The Weaver: a personal experience of Apep
This is the first of three parts of an essay series about Apep, Zep Tepi, and Kemetic concepts of time. This part is foundational UPG (unsubstantiated personal gnosis, or things that are personal experience as opposed to things learned through academic study), the events that led to my theories about Zep Tepi and djet and neheh. It's incredibly long, but might shed light on things I hint about but haven't discussed in depth on my LJ. People new to Kemetic mythology might find these links on Apep to be informative.
The weaver unthreads her loom and puts her yarns away. She takes a square of loose-woven fabric from a shelf and stands for a moment, thinking of her life and the things that she wishes were no longer in it. She opens the door to her house and steps into the cold night air, walking to the darkest part of her land. Crisp autumn leaves crunch under her boots as she steps into the clearing, with no moon in the sky she has only the distant stars to light her way. She stops to light a stick of incense, and places it in the ground.
She pulls the square of fabric out of her pocket and holds it up in front of her. She thinks of how she has learned to be helpless, powerless, much like she once learned to spell and to multiply. She feels the powerlessness as a tangible thing, something she can touch and feel, something embodied in a slip of woven cloth. She calls to a being without a name, acknowledging that what has begun can be ended; that which is made, unmade. The wind picks up at her whispered words, the trees in front of her rustling as if something very large passes beneath their branches.
She begins to loosen the threads and separate them, dropping one thread, then another, then another, into the darkness. For several minutes she works at the fabric. At first it is simple, the loose weave giving way easily to her touch. But as she works toward its core, the fabric is loath to yield to her. The cold creeps into her feet and into her hands, her fingers becoming stiff and fumbling. She begins to tear at the fabric. Suddenly, the wind roars to life, and she feels a presence around her, in a wide circle around the clearing. She hears a remnant of a voice in her mind, rusty with disuse: "no, you do not seek to destroy, that is the way of Another. To uncreate is a different thing, you must understand intimately what you hold. Slow down and sense it, know the pattern of the warp and the weft, know where to pull." With that, she closes her eyes and lets her fingers move over the fabric. She begins to select threads with care, and as they fall to the ground, the woven center of the fabric gets smaller and smaller until all that are left are the threads radiating out from it. She holds the last threads for a moment, feeling the last vestiges of the powerlessness she created for herself sitting in the palm of her hand. She holds out her hand and lets the wind sweep them away.
The fabric is gone, as if it never was. Its memory fades along with it, she no longer recalls its color, its texture. "Now, you understand," says the voice before it fades, leaving nothing but cold darkness in its wake, without even the slightest hint of a breeze to mark its passing. She turns and walks inside in silence.
Inside, surrounded by the warmth of her home, the weaver stands before her loom. She hesitates for only a second, then pulls spools of yarn off the shelves and begins to string a new pattern-- for while she has forgotten the substance of what she last made, the spark of creation remains. She still remembers how to weave.
The above story is a fictionalized form of a real-life ritual that I enacted earlier this winter. The fact that it has taken me some months to post it says something about how far outside the bounds of standard Kemetic belief that I know it to be. I have, indeed, felt called to Apep ever since I found Kemetic religion, and it's something I resisted to a large degree because of the immense fear of him and what he is understood to represent. For those seeing this for the first time (and this will eventually be posted to my website, so that may include a more sizeable number of people than it probably does right now), I stumbled across Kemetic reconstructionism through somewhat unorthodox means to begin with- as a Stargate SG-1 fan. (I've since discovered that I'm hardly alone in that, strangely enough. :) I wanted to write fanfiction about Apophis, the Goa'uld who opposes the show's protagonists, and that necessitated a bit of research into his ancient Egyptian origins. After a few weeks of reading about AE beliefs, I started to realize that I had more than enough material to write my story, but that I was reading because I was seriously curious and completely hooked on the material itself. As there had been a number of incidents in preceding years of feeling pulled toward hawks and other symbols of Heru, this made a lot of sense in hindsight (I must also note that I was completely dense about that-- since I was a neo-Wiccan with no calling toward the Egyptian gods, I assumed these signs were simply meant for others around me when they happened.) I started reading books about Egyptian religion, I joined a Kemetic temple, and have been a devout Kemetic for two years now.
But my interest in Apep persisted. It was a simple enough matter at first to put it down to my interest in the show, and remind myself "Apophis, hot Goa'uld bad guy; Apep, evil AE demon." After a while I began to understand that I had absolutely no problem telling apart fiction and reality, and I was interested in the real being. Or rather, he seemed interested in communicating with me, in that "cluebat to the head" way common to deities wanting to get the attention of Pagans. What eventually emerged, due to both solitary UPG and formal divination, is a system of reverence with Apep on one side, Ra and Hethert on another, and Heru-wer as mediator. Heru-wer is my divined Parent, my spiritual father (according to Kemetic belief, everyone has one), and He is the one who affirmed my suspicion that including Apep in my devotion is necessary for me to learn whatever it is I'm meant to learn. With that "parental permission" in hand, I set out to learn about Apep.
The ritual in "The Weaver" was my response to execration rituals, in which an effigy of Apep is made to represent the isfet in a person's life, and then ritually destroyed. Since his role is unmaking, I set about trying to unweave a bit of loose-weave fabric. I learned quite a bit that night, and had the second experience of really *feeling* his presence around me. It's worth a note on how he manifests, at least in my experience. What I notice most is the wind- a peculiar sort of wind that is strong enough to bend the 50-year-old living "fence" of bamboo around my back yard nearly sideways, but doesn't have that "violent", lashing quality of storm winds (and that I would associate quite firmly with Set). He feels large in presence (he is described as the "world encircler" (1), and that's something I tend to imagine in my mind's eye, a giant serpent encircling the yard), ancient, and alien. By alien I don't mean extraterrestrial, but not terribly used to human doings or human civilization- something I also sense about his communication, that it has a "rusty" quality to it. My UPG of him is in this sense quite contrary to the notion that he is directly responsible for all of the personal bits of chaos in an individual's life. If he is, IMO it is simply as a byproduct of his function, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. The "scary" factor is completely true, though. When I did this ritual and I really felt his presence, I did feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and there was a pretty large part of me that wanted to bolt and run into the nice, warm, safe house. It doesn't feel like a particularly personal sort of menace, though. It's more like trying to dance with a black hole or have tea with a hurricane. It doesn't care about you, it isn't trying to "get" you-- it has a function to perform and a lot of power to perform it with, and that function isn't interested in or respectful of human society or human order.
But the impression I got, above and beyond anything else, is that he *has* a function. Indeed, that he is absolutely essential to the proper balance and dynamic function of the universe. My theory is that Apep is one side of an "axis of creation and uncreation" (with Atum and Ra as the other end), and that it is the interplay of these two sides that is responsible for Zep Tepi.
(next part, "Apep, Ra, and the Bugs Bunny Theory of Zep Tepi.")
(1) http://touregypt.net/featurestories/apep.htm
The weaver unthreads her loom and puts her yarns away. She takes a square of loose-woven fabric from a shelf and stands for a moment, thinking of her life and the things that she wishes were no longer in it. She opens the door to her house and steps into the cold night air, walking to the darkest part of her land. Crisp autumn leaves crunch under her boots as she steps into the clearing, with no moon in the sky she has only the distant stars to light her way. She stops to light a stick of incense, and places it in the ground.
She pulls the square of fabric out of her pocket and holds it up in front of her. She thinks of how she has learned to be helpless, powerless, much like she once learned to spell and to multiply. She feels the powerlessness as a tangible thing, something she can touch and feel, something embodied in a slip of woven cloth. She calls to a being without a name, acknowledging that what has begun can be ended; that which is made, unmade. The wind picks up at her whispered words, the trees in front of her rustling as if something very large passes beneath their branches.
She begins to loosen the threads and separate them, dropping one thread, then another, then another, into the darkness. For several minutes she works at the fabric. At first it is simple, the loose weave giving way easily to her touch. But as she works toward its core, the fabric is loath to yield to her. The cold creeps into her feet and into her hands, her fingers becoming stiff and fumbling. She begins to tear at the fabric. Suddenly, the wind roars to life, and she feels a presence around her, in a wide circle around the clearing. She hears a remnant of a voice in her mind, rusty with disuse: "no, you do not seek to destroy, that is the way of Another. To uncreate is a different thing, you must understand intimately what you hold. Slow down and sense it, know the pattern of the warp and the weft, know where to pull." With that, she closes her eyes and lets her fingers move over the fabric. She begins to select threads with care, and as they fall to the ground, the woven center of the fabric gets smaller and smaller until all that are left are the threads radiating out from it. She holds the last threads for a moment, feeling the last vestiges of the powerlessness she created for herself sitting in the palm of her hand. She holds out her hand and lets the wind sweep them away.
The fabric is gone, as if it never was. Its memory fades along with it, she no longer recalls its color, its texture. "Now, you understand," says the voice before it fades, leaving nothing but cold darkness in its wake, without even the slightest hint of a breeze to mark its passing. She turns and walks inside in silence.
Inside, surrounded by the warmth of her home, the weaver stands before her loom. She hesitates for only a second, then pulls spools of yarn off the shelves and begins to string a new pattern-- for while she has forgotten the substance of what she last made, the spark of creation remains. She still remembers how to weave.
The above story is a fictionalized form of a real-life ritual that I enacted earlier this winter. The fact that it has taken me some months to post it says something about how far outside the bounds of standard Kemetic belief that I know it to be. I have, indeed, felt called to Apep ever since I found Kemetic religion, and it's something I resisted to a large degree because of the immense fear of him and what he is understood to represent. For those seeing this for the first time (and this will eventually be posted to my website, so that may include a more sizeable number of people than it probably does right now), I stumbled across Kemetic reconstructionism through somewhat unorthodox means to begin with- as a Stargate SG-1 fan. (I've since discovered that I'm hardly alone in that, strangely enough. :) I wanted to write fanfiction about Apophis, the Goa'uld who opposes the show's protagonists, and that necessitated a bit of research into his ancient Egyptian origins. After a few weeks of reading about AE beliefs, I started to realize that I had more than enough material to write my story, but that I was reading because I was seriously curious and completely hooked on the material itself. As there had been a number of incidents in preceding years of feeling pulled toward hawks and other symbols of Heru, this made a lot of sense in hindsight (I must also note that I was completely dense about that-- since I was a neo-Wiccan with no calling toward the Egyptian gods, I assumed these signs were simply meant for others around me when they happened.) I started reading books about Egyptian religion, I joined a Kemetic temple, and have been a devout Kemetic for two years now.
But my interest in Apep persisted. It was a simple enough matter at first to put it down to my interest in the show, and remind myself "Apophis, hot Goa'uld bad guy; Apep, evil AE demon." After a while I began to understand that I had absolutely no problem telling apart fiction and reality, and I was interested in the real being. Or rather, he seemed interested in communicating with me, in that "cluebat to the head" way common to deities wanting to get the attention of Pagans. What eventually emerged, due to both solitary UPG and formal divination, is a system of reverence with Apep on one side, Ra and Hethert on another, and Heru-wer as mediator. Heru-wer is my divined Parent, my spiritual father (according to Kemetic belief, everyone has one), and He is the one who affirmed my suspicion that including Apep in my devotion is necessary for me to learn whatever it is I'm meant to learn. With that "parental permission" in hand, I set out to learn about Apep.
The ritual in "The Weaver" was my response to execration rituals, in which an effigy of Apep is made to represent the isfet in a person's life, and then ritually destroyed. Since his role is unmaking, I set about trying to unweave a bit of loose-weave fabric. I learned quite a bit that night, and had the second experience of really *feeling* his presence around me. It's worth a note on how he manifests, at least in my experience. What I notice most is the wind- a peculiar sort of wind that is strong enough to bend the 50-year-old living "fence" of bamboo around my back yard nearly sideways, but doesn't have that "violent", lashing quality of storm winds (and that I would associate quite firmly with Set). He feels large in presence (he is described as the "world encircler" (1), and that's something I tend to imagine in my mind's eye, a giant serpent encircling the yard), ancient, and alien. By alien I don't mean extraterrestrial, but not terribly used to human doings or human civilization- something I also sense about his communication, that it has a "rusty" quality to it. My UPG of him is in this sense quite contrary to the notion that he is directly responsible for all of the personal bits of chaos in an individual's life. If he is, IMO it is simply as a byproduct of his function, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. The "scary" factor is completely true, though. When I did this ritual and I really felt his presence, I did feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and there was a pretty large part of me that wanted to bolt and run into the nice, warm, safe house. It doesn't feel like a particularly personal sort of menace, though. It's more like trying to dance with a black hole or have tea with a hurricane. It doesn't care about you, it isn't trying to "get" you-- it has a function to perform and a lot of power to perform it with, and that function isn't interested in or respectful of human society or human order.
But the impression I got, above and beyond anything else, is that he *has* a function. Indeed, that he is absolutely essential to the proper balance and dynamic function of the universe. My theory is that Apep is one side of an "axis of creation and uncreation" (with Atum and Ra as the other end), and that it is the interplay of these two sides that is responsible for Zep Tepi.
(next part, "Apep, Ra, and the Bugs Bunny Theory of Zep Tepi.")
(1) http://touregypt.net/featurestories/apep.htm