all his works; how "his paths are straight (m3')." Since the Egyptian verb m3' marks movement along a straight line, the co-incidence of Wisdom (Ma'at) and her "straight" (m3') paths makes for a typically Egyptian play on words. But there's more. The Wisdom governing all His works includes both God's paths and His course, a duality of expression that both brings together and comprehends, in the compass in two brief phrases, all His works and all His ways, the works and the ways of salvation.


Alma's poetic recitations to his son Helaman reflect the anaphoric expressions of his (again, poetic) discourse to the Saints at Gideon:

For I perceive that ye are in the paths of righteousness [cf. Eg. m3'.t, or Ma'at; straight paths];

I perceive that ye are in the path which leads to the kingdom of God;

yea, I perceive that ye are making his paths straight.

I perceive that it has been made known unto you, by the testimony of his word, that he cannot walk in crooked [Eg. isf.t; the opposite of Ma'at] paths; neither doth he vary from that which he hath said; neither hath he a shadow of turning from the right to the left, or from that which is right to that which is wrong;

therefore, his course is one eternal round (Alma 7:19-20).


Because some may yet wonder whether God's laws of morality and chastity are subject to change, Alma, anticipating the matter, immediately adds: "And he doth not dwell in unholy temples; neither can filthiness or anything which is unclean be received into the kingdom of God." Purity thus exemplifies God's unvarying ways.


The Doctrine and Covenants (3:2) also cites the ancient formula:

For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said,

therefore his paths are straight,

and his course is one eternal round.

The idea of "a shadow of turning from the right to the left," or from the right hand to the left, glossed by Alma as a reference to "right" and to "wrong," clearly shows astronomical reference: the sun at ascension or meridian, the limiting of solar shadow, the right hand (imn) as the West (imn) in Egyptian (Hebrew has the right hand as the South), the left hand as the East, the idea of solar turning, the solstices, etc. The Path and Course of God reflects the path of the sun.


And wording in Alma 37 not only suggest the Hebrew idea of the tequfah, what the Greeks would term a periodos (a period, or complete cycle), they also recall a poetic Egyptian theologoumenon from a New Kingdom text we name the Solar Litany (Solar Litany 152) that "summarizes, perhaps harmonizes, conflicting notions about the movement of the sun":

phr jtn.f
m3' b3.f

May his jtn (manifestation as solar globe) revolve (or wind) back-and-forth--
but his b3 (spiritual manifestation, radiance) follow a straight course.

Or:

His jtn shall wander in revolution;
His b3 shall proceed in a straight line.

The verb m3' gives the punchline to the couplet, for "when written with the cartouche," as here, the verb "paradoxically describes a regular circuit along a straight line," or a "going round in a straight line." The goddess Maat, whose name derives from the very same verbal root, thus personifies Egyptian notions of right, rightness, correctness, truth, justice, and candid honesty.

(Val Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 112).


The Egyptian couplet forcefully recalls another in the Hebrew Bible, though I doubt the specific textual comparison has ever been made, given how little read the obscure Solar Litany remains. We speak of Psalm 17, a cosmic psalm, to which Egyptian influence has famously been attributed. The peculiar manner in which the Hebrew Psalm unpacks the duality of solar movement, as both straight line of ascent and revolution, reveals the Egyptian influence as much as any other feature of the cosmic psalm already identified by scholars:

Miqtzeh hashamayim motza'o
utqufato al-qetzotam

From the extreme bounds of the heavens is his going out (or his ascension, cf. Eg. prj),
and his circuit (cf. Eg. phr) reaches to its extremest bounds, [and thus making One Eternal Round].
(Psalm 17:8).

If rendered into Egyptian, the couplet would feature a telling play on words, a fairly common correspondence in solar texts, between prj (to go forth or to ascend, often used of heavenly bodies) and phr (to describe a circle, make a circuit).

For the sun, ascension culminates as a full revolution, from noontide to noontide, and the motion described is therefore but one whole consisting of two complementary parts or paths. Yet, even so, the image of the motza', the linear "going forth," contradicts that of the tequfah, the "circuit." So we're left wondering whether the sensible, run-of-the-mill translations positing a simple circuit--a commonplace, really, in Bible translation--satisfy original intent. The solar course described in Psalm 17:8 involves something more than meets the eye--the sun moves far from our perception into the "extremest bounds."


Nor is such a contradictory (or complementary!) model to be found in the Egyptian texts alone; the wall murals of the contemporaneous New Kingdom tombs paint the solar course both as fixed line and as a winding, even serpentine, movement, which reflects the phr-model of solar movement. The Egyptians held to both symbolic and realistic visions of cosmic movement, the ideal and the observed. The sun to the watchful observer is indeed all over the place, at every hour and at every season (see descriptions in Joshua Aaron Roberson, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth, 2012).

"The juxtaposition of phr and m3', as descriptive of the sun's movement (or any travel for that matter), speaks both to the principle of complementary pairs [as found throughout Egyptian literature] and to a fundamental contradiction. Both jtn and b3 describe the sun, yet the words suggest distinct [or alternating] visions of what that body is [or what it may be]; for each takes a distinct [though complementary] verb (or requires a distinct model) of solar movement. The notion of m3', countering the planetary drift inherent in phr, provides the corrective element; one may say, the adjustment of the cosmos. The two modalities, movement along a straight line and turnings, keep things in balance; what the verbal pair reflects is only the true nature of any road" (Sederholm, 113).

"The complementary pair (m3', phr) occurs again in Urk. VI, 11, 22-13, 1 [another obscure text]:

Wpj-W3w.t hr m3' n.f
phry jb nj phry jm.f

Wepwawet [the swift jackal, Opener of Paths] straightens the road for him,
and thus soothes, lit. encircles or rounds, the heart of him
who makes his rounds therein (113 n 64).

The Opener of the Paths prepares a straight path before the traveler,
and thus calms (or encircles) the traveler of encircling roads

or: calms the wanderer in wandering roads.

"The hints of a cosmological reflection in the couplet lend it deep interest and suggest that the Egyptians held two, contradictory, models of celestial mechanics. Mortality is swept along by the same contrary winds. After all, the fundamental rule of life is "Follow Maat" [while also understanding that] "Life is a phr.t (phr.t pw 'nx)--either finished cycle or back-forth spin. Nevertheless, whereas life's cycle. . . mimes Fortuna, the centerpiece of Egyptian values remains the attainment of Maat [Order, Justice]" (Sederholm, 113).

The reader will recall the Wepwawet-standard (the Opener of the paths standard), in the hand of the standing figure at the apex of the round hypocephalus, who also stands directly above the seated figure of the Transcendent Amun-Re-Shu at the heart (qrb, or Kolob) of the circle. Movement from the heart to the apex of the circle marks ascension and manifest glory (the ba of Shu), which, at once, signifies culmination of the solar circuit. As Hugh Nibley would have it, the hypocephalus (which he also describes as "one eternal round"), is to be understood as a globe or sphere rather than mere circle. Ascension is thus as much circuit as line. That the circle or rounding of the hypocephalus also signifies the divine aureola encircling and thus protecting the deceased comes now as no surprise, "thus encircling, he calms the traveler of the encircling solar highways," a traveler who, as the text of the hypocephalus rim informs us, has joined the solar retinue and will soon enter into rest with the heavenly host in the tabernacle of the Elder One, in the heavenly Pillar City (or Heliopolis) at the apex of the circle.


Here is the wanderer's rest, Abraham's longed-for city: "for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God"; "but now they desire a better country, a heavenly"; "he hath prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:10, 16). Abraham, the strict follower of Ma'at, or of righteousness (see Abraham 1:1), also knew that the eternal quest for eternal life was a phr.t, a circuit or progress, from altar to altar, and back home to God. (Hugh Nibley, some forty years ago, wrote of Abraham's circuit, or progress, from altar to altar, a prominent theme in the Book of Abraham.) Phr.t also wraps the heart of the traveler in calm and quietness, no matter how exposed to the perils of the road: "[we] came forth in the way to the land of Canaan, and dwelt in tents as we came on our way. Therefore eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed from Haran by the way of Jershon, to come to the land of Canaan" (Abraham 2:15-16).


So what does the standard manual on Egyptian Religion, a textbook still used three decades after publication, have to say about the contradictory nature of solar movement?

"Clearly the earth was not thought to revolve around the sun,
but neither was the sun thought to revolve around the earth"

Leonard H. Lesko, "Ancient Egyptian Cosmogonies and Cosmology," in Religion in Ancient Egypt, 117-118.


"Neither was the sun thought to revolve around the earth."


That's a startling statement! Did the Egyptians not hold to a geocentric universe, to the plain and the simple--and predictable? Surely Professor Lesko faced immediate dismissal from Yale University for making such an unhistorical and unscientific claim about the cosmology of the ancients, a claim overturning the fixed knowledge of every ten-year-old on the planet! Cornell University nevertheless published the textbook in 1991, and it has been standard college fare on both sides of the Atlantic ever since.

While "The universe was 'all that the sun encircles,' [yet] if this phrase implies that the sun was thought to have gone around the world on a single circular course, then apparently the phrase reflected a cosmology different from that in the religious texts discussed here."

Again: "Obviously the ancient Egyptians viewed and described the world around them in a variety of ways [a various semiotic]. The personifications and metaphors of the myths and stories were imaginative, poetic, very complex, and often humorous, but they certainly did not represent the sum total of the Egyptians' cosmological or scientific thinking on the subject" (Lesko, 117).

In other words, let's not mistake metaphor, image, and icon about sun and stars for the sum total of cosmological speculation.

Other questions spring to mind: Was the Egyptian heaven a flat roof? or was it rounded or "bent"? Both representations appear in the sources. Did the sun move? or was it moved by outside agencies? Again, both ideas appear.


In 2008 I published a few speculative paragraphs about the possible rotation of the Akhet, a "place" or "moment" usually associated with the "Horizon" (and Akhet is usually translated as Horizon):

"The iconography of the Akhet shows the rounded sun. . . half manifest, half hidden, between the twin hills that, properly speaking, stand for the east and west horizons, although pictured as but one horizon. Entry into the Akhet thus answers [with immediacy] to egress on the eastern skyline."


So do the writings and iconography describe the sun as circling about a static earth? or do they rather describe a sort of continual flip-flop in the horizon in which Entry and Egress occur at the same point yet mark different moments in time, dusk and dawn? Somehow, as Professor Derchain has suggested, "the perpetual cycling of the sun" (the eternal round) must "rely upon the equation of east and west, thus linking the solar death/descent with rebirth/ascent" (Robeson, 26 n 82). Again, the flow of the iconography that marks the path from descent to ascent can take either a horizontal or a vertical model (Robeson, 43). There was nothing static about the Egyptian presentation of the solar cycle.

Some iconographic labels, in purposeful mistaking, bizarrely describe dusk at the east horizon, dawn at the west, a hint at the mysterious reversibility of the system. But this pert reversal of space and time is so typically Egyptian: "today we're saying that the sun rises in the West and sets in the East." Note the Western bafflement at encountering, and attempting to right, yet another transgression of logic: "Coming out of the Eastern (sic) Mountain, resting in the Western (sic) Mountain, every day." Note that this is "Every Day"--the continual workings of the cosmic gears. What other culture says this sort of thing? plays like games with space and time? Yet examples of such mismatch are clearly not error nor are they, after all, reflective of a pert playfulness. No. They are (we hope) "possibly intentional textual interchange of west and east, as an expression of the perpetual motion of the sun" (Roberson, 153 n 178, referencing Derchain and Piankoff). Still, we note that what moves perpetual are the cardinal points themselves, the directional markers of the earth; the in-volved sun itself "has nothing to do"--not even "roll around heaven all day."

If the earth rotates eastward on her axis, does not west mountain come round to merge with east mountain--one single point on the eternal horizon? Isn't the place of solar ingress and egress essentially, then, the same for a sun standing still? That's what the egyptologists have long been mulling over, though it remains a delicate point. The ancient record continuously teases the reader, teasing out divergent threads and imagery, that is, until he yearns for some--any--logical, Western, formula to tie the threads together into Text, into semiotic Encyclopaedia, and tell us once-for-all how the Egyptians ordered their universe. And that yearning sums up the entire egyptological enterprise--how to weave nonsense and contradiction into explanatory models. There's a bit of cosmic speculation, here, to say the least, on the part of the solar priests who composed the netherworld books for the tombs of the royal high priest of the sun, and even though we are not yet able to build a model of the Egyptian universe out of it all, the matter does deserve something better than the notation (sic!). The sometime fluidity of the cardinal points at the Akhet-horizon deserves its own chapter in the intellectual history of the human family. 

A chapter in intellectual history? Here is a culture that conceived, like many others, of fixed cardinal points as the bedrock of cosmology--and then happily, at will, shifted east and west and dawn and dusk and line and circle. Is there something worth pondering, balancing, there?

Or shall we just rest content believing that the Egyptians, like all primitives everywhere, held the Ptolemaic view? Shall we posit that they were neither philosophers nor scientists, that they didn't even know about such things as, say, the circulation of blood? (In Egypt, they did!) A placid contentment would require less thought as we page through the primitive, but even so, we're going to have to revive the already archaic signature of sic for use on nearly every translated page of obscure Egyptian writings. I await the book entitled Ancient Egyptian Cosmological Thought (sic!).

While we await tidy answers, the speculation rolls wildly on: Might the Egyptians have understood the Akhet as a rotating axis?

Certainly the round Duat, or Netherworld, which is somehow involved in the Akhet, takes shape as a temporal-spatial moment of turning. The hieroglyph that writes the logogram for Duat is a star, some say the sun, enclosed in a circle, an encircling that turns in One Eternal Round.


Again: "The inversion and righting of the sun raises questions about the Egyptian model of celestial mechanics. These states [inversion, flip-flop, righting] are merely perceptual, being symbolic of the journey through the Netherworld.


"One explanation for the inversion and [simultaneous?] righting of the sun centers round the rotation of the Akhet [itself]. If it is the Akhet that daily turns 180 degrees, and not the sun, the movement of the sun is merest illusion. Indeed the cryptographic hieroglyphs that paint the setting of the sun with the image of a man plunging headlong with outstretched arms and its rising with a man arms uplifted [Papyrus Salt 825] hint at a celestial mechanics in which the Akhet serves as the axis of revolving sky and Netherworld. The Akhet is a place of turning and the dynamis of [the complementary temporal modalities] nhh-and d.t-time, the axis of the workings of renewal in respect of which all other celestial bodies move.

"Where the Akhet lies is unknown, even unknowable; like our horizon it marks a boundary or hollow between the visible and invisible worlds. Indeed the revolution of the Akhet parallels and even motivates that of the invisible world. Osiris, who personifies, surrounds, and controls the Duat, receives the disk [or globe] at dusk and uplifts the same at dawn in perpetuum mobile. As the Akhet revolves so turns the Duat with its night sky from darkness into daylight. Gears of baffling complexity work the thing; for the movement is really a complete shift back into daylight, West to East and East to West--erasing the dark hours, and still dawning Eastward all the same.

"The Akhet and Duat together make up a temporal-spatial continuum, the Akhet as the place that holds the sun and keeps its flame; the Daut, a mostly temporal feature, a space composed of hours. Osiris [the mummified corpse in the Duat, the dead king], in his name of 'Yesterday' and acted upon by the force and wheel of time, uplifts the ponderous sun at dawn with no perceptible motion of his part. Yet it is his uplifted arms that serve as the sign of rejuvenation. Both Osiris and the sun are righted by the turning of the Akhet in the unresting hours and, as consequence, together stand upright--with arms outstretched--as symbols of towering strength and power. Here is the cosmically sized Re-Osiris standing 'with extended arm at the eastern horizon' [as one resurrected solar power].

The union and resurrection of the cosmic Re-Osiris realizes the greatest mystery of Egyptian religion.

"Egyptian theoria but subserves the theology of solar renewal for which the movements of the heavenly bodies provide the hoped-for signs. If the Akhet does turn, the axis of turning still centers in Re because he provides the motivation [the force or the focus] for that turning. The same holds true of Re's relation to the p.t [or sky] and its shape and roadways, as the iconography shows. At times the Egyptians envision the p.t as a 'bow-shaped' roof or vault (pd.t, bow), the so-called 'bent' sky. The notion of bending, when applied to the static, flat rooftop, implies a potential, even motive, force. The imagery of the bent heavens reflects (cf. Lat. reflectere, to bend backwards, like a bow) both the observable re-turn of the sun to the day sky and the nature of the road it travels. The aquatic solar roadway inclines, winds, and bends, as lead the channeled waters" [the winding phr-cycle again] (paragraphs taken from Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808, 110-111).


These few and premature thoughts only hint at the baffling complexity of the gears that work the thing--the very universe in its cosmic revolutions. Then perhaps the texts, no matter our pains, will never yield anything more than hints.

But when did the Ancient Egyptian books ever promise the reader definitions, certainty, answers? Whether they yet deliver enlargement of mind, an enlarged horizon of cosmological speculation for the curious seeker, certainly depends on our response, for deep answers to deep. We can at least read the ancients afresh--letting labels go, foregoing models.


The Book of Mormon, with which we began, is at pains to show us that the Lord's ancient covenant people understood the workings of the cosmos (Helaman 12:15)==and wanted to reader to know it: "for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun!"

As for the book of Abraham, the father of the faithful makes abundantly clear that what he terms the "set time of the earth," or "the reckoning of the time of the earth," has to do with the measurement of its axial rotation in comparison with which the moon "moveth in order more slow." In other words, both the earth and the moon spin, but because the moon spins much slower, "therefore the reckoning of its time is not so many [as the earth] as to its number of days, and of months, and of years." Do we understand what Abraham plainly though poetically sets forth? (And most readers down the decades do understand.) The numbering of day and night, month after month and year after year, comes as consequence of the earth spinning on her axis--thus "surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun!" (See Abraham 3). In Abraham's Egypt, then, to borrow a line from the standard undergraduate textbook on Egyptian religion and cosmology, the sun clearly "was not thought to revolve around the earth."

Should we thence wish to hie to Kolob, we'll need something more than the basic manual--and the deeper dive into Egyptology, the nearer our reach.