We've always been pretty good at that. The Egyptian
civilisation was one of the first to get well organised and they invented a whole lot of gods, of all shapes and sizes, to take charge of the many facets of human life and death. The world of the Egyptians began, rather
charmingly, by sexual intercourse between earth and sky, represented by Geb, earth and male, and Nut, sky and female, the lady feministically on top and no suggestion of wining, bumping or even bonking.
From that sensible beginning came the earth and especially the Nile valley.
Naturally the Sun was the most important God, Ra or Atum. The moon, even then so inconstant, was merely one of the interests of ibis-headed Thoth.
Assorted lesser gods enabled the priesthood to thrive, developing and exploiting their theological expertise until they were challenged by Akhenaton, a rather unattractive Pharaoh with a fat belly a thin face and a beautiful wife,
who proposed a Unitarian hypothesis, with the Sun as the only god. A very unpopular idea with the priesthood, neither the idea nor its proposer lasting long.
Long before this sophisticated late theogony, cave-dwelling and
hut-dwelling tribes had invented simple gods to worship or to placate, sun-gods, bear-gods, sea-gods, mountain-gods, even lion-gods, and also a few goddesses, of childbirth, of wisdom, of the moon, of the underworld.
Nowadays
our ancient skills in god-invention are being (perhaps sadly) replaced by astronomical evidence which steadily accumulates for a rather boring Big Bang in which, just 46 thousandths of a second after it started, the whole
enormous universe with its thousands of millions of galaxies, and among them some proto-Bajans, occupied only the space of a cricket-ball. Not a romantic notion. Geb and Nut are much more fun.
That Bang occurred about 15 or
16 thousand million years ago, and it's odd that the cosmologists are so precise about the 46 thousandths of a second and so unsure about the thousands of millions of years.
People who believe that the God of the Israelites got
around to the Creation just 8 000 years ago, finished the whole job in six days, and on the seventh day relaxed by windsurfing in the morning and playing polo in the afternoon, people who believe that are happy in their
belief. There's no point in trying to change their opinions.
Especially when the orthodox scientific view tells us that in the clockwork universe the spring is winding down, that everything is getting more even and uniform, that
the universe will end up cold, silent, dead and dispersed. Entropy is the word for that boring tendency, and entropy is said always to be increasing.
Other people get some romance back into the universe by believing that the
stars and planets influence their everyday lives, depending on where the stars occur in the night sky, and the date and time of the believer's birth. By using a lot of imagination the stars can be persuaded to make the form of a
fish or a bull or a crab or a virgin and these signs are imagined to have different effects. What a load of heavenly codswallop!
Yet another group get some satisfaction by believing that there was a Golden Age in the past, some
time, some place, where men and women were wise and beautiful and fragrant and contented. The sunken land of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic is still believed to be a possible site for the Golden Age even though there is no
sign of any such thing at the bottom of that ocean.
Another popular group of legends is centred on those huge and very peculiar objects which force themselves on our attention in Egypt. The huge pyramids have been thought to be
monstrous tombs for those human demigods, the pharaohs, even though few have been found to contain a body, or even a sarcophagus.
But what has been found inside the pyramids are sloping passages, some big enough to crawl
along, some so small that they must have been built in to the growing pyramid during construction. In "Keeper of Genesis" Bauval and Hancock have had a lot of ingenious fun relating these
sloping passages and the directions of the ceremonial roads around the pyramids to the positions of the sun and of important stars (like Sirius) and important constellations at the time the ancient Egyptians and their
powerful priesthood were around.
The Sphinx, for instance, looks directly East, to the point where the Sun-God, Ra, rises at dawn at the spring and autumn equinoxes. One ceremonial road points to sunrise at the summer solstice
and one to sunrise at the winter solstice.
Most conspicuous of all, to anyone who goes to Giza, is the fact that the three big pyramids there are definitely not in a straight line. Not quite. The southernmost and smallest one is
a bit off. Why? Definitely not by mistake. The biggest pyramid is aligned North/South with extreme accuracy.
The wretched groups of stars in the path of the sun described as Scorpion, Bull, Fish, Virgin etc., bear virtually no
resemblance to those animals, but there is one constellation, not quite on the ecliptic, which really does look a bit like its name.
That is the constellation of Orion, described by the Egyptians as Osiris, another son of Geb
and Nut. Orion does actually look a bit like a warrior, with a belt and a sword, though his head is very poorly represented. But look, the three stars of his belt are not quite in a straight line, the star to his left being just a
bit off, and the brightest one being the one to his right. Osiris has a full sister, Isis, who plays an important part in Egyptian mythology, important in spite of being an incestuous girl. Listen.
The Pyramid Texts say
"your sister Isis comes to you rejoicing with love of you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issues in her, she being ready as Sothis." Sothis is the star Sirius, and please note that the lady is again on
top.
Our ingenious authors suggest that in the Great Pyramid there might have been a formal, ritual copulation between the demi-God Pharaoh and the Goddess Isis, probably represented by her priestess. Where? Well, naturally in
the Queen's Chamber, from which a passage points to Orion. Not at all like our Bajan ritual, symbolic copulations on the Highway.
So we go back to the three Pyramids being out of line and realise that they could represent
the stars of the belt of Orion/Osiris.
You may have forgotten that the North/South axis of the Earth's rotation wobbles just a bit, as does a child's top, so that if we project it into the sky it describes a circle, coming back
to the same direction rather slowly, in 25 920 years. Bauval and Hancock produce some evidence from Orion's position in the sky and the direction of the pyramid passage that the Egyptian civilisation existed much earlier than the 6
000 years ago it is supposed to have begun.
For over a hundred years people have been playing with measurements and angles of the Great Pyramid. When I was a schoolboy my dentist was convinced by these that the British were the
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Other remarkable revelations of these inches and degrees have been the average density of our planet and, in 1870, the number of men living on earth. Soon it will be found they predicted
Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon.
