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| Osiris |
The rogue Egyptologist in my adventure thriller series seems to talk about the gods of Egypt as if they
really once existed at a remote time in Egypt’s past.
"They certainly existed for the ancients, whatever we think," as Anson Hunter reflects in The Smiting Texts.
"They certainly existed for the ancients, whatever we think," as Anson Hunter reflects in The Smiting Texts.
'Some might find them distasteful as Goethe did when he wrote:
‘Now I must take my pleasure by the Nile/ in extolling dog-headed gods;
Oh, if my halls were only rid/ of Isis and Osiris!’ We can praise them as the
poet Mann did when he felt : ‘The might of these lands that were/ Once
permeated by gods’
But we can’t ignore them. And the Egyptians clearly believed in them and
even listened to their voices. There is a theory called the ‘bicameral mind’,
formulated by Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, and explained in his
book ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’. He
postulated that in the earliest times, before the dawn of consciousness, the
ancients were driven by the voices of their gods, a phenomenon caused, he
asserted, by whisperings from the right side of the brain, an area little used
by modern man. But after various cataclysms and with the advent of writing, we
lost that connection with our auditory promptings from the gods, thought to
have been an amalgam of remembered authority voices. In the past, we were
powerless to do anything but obey these ubiquitous voices, but with the development
of writing we could suddenly choose what thoughts to follow. We stopped taking
orders from the gods.'
*INTERESTING UPDATE IN THIS ARTICLE BELOW: See link
