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EGYPTIAN Astrology

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Bianca
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« Reply #45 on: September 21, 2007, 03:06:15 pm »








                               Sopdet, Goddess of Sirius, new Year and the Inundation





by Caroline Seawright
 
Sopdet (Sepdet, Sothis) personified the 'dog star' Sirius. This star was the most important of the stars to the ancient Egyptians, and the heliacal rising of this star came at the time of inundation and the start of the Egyptian New Year. As a goddess of the inundation, she was a goddess of fertility. She also was linked to the pharaoh and his journey in the afterlife.

She was represented as a woman with a star on top of her headdress, or as a seated cow with a plant between her horns (just as Seshat's hieroglyph might have been a flower or a star) as depicted on an ivory tablet of King Djer. The plant may have been symbolic of the year, and thus linking her to the yearly rising of Sirius and the New Year. She was very occasionally depicted as a large dog, or in Roman times, as the goddess Isis-Sopdet, she was shown riding side-saddle on a large dog.

Sirius was both the most important star of ancient Egyptian astronomy, and one of the Decans (star groups into which the night sky was divided, with each group appearing for ten days annually). The heliacal rising (the first night that Sirius is seen, just before dawn) was noticed every year during July, and the Egyptians used this to mark the start of the New Year (wp rnpt, 'The Opening of the Year'). It was celebrated with a festival known as 'The Coming of Sopdet'. 

The time period between Sothic risings is called the Sothic Cycle and it is one of the tools Egyptologists use to create a chronology of Egyptian history.






-- Sopdet, April McDevitt

Even as early as the 1st Dynasty, she was known as 'the bringer of the new year and the Nile flood'. When Sirius appeared in the sky each year, the Nile generally started to flood and bring fertility to the land. The ancient Egyptians connected the two events, and so Sopdet took on the aspects of a goddess of not only the star and of the inundation, but of the fertility that came to the land of Egypt with the flood. The flood and the rising of Sirius also marked the ancient Egyptian New Year, and so she also was thought of as a goddess of the New Year.

Her aspect of being a fertility goddess was not just linked to the Nile. By the Middle Kingdom, she was believed to be a mother goddess, and a nurse goddess, changing her from a goddess of agriculture to a goddess of motherhood. This probably was due to her strong connection with the mother-goddess Isis.

Not just a goddess of the waters of the inundation, Sopdet had another link with water - she was believed to cleanse the pharaoh in the afterlife. It is interesting to note that the embalming of the dead took seventy days - the same amount of time that Sirius was not seen in the sky, before it's yearly rising. She was a goddess of fertility to both the living and the dead.
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Bianca
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« Reply #46 on: September 21, 2007, 03:08:47 pm »







In the Pyramid Texts, she is the goddess who prepares yearly sustenance for the pharaoh, 'in this her name of "Year"'. She is also thought to be a guide in the afterlife for the pharaoh, letting him fly into the sky to join the gods, showing him 'goodly roads' in the Field of Reeds and helping him become one of the imperishable stars. She was thought to be living on the horizon, encircled by the Duat.

 In the Pyramid Texts, paralleling the story of Osiris and Isis, the pharaoh was believed to have had a child with Sopdet:

Your sister Isis comes to you rejoicing for love of you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issues into her, she being ready as Sopdet, and Horus-Soped has come forth from you as Horus who is in Sopdet.

-- Sopdet in the Pyramid Texts

Sopdet was believed to be wife of Sah (the star Orion) and the mother of Soped (Sopdu). She was also thought to give birth to the Morning Star (Venus), the pharaoh being described as the father in the Pyramid Texts. She was linked closely with Isis, just as Sah and Soped were linked with Osiris and Horus. In 'The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys for Osiris', Isis calls herself Sopdet, saying that she will follow Osiris in the heaven. Sopdet was also connected to the goddess Satet at Abu (Elephantine).
Sirius happens to travel the sky just ahead of the large constellation of Orion. (His belt of three stars serves as an easy pointer towards Sirius, the unmistakable bright star that is one of the few visible even in city lights' glare). Orion was identified with the dying-and-resurrected god Osiris, in Egyptian mythology, who was one of the most well-known gods of the pantheon. His wife and sister Isis was Lady of Magic, who  brought her husband back to life, and the bright star his constellation followed naturally came to be associated with her.

-- Inventing the Solar System: Early Greek Scientists Struggle to Explain How the Heavens Move, Ellen N. Brundige

She was also given a masculine aspect, and linked with Horus as Sopdet-Horus during the Middle Kingdom. She was also linked with Anubis during Greek Times as Sopdet-Anubis, probably because of the iconography of her as a god, or riding on the back of a dog. She was also linked with other goddesses such as Hathor, Bast and Anqet.

She was worshiped through Egyptian history, from predynastic times, through to the Graeco-Roman period. She was venerated in Per-Soped (Saft al Hinna), in the 20th Nome of Lower Egypt.


http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/sopdet.htm
« Last Edit: September 21, 2007, 03:09:43 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #47 on: September 23, 2007, 09:19:11 pm »







Ancient Egypt and Precession
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Definition: [Astrological Ages] Did the Ancient Egyptians understand the Movement of the Ages? Nowadays they are claimed to have possessed this knowledge in a number of popular books which have appeared, subsequent to the popularisation of Jung's Astrological Age concept [see Publishing and Precession]. In contrast amongst academic archeological circles the answer is:

Answer: Almost certainly not.

Facts which Indicate the Ancient Egyptians Would Not Have Had a Movement of the Ages Concept: I'll define Ancient here to mean anytime in Egyptian history up to the fall of the Egyptian New Kingdom in 1070 BC.



* There is essentially no evidence that the Egyptians practised astrology prior to what we now call the Late Period [712 -332 BC] of their history, and there is hardly any evidence even in the Late Period. [In contrast we have huge amounts of information relating to their astral religious practices from before this time.]

* It is not until the Greco-Roman Period [332 BC - 641 AD] that we have any significant surviving documentation of astrological practices in Egypt. [The famous Dendera Zodiac only dates to 50 BC.]

* These are all based on the Greco-Babylonian constellations, which the Egyptians did not invent and did not use until after the Greek conquest [332 BC].

* They are also based on the Babylonian twelve sign zodiac concept, which was not invented by the Babylonians until the 539 - 331 BC period. The Egyptians did not invent the concept and did not use it until after the Greek conquest.

* It is doubtful that the Ancient Egyptians had a concept of a constellation as we do now - there is no reference to any such concept in Ancient Egyptian writings. They associated Gods with the sky but to individual stars not constellations. [Attempts to assign constellations to these God figures are all the work of recent authors - with no basis in the Egyptian texts.]

* The Ancient Egyptians used decans [a Greek word for the Egyptian concept] for calendar purposes instead of constellations. Each decan was ten days of their calendar and hence 10° in size. [Their complete calendar was 36 weeks of ten days with five intercalary days at new year.]

* The Ancient Egyptians produced 'decan charts' [see right] as far back as the early New Kingdom, which still survive, the first being the 'map' on the Tomb of Senmut [c 1500 BC]. There are no constellations on these 'maps', only decans. Each decan has its own god.

* No information has been found to suggest that the Ancient Egyptians were at all interested in the Equinoxes - indeed they did not have any religious festivals associated with them. The seasons were much less important in Egypt than the annual Nile food.

* We have no evidence of any sort of long-timescale keeping of astrological records [i.e.. planetary movements, heliacal star risings] in Egypt until the Greco-Roman period. It would be very difficult to discover the concept of the Movement of the Ages without these.

* The Egyptians, until they received it from the Greeks, did not have the concept of a Celestial Sphere. It's very difficult to come up with the concept of Movement of the Ages without such a frame of reference.

* From the above it probably not surprising to learn that there is no evidence anywhere in any Egyptian writings of any period that they possessed the concept of an Astrological Age [i.e. one associated via the Vernal Equinox Point with a particular Zodiac Constellation.]

 
 

The Northern [Bottom] and Southern [Top] Panel 'Decan Chart' from the Tomb of Senmut [c 1500 BC]. [In reality this panel is about 4 m long.]

This is the earliest Egyptian 'decan chart,' that appears on a tomb, rather than inside a coffin. It is also the first 'decan chart' that has associated planets. The two left hand figures in the boats in the south panel have been identified by Egyptologists as representing what we would now call the planets Saturn and Jupiter.

The figure in the boat next to the them is the star we now call Sirius, but for the Ancient Egyptians was related to Isis. As always in the decan system, she is occupying the 36th and last decan. [The decans read right to left.] The decans follow the fairly standard order seen in decans dating back to their first known instance in the Egyptian record around 2100 BC in the Middle Kingdom.

However, it should be noted that Saturn and Jupiter are not located in decans, i.e. the decans are not being used by the Egyptians to record the position of Saturn and Jupiter in particular places in the heavens, as the Zodiac Signs in a modern astrology chart would be used to do for planets. This is a later Babylonian idea that was still a thousand years in the future.

The decan system was actually used as a clock for time keeping in the night hours and through the year - modern Egyptologists call them Egyptian sidereal clocks.

The Star of Osiris. As an example of how our modern mind set imposes concepts on the Ancients take the example of Osiris. You can find written frequently that he's associated with the constellation Orion. In fact, the ancient Egyptians believed that the stars of the sky represented the bas of individual souls, i.e. one star meant one soul. Deities were associated with the heavens, but only with single stars, such as, as mentioned above, Isis with the star we now call Sirius.

In the Senmuts tomb, for example, Osiris is associated with the star known as hr rmn s3hu, a star under the arm of what we would now call Orion. Other stars in what we call Orion are associated with the god Horus or with Horus' children.


http://www.geocities.com/astrologyages/egyptianprecession.htm
« Last Edit: September 23, 2007, 09:24:17 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #48 on: September 23, 2007, 09:20:39 pm »







The Northern [Bottom] and Southern [Top] Panel 'Decan Chart' from the Tomb of Senmut [c 1500 BC]. [In reality this panel is about 4 m long.]

This is the earliest Egyptian 'decan chart,' that appears on a tomb, rather than inside a coffin. It is also the first 'decan chart' that has associated planets. The two left hand figures in the boats in the south panel have been identified by Egyptologists as representing what we would now call the planets Saturn and Jupiter.

The figure in the boat next to the them is the star we now call Sirius, but for the Ancient Egyptians was related to Isis. As always in the decan system, she is occupying the 36th and last decan. [The decans read right to left.] The decans follow the fairly standard order seen in decans dating back to their first known instance in the Egyptian record around 2100 BC in the Middle Kingdom.

However, it should be noted that Saturn and Jupiter are not located in decans, i.e. the decans are not being used by the Egyptians to record the position of Saturn and Jupiter in particular places in the heavens, as the Zodiac Signs in a modern astrology chart would be used to do for planets. This is a later Babylonian idea that was still a thousand years in the future.

The decan system was actually used as a clock for time keeping in the night hours and through the year - modern Egyptologists call them Egyptian sidereal clocks.

The Star of Osiris. As an example of how our modern mind set imposes concepts on the Ancients take the example of Osiris. You can find written frequently that he's associated with the constellation Orion. In fact, the ancient Egyptians believed that the stars of the sky represented the bas of individual souls, i.e. one star meant one soul. Deities were associated with the heavens, but only with single stars, such as, as mentioned above, Isis with the star we now call Sirius.

In the Senmuts tomb, for example, Osiris is associated with the star known as hr rmn s3hu, a star under the arm of what we would now call Orion. Other stars in what we call Orion are associated with the god Horus or with Horus' children.


http://www.geocities.com/astrologyages/egyptianprecession.htm
« Last Edit: September 23, 2007, 09:24:43 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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