"And if you're a good boy, I'll let you pet my pussy-willow."
I'm reading Lewis Spence's Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends (this is the 1990 Dover Books republication of the 1915 Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt [London: George G. Harrap & Company]; ISBN: 0-486-26525-0); I'm finding it a lot more engaging than I'd feared I would, given what little I know about the author, largely via Colin Wilson's The Occult: while Wilson approves of Spence's Encyclopedia of Occultism [sic], he notes with polite disparagement that Spence was a devotee of Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantean theories, and that he wrote some half dozen books expanding Donnelly's crackpot theories about Atlantis himself. (That said, I would love to get my hands on a copy of Spence's 1940 Occult Causes of the Present War, which his Wikipedia page says appears to be the first book about Nazi occultism.)
Of course, Spence's survey, while taking issue with some of the formulations of E.A. Wallis Budge, is itself doubtlessly out-of-date; still, it's almost as interesting to trace the (relatively) modern perceptions of an ancient culture as it is to try to divine what the people of said ancient culture actually thought, and since I'm not exactly looking to pursue an advanced degree in Egyptology or comparative religions (boy, there's money to be made in those fields, eh..?), it's all good. (Plus, Dover builds their trade paperback reprints of public domain books to last; seriously, why can't all TPs be made like Dover's?)
A couple of items have piqued the interested amusement of the comic book geek in me:
Of course, Spence's survey, while taking issue with some of the formulations of E.A. Wallis Budge, is itself doubtlessly out-of-date; still, it's almost as interesting to trace the (relatively) modern perceptions of an ancient culture as it is to try to divine what the people of said ancient culture actually thought, and since I'm not exactly looking to pursue an advanced degree in Egyptology or comparative religions (boy, there's money to be made in those fields, eh..?), it's all good. (Plus, Dover builds their trade paperback reprints of public domain books to last; seriously, why can't all TPs be made like Dover's?)
A couple of items have piqued the interested amusement of the comic book geek in me:
- In the paragraph introducing Bast, the cat-goddess whose chief city was Bubastis (which was itself a variation of her name), Spence writes: "Although she is connected with fire and with the sun, it would appear that she also has some association with the lunar disk, for her son Khensu [a.k.a. Khonsu or Khonshu] is a moon-god" (p. 148). This certainly casts the fling that the Marvel Comics characters Moon Knight and Tigra had in West Coast Avengers towards the end of Steve Englehart's run in a different -- read: sordid, perverse -- light. *shudder*
- In the paragraph explaining an aspect of Horus -- Heru-Behudeti ("Heru" is apparently the more authentic version of Horus's name), the personification of the mid-day sun -- Spence writes: "In general...he is depicted as hawk-headed and bearing in his hand a weapon, usually a club or mace to symbolize his character as a destroyer" (pps. 86-7). This sounds very much like DC Comics' Hawkman -- yeah, I know: DUHHH; but, in my defense, DC's characters aren't embedded in my memory banks nearly as deeply as Marvel's are.