Aine Rayne is a 23 year old young lady in Southeast Pennsylvania. She enjoys children, reading, writing, video games, tv, wolves, puppies, cats, various other animals (most of them a tad odd), language, religion and politics. She is not generally politically correct and has a hard time filtering herself. She typically writes a lot and is disorganized about her own crap. Currently back to searching and confusion, she considers herself a follower of Anubis and a Kemetic Pagan.
Follow her at http://yuugureokami.tumblr.com for more of her witchy-pagany shenanigans and at http://bunnylovespancakesandtea.tumblr.com for mundane life and social justice.
The Woods of My Heart 
blahpolar told me about your blog. I just started reading and I am all in.
All in? On what? The Kids Book? I’m more than happy to have your help lol
Thank you for liking my “Novice outcry”, could you please also reblog it?
https://spoopyjungian.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/novice-solitary-crying-out-for-community/
I just starting working with Set, and investigating Kemeticism, literally like less than two weeks ago… Not sure how it jives with me bc I’m hyper-Left-Hand-Path and, as far as I could gather Kemeticism is very concerned with communing with nature, while I seek to commune with whatever supramundane/astral/psychic/divine that will strengthen my psyche to the point of self-deification…
Does Kemeticism condone a practitioner, devoid of nature-based practices, seeking to deify himself?
I’m not sure where you’ve done your research that you believe kemeticism is hyper concerned with the worship and communing of nature. That’s not true, and it sounds like you may have stumbled across some Afrocentric sources, which are not for anyone who isn’t black and is not historically accurate. Kemeticism isn’t incompatible with Left-Hand Path ideology, nor do I believe it would be incompatible with your desire for self-deification, considering that’s like, the entire point of a lot of the funerary rites, to deify the dead. I can certainly pose this question to my community, who are better educated in the historical context of the religion. I have heard of people who are left-hand path people also being Kemetic, though I should inform you that Set is NOT the “Egyptian devil” as that is a common misconception. Not that you can’t work with him however you please and he agrees to. I’m sure this would be an interesting debate so I’ll ask around and get back to you.
Thanks, y0. I don’t consider Set a demon―just demon*ized* similar to Lucifer only in that sense. I looked into the Temple of Set, and their idea of “Kheper” (as a “becoming” power) strongly connects with the actual physical-realm scarabs that appeared outside my apartment throughout a transformation process of working quickly (and tumultuously) through post-traumatic stress.
After I attended a Summer Solstice ritual last year, I lit the candles we charged during the ceremony /that night/ instead of waiting for the next full moon, and sat unwaveringly until the candle burned itself out (I trained in Zen, so I had to reach into my old arsenal for that one). A deity came to me and gave me snippets of messages concerning my parents and my skewed views that led to intensely damaging choices during my childhood. It was masculine―I didn’t even believe in deities, but my work in Taoist esotericism made it possible to decipher “divine ‘gender'”―
And it coincided with a reading I got a few months earlier that amounted to “Your view of how to carry yourself, and your blindspots resultant from that view, are prohibiting you from growing, and a masculine/male figure will serve as a guide to help you reconcile who you think you should be with /what/ you want to do with your life.”
So I went with it, more scarabs popped up as I literally overcame years of toxic conditioning from my father, and I became heavily involved in not really /working with deities/, but doing what “soft polytheists” (I identify as emmanationist panentheist) do sometimes, which is working with Archetypes.
Going into a sort of trance (which is really hard for me), I only got that this deity that interceded and played a role in the scarabs thrice in my apartment building’s breezeway was (A) masculine, (B) skilled at facing Shadow head-on, and (C) involved thunder during a tween-time of chaos where day becomes night (I got the words “storm at dusk”―it was very difficult because I was a complete skeptic at that point.
In this Judeo-Christian-centric society, my conclusion was that the masculine Thing that would serve as a teacher was likely the “Lucifer” archetype―discarded, vilified, though truly serving a valuable humanistic and transformative purpose, cast into darkness but ultimately illumines the mind―but eventually all signs pointed to Set.
Someone I talked to about the scarabs said Khepri could be involved, but I find that was unlikely since (from an emmanationist perspective) a primordial Archetype like “the sun-mover” would have been nearly impossible to read even if I managed to connect; if Khepri would ever intercede, it would be entirely through a deity as an emmisary anyway.
Regardless, I went with it, and was hovering around both Kemeticism and the Temple of Set.
I have two questions:
Are the more ancient names of deities (though some find them harder to attest)―for instance, “Sutekh”, rather than the Coptic “Seth”―more conducive to working with Kemetic deities? Using “Set” /or/ “Seth” strikes me with dissonance.
Also, reconstructionists say that the celebration of Sutekh’s birth was the third extra-calendar-day after the final month of the Egyptian year, meaning they meant that before the First Day Of The First Year (no one knows what year the calendar would consider “the beginning after the Gods”)…
the 5 days before their first dated year (beginning with the Inundation of the Nile) are representative of the birth of the children of Geb and Nut (and Osiris is thrown in bc of His prominent role in justifying pharoanic theocracy)…
… The 3rd extra-calendar day is Sutekh’s day, meaning the way to find out what day they intended originally (since their calendar shifted bc it was, attestedly, based on the movement of the Sirius star) for celebration is to reconstruct a Most Likely Gregorian Equivalent is to take the Julian Day of the “first day of the first month of the first Inundation” that also coincides with when Sirius is at its zenith (139AD plus or minus 1461 Julian years) and subtract 3 days to get the Julian Date and then convert to Gregorian.
This has been set at August 25/26 (23/24 Gregorian) starting from the year the calendar was reformed to add leap-days, then September 8 after yet another (Coptic, which was highly culturally appropriative).
If you move back in time from the original reform, take out the leap days, you’ll arrive at either the 17th or 18th of July as “3 days before Day 1 of Month 1 of Season 1 (Inundation of the Nile) of the ancient year when simultaneously, Sirius was at its zenith where it could be used to make the calendars. And then subtract 2 days to get the Gregorian date.
This coincides with when my local pagan community is recognizing Sutekh’s birth on July 16th.
Are they in err? Should I ignore them and go with the first reform (Gregorian August 23rd/24th) or even the second (September 8th)?
It’s pretty urgent bc if it’s the most-ancient reconstructionist date, that means it’s in less than 3 weeks.
I apologize for any overly-technical stuff; this is very important to me, and I didn’t mean to come across as pedantic.
–Cheers
Let me address something first: I don’t mind you necessarily being pedantic, I can be that way myself XD And the only reason I mind the technical stuff is because it confuses me. So, as far as the calendar goes, usually the way we do calendars is to calculate Sirius’ rising according to our location or our chosen location in Egypt. For me, I chose Hardai because it was the main cult center for Anubis. That means my wep ronpet (Egyptian New Year) is like, July 29th. The epagomenal days, the five extra days, are the 24th-28th. We don’t bother trying to calculate the “true” date of the very first calendar and such. Even if we did, I don’t think I could answer your question because everything you said confused me, which is more likely from having a very tired brain than anything. It isn’t necessary to do that, it’s perfectly ok to calculate it for yourself in the modern calendar.
If you want to join your local community on the 16th, I don’t think they’re necessarily mistaken. The calendar stuff is kooky, so it’s hard to say.
Like I said in my response to your other comment, we don’t really work with the gods as Archetype, and I’ll be 100% honest in that I don’t know or thoroughly understand how that works. Not on a visceral level, only halfway on an intellectual one. I didn’t grow up like that and I still don’t interact with the gods like that. I never have, so, I can only comment but so much? I’m a mostly hard polytheist (the Egyptian gods are naturally squishy and often syncretize with each other, I think you’d find the concept interesting) so I’m coming from that perspective.
As far as names go, I’ve seen both the anglicized version of ancient names (such as Anup/Anpu for Anubis or, as you pointed out, Sutekh) and the Coptic. I can’t say whether it’s more correct or not to use the ancient names, but I can say go with what you like. If the Coptic gives you dissonance then go with the ancient. I use the Coptic when talking with people less familiar with the ancient names but I have a preference for the ancient. Anubis doesn’t particularly have an opinion either way for my personal relationship with him. He might have a different preference with you, but the netjer are often willing to work with their humans and negotiate, so it’s up to you.
I’ve been finding that, the negotiating thing, pretty easy with Sutekh. My elf-psyche is very No Bullshit and sometimes it’ll process His communications better than my human-psyche.
Experiencing, “grokking” (understanding fully the feels of certain UPGs), GETTING archetypes feels exactly the same way as a deity, just squishy-on-purpose when analyzed later. Like “some left-hand-path syncretics find a salient connection between the Lucifer archetype and the Set archetype”… Just subtract the word “archetype”, and we’re basically Soft Polytheists.
However, if you hold, as I do, that archetypes and deities are the same thing, and that from a Cosmic perspective, it fits into the grand designs like the Tree of Life in Kaballah…. then you wouldn’t be considered polytheistic. I believe that deities are sort of a dense heap of archetypes…..
Set = Benevolent Chaos, Entropy, Outcast, Rebel, Warrior, Enlightenment through Shadow work (which is called “Nigredo” in alchemy), and a whole bunch of other things that…
… Even without explicitly describing those words to Him, you get the “feels”, “gist” of all that, and could find a syncretic connection to another Archetype Cluster.
Or you can pick and choose some more specific archetypes (less “stuff” in the cluster), like spirit animals.
Complete atheists can use archetypes when crafting a character for writing or tabletop gaming.
Deities, in a “Cluster of Archetypes” sense, are real bc these archetypes/aspects/facets came together at Their conception, for a specific purpose in Their realm (similar but more complex than incarnation/soul-shards)…
… and are thus more easily recognizable to cultures without any other reference point. Ancient cultures could draw from these Archetypes and a sort of “Higher Mind” innate in all humans can piece the archetypes back together and recognize, “grok”, GET the feeling of the “Cluster”, the Deity, and from that point can form a relationship with them using their Higher Mind.
It’s very conducive to me as an INFJ (personality type) bc it allows me to come to very distinct discernments (“This is clearly Sutekh,” a function of Extraverted Feeling and Introverted Intuition, my two strongest psychological functions)… and then
for those doubtful days…
… My mind can deconstruct the deity into its many archetypes (energy-wise, this DOES disconnect me from the deity)… and work with them in “smaller doses” for my hyper-rational mind to still believe in.
Basically, today was a rare, EXTREME doubt day, so I connected with “less-dense” clusters of archetypes (spirit animals, basically things that I can “wrap my head around” when my heart and my gut shut down)…
And then that stopped working, so I swung back to strictly-psychological “It’s like I’m writing a character for an RPG or something.”
Then came numbness.
Being that way (having “back-up beliefs” that all stack back together into connecting with the full deity, which can only happen, for me, when my heart chakra is open AND the minor chakra right above it as well)…. It gives me one premise of faith to stand on (Archetypes), that―the more my Heart is open―condense from “patterns” to “tropes” to “the collective unconscious” to “spirit guides” to “primal forces” to “demigods, sub-divine beings” to “Aspects of Deities” to the Deity itself.
My faith formed as such bc it required that much of a Doubt-Barrier to keep it intact with my strong rationalist tendencies.
It is called Emmanationism. The higher the realm, the denser the clusters it can contain and give life to. We’re close to bottom-tier, so we can’t birth fae into this realm without incarnating them into a human body, either partially or fully.
The animal realm is an example of a (some would say) “Lower” realm. Animal SPIRITS, however, I believe come from a sub-plane of this plane. We’re in the Mental sub-plane of the Physical realm, with varying access to higher realms, and other subplanes within our realm.
Animals are on a “sibling” plane of Emotional of Physical. We can access their archetypes readily bc it requires less higher faculties as we are Animals ourselves.
Deities are so dense (lulz) that they subsume their own realm, much higher than ours, and require much more openness to receive from them. Either on purpose (training) or accident (nervous breakdown, desperation). So they can’t be born here.
I believe science can only measure this realm at present, so everything gets tossed into “Paranormal” or “Supernatural” bc scientific instruments don’t have Hearts to “measure” higher forces.
I’m so rambling. But, my faith is for all intents and purposes “Rationalization-Proof”… and it has actual words that actual metaphysicists use to describe it. Qaballah is a popular example. It’s much more hashed-out than my “Esoteric Emmanationist Gnostic Panentheistic Jungian Setian” but that’s because they’ve had thousands of people experience the same UPGs from the same “clusters”.
My brain can only do so much.
Which is why it’s hard to identify with Temple of Set, or Kemeticism, or basically anything other than my word salads.
But the experiences (UPGs and “confirmed gnoses”) bind all faiths, bc there’s a Deity (“god(dess)” or “d(a)emon”) for everyone’s needs, bc we Emmanated from Them, retaining some of the “stuff” that’s in Them (Their cluster) and thus recognizing a fit when we see it.
Totem animals are the same way.
Wow. That was intense.
Sorry. I deliberately leave my ADHD unmedicated bc it gives me more processing power (downside: i can only use it on what I like, otherwise it’s twice as hard as neuro-typical brain).
Unfortunately, I really like this stuff, bc this stuff is closer to The Big Picture than anything in my mundane life.
I wasn’t blessed with the gift to draw from nature (which is like A Plane Below us, so it’s actually like Pieces of Archetypes rather than Clusters from an emmanationist perspective). INFJs don’t work well with pieces. I’m disconnected from nature, and thus can’t “find the Divine essence” in plants and minerals and other non-biotic things.
Uhh… Send
OK, I read everything you’ve said. I pretty much understand what you’re saying, I just don’t have a comment lol don’t feel bad though, it’s not a “I don’t have a comment because of some negative thing”. Although I think you’d get along great with my one friend who appreciates such perspectives and enjoys discussing them.
I’m thinking of reposting my comment as a blog bc I only seem to care to articulate things more hashed-out if I’m more directly communicating.
But I can post it as a blog, and you could link your friend to it.
you’re more than welcome to do so, including my parts of the conversation
I made it a Month of Written Devotion thing, so I kept it more narrative/essay-ish and changed a few parts, but here it is
https://spoopyjungian.wordpress.com/2015/07/03/sutekh-1-75-many-deities-for-non-polytheists/