DENDERA ZODIAC

Of the countless artifacts stolen from Africa, France takes special pride in displaying the Dendera Zodiac at the Louvre Museum in Paris – a legacy of the Napoleon Bonaparte era. Using gunpowder and explosives, engineer Jean Lelorrain dislodged the zodiac from the ceiling of Goddess Hathor’s temple on the west bank of the Nile River at Dendera. He took it to France in 1821 where the country’s best scientists, astronomers and mathematicians struggled to decipher the dates of the celestial events within the constellations depicted on the artifact. Many began to believe the Dendera Zodiac to be thousands of years older than the biblical Creation date, which troubled the church until Jean-François Champollion (France’s famous Egyptologist) reassured them otherwise.

The Dendera Zodiac – representing the heavens from its ceiling location – was the only circular portrayal of ancient Egyptian astronomy available. Its circular frame depicts Divine Feminine space while simultaneously reflecting the curvilinear path of the sun’s orbit. Employing a metric that western astrologers continue to use to this day, the zodiac depicts the Egyptian year [360 days +] divided evenly between 12 signs or constellations which are arranged within the circle. [Days beyond 360 were regarded as a 13th month on the ancestral annual timeline.] Each constellation was as unique as the particular deity which ruled that calendrical season. In the later western zodiac, ancient Egypt’s ram-headed deity Amun became the sign of Aries; Ausar – ‘the Bull of Eternity’ – became Taurus; Khnum… Capricorn; Atum… Leo; Auset… Virgo; scales of Ma’at… Libra; Khepra… Cancer; etc.

Concerning the grand scheme of ancient Egypt, god Djehuti proclaimed: “Art thou not aware that Egypt is the image of heaven, or rather, that it is the projection below of the order of things above? If the truth must be told, this land is indeed the temple of the world…” The ancient Nile Valley is where monomyths and the god/dess archetypes embedded within our collective psyche took their original form. They’ve since journeyed through life’s theater, or the ‘WOMB OF TIME’ – as Goddess Hathor’s Dendera Temple was known. Her stolen artifact in France’s Louvre Museum depicts the movement of Sopdet – Hathor’s Nile Star whose rising presaged the sacred river’s annual inundation which began each New Year in ancient Egypt. When the ‘Milky Way’ on earth poured forth her annual bounty of gifts into Egypt’s desert lands, it became a celebratory period of reunion and renewal between the heavens, nature, and humanity within the Temple of the World. This organic Nile Valley heaven-on-earth relationship, hijacked by Set (according to mythology), is the dream which our current ‘matrix’-oppressed psyche projects hopefully into the future as the ‘Age of Aquarius’…  

Set (ancient Egypt’s notorious antagonist) and Yurugu (the Pale Fox in Dogon mythology) both represent adversarial forces against the sacred and sovereign Divine Womb and Milky Way – of which Africa’s Goddess Hathor was the quintessential archetype. Yurugu violated Goddess Amma’s sacred womb in his impatience to be born, thereafter sealing his fate to always be alone, incomplete, eternally in revolt, ever wandering the earth as the Pale Fox in search of his female soul. Set – god of chaos, violence, the desert, perversion and foreign oppression – violated the communal womb out of jealousy when he usurped heaven-on-earth’s throne after murdering and mutilating his brother Ausar, King of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the historical rape of Mother Africa’s womb and misappropriation of Her spiritual, cultural, natural, and human resources towards western imperialist ventures has led most of humanity into a profound sense of isolation, alienation, disconnection, and disorientation…

HATHOR ~ DIVINE WOMB

Hwt-hr – the Kemetic version of Hathor – means ‘Mansion [Womb] of Heru.‘ The goddess is the fertility aspect of Auset, whose posthumous conception of Heru via the mummified remains of her husband Ausar was translated into biblical text as the ‘immaculate conception’ of Christ. Hathor was worshipped at Dendera (her sacred site for over 10,000 years) as goddess of music, dance, beauty, fertility, children, birth, women and foreign lands who personifies feminine love, joy, and sensuality in Her conjoined roles as consort, mother, and lover. Facing the direction of the Nile-Star Sopdet’s rising, Dendera Temple itself was a nourishing space for healing, learning, and birthing. It housed a sanatorium with magic bathing waters and a sacred well; labs where ceremonial perfumes were concocted; a papyrus library; a birthing place; and chapels devoted to the mythologies of Auset/Ausar/Heru…

Hathor’s priestesses and priests were musicians and dancers whose rituals of worship were entrancing and entertaining as they filled the sanctuary with the sounds of song, drumming, and various other instruments such as lyres, pan-pipes and sistrums – rattles that reportedly sounded like “the cackling of geese or the rustle of papyrus flowers.” Sacred to Hathor as ‘Lady of the House of Jubilation’ and ‘The One Who Fills the Sanctuary with Joy,’ the sistrum’s rattle helped create a sonic shield of protection against wrathful deities.

Music is recognized as a profound oral-aesthetic phenomenon in the symbols at Hathor’s Dendera Temple. Sound/Word/Nommo, in Africa’s oral traditions, is understood to fundamentally act as the Divine Masculine seed. Rising from the earth/floor and holding aloft the heavens/ceiling, Hathor’s temple pillars represent the shaft of Her sistrum. At the top of each pillar is Hathor’s face, portrayed symbolically as the womb/uterus – co-creative organ of the Divine Feminine – its fallopian tubes depicted as elongated ears through which she receives sound… word… seed… nommo. Heru – goddess Hathor‘s Divine Masculine consort who helps frame & uphold the heavens [see Dendera Zodiac above] – likely plays the role of master-musician in some of the deeper Mysteries of Goddess Hathor’s Temple. Though Heru’s temple is in Edfu, as Divine Twin deities [‘Gemini’] they are highly attuned to each other’s oral-aesthetic freequency, resurrection modalities, and co-manifestation of humanity’s current grand progression as the Age of Pisces transitions into Aquarius… the Golden Age […UbuNtu]

DENDERA LIGHT

As ‘Madonna and Child,’ Hathor was often depicted as the heavenly cow; her belly filled with stars of the Milky Way which on earth is represented by the Nile River aka Maziwa Mkuu (meaning ‘The Great Milk’ in Kiswahili)… the true Ma’atrix – or ‘Temple of the World,’ according to Djehuti. Alternatively, Hathor was portrayed as the goose that laid the golden egg with a lotus plant wrapped around Her neck. The lotus plant symbolizes the sacred Nile’s southern source or womb – located in the sentient heart of Africa – whose gifts, transported on the sacred river’s northward flow, facilitated the flowering of ancient Egypt and its Mysteries that were taught in the temples. Located on 3 stones of the interior walls of Hathor’s temple, the Dendera Light artifact’s depiction of one of these sacred Mysteries has given rise to a few controversial interpretations…   

A Norwegian electrical engineer was the first to interpret the depiction as an electrical lamp, encasing as it does a snake-shaped filament with a cable at the end. The lamp is held upwards by a priest and a few smaller figures. Peter Krassa and Rainer Habeck published a book entitled Lights of the Pharaohs based on their similar interpretation of the relief. Later, a working model of the Dendera Light was constructed by Zeichnung Garn-Birne [click for video]. These interpretations may be oddly prophetic of Ethiopia’s hydro-electric dam on the Blue Nile outflow from Lake Tana which, given Africa’s scrambled post-colonial landscape, has generated concern in Egypt – the Nile’s most ecologically-vulnerable African country, yet ‘Temple of the World‘…

Mythologically interpreted, the Dendera Light artifact depicts the Hermopolis theology of creation via the Ogdoad (8 primordial male-female twin deities) and the Cosmic Egg from/into which all life is born. Pictured around Hathor-as-goose’s neck and again at the base of the Dendera Light in her temple, the lotus flower from the primordial sea of Nun (Nile womb) gave birth to the sun god, Atum-Ra in a stage known as the first occasion. The encasing bulb of the Dendera light relief represents the field of the universe or Cosmic “Golden Egg” within which the grand progression of creation… birth… enlightenment… resurrection occur; and – like the symbolic journey of the Nile’s climax in Egypt – kundalini awakens and Mysteries become known. Hence ‘Temple of the World‘… 

This mythological interpretation reinforces the significance of Hathor and Her temple as HwtHr – ‘Mansion [Womb] of Heru – and as the Seven Hathors [Pleiades in later Greek myth] who purportedly appear at a child’s birth to announce its destiny. Representing several aspects in the Ausar-Auset story, Heru – as Hathor’s Divine Masculine consort – is the quintessential protagonist embedded within humanity’s collective psyche of our destined S/Hero’s Journey. He largely champions the warrior archetype of the Divine Masculine. As “Lady of the Southern Sycamore,” Hathor used the milk from Her tree to restore sight to Heru after one of his bruising battles against antagonist Set (usurper of Ausar’s heaven-on-earth throne). “His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk and fitly set.” [Song of Songs 5:12]…  The 7 Hathors are said to question and assist the soul’s journey which, in death, is accompanied by the sky-bull [Ausar/Taurus] who has joined the Hathors in their cow form. Hathor, “Lady of the West” (where the sun sets/’dies’), appears on sarcophagi as their Protector.

Heru also represents spiritual revelation – the light of the 3^rd-eye which opens during the True Seeker’s journey through time… “The kingdom of Heaven is already within you; if you understand yourself you will find it” [proverb:- Ipet-Resyt]. ❤ Amun ❤ àṣẹ ❤ Let ❤ There ❤ Be ❤ Light ❤