Did the Egyptian Gods have Animal Heads?

a roman depiction of the god anubis

Did Egyptian Gods have Animal Heads? Of course they did, you might be saying.  If you were anything like me, as a kid you may have loved the distinctively weird depictions in Egyptian art of their gods, jackal-headed Anubis, cat-headed Bastet, ibis-headed Thoth and all the rest, much more exciting (in my opinion) than the Greek gods, who were pretty much just naked people. On the other hand, if you’ve read a bit about Ancient Egypt (the Wikipedia page on the Egyptian Religion, for instance) you might answer that no, they didn’t believe their gods had animal heads; these crazy half-man, half-beast images were just symbolic: Anubis was shown with a jackal head because the jackal was associated with the necropolis and Anubis was a god of the dead, he didn’t really look like that.  Well, in this post I thought I’d do a bit of digging, and do my best to find out what the truth actually is.

To start off with, yes, Egyptian gods were often depicted in therianthrophic – part human, part animal form.  There are the well known gods with animal heads, the sphinxes with human heads and lion bodies, and hybrids like Hathor, who is shown with cow’s ears and horns, but is otherwise human.  Other gods are anthropomorphic – human in form – Isis, Osiris, Ptah and Atum are usually shown in this way. Then there are theriomorphic depictions , where gods are shown entirely in animal form.  These are quite common, and in fact were the most common representations of gods in the very earliest periods of Egyptian history. So, for instance, Anubis could be a black jackal, and Thoth as either an ibis or a white baboon.  (Depictions could get a bit weirder than this, some gods could have plant heads, Hathor could be depicted as a pillar with a human head, Taweret was a hybrid of hippo, crocodile and lioness, and one god was shown with two thongs used to bind the damned in place of a head, but these are a quite a bit rarer…)

Now, this has caused problems for some people.  Way back when the Romans encountered Egypt, they found it unbelievable that such an ancient and sophisticated culture could worship barking dogs and scavenging ibises.  As the satirist Juvenal asked “Who knows not…what monsters demented Egypt worships? “[1]  Modern writers have often had a similar opinion; the great nineteenth century scholar Adolf Erman is said to have ended a speech on Egyptian religion by remarking “Aber Quatsch ist es doch, meine Herren!” –“But it is nonsense, gentlemen!” [2] The solution has been to argue that the gods of Egypt weren’t really animals at all.  As Zeus puts it in Lucian’s Council of the Gods “Certainly, it is disgraceful the way these Egyptians go on. At the same time, Momus, there is an occult significance in most of these things; and it ill becomes you, who are not of the initiated, to ridicule them.” [3] The modern solution has been to say that the depictions of the gods are like hieroglyphs: Sekhmet’s lion head indicates that she is a supernatural being, that she is powerful and dangerous like a lioness, but they didn’t depict what the gods would look like if we would see them.[4] By way of comparison we could point to Christian images of Jesus as a lion or a lamb, or the Holy Spirit as a dove, or angels with wings. All these things are symbolic- Christians don’t really believe Jesus has four legs and a fluffy coat of wool (well, Christian furries might…). But this is a position with I have to respectfully disagree.

a very literal depiction from the mummy ii

To start with, how did Ancient Egyptians understand their gods? There is good evidence that they believed the gods to be fundamentally mysterious, and were every bit as aware as a modern Hindu, Jew, Muslim or Christian that the divine could never be fully known. In a twelfth century hymn from the time of Ramesses III a god is described as “divine power with hidden faces and mighty majesty, who has hidden his name and keeps his image secret, whose being was not known at the beginning of time.”[5] But like modern believers Egyptians felt they could know their gods in various, indirect ways.  A modern Christian  might know God from reading about Him in the Bible, from looking at the world around them, and from personal experience, which might range from a vague sense of God’s presence to the descriptions of full-on visions of blazing angels you can find on Christian fundamentalist forums without too much digging. In the same way, the Egyptian text known as Papyrus Leiden (dating from the thirteenth century) has this mysterious verse:

All gods are three: Amun, Re and Ptah, who have no equal.
He hides his name as Amun, he appears as Re, his body is Ptah.[6]

Jan Assmann, a German scholar and leading expert in Egyptian religion, has seen this as describing the three main ways of knowing the divine in Ancient Egypt: name, cosmic manifestation and body, or image.

The name of gods often tells you something about them; ‘Amun’ means ‘hidden’, referring to his nature as the invisible, life-giving wind.  More broadly, ‘name’ can refer to myths about the gods, equivalent to the Bible stories which tell Christians and Jews about Yahweh.

The ‘cosmic manifestation’ refers to the action of the divine in nature.  At their core, gods are always of understanding the forces at work in the world, something that it’s easy for moderns, who think of the world in terms of impersonal, scientific forces, to forget. Ra was the sun god, and was manifest in the world through the sun. Shu was the atmosphere, specifically air saturated with light. Hathor was love, and Seth was at once the force behind warfare, the wild, foreign deserts and thunderstorms.  For most Egyptians, the cosmic manifestation was not the same as the god. The god of the heretic, ‘monotheist’ king Akhenaten is best known as the Aten, but his full title was ‘Ankh-re-heqa-akheti-hai-em-akhet Em-ren-ef-em-hait’ – ‘The Living one, the sun, ruler of the horizon, who becomes active in the Lightland in his identity of the light that comes from the sun disk’ – the light of the sun is the way in which we know the god, but it is not the totality of the god.[7]

The third way of knowing gods, the ‘image’, is the one that interests us here. The most common form of the image were the ‘idols’, the cult statues that represented their gods in their traditional iconography, theriomorphic, therianthropic or anthropomorphic. The most sacred of these were kept in the holy of holies in temples, locked in their shrines and seen only by priests who had first purified themselves, and entered the shrines reverently in order to carry out the daily ritual of feeding, cleaning and dressing the gods.  When the gods left their temples for festivals, they were usually borne on carry-chairs in the form of boats, something along the lines of the Ark of the Covenant or the modern portable shrines found in Japanese Shinto.  But lesser cult statues with more-or-less the same depictions could be found more commonly, as amulets, in people’s houses, and carved or painted on temple walls.  All of these were images of the gods.  But Egyptian priests did not understand the gods as literally being the statues.  Several texts tell us that the gods were thought of as descending from on high to dwell in their images, so that their worshippers could interact with them.  An excellent example of this is found carved on the walls of the temple of Horus at Edfu:

He comes down from heaven day by day
in order to see his image upon his great throne.
He descends upon his image
and unites himself with his cult image[8]

So even if the gods were fundamentally mysterious, they could live in their statues, those half-man, half-beast depictions the Romans found so shocking.  But statues and carvings weren’t the only images the gods could inhabit; living beings could also serve as vessels for their divine essence.  The best known of these is the Pharaoh, and in the Kuban Stela to Ramesses II we read:

For you are the embodiment of Re,
Khepre in his true form.
You are the living image on earth
of your father Atum in Heliopolis.[9]

But the gods could also inhabit the forms of animals.  At Memphis, the best known of these was the Apis bull, treated as a living image of a god, pampered and groomed and consulted for oracles, his mother revered as an embodiment of Isis, and when they died they were mummified and spoken of as having become ‘an Osiris’, just as dead Pharaohs and commoners were.  In fact, the worship and mummification of animals as diverse as baboons, cats, dogs, crocodiles, fish and even beetles strongly suggests that showing gods as animals was not just symbolic; in some real way the gods had a special relationship with certain animals. Writers like Herodotus record that in many Egyptian villages animals, birds or fish considered sacred to their local god were not eaten.  Remember that the animals here are images of the gods, in which part of the god’s essence might live, rather than full gods, but the same caveat applies to Pharaohs and cult statues.

As you can see, Egyptians had a higher opinion of animals than most contemporary Romans, and than many moderns. Many Egyptian texts talk about the love the gods had for animals.  In a hymn to Amun we read:

Thou art the only one, the creator of all that is. From whose eye men came forth. From whose mouth the gods originated. Who creates the herbs which the cattle live on…Who creates that which the fish in the river life on. And the birds in the air. Who gives breath to the chicken in the egg. Who maintains the young of the snake. Who creates the nourishment of the gnat. And also of the worms and the fleas. Who cares for the mice in their hole and keeps alive the insects in every tree.[10]

Looking after animals was an ethical duty for Egyptians, along the same lines as looking after the poor and needy:

I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked. I have given food to the ibis, the falcon, the cat and the jackal.[11]

The image of baboons holding their arms up to warm them in the rays of the morning sun was the interpreted by Egyptians as a gesture of worshipping the sun god, and many texts describe animals as worshipping the gods alongside humans. In the Stela of Huy the writer promises to preach about the gods to animals: “I proclaim your power to the fish in the river, to the birds in the sky.” [12]

baboons and ramesses iii worship the sun god at the temple of medinet habu

It’s worth remembering, though, that Ancient Egyptians were not animal loving hippies. If some peasants had a largely vegetarian diet, it was because they had little access to meat, not for ethical reasons. Throughout Egyptian history animals were used for their labour, eaten, hunted and sacrificed to the gods, and some sacred animals were deliberately killed to make mummies that would serve as messengers to the gods. But human beings too could be killed in warfare as enemies of the Pharaoh. It seems that to the Egyptians, the boundary between human and animal life was not rigid, and the gods were neither human nor animal, but had a relationship to both.

But we still haven’t really answered the question; fine, a god might live in a statue, or a person or an animal, but what did they really look like: if an Egyptian god appeared in the room to you right now, what would it look like? Well, you might point out that they aren’t real, so they wouldn’t look like anything, but that’s not really the point.  No doubt at this very instant, people are having very real (to them) visions of aliens, Jesus, Hindu gods, angels and a host of other supernatural beings that cannot all exist.  Google ‘visions of Mary’ and you will find perhaps hundreds of cases where the Mother of God has appeared to individuals or crowds, and I personally know people who tell me they’ve seen Jesus, or heard the voice of the Buddhist demon Mara.

And this has been going on for a long time. The historian Herodian reports that at the siege of Aquileia in Northern Italy in 238 the god Apollo appeared frequently above the city to defend it.[13] Zosimos tells us that in the fifth century, when Alaric the Goth began his siege of Athens, the goddess Athena appeared to patrol the walls, looking just like her statue and ready for war; he was so terrified he sent heralds to arrange a peace treaty. [14]  Pagans in the Roman world often saw their gods in dreams, generally appearing as they did in their statues and images, but one young Graeco-Roman Egyptian writes that he saw “not in a dream, or in sleep… a very large figure with a book in his hand, dressed in white.”[15] This was the typical description of a non-specific god: a large, beautiful figure dressed in white.

I’ll point out briefly that I don’t believe these appearances of gods were real: they were probably the result of rumours grown out of proportion, or the experiences of people in exotic mental states like hypnagogia, in which they experience dreamlike visions but are awake and otherwise lucid. Reality aside, the point is that people believed that the gods could be and were seen by human beings.

a dead egyptian before osiris, isis and nephthys

Now, for Egypt, the evidence isn’t so clear, and we have far fewer descriptions of men and women meeting gods.  In many religious texts from the New Kingdom onwards, we have gods appearing on earth, or in the dreams of kings: they are accompanied by a sweet fragrance, the earth or stars might tremble as they come, or a bright light or darkness might steal over the scene.  But there are fewer descriptions of what the gods actually look like in these instances.  Sometimes there is an oblique reference to “secret forms”, as when the magician Setna visits the underworld and sees the “secret form of Osiris” in a text from the early first century AD. [16] Interestingly, “secret image” in at least some instances refers to the cult statue, which is secret because it is hidden in the holy of holies, where normal people cannot see it.

There are two texts where a god is more-or-less described: in the stela in which Tuthmosis IV (ruled c. 1401 – 1391 BC) describes his restoration of the Sphinx, he tells how he fell asleep under it, and heard “this noble god speaking with his own mouth” [17]- he saw the sphinx itself speaking to him!

A more dramatic encounter is found in the tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor from around the twentieth century BC.  A sailor has his ship destroyed in a storm, and clinging to a mast is carried to an island bursting with an abundance of fruit and vegetables.  Then, as he makes a sacrifice, he hears the sound of thunder, the earth quakes and he is confronted by a god in the form of a human-headed serpent, its skin gold, its eyebrows lapis lazuli and its body thirty cubits long (44.4 feet or 13.5 metres). [18]

From all this, it seems pretty clear to me that if the Egyptians saw their gods in dreams or visions, they expected them to be as they were in their images: human, animal or combination of both.  They weren’t literally human or animal, although they had something in common with both; they were something other, and their true nature was hidden and mysterious.  But to dismiss their (perhaps weird) depictions as merely symbolic is to miss an important part of Egyptian belief.

A Couple of Notes

I should point out that even though many Ancient Egyptian texts survive, most of the religious ones are either hymns or collections of funerary spells along the lines of the Book of the Dead.  While these make constant references to theology, they very rarely actually explain anything.  The upshot of this is that there are numerous disagreements on what the Egyptians actually believed, even, for example, if they were really polytheistic or basically monotheistic.  So it’s best to bear this in mind, and remember that everything I (or anyone else) says about Egyptian religion is an opinion, which may or may not be supported by the evidence.  And like every civilisation, remember that there were probably dozens of different opinions about religion, and a great deal of change over its three-thousand year history.

Maybe later I’ll write a post about the Ancient Egyptian language, but in the meantime I should also say that Egyptian Hieroglyphs (like Hebrew) only recorded consonants. So, for instance, the  name we write “Akhenaten” was actually written 3x-n-jtn (where the ‘3’ represents ‘aleph’, a glottal stop, and the ‘x’ represents a sound like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’).  From various bits of evidence (Coptic- the modern form of Egyptian – as well as renderings of names and phrases into Akkadian and Greek, which did record vowels) we can reconstruct how the words were probably pronounced: 3x-n-jtn was probably vocalised as *Akhanyati.  But reconstructing dead languages is a messy and controversial business, and different people come up with different results.  So as a compromise, I (and most scholars) use the ‘Egyptological pronunciation’, a convenient compromise where you take the bare consonants, replacing ‘3’ with ‘a’ and adding ‘e’s where necessary EXCEPT where a different form of the name is much better known – Aten instead of Iten, Anubis instead of Inpu, Isis instead of Uset and so on. Whew.

Footnotes

[1] Juvenal, Satires, Satire 15, G G Ramsay (translator), 1918, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_15.htm

[2] H te Velde, ‘A Few Remarks upon the Religious Significance of Animals in Ancient Egypt’ in Numen, Vol. 27, Fasc. 1, Jun., BRILL, 1980, pp. 76-82

[3] Lucian, The Gods in Council, http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl4/wl430.htm

[4] James P Allen,  Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.44

[5] Hymn of Ramesses III, Text 68 in B G  Ockinga, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Anthology of Primary Sources (produced for the Macquarie University Egyptian Religion course, Sydney, 2009), p. 43 (available by email on request)

[6] Papyrus Leiden I, 350 (IV, 21–22), Text 66 in B G  Ockinga, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Anthology of Primary Sources, p. 43

[7]  Allen,  Middle Egyptian, p.197

[8] The Temple of Horus at Edfu, Text 46A in B G  Ockinga, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Anthology of Primary Sources, p. 37

[9] Kuban Stela: Eulogy to Ramesses II, Text 23 in B G  Ockinga, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Anthology of Primary Sources, p. 23

[10] te Velde, A Few Remarks upon the Religious Significance of Animals in Ancient Egypt, pp.77-78

[11] Ibid, pp. 77-78

[12] Stele of Huy (Turin 50044), Text 19 in B G  Ockinga, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Anthology of Primary Sources, p. 19

[13] Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1989, p.121

[14] Zosimos, New History 5.6, Ronald T Ridley (translator), Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, Sydney 2006

[15] Fox, Pagans and Christians, p.142

[16] William Kelly Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, Yale University Press, Newhaven & London, 2003, p. 474

[17] Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, John Baines (translator), Cornell University Press, New York, 1982, p 130

[18] Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, p. 49

Starchildren ready for Rapture

Remember  back in this post when I compared Starseeds – aliens trapped in human bodies longing to return to the stars – with Christians – in the world but not of it and longing for the Kingdom of God? Well, over at the charmingly wacky site Rapture Ready one poster has written a short article using exactly this as the premise. Here’s a brief quote:

I am an Extra-Terrestrial. I am here, but I am not of this planet. There is no place on this earth that is my home; there are only fortifications that provide shelter from the raging storm.

I am here only by God’s will, His design, and His Grace. I did not choose this assignment — as I had no say in the matter — but I will carry out this assignment to the best of my ability and leave that to the leading of the Holy Spirit that indwells me. I take my orders from the command of the Most High, as I am a warrior and a peacemaker, a sinner and a saint.

Although I am an extra-terrestrial, I am in human form. I am of flesh, blood, and bone. While I am a warrior, an am not invincible and I can and do break. While I am a peacemaker, I stage a daily crusade of righteousness that has love as its foundation and yet thirsts for justice. Yes, I am a sinner — and I am the worst — but because I have accepted the gift of eternal life that Jesus so freely offered me I am a saint; despite my grievous flaws and chronic stumbling.

My, oh my, this human form is so limiting. I cannot fly just yet. I can’t go from here to there in a nano-second. I cannot do complex mathematical equations without the use of calculator! And yet, it’s these human senses that allow me to enjoy the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and aromas that are the benefits that this earth has to offer.

Ah, but these human emotions are the worst. These human emotions cause pain. And yet, I wouldn’t trade these emotions for the finest house anywhere on this earth. It is these emotions that make the entire human experience so enriching for an extra-terrestrial! They make me just like you…because I am like you!

Also worth checking out on the site is the Rapture Index, an attempt to predict the likelihood of Armageddon based on such indicators as False Messiahs, the Israel-Palestine peace process, American unemployment and Liberalism.

Twilight of the Gods

I will openly admit that I’m quite a weird person.  Part of my weirdness probably comes from the bizarre books I read as a kid.  My adoptive grandmother was a linguist, with a huge and fantastical library of unusual books, and I would leave her house with a pile of them after every visit.  One of my favourites was Richard Garnett’s Twilight of the Gods. Written in the late 19th century, it’ a beautiful and humanistic satire on religion, with targets ranging from ancient paganism to medieval Christianity.  Written in wonderfully florid prose filled with hilarious circumlocutions, it is packed with references to obscure historical and  religious minutiae.  Only a Victorian academic could write a book like this and pull it off.

I was very happy to find that Twilight of the Gods had been put onto Project Gutenberg, you can find a copy of it here if you’re interested, but I’ve copied and pasted one of the shorter stories here so you can get an idea of the general style.  It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you can make it to the end, it’s one of those rare books that will not only make you laugh out loud, but will also make you smarter.

Abdallah the Adite by Richard Garnett

An aged hermit named Sergius dwelt in the wilds of Arabia, addicting himself to the pursuit of religion and alchemy. Of his creed it could only be said that it was so much better than that of his neighbours as to cause him to be commonly esteemed a Yezidi, or devil worshipper. But the better informed deemed him a Nestorian monk, who had retired into the wilderness on account of differences with his brethren, who sought to poison him.

The imputation of Yezidism against Sergius was the cause that a certain inquisitive young man resorted to him, trusting to obtain light concerning the nature of demons. But he found that Sergius could give him no information on that subject, but, on the contrary, discoursed so wisely and beautifully on holy things, that his pupil’s intellect was enlightened, and his enthusiasm was inflamed, and he longed to go forth and instruct the ignorant people around him; the Saracens, and the Sabaeans, and the Zoroastrians, and the Carmathians, and the Baphometites, and the Paulicians, who are a remnant of the ancient Manichees.

“Nay, good youth,” said Sergius, “I have renounced the sending forth of missionaries, having made ample trial with my spiritual son, the Prophet Abdallah.”

“What!” exclaimed the youth, “was Abdallah the Adite thy disciple?”

“Even so,” said Sergius. “Hearken to his history.

“Never have I instructed so promising a pupil as Abdallah, nor when he was first my disciple do I deem that he was other than the most simple-minded and well-intentioned of youths. I always called him son, a title I have never bestowed on another. Like thee, he had compassion on the darkness around him, and craved my leave to go forth and dispel it.

“‘My son,’ said I, ‘I will not restrain thee: thou art no longer a child. Thou hast heard me discourse on the subject of persecution, and knowest that poison was administered to me personally on account of my inability to perceive the supernatural light emanating from the navel of Brother Gregory. Thou art aware that thou wilt be beaten with rods and pricked with goads, chained and starved in a dungeon, very probably blinded, very possibly burned with fire?’

“‘All these things I am prepared to undergo,’ said Abdallah; and he embraced me and bid me farewell.

“After certain moons he returned covered with weals and scars, and his bones protruded through his skin.

“‘Whence are these weals and scars?’ asked I, ‘and what signifies this protrusion of thy bones?’

“‘The weals and the scars,’ answered he, ‘proceed from the floggings inflicted upon me by command of the Caliph; and my bones protrude by reason of the omission of his officers to furnish me with either food or drink in the dungeon wherein I was imprisoned by his orders.’

“‘O my son,’ exclaimed I, ‘in the eyes of faith and right reason these scars are lovelier than the moles of beauty, and the sight of thy bones is like the beholding of hidden treasure!’

“And Abdallah strove to look as though he believed me; nor did he entirely fail therein. And I took him, and fed him, and healed him, and sent him forth a second time into the world.

“And after a space he returned, covered as before with wounds and bruises, but comely and somewhat fat.

“‘Whence this sleekness of body, my son?’ I asked.

“‘Through the charity of the Caliph’s wives,’ he answered, ‘who have fed me secretly, I having assured them that in remembrance of this good work each of them in the world to come would have seven husbands.’

“‘How knewest thou this, my son?’ I inquired.

“‘In truth, father,’ he said, ‘I did not know it; but I thought it probable.’

“‘O my son! my son!’ exclaimed I, ‘thou art on a dangerous road. To win over weak ignorant people by promises of what they shall receive in a future life, whereof thou knowest no more than they do! Knowest thou not that the inestimable blessings of religion are of an inward and spiritual nature? Did I ever promise any disciple any recompense for his enlightenment and good deeds, save flogging, starvation, and burning?’

“‘Never, father,” said he, ‘and therefore thou hast had no follower of thy law save one, and he hath broken it.’

“He left me after a shorter stay than before, and again went forth to preach. After a long time he returned in good condition of body, yet manifestly having something upon his mind.

“‘Father,’ he said, ‘thy son hath preached with faithfulness and acceptance, and turned thousands unto righteousness. But a sorcerer hath arisen, saying, “Why follow ye Abdallah, seeing that he breathes not fire out of his mouth and nostrils?” And the people give ear unto the words that come from this man’s lips, when they behold the flame that cometh from his nose. And unless thou teachest me to do as he doth I shall assuredly perish.’

“And I told Abdallah that it was better to perish for the truth’s sake than to prolong life by lies and deceit. But he wept and lamented exceeding sore, and in the end he prevailed with me; and I taught him to breathe flame and smoke out of a hollow nut filled with combustible powder. And I took a certain substance called soap, but little known in this country, and anointed his feet therewith. And when he and the sorcerer met, both breathing flame, the people knew not which to follow; but when Abdallah walked over nine hot ploughshares, and the sorcerer could not touch one of them, they beat his brains out, and became Abdallah’s disciples.

“A long time afterward Abdallah came to me again, this time with a joyful, and yet with somewhat of a troubled look, carrying a camel-hair blanket, which he undid, and lo! it was full of bones.

“‘O father,’ he said, ‘I bring thee happy tidings. We have found the bones of the camel of the prophet Ad, upon which his revelation was engraved by him.’

“‘If this be so,’ said I, ‘thou art acquainted with the precepts of the prophet, and hast no need of mine.’

“‘Nay, but father,’ said he, ‘although the revelation was without question originally engraved by the prophet on these very bones, it hath come to pass by the injury of time that not one letter of his writing can be distinguished. I have therefore come to ask thee to write it over again.’

“‘What!’ I exclaimed, ‘I forge a revelation in the name of the prophet Ad! Get thee behind me!’

“‘Thou knowest, father,’ he rejoined, ‘that if we had the original words of the prophet Ad here they would profit us nought, as by reason of their antiquity none would understand them. Seeing therefore that I myself cannot write, it is meet that thou shouldst set down in his name those things which he would have desired to deliver had he been now among us; but if thou wilt not, I shall ask Brother Gregory.’

“And when I heard him speak of having recourse to that cheat and impostor my spirit was grieved within me, and I wrote the Book of Ad myself. And I was heedful to put in none but wholesome and profitable precepts, and more especially did I forbid polygamy, having perceived a certain inclination thereunto in my disciple.

“After many days he came again, and this time he was in violent terror and agitation, and hair was wanting to the lower part of his countenance.

“‘O Abdallah,’ I inquired, ‘where is thy beard?’

“‘In the hands of my ninth wife,’ said he.

“‘Apostate!’ I exclaimed, ‘hast thou dared to espouse more wives than one? Rememberest thou not what is written in the Book of the prophet Ad?’

“‘O father,’ he said, ‘the revelation of Ad being, as thou knowest, so exceedingly ancient, doth of necessity require a commentary. This hath been supplied by one of my disciples, a young Syrian and natural son of Gregory, as I opine. This young man can not only write, but write to my dictation, an accomplishment in which thou hast been found lacking, O Sergius. In this gloss it is set forth how, since woman hath the ninth part of the soul of man, the prophet, in enjoining us Adites (as we now call ourselves) to take but one wife, doth instruct us to take nine; to espouse a tenth would, I grant, be damnable. It ensues, therefore, that having become enamoured of a most charming young virgin, I am constrained to repudiate one of the wives whom I have taken already. To this, each thinking that it may be her turn speedily, if not now, they will in no wise consent, and have maltreated me as thou seest, and the dens of wild beasts are at this moment abodes of peace, compared to my seraglio. What is even worse, they threaten to disclose to the people the fact, of which they have unhappily become aware, that the revelation of the blessed Ad is not written upon the bones of a camel at all, but of a cow, and will therefore be accounted spurious, inasmuch as the prophet is not recorded to have ridden upon this quadruped. And seeing that thou didst inscribe the characters, O father, I cannot but fear that the fury of the people will extend unto thee, and that thou wilt be even in danger of thy life from them.’

“This argument of Abdallah’s had much weight with me, and I the more readily consented to his request as he did not on this occasion require any imposture at my hands, but merely the restitution of his domestic peace. And I went with him to his wives, and discoursed with them, and they agreed to abide by my sentence. And, willing to please him, I directed that he should marry the beautiful virgin, and put away one of his wives who was old and ugly, and endowed with the dispositions of Sheitan.

“‘O father,’ said Abdallah, ‘thou hast brought me from death unto life! And thou, Zarah,’ he continued, ‘wilt lose nought, but gain exceedingly, in becoming the spouse of the wise and virtuous Sergius.’

“‘I marry Zarah!’ I exclaimed, ‘I! a monk!’

“‘Surely,’ said he, ‘thou would’st not take away her husband without giving her another in his stead?’

“‘If he does I will throttle him,’ cried Zarah.

“And I wept sore, and made great intercession. And it was agreed that there should be a delay of forty days, in which space if any one else would marry Zarah, I should be free of her. And I promised all my substance to any one who would do this, and no one was found. And she was offered to thirteen criminals doomed to suffer death, and they all chose death. And at the last I was constrained to marry her. And truly I have now the comfort of thinking that if I have offended by encouraging Abdallah’s deceits, or otherwise, the debt is paid, and Eternal Justice hath now nothing against me; for verily I was an inmate of Gehenna until it came to pass that she was herself translated thither. And respecting the manner of her translation, inquire not thou too curiously. It was doubtless a token of the displeasure of Heaven at her enormities that the water of the well of Kefayat, which had been known as the Diamond of the Desert, became about this time undrinkable, and pernicious to man and beast.

“As I sat in my dwelling administering to the estate of my deceased wife, which consisted principally of wines and strong liquors, Abdallah again appeared before me.

“‘Hast thou come,’ said I, ‘to solicit me to abet thee in any new imposture? Know, once for all, that I will not.’

“‘On the contrary,’ said he, ‘I am come to set thee at ease by proving to thee that I shall not again require thy assistance. Follow me.’

“And I followed him to a great plain, where was a host of armed horsemen and footmen, more than I could number. And they bore banners on which the name of Abdallah was embroidered in letters of gold. And in the midst was an ark of gold, with the bones of Ad’s camel, or cow. And by this was a great pile of the heads of men, and warriors were continually casting more and more upon the heap.

“‘How many?’ asked Abdallah.

“‘Twelve thousand, O Apostle of God,’ answered they, ‘but there are more to come.’

“‘Thou monster!’ said I to Abdallah.

“‘Nay, father,’ said he, ‘there will not be more than sixteen thousand in all, and these men were unbelievers. Moreover we have spared such of their women as were young and handsome, and have taken them for our concubines, as is ordained in the eleventh supplement to the Book of Ad, just promulgated by my authority. But come, I have other things to manifest unto thee.’

“And he led me where a stake was driven into the earth, and a man was chained unto it, and fuel was heaped all around him, and many stood by with lighted torches in their hands.

“‘O Abdallah,’ I exclaimed, ‘wherefore this atrocity?’

“‘This man,’ he replied, ‘is a blasphemer, who hath said that the Book of Ad is written on the bones of a cow.’

“‘But it is written on the bones of a cow! ‘I cried.

“‘Even so,’ said he, ‘and therefore is his heresy the more damnable, and his punishment the more exemplary. Had it been indeed written on the bones of a camel, he might have affirmed what pleased him.’

“And I shook off the dust from my feet, and hastened to my dwelling. The rest of Abdallah’s acts thou knowest, and how he fell warring with the Carmathians. And now I ask thee, art thou yet minded to go forth as a missionary of the truth?”

“O Sergius,” said the young man, “I perceive that the temptations are greater, and the difficulties far surpassing what I had thought. Yet will I go, and I trust by Heaven’s grace not to fail utterly.”

“Then go,” said Sergius, “and Heaven’s blessing go with thee! Come back in ten years, should I be living, and if thou canst declare that thou hast forged no scriptures, and worked no miracles, and persecuted no unbelievers, and flattered no potentate, and bribed no one with the promise of aught in heaven or earth, I will give thee the philosopher’s stone.”

hot off the press: anonymous picket sydney scientology office

Not one hour ago I was waiting on Castlereagh Street in the Sydney CBD for my bus home, standing, as usual, opposite the Church of Scientology building, still busy burning carbon late into the night, with its occasionally glimpsed staff waiting for people to personality test,  auditing each other, and doing whatever else Scientologists do.  A bunch of fairly normal looking guys dressed in jeans, with backpacks and V masks walked up, one had a cigarette, then they walked over and stood outside the door.  And I realised I was witnessing an Anonymous protest against Scientology.

Not much happened.  All of us at the bus stop were pretty bored, as about a dozen identical, and useless buses had passed in the last half hour, getting our hopes up only to dash them; so watching the eight or so guys dressed in their masks hanging around was pretty exciting.  I overheard one mother having a discussion with her precocious sounding son about the cult/religion.  She compared the Thetan levels to an expensive, never-ending computer game.

The protesters had a camera, and one was carrying a bag of signs, but they didn’t really use either; possibly because the air was too cold for sign waving.  Inside, we could see the staff hurry about, on phones, chatting to each other importantly.  Whenever one went in or came out, the protesters would cheer enthusiastically and greet him enthusiastically by (a presumably made-up) name.  A group of drunk guys in suits staggered past, and were pretty surprised to see a gaggle of ninjas in their path.

Nobody called the cops, and my bus showed no sign of coming, so I went across the road to say hi.  I learned that this was the fifth protest in 5 months, and had been going on since midday.  The Scientologists sometimes try to give them flyers, and they bring their own to hand out sometimes as well.  Apparently the cops never get called, since they don’t do anything but stand there (and occasionally bounce up to look in through the windows); although they’re not allowed in, despite the scrolling LED sign inviting people to come inside for a free video.  I would have liked to ask, for curiosity’s sake, what it was that made these guys feel so strongly about Scientology, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.

So that was my excitement for today.

lion, witch & prince caspian

The Lion, the Witch on the Wardrobe has just finished on Channel 9, to be replaced by a programme about Alaskan crab fishing (the most dangerous job in the world, apparently,), and I saw the premier of Prince Caspian last weekend, so I was inspired to write an impromptu post.  They’re both pretty good films in my opinion; the first one didn’t quite live up to recent epic fantasy but on a second view I was able to chill out and enjoy it a bit more.

I grew up watching the old BBC dramatisations and reading the books (although I never liked The Horse and His Boy , or got round to the apocalyptic Last Battle), so it was always going to be hard for me to accept a new version.  Aslan doesn’t seem majestic enough, and while the BBC Aslan of my memory spoke in a regal growl the new Disney/Walden one sounds suspiciously like Liam Neeson.

Tilda Swinton makes a great White Witch though, one minute androgynously sexual and the next eerily maternal towards the boys in the movie.  I was trying to figure out why the designers had chosen to give her dreadlocks and braids though; to give a whiff of ethnic, pagan wickedness in contrast to the very English heroes? Still, she’s a fun villain, and when she tries to persuade Prince Caspian to resurrect her to fight his uncle in the second film I (and probably most of the audience) was hoping he’d do it.

But of course, Prince Caspian was written before moral ambiguity was acceptable in kid’s storytelling, and we have to wait until the too cutesy Lucy decides to put her faith in Aslan and asks the lion for help… like the dad in Arrested Development he’s busy teaching the kids a lesson, something along the lines of “That’s what happens when you try to do things yourself!” It would probably have been more narratively satisfying if they had called on the Witch for help, and more true to life; war in the real world is at best a moral grey area, and Hiroshima and Dresden are more White Witch than Aslan.  Lewis, a great writer, seems to have a number of blind spots, and the casual (bloodless) killing throughout the Narnia films is one of them.  (Another one is making all his Scottish characters cantankerous old bastards.)

So if Aslan is Jesus, then the White Witch is the devil; My gender studies class must be getting to me, because it seems like quite a lot of depictions of Satan are female these days- The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of the Christ, Bedazzled. Maybe the temptation to conflate the two villains of Christianity- Eve and Satan, is increasingly irresistible.

Another thing that occurred to me was Santa; isn’t he a human? And if so, shouldn’t he be a king of Narnia too? Then I realised that he was Father Christmas, so probably more like a pagan god… which in Lewis’ stories tend to be good guys, like his satyrs and centaurs, as long as they don’t get worshipped like the capital-G God.  I’ve been reading a bit of Lewis recently, so I could see a few themes from other works: his idea of the Tao, a universal law of nature, from the Abolition of Man, is echoed in the Deep Magic of Narnia; and his concern with believing despite lack of evidence, or at least lack of unambiguous evidence, is the central theme of Til We Have Faces. As a prolific pop-apologist, Lewis was very much concerned with why people believe, or don’t believe; I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of it.

Where am I going with these ramblings? Nowhere really… Prince Caspian is a good film for the kid’s fantasy it is.  The moral message is a bit confused, but less heavy handed than in the first story;  The effects and action are great, the characterisation satisfying.  The producers do a good job of juggling their audience’s expectations; Christians get subtle admonitions to “believe”, skeptics get a cynical dwarf not all that impressed with the patronising kids and lion.  I miss the old giant Reepacheep, along with Doctor Who and Monkey one of the heroes of my childhood,  but I can forgive it for the cool griffins.  I award this film 7.5 talking animals out of 10.

Resurrection of the Space Gods

Mummies, equally incomprehensible and not yet convincingly explained, stare at us from the remote past as if they held some magic secret. Various peoples knew the technique of embalming corpses, and archaeological finds favour the supposition that prehistoric beings believed in return to a second life, i.e. a corporeal return… Drawings and sagas actually indicated that the ‘gods’ promised to return from the stars in order to awaken the well-preserved bodies to new life.
Erich Von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods