One of the reasons Ancient Egypt fascinates us so much is the exceptional craftsmanship and monumental character of its works of art.
Most of the surviving objects we actually have available today come from tombs. This is partly why Egyptian art is an art of permanence. It is also impossible to consider it outside its religious context. If only because tombs were built precisely to ensure an afterlife for the deceased)
📝It is interesting to consider a quotation from Plato’s “Laws”, where he writes:
…even in those distant times, they (the Egyptians) apparently established that only beautiful models could be followed in the arts… They managed to determine exactly which forms and colours make young men beautiful. Having compiled a list of them, they displayed them in temples… Artists working in other ways were not permitted to create, invent, or introduce anything foreign to their native customs.
Here, Plato claims that Egyptian art remained unchanged for almost 10,000 years. And one cannot disagree with this. Most Egyptian artists did not strive for novelty or originality. Instead, they more often followed traditional formulas.
🌅Geography played a very important role in Egypt. As you probably know, the territory itself was divided into Upper Egypt (the south) and Lower Egypt (the north).
These two regions stem from the Egyptian worldview, which saw the world as a series of opposing dualities:
Upper and Lower Egypt
the red land of the desert and the black land of cultivation
Geb, the god of the earth, and Nut, the goddess of the sky
Osiris (the god of civilization) versus Seth (the god of chaos).
This conception, however, challenges the logic of the more traditional scholarly explanation that Upper and Lower Egypt were independent regions subsequently united by King Narmer. An alternative theory emerged instead: this division may have been an imagined reconstruction of the past.
And now we come to the most interesting part. The division into Lower and Upper Egypt also implied two different magical traditions — Memphis and Thebes.
There was a dual priestly body:
11 priests (hierophants) of Lower Egypt and 11 of Upper Egypt.
Although they followed a common line, there were differences in their traditions and the ways they put them into practice.
They differed in the texts they relied on, their centres of worship, and, of course, their underlying essence.
I will discuss this in more detail in future posts, because there is a great deal of information and I cannot fit it all into a single post.
📜I would also like to note that, at approximately the same time as the ancient Egyptian state was taking shape in the Nile Valley, an entirely different civilization — the Sumerian civilization — was flourishing between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
There was undoubtedly some limited trade between them, but they nevertheless developed as two entirely different civilizations. This matters because we often think of the ancient world as a single whole.
Yet Egypt and Mesopotamia offer two completely different answers to questions about power, god, and the afterlife.
I think we will certainly explore Mesopotamia as well.
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✨ © Ellen
Practitioner of Western magical traditions, priest of Moloch, medium
