When records of the Old Kingdom in Egypt began, approximately 2,700 B.C., Heliopolis was already the religious center, according to Picknett and Prince (p2, citing two sources: Saleh and Rundle Clark). For the Egyptians of Heliopolis, these authors say, all that existed was God, and therefore imbued with the divine spark of deity. This is pantheism. Often in pantheism, and certainly in ancient Egyptian thought, the balance and interaction between equal and opposite natures (male/female, potential/particular, singularity/manifestation, good/evil, darkness/light, etc.) is fundamental to ancient Egyptian thought. Further, a range of gods is required in a system like this to communicate, or intermediate, between human experience and primal being.
For the ancient Egyptians, to learn was to worship and was progress into this godhood. The Pyramid texts take this progression, or return, to deity as their central theme. They are strongly shamanistic and they are ancient; at least as old as 2,350 B.C.. Most researchers agree they existed at the start of Egypt’s “First Dynasty” around 3,100 B.C. (p.4). The more recent “coffin texts” and the Book of the Dead, inherit from them. The central theme of the Pyramid Texts is an astral journey in which the king, upon death identified with Osiris, ascends to the heavens and becomes a star in the Duat. He is then reincarnated in his successor as the son, Horus. (p.4)
In the Heliopolitan system the creator was named Atum, and he/she (Atum was androgynous) stood at the apex of the Great Ennead, a family dynasty of nine spirits or gods. This family transmits or transfers being from the immaterial, singular, and un-manifest potential represented by Atum to the material, multi-form, manifest particularity that is experienced by humans.
Before Atum arose as a “phallic-shaped hill” there was none but the watery void of chaos: Nun. (p.6). Atum “masterbated” his/her phallus and the “semen” pushed back the chaotic watery nothing of Nun, forming a sort of bubble of physical reality within it, which we know as the cosmos.
Out of this act were born two gods: Shu (male) and Tefnut or Ma’at (female), jointly called Ruti and represented by a lion and lioness. Out of their union were born Geb (earth-god) and Nut (sky-goddess). They birthed two pairs of brother-sister twins: Osiris and Isis, and Set and Nepthys. The first pair were considered beneficent, and the second destructive. Luckert, who apparently writes as though these beings currently exist, is quoted as saying that while still “behind the veil” these, finally, “‘exist low enough to participate more intimately in the human experience of life and death’ and that they operate ‘on a smaller and more visible scale than their parent(s)’.” (p.7, Luckert p.50)
This makes up the nine deities of the Great Ennead. Nun is apparently not counted – being nothing. Moving closer to the plane of human life we see the Great Ennead transfer power or being to the Lesser Ennead. This is accomplished through Horus, the child of Osiris and Isis. He is “regarded as the god of the material world, his role here echoing that of Atum in the universe. (p.8)” Thoth is scribe to the Lesser Ennead, and the jackal-headed Anubis “guards” the gateway between human life and the realm of the dead.
At Heliopolis the rising of the phallic hill of Atum amidst Nun is seen in the rising of the life-giving sun on the horizon. This is the daily birth of life in the microcosm, and it echos the creative act of Atum. This is the action of Ra, the sun-god; and one of the names of Atum is Ra-Atum. (p.8)
Heliopolis contained temples to Atum, Ra, Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the Nile god Hapi (related to happy?), I suppose including others. The Mansion of the Great Ennead was there, as well as the House of the Phoenix. In classical times, many great Greek philosophers studied in Heliopolis.
The above is written by me, following The Stargate Conspiracy, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, 1999. Anything above directly quoting from this book is enclosed in quotation marks.
But the Giza plateau is small potatoes compared to the Bosnian pyramid valley.
Icliks Incoming 