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- [Girl] Reality films.
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- [Narrator] Ancient and mysterious.
Powerful and deadly.
All knowing and generous.
The gods of Egypt were many things.
They originated many thousands of years ago
in a land faraway from Egypt.
Over time they evolved, changed, adapted and grew in mystery.
Their stories are filled with great battles and vengeance,
of cycles of nature and the balance of the very universe.
Their tales, a real game of thrones.
From the gods of the underworld such as Osiris and Anubis
to the gods of light such as Amun-Ra and Horus
the lives and actions of the gods of ancient Egypt
explain our very existence and our place in the universe.
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The mysteries of all that is and ever shall be
were explored in their lives.
Their influence has traveled across continents
and across time.
Our own so called religions are full of them
under different names.
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This is the fascinating story of the real gods of Egypt.
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The ancient Egyptian religions were very complex.
Polytheistic beliefs and multiple rituals formed integral
parts of their society.
The gods were believed to be in control of and present
within the very forces which controlled nature itself.
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The rituals and practices of the ancient Egyptians were
created to gain the favor of the various deities of the
various forces of nature in order to control the outcome.
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Most of the formal practices centered around the Pharaoh
who was believed to be God on earth
and possess his divine power or force.
He was the man between them and the gods.
And it was his role to sustain the gods with rituals
and offerings so that they could maintain
order in the universe.
To make sure this worked huge efforts were made to provide
the Pharaoh with what he needed and the thousands of priests
did very well out of the deal.
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Massive constructions across ancient Egypt were testament
to the importance placed upon appeasing and gaining
the favor of the gods of force.
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An individual could pray to a particular deity
and ask for help, or he could compel them to do his bidding
through magic, one is asking, one is telling.
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There is a direct correlation between the rise of religious
institutions in Egypt with the decline in power
of the Pharaoh.
Death was of major importance with Egyptians going to great
lengths to ensure a safe journey through the underworld
for their loved ones.
Funerary practices were expensive and often complicated.
Tombs, grave goods, mummification, offerings and more
all made it a rich man's game
but the poor did what they could.
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Over time the battle of the gods evolved,
some rose high in prominence, others fell.
It was all about the battles between the priests
of the competing temples.
Ra, Amun and Isis were pushed aside when Akhenaten
decided that the temple system would be moved to a new
location and the Aten or sun disk
would now hold the greatest slot.
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It did not last and his new temple city disappeared beneath
the sand, it would be some time before a truly monotheistic
religion would rise again.
The gods of Egypt arise in a collection of myths
from ancient Egypt which describe their actions as a method
of understanding the world around them.
Understanding the gods of Egypt and their myths is crucial
to understanding ancient Egypt itself.
There is no separation of church and state,
of life and religion because all are intertwined.
From farming to pharmacy, from politics to play
all things involve the gods for the gods are all things.
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The myths are inspired by the cycles of nature itself.
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Life is a series of patterns, repeating again and again.
This is the present age to them, before their time things
were linear and events unfolded to create the patterns.
Maat is the fundamental order of the universe
and the most important myths are those of creation itself.
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Here the gods formed existence from chaos
creating the patterns.
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The rise of the sun god Ra, the myths of Osiris,
Isis and Horus against this chaotic god, Set.
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Ra rises in the sky and continues the pattern of existence.
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He goes down each night into the underworld or duat.
The struggle is constant against chaos.
Life and death were simply part of this continued pattern
rising like Ra and setting.
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Mythology inspired and influenced Egyptian culture,
religious rituals and royal leaders, life and death,
food, sex, education, art, culture and more
were all part and parcel of the greater living myth
of the life of the gods.
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In a mirror of human dynasties,
the gods themselves altered in power,
the priests of each deity would use their influence
and there are hundreds of cases of one God usurping
a special location and claiming dominance over another.
A battle of the gods was truly at work.
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And so we must begin our journey into the gods themselves.
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We begin with Amun,
who has been around ever since the old kingdom
and the earliest days.
Known as Amun and Amen, by the 11th dynasty
he had become the patron deity of thieves,
the holiest of holy places for the gods.
Following a rebellion in the rise of Harmost the first
Amun became nationally important and was fused with the
sun god Ra to become Amun-Ra.
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Across time Amun-Ra maintained his chief post,
the only time this slipped was under the king Akhenaten
who raised Aten to the highest position.
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Amun-Ra was self created, champion of the poor and weary,
everybody loved and worshiped him,
he was the king of all gods and almost became monotheistic
when other gods were said to be mere manifestations of him.
His influence grew so large that nations outside of Egypt
began worshiping him and there are good reasons to suggest
that the Islamic, Jewish and Christian God
is based upon him and his myths.
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In Greece, Amun-Ra became known as Zeus.
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Originally Amun was the god of the wind until he merged with
Ra and also Min, the god of fertility or creation.
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These newfound powers made him the greatest of the deitys
from the Nubian sun god he adopted the symbol of the ram.
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He was the god people came to when they wanted mercy
for their own wrong doing or if they felt wrong done to.
He was the god who hears the prayers,
who comes at the cry of the poor and distressed
beware of him they said, the people were to repeat him
to their sons and daughters.
To speak his name far and wide,
he was big and small, he was all things yet to come,
fishes in the deep, birds in heaven.
He never spends an entire day angry and he was merciful.
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For many years the priests of Amun at Thebes were so
powerful that they were effectively
the leaders of the nation and held power over the economy.
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They owned two thirds of all the temples
and 90% of Egypt's ships.
The son of one high priest was actually manipulated
onto the throne itself,
and one high priest himself actually became Pharaoh
and ruler of the 21st dynasty.
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By the 10th century BC this dominance began to decline
but his worship maintained.
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His influence upon the wider world is actually massive,
he's even mentioned in the Bible.
In Greece he became Zeus-Amon,
after the battle of Issus Alexander the Great was declared
the son of Amun and considered himself divine.
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The words ammonia and ammonite are derived from Amun
because certain properties were said to be from Amon.
We turn now to one of the most mysterious of Egyptian
deities seen in copious movies and works of fiction, Anubis.
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In truth the word Anubis is the Greek name of an Egyptian
deity associated with mummification and the after life.
He was depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head
and was known at the time, as the golden jackal
or the African golden wolf.
Just like other Egyptian deities Anubis had many roles.
He was the protector of graves, embalmer and was later
replaced by Osiris as the lord of the underworld.
He ushered souls into the after life and attended the
weighing of their souls, this act would decide whether
the dead would be allowed to enter the realm of the dead.
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His color is black which symbolized rebirth from the color
of fertile silt of the Nile and also the color of a corpse
which turns after embalming.
In the old kingdom Anubis was the most important god
of the dead, he was replaced in that role by Osiris
during the middle kingdom.
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It is because of this association with the mysteries of
death and the afterlife that Anubis has crept strongly
into popular culture today, in a scary way.
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In fact he was not at all scary and helped people who had
suffered the loss of life to go to a better place.
Our next deity is the Goddess of warfare in lower Egypt.
In Greece she's known as Aloros,
in Egypt she was known as Bastet and her worship began
in the second dynasty.
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In upper Egypt they worship Sekhmet the lioness Goddess
in the same role.
And normally at the unification of upper and lower Egypt
deities were merged but in this case Sekhmet and Bastet
maintained their own identities.
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During the 22nd dynasty Bastet transformed from lioness
warrior deity into a protector deity represented as a cat.
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During later dynasty's the deity remained
but was assigned a lesser role in the pantheon
by bearing the name Bastet instead of the earlier Bast.
This happened after Thebes became the capital of ancient
Egypt during the 18th dynasty.
As they rose to great power the priests of the temple of
Amun shifted the other deities down the league
as their own Amun-Ra rose.
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Bastet was originally a lioness warrior Goddess of the sun
throughout most of ancient Egyptian history.
But later she was changed into the cat Goddess
which is familiar today.
Greeks occupying ancient Egypt towards the end of it's
civilization changed her into a Goddess of the moon.
In lower Egypt she was defender of the Pharaoh
and the later deity Ra.
Her name was associated with the jars in which Egyptians
stored their ointment and used as perfume, Bastet thus
gradually became regarded as the Goddess of perfumes.
Because of this she was regarded as the wife of Anubis
the god of embalming.
Our next deity was the most important of all the sacred
animals in ancient Egypt.
He was worshiped in Memphis and served as a go between
for humans and Ptah, Osiris and Atum.
He is the bull god Apis.
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His worship is there right at the start of Egyptian history
connected with fertility.
Archeology reveals burials of bulls indicating that the
bull was divine long before and possibly represented
the king himself.
His worship continued after the Egyptians with the Greeks
and even the Romans and lasted until the fifth century AD.
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The bull was chosen because of its strength and virility.
It was the manifestation of the Pharaoh.
Apis was one of the Egyptian gods for which Alexander the
Great performed a sacrifice during his
seizure of the country from the Persians.
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We turn now to one of the very earliest of Egyptian deities.
Khnum the god of the source of the Nile.
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This was an important position for all life along the
river relied upon the annual flooding
to bring fertility to the land.
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He was the god who created human children at his potter's
wheel and placed them within the mother's womb,
he was the divine potter.
In fact he was the third aspect of Ra,
the god of rebirth creation and the evening sun.
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Now one of the most significant deities in Egyptian
mythology, the god Horus.
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There are many depictions of Horus and Egyptologists
treat them all as separate deities although it is possible
they were all just different manifestations
of the same deity.
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He is mostly depicted as a falcon or falcon headed man.
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Commonly Horus is the son of Isis and Osiris and is a rival
to Set although in the earliest form he was their brother.
However, there is another tradition that Hathor was
his mother and wife.
He was the god of the sky, war and hunting.
Horus means falcon and also the distant one
and the one who is above.
In life the Pharaoh was Horus, in death he became Osiris,
two aspects of the same soul.
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But new Horus appeared as a new Pharaoh appeared.
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As the representation or embodiment of Horus
Pharaoh was divine, a god on earth
and because Horus was produced by Atum, the greatest,
he was part of Atum and so therefore was the Pharaoh.
Eventually this simply evolved into Pharaoh
becoming the son of Ra.
The myth of Horus is very interesting
and parallels the Christian myth.
He was born to the virgin Goddess Isis after she collected
the dismembered parts of her murdered husband Osiris, only
his penis was missing which had been thrown into the Nile.
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The myths vary but she eventually managed to get herself
pregnant by magic.
She fled to escape her jealous brother Set,
then gave birth to Horus.
Horus as the sky had two eyes,
his right eye was the sun and his left the moon.
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As a falcon he flew across the sky.
The moon was not as bright as the sun
because he had battled with Set who gouged out his left eye
and a new one created to replace it.
The eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol
of protection and royal power from deities
in this case from Horus or Ra.
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The word for the symbol as wadjet.
It was the eye of the one of the earliest of Egyptian
deities, Wadjet who later became associated with Bast,
Mut and Hathor as well.
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Wadjet was a solo deity and this symbol began as an eye,
an all seeing eye, it was adopted by Horus and Ra.
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Horus was a god of war and hunting
thus he became a symbol of majesty and power
as well as the model of the Pharaohs.
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The Pharaohs were said to be Horus in human form.
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Horus was given the role of protecting humans from his
brother Set by his mother Isis.
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Set was the god of the desert
who had killed his father Osiris.
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Over time Horus battled many times with Set
to avenge his father and to choose the next Pharaoh.
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The mother of Horus is the great Isis.
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She was so widely worshiped that her influence spread
to Greece and Rome and indeed she is associated
with Mary the mother of Jesus.
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She's seen as the ideal mother and wife,
she's the patron of nature and magic,
a friend of slaves, sinners, artists
and yet she also hears the prayers of the rich,
maidens and rulers.
She is the protector of the dead
and Goddess of children.
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Her name means throne and her headdress
is often depicted as a throne.
She represented the Pharaohs power on earth
and he was her child, he was Horus on earth,
god on earth like Jesus.
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Her parents were Geb, the god of the earth
and Nut, the Goddess of the sky.
She married her brother Osiris.
The Nile flooded each year from the tears of sorrow
issued forth from Isis.
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She first appears in the fifth dynasty on a sun temple
although it is believed she was originally a separate
deity from predynastic Egypt.
She's often depicted as the wife or assistant of a
deceased Pharaoh and the mother of the four sons of Horus.
These four sons protected the canopic jars
that contained the organs of the deceased Pharaoh.
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Her worship was carried out in a temple known as the Isium
with daily offerings from priests and priestesses.
These generally had a reputation of being wise
with great healing powers, they could also interpret dreams
and control the weather.
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Isis was associated with the star Sirius
and its appearance was a sign of the new year.
She was therefore associated with rebirth and reincarnation.
One myth reveals a slightly darker side,
here she tricks Ra into revealing his secret name
by getting a snake to bite him.
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Only she has the antidote and because she had his real name
she had power over him.
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Having a secret name was important for magic spells.
Because of this she became highly important to magicians
and magic is central to the myth of Isis.
After the conquest of Egypt Isis became known
as the queen of Heaven and she merged with other mother
Goddesses, Demeter, Astarte and Aphrodite.
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Isis spread throughout the Roman empire
and is one reason that the Christian Isis,
known as Mary was accepted so easily.
The Greek antiquarian Plutarch describes Isis as a Goddess,
exceptionally wise and a lover of wisdom
to who as her name at least seems to indicate
knowledge and understanding
are in the highest degree appropriate.
Of course her husband suffered a pretty bad fate.
Osiris was usually depicted as the god of the underworld.
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He was also the god of transition,
resurrection and regeneration.
He is given green skin, a Pharaoh's beard,
mummy wrapped legs, a crown of two large ostrich feathers,
a crook and a flail.
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He was once believed to be the eldest son of the earth god
Geb or the son god Ra and the earth Goddess Nut.
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He was the brother and husband of Isis,
and his son was Horus.
Because he ruled over the dead
and because the dead were considered to be the ones
truly living he as called the King of the living.
He was the judge of the dead in the afterlife
and from his place in the underworld
he granted life to all those things
such as vegetation rising upwards.
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He was the lord of love, permanently youthful,
lord of silence, and when a Pharaoh died he became Osiris
who rose from the dead himself.
In this way they inherited eternal life.
This was later mirrored in the Christian myths.
Eternal life through the slain god who rose from the dead
who was the son of Mary or Isis.
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The three aspects of Isis are clearly laid out in the Bible
as the three Mary's and this is why she is the mother
and lover of Jesus.
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His name probably means powerful one or God almighty
although nobody is certain.
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His crook signifies his role as the shepherd god,
the flail is unknown but maybe a shepherd's whip,
pull and push.
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His green color symbolizes rebirth.
The soul or ba of Osiris was sometimes worshiped as a
separate deity and was known as the soul of the lord
of the pillar of continuity.
This was the backbone of Osiris and the Nile itself
the backbone of Egypt.
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It therefore supplied the water, fertile silt
and vegetation for survival.
He died only to be resurrected again each year.
This ba of Osiris was power and also part of the word
for ram and so he is depicted as a ram headed god.
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The living sacred ram was in fact worshiped
and mummified as holy.
With the fall of Egypt to the Greeks
Osiris was merged with the Apis bull
and became Serapis and depicted as a standard Greek god.
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His cult continued on the island of Philae in upper Egypt
until the sixth century AD until the Romans destroyed
the sanctuaries, arrested the priests
and seized the divine images.
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And now for the deity who slew Osiris, Set.
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He is the god of the desert, storms, disaster, violence,
chaos and foreigners.
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Ra employs Set on his solar boat to repel
the serpent of chaos, Apep.
He was a balance to Horus as the lord of the Red Desert,
where as Horus was the lord
of the black land or fertile soil.
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The opposites of barren and fertility.
He killed and mutilated his brother Osiris
Isis put him back together and had Horus as a child.
Horus and Set did battle many times.
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Set is the father of Anubis and the meaning of his name
is unknown, it is likely that it gave rise to Satan
in later Christian myth.
He's often depicted as a strange and unknown beast.
In human form he has a distinctive head
and sometimes with the head of a donkey.
In the mythology of Heliopolis like Osiris and Isis
Set was born of the sky Goddess Nut and the earth god Geb.
Myths show Osiris was as wise and happy
Set as the jealous brother.
His cult continued for sometime
and influenced Christian and other religions.
We turn now to the wise god Thoth.
He is depicted with the head of an Ibis bird or a baboon.
He maintained the universe and stood beside the boat of Ra.
He would later arbitrate between the disputes of the gods.
He is associated with art,
writing,
magic,
science,
and the judgement of the dead.
His name simply means he who is like the Ibis.
In Greece Thoth was seen as their own god Hermes
and later his title became the thrice great Hermes
or Hermes Trismegistus.
For hundreds of years he was the wisest and greatest of gods
for magicians and alchemists.
As the Ibis headed human form he represents
the reckoner of time and season.
He did however have a great many roles in Egyptian society.
He was the mediator between the powers of good and evil
and ensured balance.
He was the scribe of the gods and is credited with
inventing writing and alphabets.
He reported on the weighing of the scales in the underworld.
He was self created and master of physical and moral law.
He calculated the mathematics for the structure
of the motions of the heavens.
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The Egyptians believed that without his words
the gods themselves could not have existed.
Indeed, in the underworld his power was equal
to that of Ra and Osiris.
He was the author of all science, religion,
philosophy and magic.
And the Greeks said he invented astronomy, astrology,
mathematics, geometry, medicine, theology,
government and much more.
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In fact to them he was the author
of all works of knowledge.
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Originally Thoth was a moon god providing light
in the darkness and standing beside Ra the sun god.
The myths of Egypt serve to explain and justify
the observable world and its many cycles,
patterns and mysteries.
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The nature of order and chaos.
The cycles of life and death or fertility
seasons, light in the sky, life under water,
the fate of the universe itself.
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All of this and more was explained through the lives,
actions and statements of the gods.
From the Earth to the Sun.
From knowledge to imagination.
The actions of the gods governed them all.
All forces had divine inspiration behind them.
They did not believe their gods had animal heads
they simply used symbolism to explain aspects of the power
and nature of the gods.
As their own writing system of hieroglyphics was symbolic
and held multiple meanings
so did their concepts of the gods.
They did not think the sky was a cow
called Hathor supported by other gods,
this simply explained the power of that Goddess
and merged several ideas about existence together.
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Even though there were temples and statues
depicting the gods,
the real realm of the gods cannot be known or imagined.
It is not accessible to humans.
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The myths create stories to explain in human terms
what it all means.
It was in fact a very clever devise
and one used by later religions such as Christianity.
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The myths are in fact never fully developed
we have to fill in many missing blanks.
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There was a reason behind this, a philosophical statement
saying that we simply cannot know, as humans.
They only had general outlines and fragments
and the gods themselves would not pass the script test
for a Hollywood movie because their characters
are never fully developed.
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The truth is that the meaning is the most important
part of the myth, not the detail.
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As long as the meaning remained
what did it matter that a mere detail was altered?
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Many of the myths came from earlier times
and other cultures,
they were adapted for their own environment and people.
The same thing would happen to the Egyptian gods
as Greece and Rome and then Christianity
stole the ideas and changed them.
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